The Truth About Tibet And The Dalai Lama
Exposing vile Chinese Communist Party propaganda about Tibet
My new YouTube video exposing Chinese Communist Party propaganda about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. This is a highly charged topic right now so I ask that you please watch in full or alternatively read my essay below before forming judgement.
The past week has seen an explosion of anti-Tibet agitprop by Chinese Communist Party ideologues. What is behind this campaign of dehumanization and hatred? I write now to expose Chinese Communist Party propaganda about Tibet, to show people how deeply rooted it is in racist Chinese settler colonialism and its drive for Lebensraum.
The famous anti-colonial intellectual Frantz Fanon explained how colonization strikes out against the entire existence of a conquered people: ‘’Colonial domination, because it is total … very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.’’ Sadly the Chinese Communist Party appears to have read Fanon’s description of how settler colonialism obliterates and annihilates indigenous culture as a program and guide for their destructive and murderous imperialism in Tibet.
The Chinese Communist Party invaded Tibet in 1950, forcing the Tibetan government to sign an Unequal Treaty demanding Tibet ‘’return to the Chinese motherland.’’ The Chinese Communist Party continues to moan about Unequal Treaties forced upon China by Western imperialist running dogs during the Century of Humiliation but the entire basis of its claim to Tibet rests upon an Unequal Treaty it forced upon the Tibetans at gunpoint - the Tibetans were forced to sign the Seventeen Points Agreement after the People’s Liberation Army had already invaded the country. According to the Chinese Communist Party’s view of the universe, Tibet has always been part of China since the dawn of human history. Why is it that China had to invade and brutally subjugate Tibet if it has always been a part of China? The Chinese Communists do not bother with the complexities of answering such a question. They do not even attempt to explain how the Tibetans could have signed such a treaty abrogating their sovereignty had they not been sovereign in the first place. Tibet had its own functioning government, legal system, currency and army - it negotiated and concluded diplomatic agreements with foreign powers. This all ended with Chinese invasion and colonisation.
Chinese atrocities began shortly after the invasion and occupation. The Tibetans have their own shorthand for this national catastrophe and cataclysm at the hands of Chinese imperialists, their own Nakba. They call it the dhulok, the ‘’collapse of time.’’ It is a fittingly haunting expression for a period of tremendous horror.
Roughly coinciding with Mao’s massively homicidal Great Leap Forward, Chinese occupation authorities confiscated grain and emptied granaries all over Tibet in an attempt to starve the population into submission. The purchase and sale of grain was strictly forbidden, as was cooking at home. Utensils and dishware were confiscated by Communist Party cadres while nomadic Tibetans were herded into collective farms. The Tibetan experience of forced collectivisation was predictably disastrous. The Chinese troops in charge of collectives in Tibet had no experience with farming at high altitudes. Han cadres mocked the Tibetans who had lived off the land for generations as primitive and barbaric, refusing to heed the advice of those telling them crops could not be cultivated on the Tibetan Plateau: ‘’As the Han are the bulwark of the revolution … any thinking against learning from the Han nationality and welcoming the help given by the Han nationality is wrong.’’
The sadly predictable result was massive famine and food scarcity that would ultimately haunt Tibet for two decades, calling to mind Stalin’s Holodomor terror starvation of Ukraine. The slow strangulation and suffocation of the Tibetan people as a result of this famine sparked resistance that would be brutally put down by Chinese Communist Party authorities. Party committees set quotas for arrests and local officials worked to exceed these quotas, roaming the countryside to make preemptive arrests. According to Barbara Demick, the Tibetans rounded up by Communist Party cadres at this time were held in prisons that amounted to little more than ‘’pits in the ground crammed with hundreds of people.’’
In some Tibetan areas, up to twenty per cent of the population were arrested and at least half of them ultimately died in chains. Here a chilling statistic comes to mind. Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng combed through the Chinese archives, eventually accumulating ten million words of records to conclude that some 36 million Chinese were killed and another 40 million not born as a result of Communist Party policy during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Patrick French’s own research and analysis, drawing on Chinese government data and demography by Judith Banister, found that death rates in provinces with large Tibetan populations were almost double those elsewhere in China during this same period of mass homicide. In 1960, the mortality rates in Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces—all with large Tibetan populations—were nearly double the national average of 25 deaths per thousand people. In some prefectures, like Yushu, the Tibetan population dropped 41 percent from 1957 to 1963.
Mass shootings and executions accompanied starvation and famine as the People’s Liberation Army carried out reprisal campaigns against recalcitrant villages that would ultimately recall genocidal massacres of Native Americans by the US Army at Wounded Knee and Sandy Creek. These genocidal killings prompted the Panchen Lama - the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism - to warn Mao that the Tibetan people were ‘’sinking into a state close to death.’’ He was imprisoned and tortured for daring to speak out about the horror.
It was at this time of mass murder and genocide that the Chinese Communist Party began to target Buddhist monasteries for destruction as part of a systematic campaign to break the national cultural idea of Tibet. The cultural loss associated with the Chinese Communist destruction of the Buddhist monasteries is indescribable - they functioned as museums, libraries and schools for the Tibetan people. Tibetan Buddhist statues and artworks that would compare with the greatest religiously inspired artistic achievements of Renaissance Europe - think the Pieta, the Last Supper, the Sistine Chapel - were systematically smashed, burned and destroyed by marauding Communist Party forces.
The Chinese Communist Party will never release statistics revealing the true number of Tibetans murdered as state policy during the dhulok but estimates range from a lower bound of at least 300,000 to 1,000,000. Maps of China from the 1982 census demonstrate that an entire generation of Tibetan men went missing - the entire Tibetan plateau is coloured red, showing the number of women far outstripping men even decades later. China boasts of the economic development it has brought to Tibet but the grim irony is that this economic development is built on the bones of the dead - mass graves are still regularly unearthed today during construction work as new gleaming buildings for Han settlers rise up above ground that was once used for death pits.
Barbara Demick writes that the Chinese Communist Party ultimately murdered more Tibetans during the dhulok than Imperial Japan murdered during the atrociously brutal and evil Nanjing Massacre - at least three hundred thousand Tibetans perished as a result of the famine, mass roundups and shootings, a figure that rises to up to one million by some estimates.
The Chinese Communist Party memorialises the Nanjing Massacre to this day and frequently demands apologies from Japan for the horror but effectively criminalizes Tibetan historical memory, forcibly repressing all record of the dhulok. In addition to suffering the brutality of military occupation and genocide, the Tibetan people are denied even the most basic dignity of preserving historical memory of their suffering. Survivors were forbidden from memorializing their dead loved ones and forbidden from marking the murder of up to one fifth of their people in any way. All historical memory of Communist Party atrocities inside Tibet is repressed and criminalized.
This catastrophe for the Tibetan people occurred because they fell victim to Chinese imperialism and settler colonialism. The barbaric crimes the Chinese Communist Party committed in Tibet make an absolute mockery of their claim to have liberated Tibetans from cruel feudal overlords. When a people are colonized, they don’t just lose their sovereignty, their land and their freedom. As Fanon notes, colonial domination necessitates a negation of the national reality of the colonized peoples - they must also be subjected to the propaganda and false historical narratives of their captors and slavers. And so the Tibetans have been forced to play the part of the Orientalised Other, forced to submit to endless infantilised stereotypes and Chinese racial fantasies about their people and their past.
John Power here cites laughably stilted Chinese propaganda as depicted in Great Changes in Tibet: ‘’Before liberation Tibet was a hell on earth, where the labouring people suffered for centuries under the darkest and most reactionary feudal serfdom. Tibetan serfs and slaves were deprived of freedom of the person and lived worse than animals. On top of this, a century of aggression and enslavement in Tibet by imperialist forces plunged the Tibetan people into an abyss of misery. In 1951 Tibet was liberated, and imperialist aggressive forces were driven out. This marked a great turning point in the historic development in Tibet. Since then the Tibetan people have lived with China's other nationalities in the family of the great motherland on the basis of equality, unity, fraternity and mutual help.’’
This kind of racist and patronizing Chinese colonial propaganda about Tibet has a long history. Powers goes as far back as the writings of Chinese historian He Ning in 1792: ‘’The customs of the Tibetans are completely abject and despicable. The people all appear unwashed and uncombed. Their figure resembles a dog or a sheep. Both monks and laity are equally greedy. Tibet is a place where the old is being preserved and nothing changes.”
All of Tibetan culture and history is presented here as depraved, alien, sinister. Before China, Tibet was ‘’hell on Earth.’’ The backwards savages labored under the ‘’darkest and most reactionary feudal serfdom.’’ This racist Chinese propaganda is packaged with utterly obscene atrocity porn, proclaiming that the Dalai Lama demanded human intestines and the skins of children to celebrate his birthday. Powers here can also cite absurd Chinese claims that the Tibetans operated scorpion torture pits beneath major religious pilgramige routes in Lhasa - the scorpions would apparently feast on the blood of tortured prisoners despite the fact that scorpions are not known to ever practice this behaviour.
China carted out this lunatic QAnon tier agitprop before the world in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, putting on Tibet exhibitions at the Beijing ‘’Cultural Palace of Minorities’’ filled with supposed Tibetan torture artifacts and faked evidence of Tibetan human sacrifices. Again, this type of obscene atrocity propaganda by the Chinese Communist Party has a long sordid history. While the CCP were busy torching priceless cultural heritage during the Cultural Revolution, they put on an exhibition of clay statues at the Potala - the Tibetan equivalent of the Vatican - entitled ‘’Wrath of the Serfs.’’ These clay figurines depicted various purported horrors of feudal Tibet, such as monks apparently burying children alive in the foundations of new monasteries. According to John Powers in ‘’History as Propaganda’’ these figurines were divided into four sections: “Feudal Estate Owners' Manors: Miserable Infernos on Earth,” “Lamaseries: Dark Man-Eating Dens,” “Local Reactionary Government of Tibet: Apparatus of Reactionary Rule,” and “Serfs Rise in Struggle and Yearn for Liberation.” Foreign tourists were forced to view these demented exhibits until the Chinese Communist Party eventually cottoned onto the fact that these displays mostly prompted snickering and disbelief among foreign guests.
Man Eating Dens! Miserable Infernos on Earth! It is ironic to think the Chinese Communist Party today feigns indignant outrage at those who call public attention to its very real atrocities against Tibetans and Uyghurs. For decades, the Communist Party was happy to stoke such obscene and horrific atrocity propaganda claims against Tibetans that it calls to mind Nazi blood libel claims in Der Stumer. Chinese propaganda described Tibetans as ‘’living worse than animals’’ in an ‘’abyss of misery,’’ apparently stalked by Lamas who brought with them the ever present threat of ‘’man eating dens.’’
Given these claims, it was only natural that the Chinese would depict their occupation as a moral necessity - the culturally sophisticated and advanced Han benevolently extending a hand to their little Tibetan brothers and inviting them into the ‘’family of the great motherland’’ so as to lift them up into modernity. Summarizing this ideology, Powers writes: ‘’It is the duty of the Han “big elder brothers” (lao da ge) to incorporate the minorities—forcibly, if necessary—so that as a result of contact and instruction they will gradually renounce their backward (luohou) ways and be lifted up to the level of their instructors.’’
Of course, this disgusting, racialised Chinese propaganda is simply a repackaged version of the White Man’s Burden colonizer myth which motivated and inspired Western imperialism all across the world. This myth cast the Indigenous peoples of Asia and Africa as inferior and uncivilized, needing the help of the supposedly superior West to modernize and develop. As we all know by now, this vile myth was simply cover for a vast system of violent wealth extraction, legitimizing some of the most utterly depraved and genocidal regimes to ever befoul the face of the planet.
The hellish inferno of death associated with Western colonialism was so great as to permanently lower the temperature of the planet. Untold millions were murdered across the Americas, Africa and Asia, from the ghoulish atrocities of the Belgian Congo to the stolen Indigenous children of Australia and Canada.
The atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by colonizers in the name of ‘’civilizing’’ Indigenous peoples are too many to list. It is an extraordinary and distressing state of affairs that many on the left, well versed in this history, stand idly by and shrug their shoulders as the Chinese Communist Party decides to regurgitate this foul propaganda in the name of justifying its horrors in Tibet.
Just as Australian and Canadian colonizers stole Indigenous children from their families so as to break lines of cultural transmission with colonial boarding schools, China has now separated 1 million Tibetan children from their families and forcibly placed them in Chinese boarding schools so as to absorb them “culturally, religiously and linguistically” into the dominant Han Chinese culture. Lessons are conducted solely in Mandarin Chinese so that Tibetan children will forget their native tongue and struggle to communicate with their parents when returning home.
Colonial boarding schools in Canada and Australia were genocidal and devastating for Indigenous peoples. Physical and sexual abuse were rampant in these schools and thousands of haunting unmarked graves have been unearthed and discovered on the grounds of former colonial boarding schools in Canada. It is nothing short of terrifying to know that the Chinese Communist Party has studied the genocidal destruction of Indigenous peoples in Western settler colonies and concluded in favor of implementing the exact same horrific policies against Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Little wonder that Australian historian Patrick Wolfe, considered the founder of the field of settler colonialism studies, and a strident critic of genocidal settler colonial policies in Australia and Canada, was equally vociferous in denouncing Chinese settler colonialism in Tibet and East Turkestan. Many online Marxist Leninists like to quote Patrick Wolfe to denounce Western horrors - few would enjoy reading what he had to say about Chinese Communist Party efforts to eradicate Uyghur and Tibetan culture.
Tibet doesn’t need Chinese settler colonialism. If the Tibetan people are so happy under Chinese rule, one might ask why hundreds of Tibetans have poured petrol over their bodies and lit themselves on fire in protest against Chinese imperialism. These Tibetan protesters are so despairing of life under Chinese colonial occupation that they choose the most agonizing death possible. Just as many Africans chose to throw themselves from Western slave ships to drown rather than endure a lifetime of torture and servitude, hundreds of Tibetans have preferred to burn alive rather than live to see the slow strangulation and annihilation of their people.
This is what China means when it speaks of liberation - annihilation. They make a desert and call it peace. It is reminiscent of Putin speaking of Russia’s fraternal bond with Ukraine as his brutal soldiers castrate and behead Ukrainian captives. The same Chinese Communist Party that claims to have liberated the Tibetans continues to subject hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Tibetans to forced labour and slavery in the present day. The same Chinese Communist Party that claims to have liberated the Tibetan people from slavery presides over a vast system of totalitarianism in which billions are ultimately enslaved to the whims of one man, Xi Jinping. While the Dalai Lama completely democratized the Tibetan government-in-exile and stepped back from all temporal duties, Xi Jinping instituted a theocratic cult of personality and worship in which hundreds of millions of school children must spend hours every day studying his so-called ‘’Thought’’ as part of the national curriculum.
And how are working conditions in today’s China under the self-proclaimed dictatorship of the proletariat? As late as 2007, China was scandalized by revelations that thousands of Chinese citizens had been forced to work as slaves in illegal brickyards. To this day, Chinese laborers cannot form independent trade unions - the Communist Party forcibly disappeared young Marxist students who foolishly took the Party at its word and tried to organize workers. Forced labour and suicide nets for workers - this is China in 2023. Yet we are supposed to believe the Party invaded Tibet so as to liberate the Tibetan people from serfdom. The hypocrisy is astounding: ‘’Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.’’ Let the Tibetan people go.
Bibliography
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method, PublicAffairs, 2020.
Barbara Demick, Eat The Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Random House, 2020.
Patrick French, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, Vintage, 2004.
Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
John Powers, History as Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles Versus the People's Republic of China, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Shaurir Ramanujan, ‘’Reclaiming the Land of the Snows: Analyzing Chinese Settler Colonialism in Tibet’’ in Columbia Journal of Asia, 2022.
Patrick Wolfe et al, Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility, University of Hawai’i Press, 2012.
Cia asset
Please contact me. Mark@bondirocksmedia.tv