The End of the Old System in Tibet Was a Historical Inevitability

The People’s Republic of China is a united multi-ethnic country created through the joined efforts of the peoples of all the ethnic groups in China. Over the long course of history, these ethnic groups have grown into a single community that responds to each and every challenge under the single name of the Chinese nation. Tibet has been a part of China’s territory since ancient times, and the Tibetans have been one communal member of the Chinese nation. The destiny of Tibet has always been closely connected with the destiny of the great motherland and the Chinese nation.

Down through the ages, the Tibetan people have created a brilliant history and culture, and contributed to the enrichment and development of Chinese overall history and culture. However, the social system of Tibet remained one of theocratic feudal serfdom until the mid-20th century, with an economy that was extremely underdeveloped, and a society that was conservative, closed and backward.

Tibet first began to embrace modern civilization only after the People’s Republic was founded in 1949. Having going through such important phases as peaceful liberation, democratic reform, establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and introduction of reform and opening up, Tibet has not only established a new social system, but also witnessed great historical leap forward in its economy and embarked on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Tibet’s continual progress on its present path of development is one of the objective requirements of modern civilization. It accords with the progressive trend of human society, the prevailing conditions and the current reality in China, and the fundamental interests of all ethnic groups in Tibet. While following this path, the people of the numerous ethnic groups in Tibet have become masters of their country and their society, and critically, masters of their own destiny. Along the way, Tibet has been transformed from a poor and backward society to one that is advanced in both economy and culture. Along the way, the people of Tibet have found harmony and the means of working together with the people of other parts of China to create a better and happier life. And along the way, Tibet has opened to the rest of the world and begun to absorb the outstanding achievements of human civilization.

Tibet’s tremendous progress in its development serves as eloquent evidence that the path it is now following is the correct one. However, there is a party who cluster around the 14th Dalai Lama, representatives of the remnants of the feudal serf owners who have long lived in exile, driven by a political goal of "Tibetan independence" and a sentimental attachment to the old theocratic feudal serfdom. In recent years, having seen the failure of their attempts to instigate violence in support of their cause, they have turned to preaching a "middle way." This "middle way" purports to advocate "compromise," "concession," "peace" and "non-violence"; in reality it negates the sound path of development that Tibet has followed since the founding of the People’s Republic, and attempts to create a "state within a state" on Chinese territory, to be ruled by the 14th Dalai Lama and his supporters, as an interim step towards the ultimate goal of full independence.

In the 1950s, when slavery and serfdom had long since been abandoned by modern civilization, Tibet still remained a society of theocratic feudal serfdom. This system trampled on human dignity, infringed upon human rights, and impeded development in Tibet, all of which went completely against the progressive trend in China and the rest of the world.

In old Tibet, religious power enjoyed absolute supremacy. Religious power prevailed over political power while the latter protected the former. The two combined to defend the interests of the three major stakeholders: local officials, aristocrats and higher-ranking lamas in the monasteries. Before Democratic Reform in 1959, there were 2,676 monasteries and almost 115,000 Buddhist monks and their acolytes in Tibet. Active monks accounted for one quarter of the local male population, a total that far exceeded the proportion of clergy in Medieval Europe, and was highly unusual throughout the world.

In this theocratic society religion had been distorted by feudal serfdom, and monasteries were no longer places of purity to study Buddhism and worship the Buddha, but fortresses from which the local rulers organized religious activities, exercised administration and exploitation, built up their armed forces, and passed judicial adjudication. Some monasteries even had private jails, with instruments of torture used for eye gouging and hamstringing, in addition to handcuffs, chains and clubs. A letter from the Tibetan local government department to the head of a Rabden (a theocratic and administrative organization at a lower level) in the early 1950s contains instructions in relation to the celebration of the 14th Dalai Lama’s birthday, which said that all the staff of Lower Tantric College would chant the sutra on the occasion, and "during the service, food will be offered to the hungry ghosts, for which a corpus of fresh intestines, two skulls, some mixed blood and a whole human skin are urgently needed. Please have these delivered without delay." Among the three major stakeholders, the upper-ranking lamas were the biggest money-lenders, controlling 80 percent of all loans.

Since a large proportion of the population were not engaged in economic activity and reproduction, but were used as tools of oppression by the religious power, there was an acute shortage of social resources, and demographic growth had remained stagnant for a long period of time. According to "Tibet" from Annals of Military Events in Qing Dynasty written by Wei Yuan (1794-1851) in the mid-19th century, the Department of Minorities Affairs in 1737 (the second year of Qing Emperor Qianlong’s reign) produced a report on the areas under the jurisdiction of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni, which found that there were more than 316,200 lamas in Tibet, from a regional population (excluding present-day Qamdo) of only 1.09 million. By the early 1950s, the local population still stood around 1 million, having seen hardly any increase in 200 years.

Using religion to maintain a tight control over society was a prominent feature of theocracy. Li Youyi, an official stationed in Lhasa by the Commission for Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs of the Nationalist Government, and a Tibetologist who worked in Tibet in the 1940s, lamented the fact in his essay "Tibet, the mysterious and the un-mysterious": "Why didn’t the serfs rise up and rebel against such cruel oppression and exploitation in Tibet? I asked them this question, and was shocked by their answer. They said, ’This is the result of karma.’ They believed they had done evil in a previous life, and had to suffer in this life in order to wash away their previous sins and reincarnate into a better next life. This was what the lamas preached to them, and what they firmly believed." In the words of Li Youyi, it was such thought control that made the serfs "willing to toil all their life to accumulate merits for the future, and when the aristocrats whipped them, they thought it was helping them wash away their sins."

Charles Bell, a Briton who lived in Tibet, wrote in his book Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth, "Does it not matter to you whether you are reborn as a human being or as a pig? The Dalai Lama can help to ensure that you will be reborn as a human being in a high position, or, better still, as a monk or nun in a country where Buddhism flourishes." He firmly believed that the lamas had used spiritual terrorism to maintain their influence and to hold the power in their hands.

Feudal serfdom dominated Tibet until 1959. The French traveler Alexandra David-Neel visited Tibet and its surrounding areas five times between 1916 and 1924. In 1953, she published Le vieux Tibet face a la Chine nouvelle, in which she described Tibet’s serfdom as follows: In Tibet, all the peasants spent their whole lives as debt-laden serfs, and hardly any one of them could be found to have paid off their debts... To survive, the serfs had to borrow money, grain and cattle, and pay high rates of interest. But their harvests were never enough to cover their swelling interest... They had no other option but to borrow again, borrow grains and seeds... So on and so forth, year in and year out, the cycle continued on and on. They would be burdened with debts until the day they died, debts which would be passed on to their sons. From the day they started to toil in the fields, the poor boys would be oppressed by these ancestral debts, of whose origins he knew nothing... The poor could do nothing but toil indefinitely on the barren land, deprived of all freedom as human beings, and becoming poorer with every year that passed.

Under the feudal serfdom, there was a rigid hierarchy. The 13-Article Code and the 16-Article Code, which had been practiced for centuries in Tibet, divided people into three classes and nine ranks, enshrining the rigid hierarchy in law. According to these documents, there were three classes by blood and position, each class was further divided into three ranks... As people were divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differed... The bodies of people of the highest rank of the upper class were literally worth their weight in gold, while the lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class were only worth a straw rope.

This backward social structure led to a chasm of wealth in old Tibet. By the late 1950s, the three major stakeholders and their agents, who made up less than 5 percent of the population, owned almost all of the land, pastures, forests, mountains, rivers and flood plains, and most of the livestock. Before Democratic Reform in 1959, there were 197 hereditary aristocratic families, including 25 major ones, the top seven or eight of whom each possessed dozens of manors and over 1,000 hectares of land. The family of the 14th Dalai Lama owned 27 manors, 30 pastures, and over 6,000 serfs. The Dalai Lama alone had 160,000 taels (one tael = 30 grams) of gold, 95 million taels of silver, over 20,000 pieces of jewelry and jade ware, and more than 10,000 pieces of silk clothing and rare furs. Meanwhile the serfs and slaves, who accounted for 95 percent of the population, had nothing and lived a miserable life with no human rights at all. As a Tibetan proverb goes, "Life given by parents, body controlled by officials. Though they have life and body, they are not masters of their own."

In the 1930s, British novelist James Hilton in his Lost Horizon depicted an earthly paradise, which he called "Shangri-la." Since then, many have dreamed of searching for this fictional place, and some have even taken Tibet as the prototype. But "Shangri-la" was no more than a fantasy, and there was nothing at all in old Tibet that corresponded to the Utopian images of "Shangri-la."

The backwardness of old Tibet can be seen from the following facts: Until its peaceful liberation in 1951, Tibet did not have a single school in the modern sense; its illiteracy rate was as high as 95 percent among the young and the middle-aged; there was no modern medical service, and praying to the Buddha for succor was the main resort for most people if they fell ill; their average life expectancy was 35.5 years; there was not a single standard highway, and all goods and mail had to be delivered by man and beast of burden; and the region’s single hydropower station, with a generating capacity of 125 kw, served only the 14th Dalai Lama and a few other privileged people.

Those who had visited Tibet in person, whether Chinese or foreign, were all struck by how backward the place was, and many of them have left factual records. Li Youyi recalled, after a field survey of a couple of months in Tibet in 1945, "What I saw on my 1,700-mile journey along the mid-lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo was a state of complete decay. Every day I would pass by a number of abandoned houses, and expanses of barren fields with no one tending to them. I saw more than 100 such ’ghost towns’... I set out in the season of autumn harvest. At this time of the year, you would expect to see the joy of harvest on the faces of peasants, even in backward inland areas. But in rural Tibet in 1945, I saw no sign of any happy face. What I saw was the nobility and their rent collectors whipping and yelling at the serfs; what I heard was the weeping and moaning of their victims."

In his 1905 book The Unveiling of Lhasa, Edmund Candler, the former British journalist in India working for Daily Mail, recorded details of the old Tibetan society: Lhasa was "squalid and filthy beyond description, undrained and unpaved. Not a single house looked clean or cared for. The streets after rain are nothing but pools of stagnant water frequented by pigs and dogs searching for refuse."

In the memory of Dortar, who once served as director of the Radio and Television Department of Tibet Autonomous Region, "When I came to Lhasa in 1951, I was shocked at the shabby and poor conditions. With the exception of the Barkhor near the Jokhang Temple, there was hardly a decent street in town. No public facilities, no streetlights, no water supply and no drainage. What I often did see were the corpses of those frozen to death, in addition to beggars, prisoners and packs of dogs. To the west of the Jokhang was a colony of beggars, and there was another near the Romache. The beggars numbered as many as three to four thousand, or one-tenth of Lhasa’s total population."

In a telegraph to the Gaxag (Tibetan name of the local government of Tibet) in 1950, Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, then a local government Galoin (minister) and later vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China, reported on the conditions in Qamdo: "The people live in dire poverty in this time of turmoil. In some counties roasted barley is to be found in only seven or eight households, and all the rest have to rely on turnips. It is terribly bleak, with hordes of beggars."