My mom thinks this Tibetan stuff is BS, and it might just be. Somehow it is not portrayed correctly to westerners and she tunes out any media coverage.
The Tibetans have to realize how much the chinese have done for their region. They are showing no appreciation how many people were used to build them roads (and they were miliary men too) though the mountain ranges so that food, etc. can be transported. They can separate (or whatever they wanted), but they will never support themselves. They will starve, food does not just magically appear...I'm not sure if they have the best farming conditions either
Tibetan problem is much more complicated than we think actually. I had an overview with a mongolian woman who happens to work in Ha Noi. She spent a couple of years in Tibet, as a delegate.
- Buddhism as we know is not single but plural. It is something quite "special" compared to the regular monotheists religions. Like for the catholics or the jewish, you have buddhists trends that are completely peaceful, and some others that are definitely not. Some trends could be considered ( even by buddhists themselves actually) as sects who rule a population and keep them in the middle age ( stands true for all the religions, there is at least 1 trend like that in every single religion...).
I will give 2 examples Made in Viet Nam ( again! But I learned a great deal from here) and I saw it as well in Thailand. I know some priests that are quite wonderful personalities and very kind ( one of them has one of the 3 best paph collection in Viet Nam, so he is even more wonderful
).
But, on the other side, I went to a small town close to Lao Cai. It happens that this town has a priest that is very famous all over Viet Nam. I met that man ( he forced me to meet him, or the villengers would not welcome me at all), and I discovered a quite vast sect, where he earns a lot of money by choosing the proper place to build a house, or decide that this woman must abort or be banned by the family, because his "calculations" show that the child will kill later his father, or destroy the family or... People, even high rank Vietnamese officials follow his advise very tightly. Of course, depending on who pays him, it is possible to "change" the things. That's... DAMN CRAZY !!!
He rules quite a few hundreds people in countryside, and in downtown Ha Noi. And there are more like him. I had a friend who wanted to visit the pagodas around Ha Noi. So we did. Some priest have BMW cars, luxury apartments, and a "personnal secretary" that are damn pretty ( and non-priest...). The subjects have to give a lot and a lot, and even more to be 'saved' from the poor calculations. They make calculations, and determine that this day is bad for a wedding, that other day is bad for business... It is possible to pay to the Pagoda, so by their prayers the wedding is not delayed ad vitam, or otherwise. And the people who follow that are very well educated.
In Thailand, it is not that "rare" to see priest go to karaoke or have bar girls girlfriends... That's another story, but in Thailand, if you become a monk, all criminal charges were abandoned. So far it makes some crazy monks... and quite a few high rank mafia people accepted. They cannot be officially married or have childs, but they can enjoy the "life" to a great extent...
According to that mongolian woman I met, and according to a short trip I made over there, there are 2 problems with Tibet:
- Like the chinese government says, some areas were under complete control by the priest, who would rule the population very strictly and tightly, like a dictator. The China maybe "liberated" those populations from that control ( and some of the bad guys maybe build up a nice story to show how nice they are in exil...). China build roads and infrastructures, and stored a lot of soldiers in Tibet, that's true. There are 2 reasons. Historically China was afraid of a war with India at the border. Soldiers are like athletes, they need to be used to the oxygen content and elevation, otherwise, at 1500m height, they run 50 m and are completely exhausted. That's why as well Tibet is a big strategical plot for China. Otherwise, Tibet has nearly no interesting resources. The other reason being an extension of China, and the spread of communism, of course. I think it was true that the tibetans had a poor lifestyle when Tibet was independant. Some accounts by Alexandra David Neel and others explorer show a monarchical society with everything going to the elite. China, clearly, industrialized a lot Tibet...
- Now, China does not care about tibetans, they are minorities, and as such have a strong will to be independant. However it is true as well that an independant Tibet would be in the middle age. No one would care about that country, and they would be very, very poor. China tries to mix the tibetans ( though they would remain forever, and their progeny, as "Untermensch", because they would have tibetans traits, and people over there can be highly racists, as I told before...) to keep control. The gigantic brothels for chinese soldiers are an example, for sure.
A colonized Tibet is as worse as an independant Tibet, because Chineses made brothels for soldiers, huge ones, there has been a lot of stories about AIDS spread during blood sale by the tibetans to some Chinese companies, and tibetans as individuals get nothing from China... Basically, tibetans have little hope for a bright futur, no matter what happens. Colonized and absorbed by China, or independant, and vey poor, back to the middle age...
We can partially compare with the nazis. In Europe, there was one country that did a lot to industrialize and bring a huge upgrade to a medium quality lifestyle. That's the Germany of Adolf Hitler. During the nazi power, they build roads, increased the research ( being a kind of dictatorship, money was not a problem to make research, unlike today, where every research must have credit, or sponsorship), made wonderful airplanes, a lot of industries ( IG Farben, manufacturer of Zyklon, sponsored by the nazi govenement fully became after splitting the leading chemical manufacturers after war, AGFA, Hoechst, BASF... Many insecticides incidentally came from that period, including complete classes of chemicals),the U-Boat ( submarine) and are responsible for the spatial program of USA and USSR, a huge part of it. A lot of research is coming from the nazi dictatorship, including medical findings. Like for China who build the roads and infrastructures, we can say that nazi brough a lot to Europe... but they brought hell on earth as well, massive amount of killed people, the concentration camps, holocaust...
So it is impossible to say that simply because people build roads and industrialize a country they are nice guys. However with the China/Tibet story, it is apparently very complicated, and maybe we have only one side of the history that is the "official truth". What happens in Tibet right now is not right at all, for sure, they are persecuted, but the alternative seems to be bad anyway for the people living there... colonized and destroyed or poor and destroyed.
