The Support for the Dalai Lama is Hypocritical if not Diabolical, Regardless of What You Think of the PRC Government
A few days ago, my alma mater (the LSE) posted on Instagram a picture of the Dalai Lama speaking at the school a few years back. This has become somewhat of an annual affair, where the school posts the exact same photo on different platforms, supposedly signalling that the university stands with liberal values. For years, I have been meaning to write a piece denouncing such actions, and thanks to the training I have received at the LSE, I have finally garnered some intellectual capacity to write one. Of course, I am not trained in history, and I do welcome any friends with more accurate historical knowledge to add to or correct my points.
Establishing the grounds: “Tibet is an annexed territory”.
The first modern attempt to annex Tibet is by British Indian forces in 1903, when Tibet was still under the administrative rule of the Qing Dynasty.
Similar to other ‘British expeditions’, the war concluded with a treaty that required the concession of Tibet territories to the British Raj until a large indemnity is paid by the Tibetan government. I shall spare the readers of the gruesome details of the war, but yes, the British massacred Tibetans using modern weaponry[1].
The Amban, Qing high official to Tibet, had later publicly repudiated the treaty. The British and Qing government met in 1906 to establish the Convention Between Great Britain and China Respecting Tibet. The convention established that the British agree "not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet", while China engaged "not to permit any other foreign state to interfere with the territory or internal administration of Tibet".[2]
Annexation or Liberation?
There is a common narrative in the west that Tibet is annexed by the Chinese government, while the Chinese government claims it to be a peaceful liberation. Both narratives bear some truth.
After the fall of Qing Dynasty in 1912, Tibet was incorporated into the territories of the Republic of China, by virtue of succession, provided for in the Imperial Edict of the Abdication of the Qing Emperor. The Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China adopted in 1912 specifically established frontier regions of the new republic, including Tibet, as integral parts of the state.[3] It is clear that both the ROC government and the Communists agree unequivocally that Tibet is a part of China. After the communist revolution and establishment of the PRC, naturally, ensuring the incorporations of frontier territories became a priority. The strategy adopted by Mao at the time was largely peaceful, hoping to obtain a negotiation. To the best of my knowledge, one battle did occur after failed negotiations between two sides.
However, the extent to which this was an ‘annexation’ – defined as the forcible acquisition of one state's territory by another state and is generally held to be an illegal act – is highly questionable.
Firstly, it cannot be established that the incorporation of Tibetan territories into PRC was forceful, as it was accomplished mostly through negotiations.
Secondly, it cannot be established that during the period in question, Tibet was indeed ‘another state’. There has been consistent historical continuity of legal claim by successions of central governments over Tibet.
Still, there might be grounds for some to claim that an annexation did occur, for the incorporation may not have been supported by the Tibetan population. I have two replies to this response. Firstly, those who stands behind this line of argument must then also condemn the annexation of Golan Heights by Israel, the continued annexation of Palestinian territories by Israel, and the annexation of Hawaii by the US government.
Secondly, judging by the living conditions of the Tibetan people prior to 1951, it is more likely that the majority would have supported an overthrowing of the Dalai Lama’s government. The only reason for the official resistance from the then Tibetan government was that the incorporation into PRC had greatly threatened the vested interests of the lords and lamas, rather than the common people. This leads me to the main point of this article, that is, irrespective of how you view the PRC government, one has every reason to reject the Dalai Lama and the regime he represents.
Tibet under Dalai Lama
It is paramount, for all the ‘woke kids’ who are seriously interested in the welfare of the Tibetan people, to understand that Tibet was no ‘paradise on earth’ for common Tibetans under the rule of the Dalai Lama.
When the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into religious or secular manorial estates worked by serfs. Tied to the land, the serfs were allotted only a small parcel to grow their own food. Serfs and other peasants generally went without schooling or medical care. They spent most of their time labouring for the monasteries and individual high-ranking lamas, or for a secular aristocracy that numbered not more than 200 wealthy families. In effect, they were owned by their masters who told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. A serf might easily be separated from his family should the owner send him to work in a distant location. Serfs could be sold by their masters, or subjected to torture and death. [4]While serfs suffered, secular leaders and clergymen amassed fortunes. The extent of such economic exploitation is beyond imagination. At the time, the Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen[5].
Worse still, the sufferings were well beyond the economic realm. "All pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished." They "were just slaves without rights."[6]
High-ranking lamas and secular landowners imposed crippling taxes, forced boys into monastic slavery and pilfered most of the country's wealth – torturing disobedient serfs by gouging out their eyes or severing their hamstrings.
Tashi Tsering, now an English professor at Lhasa University is representative of Tibetans that do not see China's occupation as worse tyranny. He was taken from his family near Drepung at 13 and forced into the Dalai Lama's personal dance troupe. Beaten by his teachers, Tsering put up with rape by a well-connected monk in exchange for protection. In his autobiography, The Struggle for Modern Tibet, Tsering writes that China brought long-awaited hope when it asserted control in Tibet in 1950.
Robert W. Ford, one of the few Westerners to have been appointed by the Government of Tibet prior to 1950 also writes, "All over Tibet I had seen men who had been deprived of an arm or a leg for theft (...) Penal amputations were done without antiseptics or sterile dressings".[13]
The widespread human sufferings can be traced back to the government body partly controlled by the religious leader Dalai Lama and his religion. The almost bizarre nature of such atrocities is perhaps best captured by the letter sent by the then Tibetan officials to a local leader:
为达赖喇嘛念经祝寿，下密院全体人员需念忿怒十五施食回遮法。为切实完成此次佛事，需于当日抛食，急需湿肠一付，头卢两个，各种血，人皮一整张，望立即送来。
In chanting for the Dalai Lama's birthday, all the staff of the Lower Tantric Institute need to … In order to complete this Buddhist affair, it is necessary to throw food on the same day, and it is urgent to have a fresh set of intestine, two human heads, a variety of blood, and a whole carving of human skin. I hope for you to send it immediately.
A Thangka, Tibetan Buddhist usually painting depicting a Buddhist deity and scenes, made on human skin. Apart from flaying human skin, the use of human skull as religious implements was also common. Dalai Lama himself gifted these decorated skulls to celebrities and leaders*.
Given these observations, it is not hard to deduce why the upper-class lamas, lords and Dalai Lama himself detested the changes brought by the communist regime. Imagine losing your land, your wealth, your serfs and now have to actually work for a living?! Terrible!
Consider the evidence presented by Anna Louise Strong, who visited the Central Institute of National Minorities in Beijing which trained various ethnic minorities for the civil service or prepared them for entrance into agricultural and medical schools. Of the 900 Tibetan students attending, most were runaway serfs and slaves. But about 100 were from privileged Tibetan families, sent by their parents so that they might win favourable posts in the new administration. The class divide between these two groups of students was all too evident. As the institute's director noted:
Those from noble families at first consider that in all ways they are superior. They resent having to carry their own suitcases, make their own beds, look after their own room. This, they think, is the task of slaves; they are insulted because we expect them to do this. Some never accept it but go home; others accept it at last. The serfs at first fear the others and cannot sit at ease in the same room. In the next stage they have less fear but still feel separate and cannot mix. Only after some time and considerable discussion do they reach the stage in which they mix easily as fellow students, criticizing and helping each other.[7]
For the once well-off elites who were unwilling to adjust to the new way of life, it would have seemed that fleeing Tibet or staging a rebellion were their best bets at restoring their lifestyles, which, can only be described as crimes against humanity by modern standards.
Thus, to label the Dalai Lama-led and CIA-funded[8] rebellion against the Chinese government as somehow a noble ‘independence movement’, is as good as hailing Louis XVI if he had staged a rebellion to restore feudal societies comfortable for the elites at the dire costs of the commoners, or the British gathering outside support to retake America.
Granted, one can also list other types of atrocities committed by the PRC post-1959, but it is not my intention to find ‘less of two evils’. Regardless of the progress and/or sufferings brought in by communist rule, one thing is clear: the Dalai Lama is no saint, and the regime he represents and tried to restore was highly unlikely to have been a benevolent one.
Some would be quick to point out that Dalai Lama recently renounced the feudal system himself. However, if it takes someone almost forty years of exile to finally propose democracy for Tibet and to criticize the oppressive feudal autocracy of which he himself was the pinnacular embodiment, he must not have made this decision very willingly. Additionally, his Five-Point Peace Plan, reads more like a list cobbled together to sound reasonable and uncontroversial to win press favours rather than any serious agenda to restore an independent state that upholds liberal values (Will Shetterly has a refreshing rebuttal against this plan).
To quote Parenti on what he calls the Tibet myth,
the Paradise Lost image of a social order that was little more than a despotic retrograde theocracy of serfdom and poverty, so damaging to the human spirit, where vast wealth was accumulated by a favored few who lived high and mighty off the blood, sweat, and tears of the many. For most of the Tibetan aristocrats in exile, that is the world to which they fervently desire to return. It is a long way from Shangri-La.
For all these reasons, treating the Dalai Lama with such undue respect and hailing him as some sort of vanguard for ‘peace and independence’ is an egregious act of convenient forgetfulness and ignorance that legitimises the horrible regime he embodies, and a perpetuation of misleading and harmful romanticisation of feudal Tibet. If his cause is to be celebrated, I would like to see the same press commemorating Idi Amin for not being able to return to his ‘homeland’ and his people since his exile.
Finally, it is not hard for any reader to see that the support for the Dalai Lama is part of a broader Western narrative to counter the PRC government. Those who admit this goal openly are at least commendable, for they might actually recognise the awkwardness of the position they are taking.
Yet, those who fervently worship the Dalai Lama and supports his secessionist cause, under the pretence of supporting the welfare and freedom of common Tibetans, are either willfully ignorant or outright diabolical.
[1] Allen, Charles (2004), Duel in the Snows, John Murray Press, ISBN 0-7195-5427-6
[2] Joseph, Askew (14 September 2020). "The Status of Tibet in the Diplomacy of China, Britain, the United States and India, 1911 - 1959" (PDF). Adelaide University - History Centre for Asian Studies. p. 21.
1. [3] Zhao, Suisheng (2004). A Nation-state by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism. p. 68. ISBN 9780804750011.
[4] Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 15, 19-21, 24
[5] Prenti, M. (2003) Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth. http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html#14
[6] Quoted in Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 25.
[7] Strong, Tibetan Interviews, 15-16.
[8] The New York Times (1998) Dalai Lama Group Says It Got Money From C.I.A. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/world/world-news-briefs-dalai-lama-group-says-it-got-money-from-cia.html
* I was not able to find corresponding English source for this.