| Transcript |
- neither Britain nor China could send troops into Outer Tibet to interfere with its government. The representatives of Britain and Tibet signed the agreement, but the Chinese rejected it.
For the next thirty-eight years China was plunged into civil war and chaos, and as a result Tibet was for all practical purposes independent. However, Tibet failed to take advantage of the situation in China to establish relations with the outside world, and thus their status remained unclear.
In 1931 Chiang Kai-shek did specify that Tibet was part of China, but he was in no position to assert authority. However, as soon as power was consolidated in China under the central authority of the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong, the Chinese invaded Tibet in October 1950 claiming that Tibet was an inalienable part of China. The primitive Tibetan army was no match for the huge, well-equipped Chinese army and surrendered with little resistance.
The Chinese occupation of Tibet continues to be a touchy subject to this day. Since 1951 information on Tibet has been provided by both Tibetan refugees and the Chinese Communist Party. Forthe contrasting versions on theTibetan situation, John Avedon�s In Exile from the Land of Shows and Israel Epstein�s Tibet Trans�formed are a must to read.
It is notour purpose to analyse the political situation in Tibet today. However, one question must be asked; that is�even if China has a legitimate historic claim to Tibet, did it give the Communist Party of China the right to ruthlessly set out to destroy every cultural aspect of these deeply religious people? For centuries Buddhism had penetrated every facet of Tibetan culture and its influence was all pervasive. Since the seventeenth century, up to a quarter of Tibet�s population were monks or nuns and almost every Tibetan home had its own simple Buddhist chapel or altar. After the Chinese Communist Party took control in Tibet, it sought to brutally eradicate Buddhism and replace it with Communism. This resulted in more than fifty anti-Chinese rebellions with major loss of life occurring in Tibet since the 1950 invasion; the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and nearly 100,000 refugees being forced to flee their country in 1959 in order to preserve the Tibetan religion and their cultural heritage; and the wanton destruction of approximately 95 per cent of the monasteries and temples in Tibet (said to be more than six thousand) by the Chinese Army and by Red Guards (who were both Chinese and Tibetan, heavily indoctrinated by the Chinese Communist Party) from 1950 through the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). The Chinese Communist Party has yet to apologize to its own Han Chinese people, let alone to the Tibetans, for the severe repression and atrocities of their self- instigated Cultural Revolution.
19
|
|---|
