The Dalai Lama (front right center, in black, wearing glasses) poses with his armed guerrilla escort as he flees Tibet after having instigated a militarily futile “uprising” of monks against the revolutionary Chinese government’s overthrow of his feudalist theocratic rule. Date unknown.
Anyone who has been following our Twitter feed lately has enjoyed (suffered through) a week-long discussion with some “Free Tibet” activists who defend the “right” of the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, overthrow the rule of the Maoist Communist Party of China and restore his hideous, medieval theocracy that had brutalized the Tibetan peasantry for centuries. As Trotskyists we do not defend every action of the Communist Party of China in establishing their rule over Tibet; but no matter how brutally the Chinese government’s revolutionary transformation of Tibet from a hideously backward theocratic dictatorship over a nation of workers held in total subjection as landless serfs, we have to take a side with the Maoists against the theocracy and in favor of the liberation of the serfs. The destruction of the Tibetan Buddhist theocracy by the Chinese bureaucratized workers state meant the freeing of millions of Tibetan workers & peasants from the status of chattels forced to surrender the fruits of their back-breaking labor to support a huge theocracy and of vicious landlords. No matter how brutally it was imposed upon the Tibetan workers, it was a thoroughly progressive and necessary intervention into Tibet without which the Tibetan workers would still be held as slaves by the Dalai Lama-led Buddhist theocracy. All reasonable objective histories of the struggle between the Chinese bureaucratized workers state and the Tibetan theocracy agree that life for the serfs under the Dalai Lama regime was a life of brutal exploitation under which the average life expectancy of a Tibetan serf in 1959 was around 35 years: almost HALF of the life expectancy of workers in the US and Europe at the same time. The most galling characteristic of the “Free Tibet” movement is its total refusal to even discuss the horrible conditions of the workers of Tibet under the regime of the Dalai Lamas. Their version of the “history” of the Tibetan independence struggle begins *after* the Chinese intervention in the wake of the 1949 Chinese socialist workers revolution. They thereby conveniently “disappear” the horrors of the “Good Old Days(TM)” under the Dalai Lama’s rule.
The “Free Tibet” movement was created from whole cloth by the US Central Intelligence Agency working hand-in-glove with the Dalai Lama and his gang of deposed Tibetan satraps. For at least a decade, the Dalai Lama and his cabal were heavily financed and equipped by the CIA with weapons that were smuggled into Tibet and used by Dalai Lama-linked guerrilla fighters to harass the Chinese and Tibetan communist-led government, maiming and murdering Tibetans and Chinese who were trying to modernize Tibet and bring it from the 15th century into the 20th century. The Tibetans who were recruited by the CIA to engage in this terrorism were led by their CIA handlers and US Govt representatives (including at least one President, Dwight D. Eisenhower) to believe that it was the intention of the US Government to fully back the restoration of the Dalai Lama’s rule in Tibet by driving the Chinese out of their country. In fact, no one in the US Gov’t. had any intention of doing any such thing: they simply wanted to harass the Chinese workers state, cynically using the Tibetans as their expendable pawns in the Cold War. Thousands of Tibetans and Chinese workers died as a result of this disgusting attempt of the US capitalist class to bleed the Chinese workers state to death.
In the 1990s it was revealed by US newspapers that the CIA had been financing the Dalai Lama, personally, and the “Tibetan liberation movement” generally, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In recent years the CIA has declassified thousands of documents detailing their deep involvement in creating both the armed “Tibetan resistance” inside Tibet and the “Free Tibet” movement outside Tibet from scratch. Like all of the phony “resistance movements” the US capitalist class has backed from El Salvador to Afghanistan to Venezuela, the Tibetan “resistance movement” never had any serious support inside the countries they were supposed to be “liberating”; in fact, if it wasn’t for the US’ guns and money (especially money!) most of these organizations would never have existed in the first place.
We’re going to try to post here the best documentation we can find on the origin and development of the “Tibetan resistance” and the “Free Tibet” movement so you our readers can determine for yourselves just what the truth is about the history of Tibet from its brief “independence” after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in China in 1911 and the reassertion of Chinese rule in the wake of the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Enjoy!
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Books
Anna Louise Strong, “When Serfs Stood Up In Tibet” (1959)
“When Serfs Stood Up In Tibet”, Chapter VII, “Village East of Lhasa”: “All three types of serfs were subject to the lord’s orders, to forced labor of various kinds, to flogging for whatever the lord considered misconduct. All had to get permission to marry or to leave the manor for even a short absence. If a lord had a serf tortured or even killed, the lord would not be punished. Yet within the three types of serfs there were differences. “Tsaibas and duichuns were like subjects of the lord while the nantsams were like his slaves,” explained Puntso. “Tsaibas and duichuns usually had homes which they were allowed to build on the land of the lord, and which they occupy continuously by custom, though the houses of course belong to the lord on whose land they are built. Nantsams do not usually have homes; they sleep in kitchens and store-rooms and cowsheds and out-buildings. They can seldom maintain stable families, in part because they have no place to live and in part because the lord may send husband or wife to work in another manor whenever he chooses. Tsaibas and duichuns can in part organize their own work, though they may be taken from it for many occasions of forced labor; but nantsams do not organize their own work, since they are working all the hours of the day under the orders of the lord’s steward. Nantsams also are sometimes sold or given as presents. If the daughter of a lord marries, she takes some nantsams with her to her new home as her dowry, but the tsaibas and duichuns are not thus taken for they stay with the land.”
Newspaper & Magazine articles
1950_04_26_CIA_Various Newspapers_LOCAL POPULATION INDIFFERENT TO GUERRILLA SUPPRESSION: Chinese newspaper from Canton reports on People’s Liberation Army (PLA) efforts to track down “bandits” in eastern Tibet and the PLA’s difficulties in coordinating with and maintaining discipline within their allied local forces.
Chicago Tribune, 26 January 1997: “THE CIA’S SECRET WAR IN TIBET”
LA Times, 15 September 1998: “CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ’60s, Files Show”
Associated Press (New York Times), 2 October 1998: “Dalai Lama Group Says It Got Money from CIA”: “The Dalai Lama’s administration acknowledged today that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960’s from the Central Intelligence Agency, but denied reports that the Tibetan leader benefited personally from an annual subsidy of $180,000.
“The money allocated for the resistance movement was spent on training volunteers and paying for guerrilla operations against the Chinese, the Tibetan government-in-exile said in a statement. It added that the subsidy earmarked for the Dalai Lama was spent on setting up offices in Geneva and New York and on international lobbying.”
Swans.com, 7 July 2003: “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth”
The Age, 23 May 2007: “Behind Dalai Lama’s Holy Cloak”
CIA and Other US Intelligence Agency Documents
1942_05_21_OSS_Larsen_to_Donovan re Strategic Importance of China, Tibet, Mongolia
1943_08_28_OSS_Joint Army Navy Intelligence Studies Memorandum No 9_JANIS Short Titles
1948_09_14_CIA Conditions in Tibet: “The present population of Tibet is about 2,000,000. Of these 2,000,000, only about ten percent are pro-American and the majority of these are from the aristocratic, wealthy and religious classes. The other ninety percent are friends or potential friends of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) and hope for Soviet aid for the liberation and independence of Tibet.”
1950_CIA_LADAKH (KASHMIR) – TIBET TRADE_PROPOSED ORGANIZATION OF 1950 LOBCHAG MISSION
1958_07_21_Geographic Intelligence Memorandum – Resistance in Tibet
1959_04_27_Tibet and China – Background Paper
US Department of State Documents
Chinese Government Documents
28 March 2019: “60 years have passed, how is life going for former serfs?”
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