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“A Wolf in Monk’s Robes”

If you believe the Chinese propaganda, then the Dalai Lama is “a wolf in monk’s robes”.

He is also a “splittist” and is responsible, along with his “clique”, for organising the recent protests in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet.

These assertions, along with most Chinese propaganda, are easy enough to dismiss – Tenzin Gyatso is, after all, the winner of a Nobel Peace prize, and a firm believer in protest by peaceful means.

But, should we be so trusting of his propaganda, and the facts and figures released by the Tibetan government-in-exile?

According to their official figures, which are quoted by many “Free Tibet” organisations as well as the BBC, 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the 1959 Chinese invasion.

But Patrick French, an English historian, travelled to Dharamsala in India (where the Tibetan government-in-exile are based), to find out the truth behind these claims. This is his conclusion:

After looking through the files for three days, it became clear to me that the figure of 1.2 million Tibetan deaths resulting from Chinese rule could not be accepted…

The documentation came in twenty-two sections, each divided into the regions of ethnic Tibet: U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo…

There were however no lists of names, as had been promised, and in most cases it looked as if no names had ever been recorded…

Most disturbing of all was the fact that of the nearly 1.1 million deaths listed, only 23,364 were female. This would have meant that 1.07 million victims were male, which was clearly impossible, given that there were only around 1.25 million Tibetan men in 1950.

French concludes that, in fact, up to 500,000 thousand Tibetans may have been killed since the Chinese occupation, but that 1.2 million is a grossly inflated figure with no supporting evidence.

Most people agree that the Beijing Olympics, later this year, will present an opportunity for change in China, and for improved human rights with freedom to practice religion.

But false information will not help the Dalai Lama’s cause – if anything it will make the Chinese government less willing to enter negotiations. It’s time political pressure, based on real knowledge of events in Tibet since 1959, was applied to Beijing.

Because believe it or not trendy Hollywood Buddhists have, so far, achieved absolutely nothing.

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Posted in Counterknowledge.

By Will Heaven
4 April 2008

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6 responses

  1. Clarke Fountain said
    on 5 April 2008

    The problem for Tibetans, in dealing with the Chinese, is twofold. On the one hand, the Chinese remember the 9th century (I could be off by a few hundred years) Tibetan conquest of large swaths of Central Asia, including much of traditional China. And the Chinese remember the Tibetan alliances with the Mongols and the Manchu, assisted by Tibetan Buddhism becoming an official religion of the conquerors. And the Chinese know, if Hollywood Buddhists do not, that Tibet was not Shangri-La. While it was certainly much better than is portrayed by Chinese propaganda, it was not a shining example of enlightened society, either. So the Tibetans cannot on the one hand demythologize their perception as being a purely aggrieved people by those in the West and adequately deal with their absurd vilification by Chinese officialdom. It is truly a rock and a hard place for them. Given geopolitical realities, I find it difficult to believe that the Chinese will give an inch. My expectation would be that they will suffer the cancellation of the Olympics and the black eye that will give them, rather than back down on what, for them, are core principles of Chinese national interest.

  2. Woodchopper said
    on 5 April 2008

    Its extremely difficult to estimate the mortality resulting from any conflict.

    To start with there are all sorts of definitional issues. People shot are easy to count. However in many wars the largest killers are hunger and disease brought about by the collapse of infrastructure and economic systems. Estimating the number of people killed by these means in Tibet will be hard enough, and then how do you decide what proportion of the mortality is due to the conflict, and what would have happened anyway?

    My point is that any estimate of deaths in Tibet is going to be very rough. You haven’t provided a source so I can’t look at French’s methodology. But its likely to involve a lot of guesswork as well.

    Obviously everyone should use the most accurate figures possible. But any figure is going to be open to methodological criticism (including both those produced by the Tibetans and French).

    The ‘real information’ that you seek probably doesn’t exist. All we have are unreliable estimates.

  3. Will Heaven said
    on 5 April 2008

    Apologies for not providing a source. The quotation comes from “Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land” by Patrick French.

    My copy was published in India in 2003 by HarperCollins. The ISBN is 9788172235086.

    Counting the mortality resulting from conflict is, indeed, very difficult.

    That’s why the Tibetan government-in-exile should be wary of releasing such an unreliable figure.

    Re: Fountain

    There are historical reasons for believing that TIbet was occasionally part of Greater China. But that is surely no excuse for the current human rights violations.

    “Tibet, Tibet”, by the way, is well worth a read.

  4. Arfa said
    on 6 April 2008

    Fountain: “the Chinese remember the 9th century [..] Tibetan conquest of large swaths of Central Asia, including much of traditional China.”

    Really? Then they must be insanely nationalistic. Large parts of my country were conquered by Norwegians and Danes around then, and there isn’t any animosity there.

    The Chinese national interest sounds like a brittle, irrational thing to me. I don’t think we should indulge it too much.

  5. Fabio P.Barbieri said
    on 21 July 2008

    I would like to point out that 500,000 dead, for a nation that was supposed to have, as you say, 1,250,000 adult males in 1950, are no joke. Not to mention the well-known policy of swamping the small Tibetan nation with millions of ethnic Han Chinese.

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