History of Tibet (1950–present)

Subsequent socialist reforms and other unpopular policies of the Chinese Communist Party led to armed uprisings, eventually assisted by the CIA, and their violent suppression.

[15] Despite the presence of twenty thousand PLA troops in Central Tibet, the Dalai Lama's government was permitted to maintain important symbols from its de facto independence period.

Tibetan areas in Qinghai, known as Kham, which were outside the authority of the Dalai Lama's government, did not enjoy this same autonomy and had land redistribution implemented in full.

This involved communist agitators designating "landlords"—sometimes arbitrarily chosen—for public humiliation in so-called "struggle sessions",[17] torture, maiming, and even death.

Armed rebellions initially attained considerable success, and with CIA support much of southern Tibet fell into the hands of guerilla fighters such as the Chushi Gangdruk.

Around 2,000 rebels were based out of the semi-independent Kingdom of Mustang; many of them trained at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, in the United States[38] Tibetan exiles claim that 430,000 died in total during the 1959 uprising and the subsequent 15 years of guerrilla warfare.

[42] In May 1962, the Tenth Panchen Lama sent Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai a confidential report[43][44] detailing the suffering of the Tibetan people, which became known as the 70,000 Character Petition.

[44] It was the opinion of the Panchen Lama that these deaths were a result of official policies, not of any natural disasters, which was the situation understood in Beijing by Chairman Mao and the Central People's Government.

Sautman also stated that the claim that Tibet was the region most hit by China's famine of 1959–1962 is based not on statistics gathered in Tibetan areas, but on anonymous refugee reports lacking in numerical specificity.

[49] Under the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement the Central People's Government of the Chinese People's Republic gave a number of undertakings, among them: promises to maintain the existing political system of Tibet, to maintain the status and functions of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, to protect freedom of religion and the monasteries and to refrain from compulsion in the matter of reforms in Tibet.

A report sponsored by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) found that these and other undertakings had been violated by the Chinese People's Republic, and that the Government of Tibet was entitled to repudiate the Agreement as it did on March 11, 1959.

[50] Other Tibetans have offered accounts of massacres, tortures and killings, bombardment of monasteries, extermination of whole nomad camps, and the use of military equipment provided by the Soviet Union for Chinese punitive operations in Tibet.

[54] A. Tom Grunfeld asserts that the United States took advantage of the Dalai Lama's leaving Tibet by prodding its clandestinely funded Cold War International Commission of Jurists to prepare propagandistic reports attacking China.

[63] Resistors against the Cultural Revolution included Thrinley Chodron, a nun from Nyemo, who led an armed rebellion that spread through eighteen xians (counties) of the TAR, targeting CCP officials and Tibetan collaborators, that was ultimately suppressed by the PLA.

Citing Tibetan Buddhist symbols which the rebels invoked, Shakya calls this 1969 revolt "a millenarian uprising, an insurgency characterized by a passionate desire to be rid of the oppressor.

"[64] Warren W. Smith, a broadcaster of Radio Free Asia (which was established by the US government), extrapolated a death figure of 400,000 from his calculation of census reports of Tibet which show 200,000 "missing" people.

[78] Following Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping launched initiatives of rapprochement with the exiled Tibetan leaders, hoping to persuade them to come to live in China.

[80] These events also prompted Party Secretary Hu Yaobang and Vice Premier Wan Li to visit Tibet, where they were dismayed by the conditions they found.

[82] Concurrent liberalizations in economics and internal migration have also resulted in Tibet seeing more Han Chinese migrant workers, though the actual number of this floating population remains disputed.

[85] American Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein considered the riots to be spontaneous mass expressions of Tibetan resentment, sparked in part by hope that the United States would soon provide support or pressure enabling Tibet to become independent.

When the 10th Panchen Lama addressed the Tibet Autonomous Region Standing Committee Meeting of the National People's Congress in 1987, he detailed mass imprisonment and killings of Tibetans in Amdo (Qinghai):[when?]

[90] In 1990 a dissident journalist provided materials to The Observer suggesting that over 450 Tibetans had died in March 1989 and alleged that prior to the violence, the police in Lhasa had received orders from General Li Lianxiu to provoke an incident.

[105] In 2008 the Chinese government "launched a 570-million-yuan (81.43 million U.S. dollars) project to preserve 22 historical and cultural heritage sites in Tibet, including the Zhaxi Lhunbo Lamasery as well as the Jokhang, Ramogia, Sanyai and Samgya-Goutog monasteries.

While Chinese authorities announced after the protests that over 1,000 individuals detained had been released, overseas Tibetan organizations claimed that at least several hundred remained in detention by the start of 2009.

[107] Religious repression included locking down major monasteries and nunneries, and a propaganda campaign where local authorities renewed “Patriotic Education,” which required Tibetans to participate in criticism sessions of the Dalai Lama and sign written denunciations of him, according to Amnesty's 2009 China report.

Tibetan members of the Chinese Communist Party were also targeted, including being made to remove their children from Tibet exile community schools where they would have received a religious education.

[119][120][121] [116] Referencing the population figures of Lhasa, the Dalai Lama has recently accused China of "demographic aggression" while stating that the Tibetans had been reduced to a minority "in his homeland".

However, since the 1960s, Chinese rule has had the effect of increasing the population of the Tibetans, not decreasing it, largely due to a modernization process that has improved the standard of living and lowered infant, maternity and other mortality rates.This table[131] includes all Tibetan autonomous entities in the People's Republic of China, plus Xining PLC and Haidong P. The latter two are included to complete the figures for Qinghai province, and also because they are claimed as parts of Greater Tibet by the Government of Tibet in exile.

The United States also took advantage of the Dalai Lama's having left Tibet by having the CIA revive its Cold War propaganda machine, creating supposedly popular organizations such as the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees, prodding its clandestinely funded Cold War human rights organizations such as the International Commission of Jurists to prepare propagandistic reports attacking ChinaBased on the documentation and named respondents, the authors present the tale of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secretly bankrolling the formation of the ICJ as an instrument of the cold war.

The 1960 LIC report, Tibet and the Chinese People's Republic (ICJ, Geneva: 1990), shows strong signs of bias in accepting or rejecting the testimonies cited