Writing back in 2002 for the New Left Review, Wang Lixiong pointed out that only “a tiny minority - mainly younger urban people with higher education - view the Dalai Lama in a more detached way, as a human being rather than as a god, and embody the attractions of Western liberalism and capitalist prosperity rather than reincarnated divinity. But within the TAR, those with college education comprised only 0.57 per cent of the population in 1990. The overwhelming majority of Tibetans are peasants, nomads and poorly educated town-dwellers who have never heard of the Nobel Prize or Hollywood. They worship the Dalai Lama with the same awe as they do the gods whom they would never be lucky enough to meet. It is common enough in Tibet today to see a crowd form and bow down to worship a little boy, merely because he is a reincarnated Buddha.”

Under the Dalai Lama’s government, 92 per cent of the budget was devoted to religious expenditure, and as Wang notes, “even today, according to some estimates, the Tibetans pay about a third of their annual income to the monasteries. This is money that will not be transformed into productive investment nor used to improve the people’s lives.”

Indeed, “the Deng era renounced the class line, restored traditional Tibetan religion, and re-engaged the upper classes in a ‘united front.’” Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall have also discussed this at length – the old religious aristocracy had already, by the late 1980s, been largely restored to economic power in the TAR, though not to complete autonomous political power of course. Goldstein and Beall spent sixteen months living in Tibet documenting this very phenomenon, pointing out that “all the former wealthy theocratic households are [again] among those with the largest herds and most secure income. On the other hand, all of today’s poor are from households that were very poor in the old society.” (see Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall, “The Impact of China’s Reform Policy on the Nomads of Western Tibet’” Asian Survey, vol. 29, no. 6, 1989, pp. 637–8, 640–1.)

David, you argue that while I can “catalogue a number of instances of torture, etc. perpetrated within Lamaist Tibet” that “worse followed from 1950.” This is debatable, though what you also need to remember is the fact that many of the abuses that occurred between 1950 and 1979 were carried out by Tibetans themselves. The Government in Exile and the pro-Tibetan lobby in the West are continuously accusing the CCP of having instigated a policy of “cultural genocide” during this period, which of course they define as constituting a serious violation of human rights. But the vast bulk of the destruction that occurred in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution was carried out not by Han Chinese but by hundreds of thousands of Tibetans themselves. So the obvious question then, is why? Why did so many Tibetans destroy their own monasteries?

It is worth quoting Wang Lixiong at length here, from his essay titled “Reflections on Tibet”, published in New Left Review, March-April, 2002:

“The Dalai camp and Western public opinion have always attributed all of this destruction to Han Red Guards coming in from China proper, after the Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966. The truth is that, because of poor transportation and the huge distances involved, only a limited number of Han Red Guards actually reached Tibet. Even if some of them did participate in pulling down the temples, their action could only have been symbolic. Hundreds of shrines were scattered in villages, pastures and on rugged mountainsides: no one would have been capable of destroying them without the participation of the local people.  
Furthermore, most of the Red Guards who did reach the TAR were Tibetan students, returning from universities elsewhere. The fact that they often retained their organizations’ original names - Capital Red Guards, for instance - is one reason for the confusion over this. With the gradual return of these Tibetan Red Guards - who often combined their revolutionary work with visits to their families - the sparks of the Cultural Revolution spread across villages and pastures over the entire Tibetan plateau; followed by the rampage of destruction. It is true that tension at the time was so high that no one dared voice any dissent; nevertheless, the rulers alone could not have created the sort of social atmosphere that then prevailed without the participation of the masses, who sometimes played a leading role. The authorities in Tibet often tried to restrain radical actions, with the PLA, for example, consistently supporting the more conservative factions against the rebels. Temples and monasteries survived best in the central cities and areas where the authorities could still exercise some control. In contrast, the Gandan Monastery, some 60 kilometres outside Lhasa and one of the three major centres of the Yellow Hat sect, was reduced to ruins....


....To point out that it was largely the Tibetans themselves who destroyed the monasteries and temples is not to exonerate the Han; but it does raise broader questions, beyond the issue of responsibility. Why did the Tibetans, who for centuries had regarded religion as the centre of their lives, smash the Buddhist statues with their own hands? How did they dare pull down the temples and use the timbers for their own homes? Why did they ravage the religious artefacts so recklessly, and why were they not afraid of retribution when they denounced the deities at the tops of their voices and abused the lamas they had so long obeyed? Surely these actions are evidence that, once they realised they could control their own fate, the Tibetan peasantry, in an unequivocally liberating gesture, cast off the spectre of the afterlife that had hung over them for so long and forcefully asserted that they would rather be men in this life than souls in the next.”

The Tibetan historian in exile, Tsering Shakya, agrees, saying that “it is true that Tibetans played an active part in the Cultural Revolution,” but rightly points out that “the destruction of religious sites in Eastern Tibet - outside the TAR - had begun before the Cultural Revolution, as far back as 1956, under the guise of suppressing local uprisings in Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and Sichuan.” (see “Blood in the Snows”, also published in New Left Review). Nevertheless, most of the destruction that took place within the TAR occurred at the hands of the Tibetan peasantry.

Wang Lixiong, along with the American historian A.Tom Grunfeld, depict the traditional society of Tibet as dark and corrupt, with the common people living on the brink of a precipice. This was also the perception of the CCP. “Yet,” says Tsering Shakya, “their response to the situation when, in 1959, they seized the reins for themselves, was to plunge Tibet into depths of misery it had never known before. The economic and living conditions of the people plummeted sharply between 1960 and 1979; in many areas people were forced to live on a single meal a day. It was not until the 1980s that living conditions began to improve, under the new leadership of Hu Yaobang.”

Wang Lixiong certainly doesn’t dispute this. “The organisation of the People’s Communes killed off any enthusiasm for production,” he says. “In conjunction with the political assaults of the Cultural Revolution this led to a stagnation of living standards, especially among the farmers and herdsmen. Although the suffering could be temporarily concealed by the high revolutionary energy of the time and by the introduction of other benefits, such as medical care and social promotion, according to the 1980 figures half a million of the already impoverished Tibetans - over a quarter of the population - were worse off after the mutual-aid groups were communized, and about 200,000 were rendered destitute.”

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 3-8-2008 10:18 ]

Tsering Shakya is right then in saying that living conditions plummeted during these years, but as Wang, Sautman, Grunfeld and others have all pointed out, the same can be said for the rest of China. The policies of the Great Leap Forward were not intended to decrease living standards, but to raise them. They proved to be disastrous, true, and the people of Tibet continue to harbour a great deal of resentment over what happened during those years, but Tibet is no longer the same place it was back then. Neither is the rest of China for that matter.

Today, Tibetan cadres not only comprise the statistical majority but also control most of the leading government positions within the TAR, including the crucial departments of finance, public security and justice. In fact, as Wang points out, “by 1989, Tibetans accounted for 66.6 per cent of total cadres in the TAR, 72 per cent at provincial level and 68.4 per cent at prefectural level. All ‘number one’ administrative leaders at provincial and prefectural levels are Tibetans, as are the Party Secretaries in 63 out of the 75 counties.”

Living standards have also improved significantly since 1980, as Tsering Shakya rather reluctantly admits. “In 1979 the average income of Tibetan farmers and herdsmen was 147 RMB; in 1990 it was 484 RMB and in 1994, 903.29 RMB. In 1992, the TAR’s total agriculture output was up 69.8 per cent from 1978—and 460 per cent up from its 1952 level. In the cities the improvement was even greater. (see Tibetan Population in Contemporary China, p.342 and the 1995 Yearbook of Tibetan Statistics, p.178)

Indeed, as Wang points out, “annual economic growth in Tibet was over 10 per cent between 1991 and 1999 - higher than in China proper. Per capita income for farmers and herders has grown by 9.3 per cent per year, for urban residents by 19.6 per cent. These are not just empty figures. On a visit to Tibet in 2000, rising living standards were visible everywhere, in rural areas as well as the towns, with a lot of new construction taking place. Material conditions are currently comparable with those of inland - not coastal - China. Tibet is more prosperous now than ever before in its history.”

As Sautman, Grunfeld, Parenti, Wang and others have all pointed out, religious practices in both the TAR and the Tibetan areas of the neighbouring provinces have now been revived to a level comparable to pre-1959 – “barring,” says Wang, “only the restoration of the old monastic economy and ‘unity of monastery and state’”. The number of monks and nuns, notes Wang, “increased to 46,000 - 2 per cent of the Tibetan population - by 1994. Temples were under construction everywhere. The decision of the Second Tibetan Work Forum of 1984 to ‘gradually restore about 200 temples by the end of the eighties’ was vastly exceeded, with 1,480 temples and monasteries reopened by 1992, and over 300 more by 1994. A considerable part of the capital involved came from local government, while the TAR authorities allocated 260 million RMB for rebuilding between 1980 and 1992. The provincial governments in Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai also contributed a sizeable amount of money to religious projects in their Tibetan areas. The central government disbursed over 53 million RMB for the renovation of the Potala Palace, as well as 64 million RMB and 614 kilos of gold to construct a tomb pagoda for the Tenth Panchen Lama.”

David, I agree with you that human rights contraventions in Tibet continue to occur today – my argument though, remember, is that the extent of these abuses have been exaggerated by the Government in Exile and its supporters, sometimes grossly, and that human rights conditions are improving, especially on the macro socio-economic front (which you cannot divorce from the issue of human rights).

David, you say that you "fully agree that human rights organisations should not exaggerate the extent of abuses. We agree also that groups and individuals should speak out and voice criticisms but not exaggerate. I hope that I am [not] prone to such exaggeration."

I appreciate the fact that we share these common points of agreement, but, with all due respect, it would seem as though the organisations you work for do indeed exaggerate the extent of human rights abuses in Tibet.

David, you are the co-ordinator of the Tibet Urgent Response Network, Four Directions UK & Friends of Tibet UK, are you not? Anybody visiting any of the websites promoting these groups can see for themselves just how far exaggerated the claims of human rights abuses in Tibet are. On one site I came across, promoting Friends of Tibet, a fundraising event in the form of a photographic exhibition was being advertised: "The photographs narrate how a peaceful, spiritual country was overtaken by military invasion, colonial occupation, atheist campaigns and a flood of conquering colonists who are now diluting the culture and dominating the landscape. A nation in danger of assimilation in their own homeland, surviving in exile in India," read the advertisment.

Now look David, anybody who has been to Tibet in the last ten years, and who is capable of measuring what they see objectively, will know that such claims are utter rubbish. Pre-1950 Tibet was hardly a "peaceful, spiritual country" for starters. This is an outrageous distortion of the historical facts. The Lamaist system of government came into being through bloody struggles: the early lamas assassinated the last Tibetan king, Lang Darma, in the 10th century. Then they fought centuries of civil wars, complete with mutual massacres of whole monasteries. "The former ruling class, now based in Dharmasala, denies there was ever a class struggle in old Tibet, but the mountains of Tibet were filled with bandit runaways, and each estate had its armed fighters, and there are well documented uprisings among Tibetan serfs in 1908, 1918, 1931, and the 1940s. In one famous uprising, 150 families of serfs of northern Tibet's Thridug county rose up in 1918, led by a woman, Hor Lhamo. They killed the county head, under the slogan: 'Down with officials! Abolish all ulag forced labor!'" (see Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet; Grunfeld, "Tibet: Myths and Realities," New China, Fall 1975, and R. Hicks, Hidden Tibet - The Land and Its People, 1988.)

The claims of "cultural genocide", as I have already argued elsewhere on this thread, are just plain wrong. In fact, Tibet over the past few decades has been experiencing a cultural renaissance! Goldstein and Beall argue that all of Tibet's traditions are well intact in the countryside among herdsman and barely farmers, and the claim that "a flood of conquering colonists" are now "diluting the culture and dominating the landscape" is preposterous!

If we consider the Tibet Autonomous Region only, then according to the last population census, conducted in 2000, “there were 2,616,300 people in Tibet, with Tibetans totalling 2,411,100 or 92.2% of the current regional population. The census also revealed that the Tibetan's average lifespan has increased to 68 due to the improving standard of living and access to medical services.” In 1950 the average lifespan was only 35, and “infant mortality has dropped from 43% in 1950 to 0.661% in 2000.”

As Barry Sautman, who is Associate Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology points out in his study on Tibet and the (Mis-)Representation of Cultural Genocide, “the state sponsored transfer [of Han Chinese] to Tibet is on a small scale. From 1994 to 2001 the PRC organised only a few thousand people to go to Tibet as cadres. Most serve only 3 years and then return to China. Those who move on their own to the Tibet Autonomous Region usually return to China in a few years. They come for a while, find the cities of Tibet too expensive, and then return to China. Some of the 72,000 Chinese who maintain their hukou [household registration] in Tibet don't really live there. Pensions are higher if your household is registered in Tibet.”

These facts are supported by articles in the Columbia Journal of Asian Law and by an Australian Chinese demographer in Asian Ethnicity in 2000, and show that the claims of ethnic swamping in Tibet are misleading. "What I think these articles show,” says Barry Sautman, “is that there is no evidence of significant population losses over the whole period from the 1950s to the present.

There are few Han living outside of the main urban centres David, and as Wang Lixiong has quite rightly pointed out, because the Han are "concentrated in the towns and along the main roads" they have a "more visible presence than the statistics justify."

There are two types of Han living in the TAR: those who have been drawn there by the magnet of money-making (prostitutes, cobblers, tailors, clock-repairers, vegetable farmers, grocers and even Chinese beggars, who can also make a living in Lhasa.) The second type of newcomer, as Wang points out, "is the tourist or adventurer, mainly from the Han elite - people such as journalists, writers, painters, photographers, students, and not a few officials, ostensibly on missions, but actually on travel jaunts. These Han differ from earlier cadres in that they don’t look to local political power for protection - nor do they get near the core of Tibetan society. They retain their outsider identities; few intend to stay. The first type are similar to the ‘floating population’ in the big PRC cities, and will leave when conditions cease to be profitable. The second group come and go anyway. But both bring secularisation and commercialisation to Tibetan society; the blow they represent to the traditional order is not to be underestimated."

So Tibet's major urban centres are now a little more commercialised and cosmopolitan. So what? Welcome to the modern world, Tibet! Such diversity is surely, by all objective measures, historically progressive. As the author writing for the China Development Brief very correctly points out in my opinion, Beijing's Western Development Strategy is indeed likely to have various impacts on ethnic minority cultures in Tibet, "just as 'the market' has impacted, with unevenly distributed costs and benefits on every corner of the globe. But cultures have seldom been pure or static; and never less so than now, in what has become a largely post-traditional and increasingly hybrid world. The great issue of the age is not how to preserve cultures intact, but how to ensure that people whose cultures are changing through internal and external pressures have a significant say in defining their own future." As I keep saying, Tibetans are divided over their attitude towards China's governance - most people have very complex and conflicting views that are in constant states of flux. Some are embracing the new modernity already, and while others are keen to, some are also of the opinion that they are threatened by it.

Beijing's paternalism more often than not assumes what's best for its citizens. My point is that Tibetan separatists in exile and their pro-Tibet lobbyists in the affluent West are more often than not just as equally presumptuous. They do not speak for the majority of Tibetans any more than do the politicians in Beijing.

My charge against the so-called "pro-Tibet lobby" is that they push an essentially masturbatory discourse that festishises a virtual Tibet as its object of desire, whilst projecting oedipal fears onto a rival Han who are consequently demonised in waves of hyperbolic spasms.

The assertion that the Han are "flooding" Tibet is factually incorrect, just as Pauline Hanson's claim that Australia in the late 1990s was being "swamped" by Asians was also factually wrong. Hyberbolic silliness! Asian Australians make up only about 6% of the total population. Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party and the Tibetan Government in Exile and their supporters have much in common - they both distort the truth to suit their own political agendas, and they both push discourses that are fundamentally reactionary and inherently racist.

As I keep arguing, it is important to speak out against human rights abuses, wherever and whenever they occur. But exaggerating abuses merely compromises the legitimacy of the human rights cause, and in Tibet's case, it encourages seperatists, thereby further provoking those hardliners who are charged with overseeing the region's public security into initiating tougher crackdowns.

I will not respond to your second last point, because I have noticed that Sarah Ravensworth has already done that for me, in her comment above.

Finally, you ask me on what I base my contention that the Dalai Lama supports India's nuclear program. As the British journalist Christopher Hitchens reported in an article titled "His Material Highness", published in Salon back in July 1998, "The Dalai Lama has come out in support of the thermonuclear tests recently conducted by the Indian state, and has done so in the very language of the chauvinist parties who now control that state's affairs. The 'developed' countries, he says, must realise that India is a major contender and should not concern themselves with its internal affairs. This is a perfectly realpolitik statement, so crass and banal and opportunist that it would not deserve any comment if it came from another source."

David, it is in fact a well documented fact that on the day after the second round of Indian tests, the Dalai Lama immediately held a press conference and made a statement in which he urged the international community not to comment on India's actions. He said the country had a right to develop nuclear weapons and that it was "not democratic" for the international community to criticise India. If he has changed his position since, then good. But the fact that he came out in support of India's nuclear program back in 1998 speaks volumes. The man is a political chameleon, as I keep saying.

Warmest regards,

M.A.Jones
Shenzhen

Dalai lama received the Nobel Prize in Peace, then supportted India to develop nuclear weapons.
BTW, Dalai Lama's statement in Iraq War was also "interesting ".
Which one was hypocritical? Dalai lama?  Nobel Prize? Or both?

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 3-8-2008 10:45 ]

I wouldn't say that the long extracts that you have posted here show anything except that "M.A.Jones" is happy to distort the facts to make his case. Let's just take a couple of examples:

Quote:

Living standards have also improved significantly since 1980, as Tsering Shakya rather reluctantly admits. “In 1979 the average income of Tibetan farmers and herdsmen was 147 RMB; in 1990 it was 484 RMB and in 1994, 903.29 RMB. In 1992, the TAR’s total agriculture output was up 69.8 per cent from 1978—and 460 per cent up from its 1952 level. In the cities the improvement was even greater. (see Tibetan Population in Contemporary China, p.342 and the 1995 Yearbook of Tibetan Statistics, p.178)
Indeed, as Wang points out, “annual economic growth in Tibet was over 10 per cent between 1991 and 1999 - higher than in China proper. Per capita income for farmers and herders has grown by 9.3 per cent per year, for urban residents by 19.6 per cent. These are not just empty figures...

Actually, these figures are completely empty because they are not corrected for inflation. Income growth was actually NEGATIVE in the 1990s and was extremely slow at other times (see posts 9 and 10 in this thread).

Quote:

Nevertheless, the fact is David, that even during this messy period [1911-1950], China exercised sovereignty over Tibet, and at no time did China ever give up its sovereign claims. Never. Period.

China did not exercise sovereignty. It may have claimed sovereignty, but that is a different thing. It had no control over Tibet. Reasonable historians (like Prof Robbie Barnet of Columbia and Melvin Goldstein of Case Western Reserve) recognise that Tibet was effectively independent during this time (as well as during many other times during its history, including much of the Qing dynasty).
Here's a quote from Goldstein:
The Tibetans didn't really have a declaration of independence in a Western sense but it was clear that that was the case, so from that point on, for the next 40 years, until 1950 or 51, Tibet operated independently but it was "de facto" independent in the sense that the international community did not accept or support that Tibet was independent.

Quote:

Beijing's paternalism more often than not assumes what's best for its citizens. My point is that Tibetan separatists in exile and their pro-Tibet lobbyists in the affluent West are more often than not just as equally presumptuous. They do not speak for the majority of Tibetans any more than do the politicians in Beijing.

Actually, we don't know what the majority of Tibetans want. The reason for this is that the CCP, ruling Tibet from Beijing, won't let them express their wishes. The author pretends that the  Tibetan separatists in exile are somehow equivalent to the "paternalists" in Beijing, but there is no symmetry here: the CCP "paternalists" are the ones who have the power in Tibet, so they are responsible for the suppression that keeps Tibetans from expressing their wishes.

About "de facto" independent , I would like to extract again, it is very interesting that we can find most popular topics about Tibet issue in :
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?p=496502#496502
Discussion in above forum was much more professional than ours
I will give you my response about "de facto" independent later.

Quote from http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?p=496502#496502:
anchor Posted: Thu Jan 25, 2007 8:08 pm  
Tibet Response Network wrote:
You have quoted from several Chinese authors which rather emphasises the sad fact that history is usually written by the victors. Perhaps I could direct you to "Tibetan Nation" by Warren Smith, Jr. I quote; "In April (1912) the Chinese garrison in Lhasa surrendered to the Tibetans..... Chinese troops were eventually removed from Tibet, via India at the end of 1912. In January 1913 the Dalai Lama finally returned to Lhasa. Tibet was free of the Chinese for the first time since 1720." (Page 181.) ".
I am not sure if you see the bigger historic picture in 1911-12. The Chinese troops in the quotes were Imperial Qing troops. Year 1911 marked the end of Imperial China, when the nation rose up and overthrew the Qing Dynasty. Qing troops quickly surrendered to or were destroyed by revolutionary forces in Southern and Southwestern China. Many provinces at the time claimed independence from Beijing. The question is whether claiming independence from a government the same as claiming independence from a state.
Tibet Response Network wrote:
Contrary to your assertion, I did not imply or write that the Tibetans rose up and expelled the Chinese troops aggressively. I chose my words very carefully when I said "formally expelled". Put another way, it was done according to formal concepts and in a ceremonial manner. Photographic evidence of these events is readily available.
Again, you may have misunderstood history. The last Qing emperor abdicated in 1912, all Qing troops were ordered to surrender to provincial authorities and disband. Therefore, the surrender and disbandment of the Imperial Qing garrison in Tibet only indicates the fall of the Qing dynasty. From that point on, China entered the Republic era.

Tibet Response Network wrote:
The Chinese Republic asked that Tibet join the new Republic, a de facto recognition of the fact that Tibet was at that time a separate entity or nation.
In 1912, the Chinese Republic government in Beijing has absolutely no power beyond the city limit. China was literally divided into many de facto independent states of various sizes. Beijing also invited Marshal Zhang of Manchuria, General Cai of Yunnan, and various other warlords to join the New Republic. The result was a twenty year civil war in China's hinterland.
Tibet Response Network wrote: The Chinese government represses Tibetans, imprisons and tortures young nuns for shouting "Free Tibet" and shoots pilgrims crossing into Nepal. Sorry, Mark, but give me the Dalai Lama any day.

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 3-8-2008 04:04 ]

You said:
the CCP "paternalists" are the ones who have the power in Tibet, so they are responsible for the suppression that keeps Tibetans from expressing their wishes.

"suppression" is the word used by  Tibetan separatists in exile.
"keeps Tibetans from expressing their wishes."
Tibetan in China expressed their wishes clearly, but the wishes of them have been filtered from westerners by mainstream Western media. I will give you an example in youtube
Please search "A year in Tibet" in http://www.youtube.com, It was an interesting BBC documentary film.
Please watch the whole of it, There are 5 episodes in all

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 3-8-2008 04:22 ]

Quote:

Many provinces at the time claimed independence from Beijing. The question is whether claiming independence from a government the same as claiming independence from a state.

Yup, it is.  I don't quite have time to elaborate on this point, but I shall offer the example of the the US civil war in which the southern states didn't like the stance the government had on several issues (including the main one, slavery) and left the union.  The government governs the state.  You can't be independent from one without being independent from the other.

http://www.wangyee.net/comp/Tibet2004.htm
Above link returned
alberto,about question
11.Reting Rinpoche was 14th Dalai lama's teacher, just he found 14th Dalai lama as reincarnation. Do you know why Reting renpoche and 14th Dalai lama'father died nearly at the same time? what's causes they dead of?
Your answered
Reting Rinpoche was imprisoned in the Potala palace and died there around 1947. This was part of a civil war between his followers and those of Taktra Rinpoche, who held in to power until the 14th DL took power in 1950. I don't know about the 14th Dalai lama's father.

Pls look at below in this book
http://www.wangyee.net/comp/Tibet2004.htm#_Toc84238977

Now let’s move back to the 14th Dalai, who never disclosed whether he had visited Gokhang.  His first regent was a Live Buddha called Reting Rinpoche, who was pro-Beijing.  Reting ruled for eight years before he handed over to Regent Taktra Rinpoche.  The innocent Reting agreed with Taktra personally to rotate office regularly, but Taktra denied later.  To get the power back, Reting allied with Choekyong Tsering, father of 14th Dalai.  

However, Choekyong Tsering was soon poisoned in AD1947, generally believed done by men of Taktra.  During nationwide shock, Taktra arrested Reting and put him into jail, accusing him to be the one behind this assassination.  Reting’s acolyte, Tsenya Rinpoche [6], led pro-Reting monks to save their head via protest.  Taktra ordered guns for them. At least 200 Sera-Monastery monks died in this monastic “civil war”. Reting’s residence was razed to the ground.

Taktra then announced to Tibetans that it was a rebel plotted by China central government and started a holocaust of Han merchants in Lhasa.  Meanwhile, he telegraphed China government in Nanjing, which was then fully engaged in fighting with communists, saying that Reting was a communist [7].  Another smart lama, wasn’t he?

Reting was charged with treason and tortured to death in jail.  His testis were grinded before he was strangled, or poisoned by other accounts [8].  Other “accomplices” had their eyeballs dug.  [9]

Just how cruel and tormenting the atmosphere of this time has been described later by a Tibetan refugee: "Rivalry, in-fighting, corruption, nepotism, it was decadent and horrible. Everything was a matter of show, ceremonial, jockeying for position”. [10]

The focus of this whole power struggle is actually on whether Tibet should stay with then war-torn China.  Reting was pro-China, so was 14th Dalai’s father, Choekyong Tsering, who couldn’t even speak Tibetan when his son was enthroned.  Their rival was the nobility.  They didn’t want to stay under the weak China.  They were more interested to obtain British military aid so as to more effectively control their surfs.  And they prevailed in this round.

After the relentless cleansing in AD1947, pro-China lamas and the family of 14th Dalai were suppressed, leaving his brother Gayle Dhondup still murmuring about their father’s abnormal death till now [11].  The pro-independence side seized the power.  They taught the 14th Dalai their dogma, which made this highly intelligent young man a person of contradiction.  He inherited both pro and anti-China thoughts from both sides.  When the feudal lords failed in their AD1959 revolt, he went on exile with them; whereas when they used him as an image for Tibet Independence, he from time to time expresses wishes to reconcile with China government and keep Tibet as an autonomous region of China as it always has been.  It’s generally accepted that he’s not a die-hard pro-independence person.

From AD1947 till AD1950 it was the prime time of the pro-independence sect, while young 14th Dalai grew up.  Then in AD1950 the China army was at gate.

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 13-8-2008 00:04 ]

Even so called  "de facto" independent ,was opposed by Reting Rinpoche and Choekyong Tsering,14th Dalai lama's teacher and his father.

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 14-8-2008 09:07 ]

qinghai_history.JPG (112.57 KB)

12-10-2008 18:08

1.Qiang and Di are the first, that lived in this land. The remains of ancient culture indicate that the development of   
     Qinghai can be dated back to 6,000 years ago.The Di people were related by marriage with other ethnic groups.
     Their decedents became the Han nationality later.

2.In 121B.C, the Han Dynasty  government established a fortress here and built the Xiping Pavilion overseeing the   
   areas of Yellow and Huangshui Rivers,thus began its control over the eastern part of Qinghai. Later, it established   
   seven counties including Linqiang, Anyi, Poqiang, Yunwu, Yujie and Heguan, formally incorporation this area into  
   the systems of prefectures and counties of the Central Plains feudal dynasties.

   After the agricultural Han Dynasty of China finally succeeded in expelling Huns, their northern nomadic feud,
   to Central Asia , Qiang became Han’s top threat.  During the 2-3rd century the two nations were constantly in   
   fierce battles against each other.  By the end of the 3rd century, however, it seemed that Qiangs were inevitably  
   losing the war. Some Qiang tribes stayed and mixed with Han into Chinese. Some others moved southwards along
   the southeastern boundary of Tibetan Plateau and settled down in Kham area, which is now western Sichuan
   Province and northwestern Yunnan Province of China.  They are the ancestors of many ethnic groups nowadays in
   this region, such as Naxi people in Yunnan.

3.The Xianbei people  were a significant nomadic people residing in Manchuria and eastern Mongolia.
   At the beginning of the 4th century, the Xianbei people moved into Qinghai and set up a Tuyuhun kingdom of their   
   own. Tuyuhun was conquered by the Tibetan kingdom In 663. Over the following centuries most Tuyuhun people  
   assimilated by Tibetans, the rest Tuyuhun people became the Tu ethnic group,living in Qinghai nowdays.

4.In AD 602, Tibet nation evolved into the Tibetan Kingdom based on a loose union of hundreds of tribes scattered  
   in the southwestern corner of Tibetan Plateau.At roughly the same time Tang Dynasty was founded, which brought
   China into one of its prime times. In AD663 Tibet started war to destroy Tuyuhun.  Tuyuhun asked for help from     
   Tang but the latter was fully engaged in war with Koguryo. A delayed reinforcement of 100,000-strong Tang troops
   attempting to restore Tuyuhun was defeated in AD670 when Tibet mobilized all its army of 400,000.

   For the Tibetan Kingdom, which lies in the most barren land on the earth, since the Himalayas blocked from its
   west, Tang to its east, it could seek expansion only in the north, which is Central Asia.  

   Tang Emperor made one of the most foolish decisions in the history by granting Tibet the Hetao area, an alluvion of
   the Yellow River, as the dowry for its second Princess JinCheng married to Tibet in AD710.  

   The sterile Tibet Plateau couldn’t sustain a large military force, but a fertile alluvion could.  Tibet soon combined
   its nomadic and agricultural strengths and created a powerful cavalry army, which enabled it to seek aggression
   into Central Asia

   By the end of eighth century, the expansion of Tibet into China had been successfully curbed.  

   However, at that moment Tibet was still a decisive player in the world. It could have become another Mongol Empire
   and conquered the neighboring civilizations such as India and China. Nobody would have imagined its rapid
   degeneration and later falling as a part of China, the key factor being Lamaism.

   Buddhism was introduced to Tibet by two princesses from Nepal and Tang from both sides of the Plateau.
   The Tang princess, WenCheng, alone brought 360 scrolls of Buddhism scriptures, a Buddha sculpture as well as
   lots of monks to Tibet.  
   To accommodate them, his husband King Songsten Gampo built the first Buddhism temple, Jokhang , in Lhasa.

   Before that, Tibet’s dominant religion was Bonism, a type of Shamanism .  It is now still alive, mixed with
   Lamaism and called the Black-Hat Sect of Lamaism.  As in any other counterpart during transition from slavery to
   feudalism, the Tibet king was merely the leader of many feudal lords, which evolved from tribe chiefs.  Like them, he
   had to obey the instruction from Bon priests, who were masters of rituals.  This remnant of slavery regime obviously
   restricted his power.  The king hence sought to get rid of Bon priests’ influence from politics, and Buddhism
   became the best choice, at least he thought so.

   Therefore, Tibetan kings became fervent promoters of Buddhism.  Trisong Detsen, the king who ended peace with
   China, invited Shantarakshita and Padmasambhava  from India around AD780.  He never realized what a terrible
   decision he had made, which would before long cost his dynasty and broke Tibet into parts.

   Now the Bon priests felt the fatal threat.  Were all Tibetans converted to Buddhism, no matter voluntary or forced to
   do so, they would end up jobless and lost all their privilege and power.  They had to fight back.  In AD838, they
   murdered the drunken king Tritsu Detsen, a fanatical adherent of Buddhism who pushed through a harsh regime of
   monastic despotism that placed the rights of the monks far above those of ordinary people, and sent his brother   
   Langdarma to the throne.  The first decree of the new king was prohibition of Buddhism.

   In the Lamaism scripture Tritsu Detsen was of course depicted as one of the four messengers from
   Avalokitesvara.  It smeared Langdarma as the incarnation of a donkey, who belonged to but loathed his four
   owners.  

   Soon came the counterattack from the Lamaism side.  In AD842 they sent Palgyi Dorje, disguised as a black-hat
   Bon priest requesting to meet Langdarma, to commit regicide.  In order to bring the murder into accord with the
   Buddhist commandment against any form of killing, lamas evaluated it as a gesture of compassion: in being killed,
   Langdarma was prevented from collecting even more bad karma and plunging ever more people into ruin.  In this
   sense Palgyi Dorje didn’t kill Langdarma but nobly and mercifully liberated him from further bad karma.

   The assassination irreversibly destroyed the fragile political balance of Tibetan Kingdom, a loose tribe union, and   
   facilitated feudal lords to mushroom.  It triggered a bloody civil war that lasted for centuries.  
   In AD 857, an uprising of slaves was first broken out in Amdo, and then it passed throughout  the whole Tibet.
   The Tibet Kingdom was ruined completely. Tibet hasn't been an independent country since then.Only a large     
   number of Tibetan tribes were left until they were conquered by the Mongolians.

5.In the 13th century, the Mongolians entered Qinghai.
   Yuan dynasty established administration to govern the Tibet tribes in Qinghai.Then Mongolians entered Qinghai
   lasting for centuries even after Yuan dynasty ended. Such as,at the beginning of the 16th century, the Heshuote
   tribe, one of the four tribes of Elute Mongolia, moved to Qinghai.
  
   In the first year of the reign of Emperor Yongzheng in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the rebellion of Mongolians tribe
   was suppressed.

   Since then, the Qing Dynasty enhanced its control and the development of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai provinces.
   It appointed a special minister to oversee the 29 Mongolian tribes and the affairs in southern Qinghai and the
   Yushu area. In northeast Qinghai, Xining Fu was founded which inherited the Tusi system of the Ming Dynasty and
   was under the jurisdiction of the Gansu Province.

6.Hui and Salar entered Qinghai from the 14th century.
   They are descended from  Arab and Persian Muslim traders who settled in China and  gradually intermarried and
   assimilated into the surrounding population keeping only their distinctive religion. Especially ,a lots of western Asia
   Muslim followed the returning of Mongolians'army  entered into China during the 13th century.
   
   In 1912, Ma Qi,a Hui warlord was appointed as the highest military commander of Xining by Beijing government.
   In 1915, Ma was entrusted military and minority affairs concerning Mongolian tribes and the Gansu, Ningxia and
   Qinghai provinces.They established  Hui and Salar Muslim troop which were faithful to Ma's family.  
   Since then, Ma's warlords,including Ma Qi's son,Ma Pu-fang, controlled Qinghai for almost 40 years with the  
   support of the KMT government until CCP entered in 1949. Ma Bufang and his family fled to Taiwan.

7.In 1930's, several thousands Kazakhs nomads entered Qinghai from Xinjiang, for fleeing from being oppressed by
   warlord in Xinjiang province.

[ Last edited by joej2005 at 26-10-2008 17:02 ]