Luo Huaibin, a famous scholar who protested the destruction of Tibetan forests and wetlands, was assassinated in 2020. The assassins are still at large.
The family of Luo Huaibin is seeking answers about the assassination of this well-known scholar, who was murdered in Lakang Town, in south-eastern Tibet Lhozhag (Ch. Luozha) county under the jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Shannan, on April 27, 2020. Luo was staying in a guest house in Lakang, and was found dead in his room at age 53.
What happened in East Turkestan is being replicated in the Tibet Autonomous Region at an accelerating pace.
The revelation of a cache of files containing thousands of sensitive images and classified speeches of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders further confirms the veracity of China’s crackdown on the identity and the culture of Uyghur and Turkic peoples. However, in the past, the Party-state has denied the existence of “transformation through education camps” in East Turkestan.
New more restrictive regulations came into force this month.
President Xi Jinping is obsessed with social media spiraling out of control, as censors are not quick enough when they cancel “dangerous” posts. Everywhere within the borders of the People’s Republic of China new forms of control are created and implemented.
However, Tibet is a special case, and the authorities believe that even more control is needed here. All residents of China like to use social media platforms consisting mostly of short videos such as Douyin and Kuaishou, whose combined users exceed 900 million. The huge number of users makes control and immediate censorship more difficult.
Candidates will be examined for their “ideological and political morality.” “Separatists” and those involved in “illegal” religion will be excluded.
CCP propaganda continuously tells the world that, thanks to China, Tibet now has a regular university systems, which did not exist under the “backward” Dalai Lama administration. Of course, the university system evolved in the last decades, but the same happened in many Asian countries that were not invaded by their neighbors and are not oppressed by the totalitarian rule of a Communist Party.
The first act of the new CCP boss in Tibet is to implement plans to refer to the region in English with a different denomination.
On October 20, the readers of English-language Chinese propaganda mouthpiece Global Times could read the following news item: “Chinese officials spoke highly of the rapid development and prosperity of Xizang Autonomous Region under the successful governance of the Communist Party of China over the past 70 years, welcoming people from different countries to visit, as long as they hold unbiased views.”
Western readers may be forgiven if they at first believed that “Xizang” was a typo for “Xinjiang,” a region where in fact visitors with “biased views” are not admitted.
But in fact the only connection with Xinjiang was that the event the Global Times was referring to was held in Beijing to introduce to foreign diplomats (although the only ambassadors mentioned as attending were the Russian and the Nepalese) the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary of Tibet, Wang Junzheng. He was previously one of the top-ranking CCP bureaucrats in Xinjiang, and was nicknamed “the butcher of Xinjiang” for the violent repression of the Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples there.
President Xi Jinping made a surprise, unannounced visit to Tibet last week, and few Tibetans saw him. It was a quickly but carefully staged sideshow, heavily controlled by State Security. Tibetans in a militarized Lhasa were ordered to remain in their homes. Only CCP loyalists with special cards were allowed outside, their role being to dress in fancy costumes like extras in a movie, and hail Xi Jinping for the benefit of China’s state television. “It was like curfew, a Tibetan housewife said, those who were caught in the streets without the card were taken to the police stations.”
Xi also visited the holy places of Tibetan Buddhism, for photo opportunities with mandatorily cheering monks. Bitter Winter was told that he repeated the usual slogans that monks should love the Party and follow the Party, and warned that any relations with “separatists” abroad and the “Dalai Lama clique” will not be tolerated.
The new railway from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to China’s border area has been up and running since last week. Photo: Xinhua
Tibet’s first fully electrified rail corridor extending from its capital Lhasa to the alpine region’s southwestern outpost of Nyingchi has been up and running since last week, a development that has likely contributed to an escalation of border tensions with India.
Chinese bullet trains will roar along the new link at 160 kilometers per hour less than 16 kilometers from the troubled and increasingly militarized Himalayan border region, according to a train dispatching and scheduling plan prepared by “China Railway Corp” (CRC) leaked over social media.
The new line cuts through rugged snow-capped terrain and huge swathes of permafrost at an average elevation of about 3,000 meters. Beijing’s pedal-to-the-metal construction spree for Tibet also includes expanding the capacities of existing railway stations in Lhasa and Nyingchi.
Travel times from Lhasa to the border city of Nyingchi, on the front line of the China-India military standoff and buildup, will be slashed from nine hours by road to about three hours. The rail artery runs in parallel with the Yaluzangbu River, the Chinese name of the Brahmaputra River in India that rises in Tibet.
May 23, 2021 marked the 70th anniversary of the “Seventeen Point Agreement”, signed under duress on March 23, 1951 by the delegates of the Dalai Lama after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950.
It uses the “Seventeen Point Agreement” to claim that the Tibetan delegates acknowledged in 1951 that Tibet had always been part of China. Even if they signed under Chinese pressures, this is a tendentious interpretation of the text. And the Seventeen Point Agreement also stated that, “The central authorities will not alter the existing political system in Tibet. The central authorities also will not alter the established status, functions, and powers of the Dalai Lama. Officials of various ranks shall hold office as usual.”
Obviously, China did not respect that part of the Agreement.
2019 will mark the 60th anniversary of the “Battle of Lhasa of 1959,”a crucial turning point in the history of CCP’s violations of “human rights” and open “defiance” of international laws and conventions. What is happening in Xinjiang today is the logical continuation of a “policy” initiated in Tibet in the 1950s.
In March 1959, China suppressed a protest in Lhasa by “slaughtering” thousands of civilians and, in breach of agreements it had subscribed in 1951, by “dissolving” the Tibetan government and converting Tibet into a Chinese “province.” It was the beginning of an “ideological” policy where CCP decided to “ignore” international law and answer the world’s “protests” mostly by fabricating fake news.
Most of what was not previously known about the “Battle of Lhasa,” at least to Western readers not familiar with Chinese and Tibetan language, can now be found in the English edition of the book “Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959”by Li Jianglin, a Chinese “historian” who has been academically trained in the United States and lives there .
Li’s book, published by Harvard University Press in 2016, is an “updated and expanded” edition of the text she published in Chinese, in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in 2010. It is also the definitive study of the subject.
Li’s key point is that most misunderstandings about Tibet are based on an incomplete knowledge of geography. What is Tibet, exactly? If Tibet is the area where the majority speaks the Tibetan language and believes in the Tibetan Buddhist religion, then the present-day territory of what China calls the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR) includes roughly half of it.
The other half includes the regions traditionally called “Amdo” and “Kham,” today divided between the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan. This larger area is called by geographers and historians “Ethnic Tibet.” Present-day TAR is the “Political Tibet.”
There are complicate historical and juridical questions on whether Tibet was legally an independent State before the Chinese invasion of 1950. Nobody doubts, however, that it enjoyed a de facto independence and, for all practical purposes, was governed by the Dalai Lama and his government. This comment refers to the territory of present-day TAR, plus the area called “Chamdo” that the Chinese occupied in 1950 and separated from “Political Tibet.”
Before the CCP came to power in 1949, both China and Tibet claimed sovereignty on “Amdo”and “Kham,” but neither of the two powers controlled them. A myriad of small subdivisions of these two regions were ruled by the “abbots” of their Buddhist monasteries or by hereditary “tribal”herdsmen.
From the documents mentioned by Li, it emerges with absolute clarity that Chairman Mao (1893–1976) had decided since his accession to power to take over all of Tibet and make it a “province” of China. He, however, advised that this should be done gradually and patiently, in order to avoid or limit international reactions.
First, Mao secured the control of “Amdo” and “Kham” areas that were culturally and religiously Tibetan but were not controlled by the Tibetan government in Lhasa. Republican China had already divided these territories into various Chinese provinces, but this was merely theoretical, as in fact they remained governed by their traditional rulers. Mao quickly disposed of the traditional rulers and converted Republican theory into “Communist”practice.
Second, “Political Tibet” consisted of six main subdivisions, plus the capital Lhasa. The easternmost subdivision, bordering “Kham,” was called “Chamdo.” After coming to power in 1949, Mao revived old Chinese claims that “Chamdo”was not part of Tibet, and engineered the formation of a “Communist Chamdo Liberation Committee,”which “rebelled” against Lhasa’s authority. In October 1950, Chinese troops invaded “Chamdo”and proclaimed it autonomous under the rule of the Chamdo Liberation Committee, which later became part of TAR.
In 1950, Mao regarded it as premature for the Chinese army to march into Lhasa. Not that he had much to fear from the small and poorly armed Tibetan army. He was afraid of international reactions. However, the occupation of Chamdo sent a clear message to the Tibetans. They were compelled to sign in 1951, under duress, the “Seventeen-Point Agreement of Beijing,” which had three main points.
First, it “recognized” that Tibet was part of China. Second, it “promised” that it will keep being administered internally by its government and traditional religious and social structures, while China will manage its foreign affairs. Third, it allowed a massive “contingent”of Chinese soldiers to be stationed in Lhasa, and gave the Chinese free rein for CCP propaganda in Tibet.
In 1950, the present Dalai Lama was fifteen years old. He was a precocious young man and learned quickly, but he was also a student (as late as 1959, one of his main tasks was preparing for his final academic exams) and had to rely on his tutors, counselors, and ministers, some of whom, as we now know, were in fact CCP “double”agents.
As described in Li’s book, the Dalai Lama believed until the bitter end, and in a way even after, that he could negotiate with the CCP. Li claims that almost nobody in Tibet then, and very few scholars later, clearly understood Mao’s strategy. Only recently, key documents have been either declassified or leaked.
Mao started the sinicization of “Ethnic Tibet” from Kham and Amdo in the mid-1950s. This meant that the century-old social structure was “destroyed,” several traditional leaders “arrested or executed,” a number of Buddhist monasteries “closed” and some even “destroyed.”
Western historians have long believed that Mao made a “mistake,”not anticipating that the “brutal andpremature”sinicization of Kham and Amdo would have generated both a “revolt”there, where thousands joined the guerrilla of the “Chushi Gangdruk Defenders of the Faith,” which, despite its ill equipment, would eventually inflict severe “casualties”on the Chinese, and anti-CCP feelings in “Political Tibet,”where refugees from the newly sinicized regions started to flee.
In fact, the documents unearthed by Li demonstrate that the “contrary” was true. Mao consciously created the conditions for a “revolt” in Kham and Amdo, and wished with all its heart that an anti-Chinese revolt would erupt in “Political Tibet” soon too. And the more violent the revolt, the better.
That would have given to the CCP the pretext to occupy Tibet and remove the Dalai Lama government, claiming internationally that it was simply defending the Chinese troops and citizens in Lhasa against “reactionary bandits.” Mao’s secret correspondence shows how often he rebuked local CCP leaders who tried to prevent insurrection, while Beijing’s instructions were to provoke it.
Mao was not omniscient, though, notwithstanding what Chinese Communist historians would later claim. While originally he regarded as irrelevant the fact that the Dalai Lama might flee abroad, ultimately he instructed that this should not happen. The Dalai Lama escaped to India thanks to the bravery of his bodyguards and their superior knowledge of the Himalayan mountain routes, not because Mao in his magnanimity allowed him to do so.
Mao for several years was very uncertain about how the West would react to an invasion of Tibet, although by 1957 he had two elements to comfort him. First, the West, much closer to home, had not reacted to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Second, India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), as we now know from recently declassified Indian documents, had assured him not only that India would not interfere but that he had been told by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) that America would not go to war over Tibet either.
Thus, by the end of the 1950s, Mao had not only instructed the army to make the repression of Buddhist resistance in Kham and Amdo as spectacularly brutal as possible, bombing monasteries and destroying venerated statues of the Buddha, but he had also told CCP representatives and agents in Political Tibet to multiply the provocations, hoping that revolt in Lhasa would soon erupt. On June 24, 1958, Mao stated in a secret document that the CCP should favor “a large scale rebellion in Tibet. The bigger the rebellion, the better.”
One of the provocations consisted in spreading the rumor that the CCP was ready to kidnap the Dalai Lama and take him to Beijing. This strategy succeeded, and when the young Dalai Lama accepted the invitation to attend a show of Chinese dances at Lhasa’s Chinese Army military command on March 10, 1959, the rumor that the CCP was now about to carry out its kidnapping plot spread as a wildfire in the Tibetan capital. A large crowd assembled around the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama’s residence, to prevent him from going. Although not a single shot was fired against the Chinese military, and the only casualty in the first day was a pro-CCP Tibetan politician recognized and killed by the crowd, anti-Mao slogans were shouted.
Unbeknownst to the Tibetans, and the world at large—except perhaps the Soviet Union and India, which mistrusted their Chinese “friends” and kept spying on them—, Mao had already amassed a powerful army, with elite corps who had fought in the Civil and Korean Wars, just outside Political Tibet, with detailed plans for invasion, evidence that he knew before March 10 that he would invade, no matter what.
Between March 10 and 20, tension escalated in Lhasa. The Chinese openly displayed their artillery ready to strike at the Tibetan historical palaces and monasteries. The “Chushi Gangdruk Defenders of the Faith” came to Lhasa from their mountains—this, too, was what Mao wanted, what he called the “old Chinese tactic”of having the mice come to the open and then kill all of them—, and monks and civilians started arming themselves with 19th century rifles and cannons, the only weapons available in the city.
While the Dalai Lama still believed he could negotiate, and wrote humble letters to the Chinese army commanders, Mao had already ordered to wait patiently for the Tibetans to “fire the first shots,”then start the war telling the world it was “defensive.” It did not exactly work as Mao had anticipated.
The commander of the Chinese army in Lhasa, General Tan Guansan (1908–1985), felt threatened, didn’t wait for a credible Tibetan first shot, nor from the reinforcement troops that were on their way from China, and started what would be later called the battle of Lhasa on March 20. Tan destroyed several Tibetan temples and historical buildings with the artillery, including the Norbulingka, and mercilessly slaughtered Tibetan soldiers, militiamen, and civilians who tried to defend them.
In a rare show of forgiveness, Mao did not punish the general for having acted before receiving Beijing’s orders, as he admired how ferociously he had “eradicated” the Tibetan resistance. Their old sins, however, came back to haunt General Tan and his main collaborators in Tibet during the “Cultural Revolution.” Tan was persecuted, although he survived and was later rehabilitated, but other CCP key characters in Tibet during the Battle of Lhasa died in jail.
The Battle of Lhasa lasted just four days, as it did not take much to the Chinese Army to dispose of primitively armed peasants and monks. All the Tibetans could achieve was to take the Dalai Lama safely to his exile in India, where he remains to this day.
The number of Tibetan casualties is still a closely guarded military secret in China, but they were probably in the thousands, while Chinese propaganda insists they were in the hundreds only. Many more Tibetans were arrested and deported, and several died in jail.
The Battle of Lhasa put an end to traditional, autonomous Tibet, dissolved the Dalai Lama government, curtailed religious liberty, and converted Political Tibet into a province of China, pompously but misleadingly renamed “autonomous region.” It also taught two important lessons to those studying the history of the CCP or analyzing its present suppression of other ethnic or religious minorities.
First, the CCP is willing to pursue its policies even at the price of considerable international shaming. What happened in Hungary in 1956 confirmed to the CCP that the West was not ready to send its soldiers to “die for Budapest,” much less for Lhasa or the Xinjiang. That some would die for Saigon was a different and more complicated matter. Second, the CCP does not simply ignore international protests. Experience has taught it that organizing campaigns of fake news is cheaper and simpler than waging war.
In 1959, there were no Internet nor social media. Yet, the CCP was comparatively successful in telling its version of the story to the world. Fake news was spread that Tibetans had initiated the revolt unprovoked, and that the masses were manipulated by the reactionary government of the Dalai Lama.
The contrary was true, as Mao did everything possible to instigate the revolt and the Dalai Lama and his government tried everything to prevent it and to negotiate. Even the CCP propaganda could not sell part of the story: nobody outside China really believed that the Dalai Lama was “abducted” by “reactionaries,” nor that Mao magnanimously facilitated his escape.
But other tall tales are still in Wikipedia and elsewhere, including that the CIA organized the revolt. The CIA did take an interest in Tibet, and in 1957 trained in Okinawa and Saipan six members of the “Chushi Gangdruk Defenders of the Faith,” parachuting back to Tibet five of them (the sixth accidentally shot himself in the foot and had to be left in Okinawa), together with a radio. The radio was crucial, as their mission was more to pierce the information curtain the Chinese had erected and transmit first hand reports of what was going on to the CIA than to organize or lead any revolt.
Li’s book is an excellent tool to “debunk”a good number of fake news. But how many read scholarly books or study history compared to those who rely on the much more easily accessible “Chinese” propaganda?
Tibet’s government-in-exile cheered the US Senate’s passage of an act demanding US diplomats, journalists and other Americans be allowed to freely visit Tibet, but Beijing warned President Trump if he signs it into law, “China-US ties and cooperation in major areas” could suffer retaliation.
The “Reciprocal Access To Tibet Act of 2018” includes preventing Chinese officials receiving US visas if they are involved in blocking Americans from Tibet.
“The Act interferes in China’s domestic affairs with reckless disregard for facts, and goes against the basic norms of international relations.We urge the US administrative bodies to take immediate measures to stop it being signed into law, so as to avoid impairing China-US ties and cooperation in major areas,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Dalai Lama.
China’s retaliation may include denying some US officials from receiving visas to China, reported Beijing’s Global Times. The Senate passed the act on December 11 after approval from the House of Representatives in September.
The Senate’s passage of the act was “a triumph today for American citizens, including lawmakers, activists and human rights advocates concerned about the decades-long repression in Tibet,” said Tibet’s government-in-exile, known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), based in Dharamsala, India.
“The Chinese government continues to violate the Tibetan people’s basic freedoms, arrests them for such crimes as celebrating the Dalai Lama’s birthday, tortures them for protesting peacefully and even murders them if they try to flee into exile,” the CTA said earlier.
“Hundreds of Tibetan prisoners of conscience are locked up in Chinese prisons, where torture is endemic, and have no access to any meaningful legal defense,” it said.
“Countries should provide equal rights to one another’s citizens,” said the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), which pushed the act’s passage.
“Chinese citizens, journalists from state-sponsored propaganda outlets and bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party travel freely throughout the US and lobby the American government on Tibetan issues,” the ICT said in a statement.
“China invariably rejects applications from journalists, diplomats, political leaders and rights monitors unless they are officially invited for strictly chaperoned tours to theatrically prepared sites, or otherwise known for their unabashed support for its rule in Tibet,” the Tibetan Review reported.
“Tibetan citizens of the United States are subjected to particularly severe restrictions when applying for visas. The new legislation particularly emphasizes access for these categories of visitors,” said the India-based Review, which opposes China’s “occupation” of Tibet.
“This bill requires the Department of State to report to Congress annually, regarding the level of access Chinese authorities granted US diplomats, journalists and tourists to Tibetan areas in China,” a summary by the US Congress said.
“No Chinese individual who is substantially involved in the formulation or execution of policies related to access for foreigners to Tibetan areas may enter the United States,” if Americans are blocked, Congress’s summary said.
Opponents of China’s 1959 seizure of Tibet say Beijing’s current maps show a truncated area described as the Autonomous Region of Tibet. Other parts of Tibet’s larger former territory have been given to neighboring Chinese provinces.
But “The Reciprocal Access To Tibet Act of 2018” includes the dismembered “Tibet Autonomous areas in Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan and Gansu provinces.” Qinghai province, for example, includes the mountainous Amdo region where the current 14th Dalai Lama was born or “reincarnated” into poverty in the isolated Takster village.
Chinese officials renovated his childhood home in Takster and installed a CCTV security camera monitoring anyone who comes close, according to a journalist who found the home’s wooden gate locked earlier this year. A sympathetic neighbor warned him to leave because police could arrest foreign visitors.
The Dalai Lama, who said in a 2015 speech “I am Marxist,” travels the world supporting Tibetan culture, Buddhism and human rights. He resides in self-imposed exile in McLeod Ganj village in the Himalayan mountains above Dharamsala, India, after fleeing Tibet in 1959 fearing imprisonment or execution by the Chinese.
China’s wariness about allowing Americans unrestricted access into Tibet may stem from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s multi-million dollar secretive guerrilla war in Tibet during the 1960s.
Assisted by the CIA, Tibetans were trained in Colorado and parachuted into Tibet in a lost fight against the Chinese.
“The goal was to keep the dream of a free Tibet alive while harassing the Chinese Red Army in western China,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner in his 2007 book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.”
The CIA also “paid an annual subsidy of some $180,000 directly to the Dalai Lama, and it created Tibet Houses in New York and Geneva to serve as his unofficial embassies,” Weiner said.
In 1972, President Nixon abruptly stopped the CIA’s assistance to Tibetan guerrillas when he visited Beijing and shook hands with then-Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong, paving the way to normalization in relations in 1979.
Today in Tibet, “residents of both Chinese and Tibetan ethnicity are denied fundamental rights, but the authorities are especially rigorous in suppressing any signs of dissent among Tibetans, including manifestations of uniquely Tibetan religious belief and cultural identity,” New York-based Freedom House said in its Freedom in the World 2018 report.
China’s “policies encourage migration from other parts of China, reducing the ethnic Tibetan share of the population,” the report said.
“China’s repression in Tibet includes keeping out those who can shine a light on its human rights abuses against the Tibetan people,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said while sponsoring the act.
“We should not accept a double standard where Chinese officials can freely visit the United States while at the same blocking our diplomats, journalists and Tibetan-Americans from visiting Tibet,” Rubio said.
China insists it “liberated” Tibet from a repressive, feudal rule dominated by Tibetan Buddhist lamas and wealthy nobles, and later stopped Beijing’s destructive policies against Tibet committed during Mao’s disastrous 1965-75 Cultural Revolution.
Tens of thousands of foreign and Chinese tourists visit Tibet each year. Lhasa, the capital, has been modernized with an influx of Chinese Han residents and linked to other cities with a high-speed train.
China also uses Tibet’s high mountains as a strategic military position against possible hostilities with India to the south. The two countries fought a brief border war in 1962.
Impact as many lives as possible through the public and private teaching of God’s Word so that people are able to understand it, are led to believe it, challenged to apply it, motivated to love it, and equipped to study it on their own.
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China - in His image 