Tibet in the twentieth century
The Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876-1933) was an exceptional man and a great ruler. He laid plans to bring Tibet into the modern era: to build roads, to improve the educational system, to reform the monasteries (some of which had become corrupt), and to bolster Tibet’s military defenses. In some areas he
was successful, but he came up against an intransigent conservative lobby that blocked many of his proposals. In 1903, a British expedition arrived in Tibet to forge a trade agreement that fully exploited the Tibetan government’s economic naivete. Seeing how easy it was for a foreign power to march into
the capital, the Chinese general Chao Erh-feng began organizing a number of brutal raids into Tibet. His plan was to annex the country and capture its leader, but the Thirteenth Dalai Lama got wind of his plan and fled to India. Chao proclaimed that he had removed the Dalai Lama as the head of the country, but the Tibetan people ignored him and continued to view the Thirteenth as their leader.
As the Nationalists gained power in China, Chao lost his support, and the Tibetan government banished all Chinese officials and soldiers from its soil. However, when the Chinese Nationalists took political control of
China, they began to recognize Tibet’s strategic significance and its vast mineral wealth. Tibet’s right to self-rule had not been questioned for more than three hundred years, but in 1912, the new Chinese leaders began claiming historical rights over their neighbor. In 1933, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama died, but not before he had prophesied the imminent destruction of his country.
The Thirteenth had foretold that he would be reborn in Eastern Tibet, and the search began for his reincarnation. In 1937, the ruling regent, Reting Rinpoche, in a sacred lake named Lhamo Lhatso, saw visions revealing the house where he would find Tibet’s new leader. Following various signs and
portents, Reting Rinpoche and his party found a house in the northeastern province of Amdo that matched the vision he had seen. The officials disguised themselves as merchants and began to question the two-year-old son of the family who lived there. The boy passed a number of intricate tests designed to
determine if he was really the Thirteenth’s true incarnation. The state oracles confirmed the discovery, and in 1940, at the age of four, the boy was enthroned as the new Dalai Lama.
By 1948, the Chinese leadership had fallen to Communist control, and the new government began publicly to question Tibetan sovereignty. Once again, suspicious of their intentions, the Tibetan government expelled Chinese officials from the country. Tibet’s fears were realized when on New Year’s Day,
1950, Peking Radio reported its intention to “liberate” Tibet from Western imperialists, even though there were only six Westerners known to be living in Tibet at the time. At five million strong, China’s army was almost the size of the entire Tibetan population. Due to the pressing circumstances, the government decided to officially inaugurate the sixteen-year-old Dalai Lama earlier than was customary.
After gaining control of the East, the Communists marched on Lhasa in 1951. By 1959, the country was suffering brutally under the Chinese rule. Torture was endemic; thousands of people were executed; struggle sessions (interrogations involving physical torture, psychological bullying, and public humiliation)
were conducted in towns and villages to encourage Tibetans to turn against their neighbors; monks and nuns were forced to copulate in public; children were forced to shoot their parents. The violence could not have been a sharper contrast to the
peace that had existed previously in Tibet. Before the invasion, about one-sixth of the male population of Tibet were monks, and almost every family had either a son or a daughter who had taken the monastic vows. (Although monks far outnumbered nuns, there were between six hundred and eight hundred nunneries in Tibet before the invasion.)
The monastic system allowed for a person from the humblest of origins to attain a privileged position through merit rather than birthright, but it was a system so utterly foreign to the communists (who despised all religion) that they could see it only as an example of feudalism with the monastics as
overlords. If the Chinese found the Tibetan system incomprehensible, the Chinese Communist ideology was equally foreign to the Tibetans and contradicted
the values they had held sacred for a thousand years. The young Dalai Lama tried to mediate and negotiate but to no avail. In his autobiography, he describes his inner struggle during this difficult time:
Only the thought of my responsibility to the six million Tibetans kept me going. That and my faith. Early every morning, as I sat in prayer in my room before the ancient altar with its clutter of statuettes standing in silent benediction, I concentrated hard on developing compassion for all sentient beings. I reminded myself constantly of the Buddha’s teaching that our enemy is in a sense our greatest teacher. And if this was sometimes hard to do, I never really doubted that it was so.
On March 10, 1959, thirty thousand people swarmed around the Dalai Lama’s summer palace to thwart what they suspected was a Chinese plot to kidnap their leader. Disguised as a soldier, the Dalai Lama fled to India to establish his government in exile. With their beloved spiritual leader gone, the
monasteries and nunneries reduced to rubble, thousands of people dead and imprisoned, and the rest in grief and shock, Tibetan independence came to an end. China proclaimed that it had successfully annihilated the “darkest feudal serfdom in the world.”
