Background & Analysis
The area of the world known as Tibet is plagued by controversy and a great deal of debate. The very word “Tibet” conveys mixed messages to people in this day and age. To some, it is a reference to the political boundaries of the Tibet Autonomous Region, a province within China. To others, it is the immense plateau that extends past today’s political boundaries and into the provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai, and Yunnan, spanning a region roughly one-third the size of the United States. Tibet was once an independent country, but for centuries, its rule has continually changed hands between Tibetan autonomy and Chinese authority.
Many would say that “freeing Tibet” doesn’t sound like a very complicated problem – it was once a sovereign state and China should let the Tibetans govern themselves again. However, most ethnic Tibetans consider their nation to reach across the entire plateau, including the areas that the Chinese government does not regard as part of the Tibet Autonomous Region. If Tibetan liberation meant just giving up that piece of land, the People’s Republic of China might be more willing to negotiate; only if they were to hand back the entire Tibetan plateau, China would lose a great deal of the land it currently possesses – something the country is not so willing to sacrifice.
Another problem is that the Chinese have done a lot of work to keep the region in a stronghold. The government has actually offered incentives (both monetarily and through various special benefits) for ethnic Han Chinese to relocate to Lhasa and other parts of the Tibet Autonomous Region. With thousands upon thousands of non-Tibetans living there, it is less likely that even the “political Tibet,” rather than the whole plateau, will be turned over. Nevertheless, ethnic Tibetans still dominate the region, and a great percentage of them are found just outside of the Tibet Autonomous Region, in Gansu, Qinghai, and the other nearby provinces.
While it may appear that the issue is a matter of who should have the right to govern the land that is currently the southwestern part of China, the biggest concern is human rights. The Tibetan lifestyle and belief systems do not mesh well with the political views of the People’s Republic of China. During the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Tibet was overtaken and thousands of Buddhist temples and holy artifacts were destroyed. Their Buddhist religion is of the utmost importance to practically all Tibetans, and this was truly a tragedy for them. In spite of all of the destruction, which the Chinese do recognize and regret today, the spirit of Buddhism is irrepressible in Tibet. Today, all the Tibetans desire is complete religious freedom. “Free Tibet” once meant China giving Tibet independence once more, but in recent years, the Dalai Lama has decided to abandon this cause and now only seeks that his people be granted the freedom to practice their religion without fear of oppression. A great deal of human rights abuses have happened in Tibet, and the world’s hope now is that Tibetans may be granted the basic human rights they have sought for so long.
