If you are curious about Tibet's relationship with China over the centuries, in
view of the recent incidents, you may find the article below useful. The
article says that Tibet was never a part of China till Communist China marched
into Lhasa.
The question arises - was there a country called Tibet at all? Was there a
government in Tibet? Dalai Lama is a spiritual leader, not a political one.
What makes a Tibetan a Tibetan? Religion, language or tribal division?
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From the NYT
Op-Ed Contributor
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13sperling.html
By ELLIOT SPERLING
Published: April 13, 2008
Bloomington, Ind.
FOR many Tibetans, the case for the historical independence of their land
is unequivocal. They assert that Tibet has always been and by rights now ought
to be an independent country. ChinaÂ’s assertions are equally unequivocal: Tibet
became a part of China during Mongol rule and its status as a part of China has
never changed. Both of these assertions are at odds with TibetÂ’s history.
The Tibetan view holds that Tibet was never subject to foreign rule after it
emerged in the mid-seventh century as a dynamic power holding sway over an
Inner Asian empire. These Tibetans say the appearance of subjugation to the
Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, and to the
Manchu rulers of ChinaÂ’s Qing Dynasty from the 18th century until the 20th
century, is due to a modern, largely Western misunderstanding of the personal
relations among the Yuan and Qing emperors and the pre-eminent lamas of Tibet.
In this view, the lamas simply served as spiritual mentors to the emperors,
with no compromise of TibetÂ’s independent status.
In ChinaÂ’s view, the Western misunderstandings are about the nature of China:
Western critics donÂ’t understand that China has a history of thousands of years
as a unified multinational state; all of its nationalities are Chinese. The
Mongols, who entered China as conquerers, are claimed as Chinese, and their
subjugation of Tibet is claimed as a Chinese subjugation.
Here are the facts. The claim that Tibet entertained only personal relations
with China at the leadership level is easily rebutted. Administrative records
and dynastic histories outline the governing structures of Mongol and Manchu
rule. These make it clear that Tibet was subject to rules, laws and decisions
made by the Yuan and Qing rulers. Tibet was not independent during these two
periods. One of the Tibetan cabinet ministers summoned to Beijing at the end of
the 18th century describes himself unambiguously in his memoirs as a subject of
the Manchu emperor.
But although Tibet did submit to the Mongol and Manchu Empires, neither
attached Tibet to China. The same documentary record that shows Tibetan
subjugation to the Mongols and Manchus also shows that ChinaÂ’s intervening Ming
Dynasty (which ruled from 1368 to 1644) had no control over Tibet. This is
problematic, given ChinaÂ’s insistence that Chinese sovereignty was exercised in
an unbroken line from the 13th century onward.
The idea that Tibet became part of China in the 13th century is a very recent
construction. In the early part of the 20th century, Chinese writers generally
dated the annexation of Tibet to the 18th century. They described TibetÂ’s
status under the Qing with a term that designates a “feudal dependency,” not an
integral part of a country. And thatÂ’s because Tibet was ruled as such, within
the empires of the Mongols and the Manchus. When the Qing dynasty collapsed in
1911, Tibet became independent once more.
From 1912 until the founding of the PeopleÂ’s Republic of China in 1949, no
Chinese government exercised control over what is today ChinaÂ’s Tibet
Autonomous Region. The Dalai LamaÂ’s government alone ruled the land until 1951.
Marxist China adopted the linguistic sleight of hand that asserts it has
always been a unitary multinational country, not the hub of empires. There is
now firm insistence that “Han,” actually one of several ethnonyms for
“Chinese,” refers to only one of the Chinese nationalities. This was a
conscious decision of those who constructed 20th-century Chinese identity. (It
stands in contrast to the Russian decision to use a political term, “Soviet,”
for the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.)
There is something less to the arguments of both sides, but the argument on
the Chinese side is weaker. Tibet was not “Chinese” until Mao Zedong’s armies
marched in and made it so.
Elliot Sperling is the director of the Tibetan Studies program at Indiana
UniversityÂ’s department of Central Eurasia Studies.
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