Sinicization of Tibet

Early developments

After the fall of the Qing dynasty and before 1950, the region roughly corresponding to the modern-day Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) was a de facto independent nation. It printed its own currency and postage, and maintained international relations. Tibet claimed three provinces (Amdo, Kham and Ü-Tsang), but only controlled western Kham and Ü-Tsang. Since 1950, China made eastern Kham part of Sichuan and western Kham part of the new Tibet Autonomous Region.

During the early-20th-century Republic of China era which followed the Qing dynasty, Chinese Muslim general and Qinghai governor Ma Bufang is accused by Tibetans of implementing sinicization and Islamification policies in Tibetan areas. Forced conversion and heavy taxes were reported under his rule. After Mao Zedong won the Chinese civil war in 1949, his goal was the unification of the "five nationalities" as the People's Republic of China under the Communist Party of China. The Tibetan government in Lhasa sent Ngabo (known as Ngabo in English sources) to Chamdo in Kham, a strategic town near the border, with orders to hold his position while reinforcements came from Lhasa to fight the Chinese. On 16 October 1950, news arrived that the People's Liberation Army was advancing towards Chamdo and had taken the town of Riwoche (which could block the route to Lhasa). Ngabo and his men retreated to a monastery, where the People's Liberation Army surrounded and captured them. Ngabo wrote to Lhasa suggesting a peaceful surrender instead of war. According to the Chinese negotiator, "It is up to you to choose whether Tibet would be liberated peacefully or by force. It is only a matter of sending a telegram to the PLA group to recommence their march to Lhasa." Ngabo accepted Mao's Seventeen-Point Agreement, which stipulated that in return for Tibet becoming part of the People's Republic of China, it would be granted autonomy. Lacking support from the rest of the world, in August 1951 the Dalai Lama sent a telegram to Mao accepting the agreement. The delegates signed the agreement under duress, and the Tibetan's government's seal was forged.

Although the incorporation of Tibet into China is known in Chinese historiography as the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, the Dalai Lama considers it a colonization and the Tibetan Youth Congress agrees that it was also an invasion. The Chinese government points to improvements in health and the economy as justifications for their assertion of power in what it calls an historically-Chinese region. According to the Dalai Lama, China has encouraged Han Chinese immigration into the region.

Before the agreement, Tibet's economy was dominated by subsistence agriculture and the stationing of 35,000 Chinese troops during the 1950s strained the region's food supplies. When the Dalai Lama visited Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1954, Mao told him that he would move 40,000 Chinese farmers to Tibet.

As part of the 1960s Great Leap Forward, Chinese authorities coerced Tibetan farmers to cultivate maize instead of barley (the region's traditional crop). The harvest failed, and thousands of Tibetans starved.

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution, involving students and laborers of the Communist Party of China, was initiated by Mao and carried out by the Gang of Four from 1966 to 1976 to preserve Maoism as China's leading ideology. It was an intra-party struggle to eliminate political opposition to Mao.

The Cultural Revolution affected all of China, and Tibet suffered as a result. Red Guards attacked civilians, who were accused of being traitors to communism. More than six thousand monasteries were looted and destroyed. Monks and nuns were forced to leave their monasteries to "live a normal life", with those who resisted imprisoned. Prisoners were forced to perform hard labor, tortured and executed. Although the Potala Palace was threatened, Premier Zhou Enlai intervened and restrained the Tibetan Red Guards.

Recent developments

China's National Strategic Project to Develop the West, introduced during the 1980s after the Cultural Revolution, encourages the migration of Chinese people from other regions of China into Tibet with bonuses and favorable living conditions. People volunteer to be sent there as teachers, doctors and administrators to assist Tibet's development. Citing an unqualified labour force and less-developed infrastructure, the Chinese government has encouraged migrants to stimulate competition and change Tibet from a traditional to a market economy with economic reforms set forth by Deng Xiaoping.

According to Tibetan exile groups, since the end of the 1990s ethnic Tibetans have become a minority in Greater Tibet; in 2003, its population consisted of an estimated 6 million ethnic Tibetans and 7.5 million non-Tibetans from a number of ethnic groups. They remain the majority ethnic group in the Tibet Autonomous Region, making up about 93 percent of the population in 2008.

The 2008 attacks by Tibetans on Han- and Hui-owned property were reportedly due to the large Han Hui influx into Tibet. According to George Fitzherbert, "Tibetans complain of being robbed of their dignity in their homeland by having their genuinely loved leader incessantly denounced, and of being swamped by Chinese immigration to the point of becoming a minority in their own country." The Chinese government has attempted to develop Tibet as part of its China Western Development policy. The Chinese government has invested 310 billion yuan (about 45.6 billion U.S. dollars) in Tibet since 2001. In 2009 it invested over $7 billion into the region, 31 percent more than the previous year. The Qinghai-Tibet Railway was completed in 2006 at a cost of $3.68 billion, leading to increased tourism from the rest of China. The Shanghai government contributed $8.6 million to the construction of the Tibet Shanghai Experimental School, where 1,500 Tibetan students receive a primarily-Chinese education. Some young Tibetans feel that they are Tibetan and Chinese, and are fluent in Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese.

Education and employment

Since 1949 the Chinese government has used the minority-education system to coerce Tibetans to acquire the Chinese language, and minority education has been considered a key aspect of Sinicization pressure. Since the early 2000s, however, there has been a process of Tibetanization of Tibetan education in Qinghai's Tibetan regions. Through grassroots initiatives by Tibetan educators, Tibetan has been somewhat available as the main language of instruction in primary, secondary and tertiary education. The Tibetan language remains marginalized in government employment, with a small number of public-service positions mandating a Tibetan degree or Tibetan language skills.

Population growth

In 1949, there were between 300 and 400 Han Chinese residents in Lhasa. In 1950, the city covered less than three square kilometres and had around 30,000 inhabitants; the Potala Palace and the village of Zhöl below it were considered separate from the city. In 1953, according to the first population census, Lhasa had about 30,000 residents (including 4,000 beggars, but not including 15,000 monks).

In 1992 Lhasa's permanent population was estimated at a little under 140,000, including 96,431 Tibetans, 40,387 Han Chinese and 2,998 others. Added to that figure were 60,000–80,000 temporary residents, primarily Tibetan pilgrims and traders.

Debate

In 1989, high-profile French criminal lawyer Robert Badinter participated in an episode of Apostrophes (a well-known French television program devoted to human rights) with the Dalai Lama. Referring to the disappearance of Tibetan culture, Badinter used the phrase "cultural genocide". In 1993, the Dalai Lama used the same phrase to describe the destruction of Tibetan culture. During the 2008 Tibetan unrest, he accused the Chinese of cultural genocide in their crackdown.

In 2008 Robert Barnett, director of the Program for Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, said that it was time for accusations of cultural genocide to be dropped: "I think we have to get over any suggestion that the Chinese are ill-intentioned or trying to wipe out Tibet." Barnett voiced his doubts in a review in the New York Review of Books: "Why, if Tibetan culture within Tibet is being 'fast erased from existence', [do] so many Tibetans within Tibet still appear to have a more vigorous cultural life, with over a hundred literary magazines in Tibetan, than their exile counterparts?"