With the recent publicity surrounding the ongoing repression in Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, and the public protests around the world as the Olympic torch makes its way to Beijing, I have received several queries from readers about the history of conflicts between Tibet and China.
There is a new web page on the historyguy.com site detailing some of these Sino-Tibetan Wars and Conflicts. It is at: http://www.historyguy.com/tibet_china_wars_conflicts.html
While normally I take as neutral a position as possible while explaining world conflicts on the main historyguy.com website, and leaving my more opinionated commentary for this blog, I come down against the continued repression by the Chinese Communist Party in Tibet. I see a distinction in identifying the brutality and evil of the occupation as sourced in the Communist ideology than in any innately Chinese cultural aspects. When an authoritarian, dictatorial regime conquers a smaller, basically defenseless nation, it can never be justified. I liken the Chinese occupation of Tibet with the other evil occupations of history, such as the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet conquest of the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).
Those once-captive nations eventually regained their freedom, and one day too, Tibet may once again see the back-end of the Communist occupying forces, just as, after the 1911 Revolution, Tibet saw the last of the Manchu Imperial occupation army.
Jiang
April 30, 2008 at 2:05 pm
I strongly disagree with you on Communism ideology being brutal and evil. Communism comes from the West and its tenets are about liberating the pool and underprivileged, which might be brutal to the privileged but certainly not evil. Wealth can be re-distributed peacefully or violently. Either way, it’s bad for the class of rich and powerful. Marx has detailed many evils capitalism and Imperialism have committed to the people around the world and some of the evils are about powerful nations’ conquering of weaker nations. I suspect that you know little about Communism and how it was introduced and accepted by Chinese. There are good intentions to reform Tibet’s backward serfdom system, albeit it’s a failed one. Your prejudice will prevent you from being an effective and just historian.