Here are some points which anyone passing judgment on recent events in Tibet should bear in mind:
1. Tibet, an independent country until 1950, was not suddenly occupied by China. The history of its relations with China is long and complex, with China often acting as a protective overlord – the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.
(The term "Dalai Lama" bears witness to this interaction: it combines the Mongolian dalai – ocean – and the Tibetan bla-ma.)
2. Before 1950 Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (the last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door).
Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India.
This did not prevent the elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.
3. The Cultural Revolution which ravaged the Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s was not imported by the Chinese. Fewer than a hundred of the Red Guards came to Tibet with the revolution, and the young mobs burning the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetan.
4. Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and substantial CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilise Tibet are not irrational.
5. As television images show, what is going on now in Tibetan regions is no longer a peaceful "spiritual" protest of monks as in Burma over the last year, but gangs burning and killing ordinary Chinese immigrants and their stores. We should measure the Tibetan protests by the same standards as we measure other violent protests: if Tibetans can attack Chinese immigrants, why can't the Palestinians do the same to the Israeli settlers on the West Bank?
6. The Chinese invested heavily in Tibetan economic development, as well as infrastructure, education and health services. Despite undeniable oppression, the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today. Poverty is now worse in China's own undeveloped Western rural provinces than in Tibet.
