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I'm a bit of a dissenter among Hexbear on this maybe.
I'm not convinced the Tibetan people supported the invasion.
I hear it being justified by "slavery existed in Tibet", but by that logic any country with slavery (e.g. Mauritania, Haïti) deserves to be invaded. It sounds like a post hoc smear. I don't think the motivation was to free the slaves.
Willing to read books/papers with a more hexbearian perspective, I'm not basing my opinion on very much research I'm happy to admit.
That’d be like saying “The people of the Confederacy did not support the Union invasion”, with “the people” only referencing the white citizens of the Confederacy and not the millions of black slaves, Native Americans, and white abolitionists.
Of course the “people of Tibet” would not be rejoicing at the PLA operation; as those people were part of the 5% of the population that owned the other 95% as slaves. I’m sure that the 95% were distraught they were no longer enslaved against their will.
Also Haiti didn’t have slavery because they themselves wanted it. It was imported on a mass scale from a colonial power. Tibet had slavery because it was baked into their religion and culture with a vile caste system and violent repression.
A country that is built upon 95% of their “citizens” being chattel slaves does not have a right to exist and be tolerated by countries around it, and such a state genuinely should be invaded if the aim of the invasion is to sweep aside a vile system that is keeping millions of people as nothing more then livestock.
Of course the “people of Tibet” would not be rejoicing at the PLA operation; as those people were part of the 5% of the population that owned the other 95% as slaves. I’m sure that the 95% were distraught they were no longer enslaved against their will.
Were there that many slaves?
Also Haiti didn’t have slavery because they themselves wanted it.
Sorry. I was unclear. I was talking about restavèk, which pretty much is "baked into their culture", or is part of it at least.
I guess the issue here is I don't really know what sort of economy/structure was in place before 1950, or what motivated the Chinese involvement.
Yes, it sounds absurd, but 95% of the population were enslaved.
The economy was closed off, agricultural based, and in all effect, a self-made hermit kingdom centered around a theocracy of the Dalia Lama.
While this source is Chinese, it is excellently sourced, and should answer essentially every one of your questions. It also details the history of the slavery, and the extent to which it was baked into Tibetan society. Not to mention a population breakdown that adds up to 95% of the population being enslaved serfs, or chattel slaves.
Chinese involvement arose primarily from three facts. The first being that if they claimed to be a socialist country, but allowed a neighboring theocratic country to practice chattel slavery, it would make them immensely hypocritical. The second being that bandits stationed in Tibet would frequently raid and pillage the Chinese countryside bordering Tibet, with these attacks only intensifying as the west sent Tibet arms and money. Finally, the third reason being that Tibet was historically part of China before the breakup in the early 20th century, and incorporating the country back into china made historical sense while freeing its population made moral, economic, historical, and ethical sense.
Thanks. I found this article saying something similar: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/tibet-china-feudalism
Going offline now. Take care.
That is, as pretty much all western media on the topic of China and Tibet, an awful article full of complete nonsense. They throw around bullshit buzzwords like "occupation" and "forced collectivization" that betrays either a total ignorance or purposeful and malicious distortion of the history and status of Tibet in the PRC. But as you yourself recognize even they cannot help but admit that over 95% of the population of Tibet were essentially enslaved and that the fairy tale image of pre-liberation Tibet that has been sold to westerners is a crock of shit. And yet the CIA funded "free Tibet" crowd are even lying about that and trying to claim that that history is all "Chinese communist propaganda". So ask yourself, why should anyone believe anything else they say about Tibet?
This old article (1974) from the US neoconservative outlet National Review made the rounds here a few months ago and speaks to the point of western misinformation. Even these diehard anti-communist neocons admit that the Chinese government and CPC were working with the Tibetan state throughout the 1950s to improve conditions for Tibetans, but US meddling forced more drastic action on the behalf of the CPC. The Dalai Lama has been in the pocket of the CIA ever since 1959, if not even before. A spiritual precedessor to Juan Guaidó, if you will.
https://shugdensociety.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/a-myth-foisted-on-the-western-world/
The additional irony is that the Pax America who demand the return to slavery had used slavery as a justification for violation of sovereignty, mass murder, and other atrocities in countries of color. Pax Americana also continued the enslavement, torture, unethical experimentations, mass rape, mass murder, cannibalism, mass savage indoctrination, and inheritance thief in Indian Reisdential fake schools that the Aboriginal parents were tricked into funding under the lies that their children are receiving high quality education, luxurious living conditions, and guarentee to be elites of European diaspora societies even after the Cold War. The Indigenous people in British diaspora is still enduring forced imprisonment in harsh barren wasteland, concentration camps, planned starvation, planned chemical attacks, overdue reparation for thief, and fake news slander that are worst than the slanders against Donald Trump. The fake news criticism that the Western European diaspora made towards the Indigenous people is a projection of the Western European immigrants like how the criticism towards Communist countries tend to be projects of Pax Americana.
I want to correct a few misconceptions that are evident in your comment:
I'm not convinced the Tibetan people supported the invasion.
It wasn't an invasion, it was a liberation, and a peaceful one at that until reactionary forces, fearing the loss of their privileges if the serfs should be liberated, started a brutal armed insurrection.
The vast majority of the people of Tibet at that time were serfs and lived in miserable, inhumane slave-like conditions. Are you arguing that slaves would prefer to continue to be enslaved?
justified by "slavery existed in Tibet"
That was indeed not the primary reason why the PLA first entered Tibet. It was rather to preserve the territorial integrity and safeguard the sovereignty of China, of which Tibet was and is recognized as an integral part.
by that logic any country with slavery [...] deserves to be invaded
Tibet was not and is not a country. For a period of a few decades during which China was in chaos and turmoil following the fall of the Qing dynasty, the local government of Tibet had merely ceased to answer to the central government of China, but the region never formally declared Independence and never ceased to legally be a part of China.
Pro-independence forces fomented and backed by western imperialists who had already once invaded Tibet were however attempting to break Tibet away from China just like they are trying to do with Taiwan today. This created an urgent necessity for the PLA to intervene to protect Tibet and secure its borders.
I don't think the motivation was to free the slaves.
Whether or not this was the primary motivation, this was still one of the main goals that the CPC openly declared needed to be accomplished sooner or later, as it was evident that the system of feudal-theocratic serfdom was halting virtually all social and economic progress in Tibet. The CPC emphasised the need for democratic reform as soon as the people of Tibet were ready to make that step.
All of this is explained in greater detail in the documentary which i linked in my other comment.
I did want to tack on, but the annexation of Tibet was absolutely not peaceful. After initial negotiations failed, the campaign opened with the Battle of Chamdo and resulted in several thousand casualties, the majority of which were on the Tibetian side. It was only after this that the PLA requested the Tibetan capitulation, to which the Dalia Lama agreed, and Tibet entered annexation negotiations.
justified by "slavery existed in Tibet"That was indeed not the primary reason why the PLA first entered Tibet. It was rather to preserve the territorial integrity and safeguard the sovereignty of China, of which Tibet was and is recognized as an integral part.
by that logic any country with slavery [...] deserves to be invadedTibet was not and is not a country.
Hmmm..... this makes it sound worse not better. Counties do not have ontological existence outside human opinion. Is Catalonia an integral part of Spain? Is Ireland an integral part of the Union? Is Ukraine an integral part of Russia? These positions have all been claimed by belligerents at various times.
You say it "was recognized" as China, but by whom? It is actually/ontologically part of China can never be a good justification, because countries don't have that sort of objective ontology.
In the Qing Dynasty, Mongolia was part of China. Debates on whether Xinjiang/Manchuria/Tibet are "really" part of China have gone on for centuries, and can't be settled by expressing an opinion on it.
You or i may think it's not a good justification but for a lot of people it is. China was subjected to a century of humiliation during which imperialist powers invaded China and attempted to rip it apart, to separate it from territories which had been a part of China for centuries. The restoration of China's national unity, integrity and sovereignty was and is viewed by a majority of Chinese people as a national imperative if China is to regain its dignity. It's why they will never accept "Taiwan independence".
It is very dangerous when westerners refuse to understand this and think that borders are meaningless and that this or that territory can be separated from China and they will just accept it. You have to understand that China is determined to never again allow to be done to them what was done in the 19th and early 20th century. (The same goes for Russia too, which is why we have the conflict in Ukraine which Russians view as an existential one and will never accept losing.)
All this fancy philosophical talk about objective ontology is meaningless when you ignore how a nation of a billion people feels.
There's lots of irredentist claims in every part of the world.
It's not a tenable claim to say the irredentist claim is valid just because it exists.
It's not a tenable claim to say the irredentist claim is valid just because the majority/big country supports it. By that logic no small country could ever become independent of a big one.
Tibet was separate from China before 1720. Then it was in China 1720-1912 (198 years). Then it was independent 1912-1950 (38 years). Saying "Well it actually is China" is just asserting a claim, no more.
Should Mongolia also be absorbed into China?
I have a question for you: do you think that the people of Tibet would be materially better off if they had been turned into an anti-China proxy by the imperialists like Ukraine is now for Russia? Do you not think that maybe being a part of China and enjoying the peaceful economic and social development that China has brought to Tibet has been to the advantage of the people living there?
What exactly would you hope to achieve by making Tibet "independent" (leaving them more vulnerable to imperialist meddling and exploitation) and how do you know that Tibetans actually want that? I'm trying to understand, why are Europeans so fixated on creating ethno-states everywhere? What is wrong with Tibet being a part of the multi-ethnic Chinese nation to which they have deep historic and cultural ties?
I have a question for you: do you think that the people of Tibet would be materially better off if they had been turned into an anti-China proxy by the imperialists like Ukraine is now for Russia?
I don't know.
how do you know that Tibetans actually want that?
I don't know what Tibetans want, much less the Tibetans living in 1950. There's a few particularly vocal ones of course on both sides, but I don't have good information on the various opinions that exist their and their prevalence.
Then it was independent 1912-1950
It formally wasn't. China never recognized it as independent and neither did the "international community" (however you want to interpret that term).
Should Mongolia also be absorbed into China?
That's not for me to say. The PRC recognized Mongolia's independence and they have great and lucrative relations now. I don't currently see that anyone who matters has any material or ideological interest in changing that.
I'm not making a prescriptive statement. I'm telling you how things are and not how they should be.
Countries are not inert objects in a universal logical framework, they are made up of people and what the people of a country think and want and feel matters, even if that's subjective. And when that country is a civilization state like China that carries a certain weight.
By that logic no small country could ever become independent of a big one.
They usually can't unless their independence is to the advantage of one of more big countries. For instance, although Mongolia being independent has more to do with Russia and the Russian civil war than it does with China, it is nevertheless a useful buffer state for both.
If it wasn't, it probably wouldn't be independent.
I'm not making a prescriptive statement. I'm telling you how things are and not how they should be.
Yeah, no. I disagree. What I've been hammering on is that a territorial claim is NOT objective, but rather prescribed by human institutions. If you don't agree, that's fine. But the fact remains: there's no objective fact that determines whether Corsica belongs to France or itself: only human opinions. I can't make the point any more thoroughly than I already have.
a territorial claim is NOT objective
That's correct. That's what i've been trying to tell you, that the subjective matters and that we can't just ignore it and pretend like we can establish an objective framework for everything where human relations are concerned, which is ultimately what international relations are just on a larger scale.
I recently posted about a documentary on precisely this topic. Please do yourself a favor and watch it as soon as possible. Be sure to watch both parts as the first deals mainly with the situation before the liberation while the second goes into the actual process of how the liberation happened. You don't need to take our word for it, listen to what people who were alive back then had to say and what they wrote.
The documentary references many western sources (too many for my liking in fact, i would prefer a less eurocentric view) both contemporary as well as modern, including some that have very little reason to be sympathetic to communists and some that were probably outright racists and sinophobes, and even these paint a very grim picture of pre-liberation Tibet. It also lets Tibetans themselves tell their stories. So it is by no means presenting an exclusively Han Chinese perspective.
If you still have questions, reservations or concerns afterwards there are more resources that we can recommend to you on this subject.
Thanks for the links
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Well, they didn't do it in one day. There was a post a few days ago on a documentary about Tibet. It's from CPC-affiliated media, but it uses Western sources. Someone also commented a link to a CPC article talking about how they did it.
The PLA basically entered by signing an agreement with the theocratic government and they started growing crops and establishing schools, until reactionaries forces tried to drive out the PLA which invited support from the serfs to change the regime.
I agree our justification of meme-y, but actual Chinese could probably give a more nuanced explanation.
I'm far from an expert on the topic but I think this write up from the r/sino sidebar is a good starting point:
There is a lot of literature referenced in the write up that I'm sure would provide a more in depth understanding but I think it does a good job of providing a gist of things and also some of the historical context of the Tibet-China relationship. Another commenter pinguinu has also pointed out that the liberation of Tibet was a gradual process with many challenges, which I think is important to consider. This quote (which I got from the sino article) outlines both that and also the framework with which the CPC has approached these types of challenges well I think:
“As yet, we don’t have a material base for fully implementing the Agreement, nor do we have a base for this purpose in terms of support among the masses or in the upper stratum. To force its implementation will do more harm than good. Since they are unwilling to put the agreement into effect, well then we can leave it for the time being and wait. …” [Mao Tse-Tung, from Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume 5]