Ang Maoist-Third Worldist approach sa Kilusang Pagpapalaya sa Tibet

Ang Maoist-Third Worldist approach sa Kilusang Pagpapalaya sa Tibet. Humihingi kami ng tulong upang maisalin ang dokumentong ito sa wikang tagalog.

by End Imperialism

(Source: monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

As the Western (m)asses fall in lock step behind the imperialist media machine’s espousal of Tibetan nationalism, Maoist-Third Worldists should try and untangle myth from reality with regard to Tibet, its history, its relations with the rest of China, and the Free Tibet movement.

Clearly, the issue of Tibet has enormous ideological appeal to post- or semi-Christian Western liberals subscribing to idealist anti-Communist or anarchist dogmas grounded in fascist and Trotskyist propaganda about the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, its function and its practice. Moreover, the issue of Tibet allows Western liberals, whose entire society and upbringing trains them to view non-White races as “primitive” or barbaric, to fantasise about a small Asian “nation”, making it all the easier to project their instinctual racist ideas onto a far larger Asian nation. Loving Tibet allows the anti-Communist bourgeoisie of the West (the entire population who are in the top 20% of the world by income) to hate China all the more.

China is thus the perfect ideological foil to White “Free Tibet”ans’ vaunting of their own apparently relatively “democratic”, “peaceful”, “tolerant” and “civilised” societies. This article will show that the Free Tibet movement as understood and practised in the West is nothing more than an ideological justification of the brutal and rapacious imperialism which keeps class conflict, revolution and proletarian consciousness from disturbing the parasitic Western bourgeois order.

A Brief History of Feudal and Socialist Tibet

Tibet, an area about the size of w£s$tern £urope, was originally populated by nomadic tribes who fought each other for grazing land. These tribes made slaves of other tribes whose land they conquered. The name Tibet comes from that of one of these victorious tribes, the Tubo. The Tubo practiced a shamanic animism known as Bon. Buddhism was brought into Tibet during the Tang dynasty (618-907), when Emperor Taizong gave his daughter, Princess Wenzheng, to the Tubo King, Songsten Gampo. The Princess, as with all the Tang aristocracy, was a Buddhist and, despite the resentment of the Bon shamans (which reached the point of war and the re-establishment of animism as the dominant religion in AD838), Buddhism proliferated after her influence. Yet the animistic beliefs of the Bon shamanic rulers of Tibet lived on. Tibetan Buddhism from the Tang dynasty onward was forced to create a quite unique hybrid religion, expressing the ideology of the unified (though competing) Chinese and Tibetan royal families in the age of incipient, post-nomadic Feudal development.

The first Grand Lama (the leader of all of the other ‘lamas’ or gurus) from the Sakya Buddhist sect was created in the thirteenth century by Yuan Emperor Kublai Khan, descendant of the great Mongol ruler of most of Russia, part of £urope and all of China, Genghis Khan. Centuries later, the Chinese Emperor sent his army into Tibet to support the fifth Grand Lama, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, the ruler of all Tibet. (1) The Dalai Lama, thus inaugurated pledged his allegiance to the Chinese government and received in return enough gold and sliver to build 13 monasteries of the Yellow sect in Tibet. Since that time, every successive ‘reincarnation’ of the Dalai Lama has been confirmed by China’s government, up to and including the current one.

There was bitter and murderous feuding amongst the Tibetan Buddhist sects which succeeded the ascendancy of this first Dalai Lama. (2) Curren writes,

“In 1660 [during the Qing Dynasty], the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too ‘like eggs smashed against rocks…. In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.’” (3)

There followed forcible conversions and the usual brutal wars for sectarian supremacy amongst the competing Schools. One of the prayers of the Gelug School of Buddhism (that sect to which the Dalai Lama belongs) reads: “Praise to you, violent god of the Yellow Hat teachings/who reduces to particles of dust/ great beings, high officials and ordinary people/ who pollute and corrupt the Gelug doctrine.” (4)

So much for theology. Engels wrote:

“All religion… is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s (sic) minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces.” (5)

What terrestrial forces, exactly, did Tibetan Buddhist theology reflect?

Tibetan society was almost completely based on a feudal system of manorial estates of arable land worked by serfs.(6) These estates, says Parenti, were owned by two great ruling class groups: the “secular” landlords and the theocratic Lamas, neither of whom worked a day in their lives. Karan writes that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.” (7) The high Lamas themselves lived in opulent luxury, not quite befitting the anti-materialist doctrine they expected their religious subjects to accept. The Dalai Lama himself lived in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.

Many of the landlords and the Lamas themselves held slaves, which were basically domestic servants culled from the rural populace and forced to satisfy their master’s every whim (including also sexual ones from serf girls). Not including the 10% of Tibetans who were junior monks and were essentially that to their Lama Masters, slaves constituted around 5% of the population. Mike Ely writes,

These days, the Dalai Lama is “packaged” internationally as a non-materialist holy man. In fact, the Dalai Lama was the biggest serf owner in Tibet. Legally, he owned the whole country and everyone in it. In practice, his family directly controlled 27 manors, 36 pastures, 6,170 field serfs and 102 house slaves. (8)

Torture, using a variety of heinous mechanical devices, was routinely practiced by the “non-violent” Buddhist lamas against slaves, dissidents, unruly servants and serfs, junior monks and, later, communists. (10) Long before the Chinese Red Army (and sympathetic Amerikan journalists like Anna Louise Strong) arrived in Tibet to reveal the brutal nature of the feudal theocracy, foreign observers reported on the slavery practiced there.

The following account was written by Sir Charles Bell, who was the British administrator for Chumbi Valley in 1904-05. At that time, Chumbi Valley was under British occupation pending payment by Tibet of an indemnity which resulted from the Younghusband Expedition of 1904.

“Slaves were sometimes stolen, when small children, from their parents. Or the father and mother, being too poor to support their child, would sell it to a man, who paid them sho-ring, ‘price of mother’s milk,’ brought up the child and kept it, or sold it, as a slave. These children come mostly from south-eastern Tibet and the territories of the wild tribes who dwell between Tibet and Assam.” (11)

“The vast majority of the Tibetan population were serfs, who were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land- or the monastery’s land- without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.” (12)

The serfs of feudal Tibet were forced to hand over much of their crop to their landlord in taxes and to engage in hard forced labour known as ulag. Tibet scholar A. Tom Grunfeld writes:

“These [manorial] estates were extremely lucrative. One former aristocrat noted that a “small” estate would typically consist of a few thousand sheep, a thousand yaks, an undetermined number of nomads and two hundred agricultural serfs. The yearly output would consist of over 36,000 kg (80,000 lbs.) of grain, over 1,800 kg (4,000 lbs.) of wool and almost 500 kg (1,200 lbs.) of butter… A government official had “unlimited powers of extortion” and could make a fortune from his powers to extract bribes not to imprison and punish people…. There was also the matter of extracting monies from the peasantry beyond the necessary taxes.” (13)

It was this brutal serfdom imposed on the peasantry of feudal Tibet by the landlord system, its army, its religious order and its economy, which allowed for strong commercial ties to develop between the similarly organised central Chinese imperial power and its Tibetan counterpart. (14) Its effects on the people of Tibet were illiteracy, superstition, extreme hunger, malnutrition, disease, and early death.

Tibetan feudalism, based as it was on an onerous and backward system of exploitation and oppression, was not to last. In 1951, the victorious Chinese Red Army moved into Tibet. It moved after having defeated the organised State power of landlordism and comprador capitalism represented by General Chiang Kai-Shek’s “nationalist” Kuomintang (KMT) Army (with whom the Lamas had had good relations). For a full two years after conquering state power in China, there were no Red Army troops sent to feudal Tibet. In 1951, representatives of the 14th Dalai Lama and the 10th Panchen Lama (15) signed an agreement with the Communist government designed to ensure peaceful relations between the representatives of feudal oppression and those of social liberation. (16) In 1954, the Dalai and Panchen Lamas went to Beijing to attend the first National People’s Congress. The Dalai Lama was elected Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee. The Panchen Lama was a member also. But in 1956, the leaders of the three great monasteries in Tibet (Ganden, Sera, and Drepung) issued a statement demanding that the feudal system of land relations upon which their privilege and their religious hegemony depended be maintained, in the face of the likelihood of popular and socialistic land redistribution. This prompted the Communist government to do precisely what the clerical reactionaries feared and an order was issued to confiscate landlord property and redistribute it amongst the serfs. The Tibetan reactionaries mustered an army of 7000 men (including guerrillas trained overseas by the O.S.S., the precursor of the CIA, and air-dropped into Tibet along with machine guns, mortars and ammunition) and announced the founding of a Tibetan Independent State. The revolt was put down by the People’s Liberation Army, who captured up to 4000 rebels, whilst the Dalai Lama fled into exile, impressively welcomed by the neo-colonial government in India.

Thus, the historical, if sometimes fractious, alliance between the Tibetan ruling class and that of the rest of China within a unified State structure, unsurprisingly, proved most distasteful to the Lamas and their landlord friends. Could this have had something to do with the fact that these visiting Chinese were Communists?! The Chinese Communist Party knew well that Tibet could be a significant staging post for imperialist invasion and, in fact, the KMT aimed to “liberate” China (from new democracy and socialism) from a base held in Tibet. (17) Snow writes:

“[At] the time of the collapse of the Qing dynasty [1911] Tibetan authorities had British encouragement when they attempted a coup and proclaimed Tibet’s fealty to China at an end. Chinese troops suppressed the rebellion and the British never recognised Tibet as an independent state.” (18)

In fact, Britain invaded Tibet from India in 1888, 1903, and again in 1913, but failed to defeat the Chinese government. The Tibetan feudal lords and the Lamas nonetheless forged a de facto alliance with the imperialist British raj before the aforementioned agreement with the Chinese Communist Party effectively ended British domination of Tibet. India, too, claimed suzerainty over Tibet in 1954. The comprador neo-colonial Indian government (with massive Amerikan, “Soviet” and British investment continuing to dominate the economy post-independence) was vexed because China was to build a road connecting Lhasa (the Tibetan capital) with Kathmandu (the Nepalese capital) and with Chinese Turkestan. Nepal had traditionally been a tributary monarchy under the rule of the British Raj in India, and the capitalist government in New Delhi did not wish to disturb this system with a network of struggle connecting Communist China with the toiling masses of Nepal, Turkestan and India itself. As British journalist Nevill Maxwell wrote:

“China viewed the Indian desire to have semi-independence in Tibet as a preliminary attempt to draw Tibet under Indian influence, an inference neither far-fetched nor unfair. When China later established diplomatic relations with Nepal, China became an open competitor in what India regarded as a diplomatic reserve.” (19)

The pro-feudalism policies of the neo-colonial capitalist government in India ultimately led to the Sino-Indian border dispute of 1959 in which there were casualties on both sides, but in which Socialist China was a paragon of peace-seeking internationalism.(20) Clearly, then, Tibet was a part of China where internal contradictions (between landlords and serfs and Tibetans and Han Chinese) and external contradictions (between Socialist China, neo-colonial India and imperialism) would provide the context for the outcome of the class struggle.

The latter had, in any case, proceeded apace from the time of the Red Army’s entry into Tibet. As in amerika with Black slaves in the south joining the similarly “invading” Union Army, taking advantage of a contradiction having erupted amongst the White settler population, many Tibetans seized the opportunity to liberate themselves, as they had in vain tried many times to do in the past, by joining the Red Army. In fact, over a thousand Tibetans had joined the Red Army as early as 1935, during the Long March when the Chinese Communist Party had heroically and epically decamped, travelling six and a half thousand miles from the Communist base area of Ching-kangshan in Kiangsi (under siege by KMT troops) to Shensi in the north-west of China. Journalist Helen Foster Snow interviewed a young monk who had joined in those days:

“I was only a little-monk training to become a lama anyway. I entered the lamasery to study when I was seven, but now I don’t believe in any religion. Religion is feudalism, and it is the opium of the Tibetan people.”

“Did many lamas join the Red Army?” I inquired.

“No, but many young monks joined the Red Army when it came.”

“How do you like the British?” was my next question.

“British imperialism is very bad in Tibet,” was the answer. “And the lamas work with the British instead of standing for Tibetan independence.” (21)

The Chinese Communist Party, under Comrade Mao Zedong’s leadership, waged war against feudalism and its political bulwarks in Tibet. To do this, it organised Tibet’s serfs into a modern and collective labour force opposed to exploitation and oppression. Edgar Snow wrote:

“Former Tibetan serfs were trained and armed and labour was conscripted to construct public works. Schools and hospitals and barracks were opened in the lama temples and homes, a modern Tibetan army was being trained, highways now linked China and Lhasa, and the capital saw its first power plant and steel mill… Tibetan party members receiving technical school and higher education now numbered many thousands. Most of them had begun as illiterates. The great majority were being trained to teach in a mass education program in Tibet. It was only in 1962 that ‘the first group of Tibetan students of the preparatory specialty class of the Central Minorities Institute [Peking] graduated’ and took up ‘their posts in the building of a new Tibet…. It was stated that ‘almost all the group’ were children of serfs.” (22)

Parenti writes:

“By 1961, Chinese… authorities expropriated the landed estates owned by lords and lamas. They distributed many thousands of acres to tenant farmers and landless peasants, reorganizing them into hundreds of communes. Herds once owned by nobility were turned over to collectives of poor shepherds. Improvements were made in the breeding of livestock, and new varieties of vegetables and new strains of wheat and barley were introduced, along with irrigation improvements, all of which reportedly led to an increase in agrarian production.” (23)

By the mid-1960s, then, the shackles of serfdom had been removed from Tibetans who were empowered under the new democratic system of economic ownership. However, there were those elements of the ruling Communist Party who did not wish to see socialist ownership of the means of production, but only the end of absolute feudalism and sought to ensure that profitability (rather than democracy and human need) was the raison d’etre of production. These “capitalist-roaders” were bourgeois elements within the party who effectively controlled the means of production and their allocation and usage by wielding political power. (24) They had grown up in the soil of what Marx called “bourgeois right” (the socialist, but not communist, principle of “from each according to her ability, to each according to her work”) and the unequal pay, and unequal relations between mental and manual labour and between town and country associated with it. Since different individuals perform different amounts of labour, and thus receive different incomes, in socialist society, and because economic scarcity necessitates a market in commodities (as opposed to the free procurement of goods from the public store), would-be bourgeois elements under socialism could hope to accumulate wealth at the expense of the peasantry and the working class, whose labor creates all of society’s wealth. Moreover, the bourgeoisie growing up within the Chinese Communist Party was in thrall to the Theory of the Productive Forces, a pernicious doctrine which states that socialism depends not upon class struggle and the victories of the proletariat, but upon increased productivity in the economic base of society. The new bourgeoisie, then, was allied with the richer peasants who still operated within an economic system of socialist market relations (albeit ones strictly regulated by the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’s preventing a new bourgeois class forming) and who were able to buy the lands and hire the labor of their neighbours.

Mao wrote:

“Lenin said ‘small production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale. This also occurs among a section of the workers and a section of the party members. Both within the ranks of the proletariat and among the personnel of state organs there are people who follow the bourgeois style of life.’ The existence of bourgeois influence and the influence of international imperialism and revisionism are the political and ideological source of new bourgeois elements, while the existence of bourgeois right provides the vital economic basis for their emergence.” (25)

Individuals and groups within the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Tibet sought to increase productivity in a few profitable industries, particularly mining and grain production. They opposed the collectivisation of agriculture and the development of large-scale industry. They saw these as tending to disrupt the Party’s alliance with elements of the old Tibetan regime who still held some political power. When Mao announced the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, encouraging the Chinese masses to “bombard the headquarters”, to overthrow a government which had become thoroughly infilitrated (but not yet dominated) by bourgeois influence, “Communist” Party leaders in Tibet, particularly PLA General Zhang Guohua, went about trying to prevent the ensuing class struggle from affecting their positions of privilege. Mike Ely:

“Zhang’s forces planned to ride out Mao’s new campaign. They used the tactic of “waving the red flag to oppose the red flag.” When the Cultural Revolution was announced, they organized their own official “Cultural Revolution Group.” They literally painted Lhasa red–announcing that every house should fly the red flag and display a Mao poster. Loudspeakers broadcast revolutionary songs and streets were given new names… In short, the revisionists wanted the Cultural Revolution in Tibet to be confined to orderly production, quiet study, and army actions. They sent squads to every factory and school to make sure that the growing Red Guard movement did not get out of their control. Powerful forces in Peking, including Premier Zhou Enlai, one of the top officials in the government, tried to help by ordering the Red Guards to stay out of Tibet. They even gave the Red Guards a going-away dinner party. But the Red Guards refused to leave.” (26)

During the Cultural Revolution, in Tibet factories were taken over by revolutionary workers, the newspaper Tibet Daily was seized by rebels, land was collectively organised into ‘People’s Communes’ (armed by the State to resist CIA-backed exile gangs), and irrigation and drinking water systems installed therein so that Tibet’s food production doubled between 1966 and 1976. Rural schools and theatre groups were pioneered in Tibet duing the Cultural Revolution, the first mass education drive in Tibetan history. Modelled on the famous ‘barefoot doctors’ operating in the rest of China during the Cultural Revolution, thousands of newly trained doctors were sent out amongst the Tibetan peasantry. Industry, also, took a great leap forward in Tibe during the anti-revisionist Cultural Revolution. Mike Ely writes:

“In 1964 there had only been 67 factories. By 1975 there were 250 enterprises- most of them serving local and agricultural needs. Small hydroelectric plants brought electricity to the people. Manufactured goods were available to the masses for the first time: Sun goggles cut down the widespread cataract-blindness among old people. Pressure cookers wiped out many child-killing diseases passed in old-style Tibetan cooking. New farm implements increased productivity and made life easier.” (27)

Obviously, for the new democratic impetus to take off amongst the Tibetan people, a campaign directed against old superstitions and feelings of religious awe for the main ideological institutions of the old feudal order, the Buddhist monasteries, was necessary. It is debatable whether a degree of insensitivity to the cultural bonds developed amongst the Tibetan people by Buddhist religious practices was shown by Communist cadres, it is nonetheless true that outmoded notions of karma, reincarnation and prayer (along with those religious beliefs propounded by Mosques, Synagogues and Zen Temples defaced during the GPCR) were quite incompatible with the new democratic and scientific culture developing in the socialist Tibetan countryside. Coupled with the fact that they were the very strongholds of, first, armed feudalism and, later, counter-revolutionary activity and organisation, the Tibetan monasteries could not and did not escape attack by the Cultural Revolutionaries of the Tibetan people. Their dismantling by massive groups of serfs led by Communist Party cadres, who met with stiff armed resistance by some of the Lamas inside, revealed the loot which the blood, sweat and tears of Tibetan serfs had paid for over the centuries.

Yet, ultimately, the GPCR must be judged a failure insofar as it did not prevent the bourgeoisie within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from coming to full State power after Mao’s death. In Tibet, during the GPCR, a camapaign was launched by elements within the CCP to reinstate the so-called “four freedoms” (to practice religion, to trade, to lend money with interest, to hire laborers and servants) and to bring back the Dalai Lama to Tibet as a “national” figurehead. (28) Whilst this particular counter-revolutionary action was defeated, the fake “Communist” forces who had planned it would succeed in riding to state power after Mao’s death and implementing precisely the aforementioned “four freedoms” model for rural exploitation.

Post-Socialist China and Tibet

Around 1976, after Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping began in earnest to restore capitalism in China. (29) In Tibet, Communist Party membership which had multiplied during the GPCR dropped dramatically as many revolutionary Tibetans were purged from the Party. (30) The Panchen Lama and many counter-revolutionary rebels, who had been in prison from 1959, were released and asked to return to government. (31) In the Tibetan countryside, the phony “Communist” government dismantled the People’s Communes in 1980, (32) and the local Production Teams (which involved twenty to thirty households in collective labour projects) soon after. Production became concentrated in small scale family units, and tax breaks were introduced so as to placate those better off peasants lacking socialist consciousness. Goldstein and Beall note the consequences of this turn to market relations in the countryside for the historically very revolutionary nomadic peoples of Pala, Tibet. They write:

“Another striking consequence of China’s post-1981 reform policy is the rapidity and extent to which economic and social differentiation has re-emerged in Pala. Although all Pala’s nomads in the old society were subjects of the Panchen Lama, tremendous class differences existed among the subjects. Rich families had huge herds and lived in relative luxury alongside a substantial stratum of herdless laborers, poor nomads, servants and beggars. Implementation of the commune in 1970 removed these disparities since all private ownership of the means of production ended at this time…. The dissolution of the commune in 1981 maintained a rough equality since all nomads in Pala received an equal number of livestock. However, in the ensuing seven years, some herds have increased while others have declined dramatically. Once again there are both very wealthy and very poor nomads. One household actually has no livestock at all.”

“While no households had less than 37 animals per person in 1981, 38 percent had less than 30 in 1988. At the high end of the continuum, the proportion of Pala households with more than 50 animals per person increased from 12 percent in 1981 to 25 percent in 1988. Ten percent of the households had more than 90 animals per person versus none in 1981. As a result of this process of economic differentiation, the richer 16 percent of the population in 1988 owned 33 percent of the animals while the poorer 33 percent of the population owned only 17 percent of the animals. The past seven years of family-based `responsibility’ system has resulted in an increasing concentration of animals in the hands of a minority of newly wealthy households, and the emergence once again of a stratum of poor households with no or few animals. These new poor subsist by working for rich nomads, several of whom now, as in the old society, regularly employ herders, milkers, and servants for long stretches of time.” (33)

This is precisely the pattern of social relations prevalent in the rest of China as capitalism has returned to the countryside and the cities.

The average life expectancy in Tibet in 1951, when the Red Army entered the country was 35 years old, literacy stood at 10% of the population. The landlords, just 5% of the population, held 95% of the country’s wealth. Today, Tibetan life expectancy is between 65 and 70 years and 85% of the population is literate. (34) Despite these impressive achievements, the growth of capitalism and exploitation in Tibet as in the rest of China threatens the livelihood of Tibetans both inside and outside the country. This is particularly so insofar as the small farmers produced by the capitalist rural reforms of the past 25 years find themselves having to compete with imperialist agriculture. The effects of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) entry into the Chinese rural sector have been dramatic. Weil writes:

”After rapid income gains in the first decade or so of reforms, the rural sector in China has recently lost ground relative to the urban population, prompting the government to continue the policy of propping up the price of farm products through both state purchasing programs and protective tariffs. Such methods have kept Chinese agricultural products above the level of global “free market” prices. Entry into the WTO would largely undermine these forms of price control and state subsidization of the peasant farmers.”

“Current government prices for Chinese grain are approximately 10 to 70 percent above the global market level, or an average of around 30 percent more than those in the United States. For example, early this year, corn sold in the northeast province of Jilin, a major grain growing region, at $85 per ton, or some $9 above the comparable U.S. price.”

“Given this spread, the free importation of foreign grains could quickly drive large number of Chinese farmers, many already economically marginalized and having difficulty selling all their produce, out of business. Subsisting on a mere one to two dollars per day on average under the current policies — with tens of millions earning still less — even a relatively small drop in the price paid these peasants or further shortfall in their ability to sell their crops would be ruinous for many.”

“U.S. and other foreign grain companies are poised to exploit such weaknesses by pouring relatively cheap imports into China. The potential is enormous, as the U.S.-China accord specifies that imports of wheat must rise from the current level of around 200,000 tons annually to 10.6 million tons in the next few years, while importation of corn is set to increase from 55,000 to 7.9 million tons. The U.S. National Corn Growers Association predicts that exports from the United States to the Chinese market could triple.” (35)

Those peasants unable to compete on the market with the wealthier farmers and the imperialist agricultural combines must sell their land and most end up travelling to the cities in search of industrial employment, where they are paid starvation wages for back-breaking work in factories owned by imperialist multinational corporations. Indeed, “over the past two decades, between 100 million and 150 million migrants have moved from the rural to the urban areas either to look for work or to work in sweatshops. The average wages of these migrant workers have remained the same since the 1990s: between $50 and $70 a month.” (36)

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in China is huge, and second only to that in the U.S., at $54 billion dollars in 2004. Yet whilst FDI in amerika is largely in the field of finance and services (that is, unproductive sectors of the economy), FDI in China is designed to superexploit the country’s cheap labour force and unregulated environmental resources. The comprador class in charge of selling Chinese produce cheaply to Western multinational corporations that is, the Chinese “Communist” Party government, benefit richly by allowing the Chinese economy to be bought up by imperialism. China, says Dr. Mobo Gao of the University of Tasmania, “is the workshop of the world, owned by foreigners, but managed by Chinese.” (37)

It is important to recognise that the changes in Tibet’s social structure are precisely those of other, much worse off, rural areas in China, particularly in its west. Where the Chinese government has allowed massive FDI and invested capital of its own in its eastern seaboard provinces (those areas like Shanghai which are major transport links in funnelling Chinese produce out of the country and into Western markets) there has been a concomitant neglect and under-development of more western and central rural areas. Although there have been struggles around this issue, it is inevitable that the Chinese “Communist” Party right-wing (that is, those officials even more reactionary than the revisionist norm) will be in the ascendant. So long as Chinese “development” is taken to mean profitability, and imperialist finance is allowed to dominate the country’s economy, regional gaps between export oriented eastern seaboards and western rural provinces, including Tibet, will be exacerbated and political power tend to congeal around the latter.

Inequality, then, in Tibet as in China generally has greatly increased under state capitalism Nonetheless, according to Goldstein et al:

“The impact of these [neo-liberal] reforms on farmers’ standard of living is almost universally perceived by villagers to be positive. 94% of all 780 households felt their livelihood had improved since decollectivization, and in even the poorest xiang, Medrogongkar, 93.4% of respondents responded positively, saying their livelihood had improved. When responses were analyzed by socioeconomic status, it was found that 99.1% of rich and 81% of poor households reported that they had better livelihoods. The almost universal reason villagers offered for this was not new technology but rather their newly acquired freedom to work hard on their own resources for personal profit.”

“…. When respondents were asked whether they think they now have a better life than their parents, 85.5% responded positively. Only 8.6% said they were worse off. … Older villagers in the age category 60–79 years held this view—and their parents would have been adults at the end of the traditional society, i.e., they would have been between 40 and 60 years of age when the socialist period began in 1959. There was also optimism about the future. When asked whether they think their children will be able to have a better livelihood than they now have, 92% said yes.” (38)

The Tibetan peasant’s ability to provide enough grain for his subsistence was based on massive government subsidies until the recent entry of the imperialist WTO into China’s rural sector. It is to be expected that there will be increased unemployment and flight into urban areas for those peasants whose meagre forces of production cannot hope to compete with w£$stern imperialist produce.

During the ongoing revisionist (39) era, China as a whole went from full employment to having 60 million unemployed persons in search of work. At present, there are a great many rural Tibetans who have migrated to the towns of Lhasa for the same reasons. Despite the increased investment by the Chinese government in Lhasa’s urban infrastructure, a great many of these economic migrants cannot find work, particularly as the top government and business posts are held by Han Chinese who stay on a short term basis.

Recent urban rioting in Tibet, timed not coincidentally with international media focus on the forthcoming Beijing 2008 Olympics, is not different from other urban riots that have taken place throughout China and have not received any international publicity. The recent riots in Lhasa have been anything but peaceful and have certainly involved brutal and organised attacks on ethnic Han Chinese, a fact not reported by the imperialist media. (40) Tibetan nationalists, in league with Amerikan imperialism led by representatives of slavery and serfdom, argue that Tibet is being “swamped” by Han Chinese immigration. Whilst it is true that the revisionist Chinese regime encouraged migration to Tibet of Chinese entrepreneurs and skilled workers throughout the 1980s and 1990s so as to “develop” (that is, exploit) Tibet’s resources, this initial fast pace of Han Chinese immigration has not been sustained and its extent has been greatly and cynically exaggerated. Dr. Barry Sautman of Hong Kong University writes,

“Separatists and their supporters claim that Han Chinese have been “flooding” into Tibet, “swamping” Tibetans demographically. In fact, between the national censuses of 1990 and 2000 (which count everyone who has lived in an area for six months or more), the percentage of Tibetans in the Tibetan areas as a whole increased somewhat and Han were about one-fifth of the population. A preliminary analysis of the 2005 mini-census shows that from 2000-2005 there was a small increase in the proportion of Han in the central-western parts of Tibet (the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR) [precisely the more developed urban areas! Author] and little change in eastern Tibet. Pro-independence forces want the Tibetan areas cleansed of Han (as happened in 1912 and 1949); the Dalai Lama has said he will accept a three-to-one Tibetan to non-Tibet population ratio, but he consistently misrepresents the present situation as one of a Han majority. Given his status as not merely the top Tibetan Buddhist religious leader, but as an emanation of Buddha, most Tibetans credit whatever he says on this or other topics.

The Tibetan countryside, where three-fourths of the population lives, has very few non-Tibetans.The vast majority of Han migrants to Tibetan towns are poor or near-poor. They are not personally subsidized by the state; although like urban Tibetans, they are indirectly subsidized by infrastructure development that favors the towns. Some 85% of Han who migrate to Tibet to establish businesses fail; they generally leave within two to three years. Those who survive economically offer competition to local Tibetan businesspeople, but a comprehensive study in Lhasa has shown that non-Tibetans have pioneered small and medium enterprise sectors that some Tibetans have later entered and made use of their local knowledge to prosper.” (41)

Another baseless charge of the reactionaries leading the Tibetan nationalist movement is that Han Chinese chauvinism is involved in “cultural genocide” against Tibetan culture (the same charge in the past used to justify maintaining Tibetan feudalism). In fact, alongside and in tandem with the growth of exploitation in the countryside, the Chinese “Communist” Party has encouraged the building of Buddhist temples. This is to attract tourist revenues, as Western liberal reactionaries flock to Tibet to have their orientalist fantasies sold back to them. Tourists pay to see a timeless and exotic Shangri-la, populated by a mysterious, gentle, humble people who are content in their otherworldliness. Furthermore, the reintroduction of religious practices in Tibet is designed to blunt the scientific and socialist culture the hard fought class struggles of the Tibetan masses had achieved in the Maoist era. The very “Communist” Party government which has reinstated the political power of clerical functionaries throughout Tibet from the 1980s on, reportedly mock the Tibetan people as “superstitious” and “barbaric”. (42) The new power of the monasteries and their ideology was further compounded by the shutting down of a great many primary and secondary schools in Tibet by the government, who insist on building new ones in areas where Han Chinese specialists are to be trained for important political and economic roles. (43) The Dalai Lama’s claims of “cultural genocide” taking place in Tibet are thoroughgoing lies. Sautmann writes with some justice:

“Western politicians and media also consistently credit the Dalai Lama’s charge that “cultural genocide” is underway in Tibet, even though the exiles and their supporters offer no credible evidence of the evisceration of Tibetan language use, religious practice or art. In fact, more than 90% of Tibetans speak Tibetan as their mother tongue. Tibet has about 150,000 monks and nuns, the highest concentration of full-time “clergy” in the Buddhist world. Western scholars of Tibetan literature and art forms have attested that it is flourishing as never before.” (44)

Anti-Chinese claims such as those made above are given much airplay in the West. Why this interest in unabashed support for oppressed Tibetans when the rest of the oppressed Third World gets such short shrift?

Free Tibet for Imperialism

Ever since the overthrow of feudalism in Tibet, agencies of Amerikan imperialism have taken a keen interest in the region. The Dalai Lama’s fake “government” in exile (never recognised by any nation, including amerika, as such) was funded in its activities by the CIA. Parenti writes:

“Throughout the 1960s, the Tibetan exile community was secretly pocketing $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to documents released by the State Department in 1998. Once this fact was publicized, the Dalai Lama’s organization itself issued a statement admitting that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama’s annual payment from the CIA was $186,000. Indian intelligence also financed both him and other Tibetan exiles. He has refused to say whether he or his brothers worked for the CIA. The agency has also declined to comment.” (45)

Generous donations made by the covert military wing of U.S. imperialism were repaid by the Dalai Lama by his embracing such luminaries of enlightened pacifism as Amerikan “republican” senator Jesse Helms, neo-liberal butcher and friend of Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, Sr. General Augusto Pinochet, whose exile to Spain on human rights abuse charges the venerable monk protested. Ignoring 100 million rotting corpses of starved and disease-ridden humans per decade, the Dalai Lama also made this startling statement of falsehood:

“Those countries which pursue Capitalist policies within a democratic framework are much freer than those which pursue the Communist ideal.” (46)

Here are some highlights of the recent Amerikan role in shaping Free Tibet’s history according to intelligence and security consultant Richard M. Bennett:

“The CIA conducted a large scale covert action campaign against the communist Chinese in Tibet starting in 1956. This led to a disastrous bloody uprising in 1959, leaving tens of thousands of Tibetans dead, while the Dalai Lama and about 100,000 followers were forced to flee across the treacherous Himalayan passes to India and Nepal.”

“The CIA established a secret military training camp for the Dalai Lama’s resistance fighters at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado, in the US.”

“The CIA Tibetan Task Force created by Roger E McCarthy, alongside the Tibetan guerrilla army, continued the operation codenamed “ST CIRCUS” to harass the Chinese occupation forces for another 15 years until 1974, when officially sanctioned involvement ceased.”

“By the mid-1960s, the CIA had switched its strategy from parachuting guerrilla fighters and intelligence agents into Tibet to establishing the Chusi Gangdruk, a guerrilla army of some 2,000 ethnic Khamba fighters at bases such as Mustang in Nepal.”

“After the Indo-China War of 1962, the CIA developed a close relationship with the Indian intelligence services in both training and supplying agents in Tibet.”

“Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison in their [reactionary, pro-CIA- author] book The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet disclose that the CIA and the Indian intelligence services cooperated in the training and equipping of Tibetan agents and special forces troops and in forming joint aerial and intelligence units such as the Aviation Research Center and Special Center. This collaboration continued well into the 1970s and some of the programs that it sponsored, especially the special forces unit of Tibetan refugees which would become an important part of the Indian Special Frontier Force, continue into the present.”

“The former CIA Tibetan Task Force chief from 1958 to 1965, John Kenneth Knaus, has been quoted as saying, “This was not some CIA black-bag operation.” He added, ‘The initiative was coming from … the entire US government.’”

“Despite the lack of official support it is still widely rumored that the CIA were involved, if only by proxy, in another failed revolt in October 1987, the unrest that followed and the consequent Chinese repression continuing till May 1993.” (47)

The Dalai Lama’s “government-in-exile” was unceremoniously scrapped from the CIA payroll by the end of 1974 (48), as Amerikan imperialism recognised that it no longer needed a proxy army of counter-revolutionaries to try and secure its economic interests in China: the revisionist Chinese government would do just fine! But in recent years, the U.S., via the “National Endowment for Democracy” has donated $2 million to the Dalai Lama’s exile community in India. The Dalai Lama has also received massive funds from billionaire speculator Gerge Soros’ “Open Society Institute”. (49) Decisive as the profits held and managed by the Chinese government are to the repayment in Amerikan dollars of U.S. investments, imperialism does not wish to rock its Chinese superexploitation gravy train too much. At the same time, imperialism wants to prevent any measure of national autonomy for China and any dictation by the Chinese national bourgeoisie of where and where profits are not invested. Imperialism uses the issue of Tibet to undermine the internal cohesion and international reputation of the Chinese state. At present, the racist and militarist settler state of Israel is very concerned with the oppressed of Tibet. Undoubtedly, recent Amerikan and Israeli expression of Tibetan nationalism are related to China’s progressive unwillingness to agree to impose sanctions on anti-imperialist Iran, and its ties to other independent-minded national bourgeois governments of the Third World (Venezuela, for example) (50) make it all the more difficult for imperialism to threaten war on the Iranian people. In addition, it is worth noting that Tibet has the world’s largest reserves of uranium, and as well as plentiful copper, gold, oil and gas. (51)

Clearly, then, imperialism is deeply involved in the Free Tibet movement. The leadership of the movement is composed mainly of exiles under the control of the Dalai Lama and his imperialist retinue and bourgeois nationalists within the Tibetan capital. These forces aim to use the discontent of the urban and rural poor, dispossessed under China’s social-fascist government, to hammer an ethnic wedge between the Tibetan and Chinese people.

The Maoist-Third Worldist Approach to Tibetan Independence

As Maoist-Third Worldists, we support the right of all nations to self-determination. We recognise that the nationalism of oppressed nations is applied internationalism. The principal contradiction in the world today is between imperialism and the oppressed nations. Imperialism, the process of exporting capital for productive investment in countries whose labor is militarily dominated and can thus produce superprofits (profits over and above those pertaining in the capital-exporting country) for the foreign investor, is able to sustain itself only by its exploitation and monopoly of the labour, natural resources and markets of the Third World. Anti-imperialism, whether that of the national bourgeoisie chafing against its more productive and more powerful imperialist competitor or anti-imperialism of the Third World masses struggling to break the grip of capital over their body and mind, is the sine qua non of socialist revolution and must be prioritised as such by every real communist. Maoist-Third Worldists understand that the vacillating national bourgeoisie alone is not able to effect a truly successful anti-imperialist resistance in the long term and that the anti-imperialist struggle of the working class is most effective when harnessing through a United Front the political power and resources of all popular classes.

The people of Tibet have legitimate and far-reaching grievances with the capitalist government of China. Maoist-Third Worldists support the demand for Tibetan independence insofar as it is a demand raised by the organisation and self-activity of the Tibetan masses themselves. Maoist-Third Worldists do not support the ethno-nationalism of the bourgeoisie in Tibet and do not see the solution to Tibetan poverty and oppression in attacking Chinese people and Chinese ideologies. We oppose Han Chinese cultural and political chauvinism amongst bourgeois supporters of the neo-colonial Chinese State (52) which ignores and belittles Tibet’s own culture and problems of development. We recognise the unique cultural foundations of Tibetan society, but we do not see these in isolation from historical Chinese influence in China.

As in Kosovo, imperialism is taking advantage of the grievances suffered by a distinct national minority under a fake socialist regime and using the aspirations for independence felt by the oppressed as a means of conquering the area as a beachhead to wage war against an oppressed nation. Maoist-Third Worldists recognise that China, including Tibet, is an oppressed nation. China has more foreign capital invested in it for the purposes of superexploitation than China itself exports. As such, the principal enemy of the Chinese and Tibetan people is not each other’s nation, but imperialism. The liberation of Tibet from the depredations imposed by capitalism has not and cannot take place outside the struggle of the Chinese working class as a whole against imperialism and its local capitalist agents. The bourgeois elements behind the Free Tibet movement can only lead Tibet down the path of fratricidal war with China. As with the imperialist-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (which has allowed imperialism to turn Kosovo into a NATO colony from which to threaten Russia and a major distribution point in the international heroin trade), the Free Tibet movement will ensure that Tibet becomes a giant military base from which imperialism can further harass the oppressed people of China.

China’s territorial integrity should be evaluated against the principal contradiction, the contradiction between imperialism and oppressed nations. Both China and Tibet are oppressed nations. Undermining Chinese territorial integrity in Tibet, at present, is to collude with Amerikan imperialists. It is to collude with the CIA. We would support demands for independence so long as such demands objectively advanced the resolution of the principal contradiction in our favor. We only support such a demand when it benefits the struggle of oppressed nations as a whole. Phony Western liberals professing their concern for Tibetan independence are seasoned supporters and beneficiaries of brutal and decadent imperialism. The Tibetan people should not allow themselves to be pawns of the imperialists. The Chinese are better friends to the Tibetans than Westerners.

Notes.

(1) Michael Parenti, ‘Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.

(2)The “R”CP=U.S.a’s Mike Ely writes: “Between the 1400s and the 1600s, a bloody consolidation of power took place, the abbots of the largest monasteries seized overall power. Because these abbots practiced anti-woman celibacy, their new political system could not operate by hereditary father-to-son succession. So the lamas created a new doctrine for their religion: They announced that they could detect newborn children who were reincarnations of dead ruling lamas. Hundreds of top lamas were declared “Living Buddhas” (Bodhisattvas) who had supposedly ruled others for centuries, switching to new bodies occasionally as old host bodies wore out.” (Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet, Part 1, When the Dalai Lamas Ruled: Hell on Earth’, Revolutionary Worker, no. 944, February 15, 1998). Indeed, the Tibetan Buddhist ruling class surmised that being born female was a proof of past sins, and females were not allowed to touch Lama’s belongings, nor even set foot in a monastery. These beliefs reflected the patriarchal foundations of feudal Tibetan and Chinese society. Also found here.

(3) Erik D. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today (Alaya Press, 2005), p. 50.

(4) Stephen Bachelor, ‘Letting Daylight into Magic: The Life and Times of Dorje Shugden,’ Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, no. 7, Spring 1998.

(5) Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring, p. 345, quoted in Howard Selsam and Harry Martel (eds.), Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin (New York, International Publishers, 1963), p. 230.

(6) Michael Parenti, ‘Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.

(7) Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), p. 64.

(8) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet, Part 1, When the Dalai Lamas Ruled: Hell on Earth’, Revolutionary Worker, no. 944, February 15, 1998). Also found here.

(9) Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking, New World Press, 1959), pp. 91-96. Stockwell writes: “The lords used such inhuman tortures as gouging out eyes, cutting off feet or hands, pushing the condemned person over a cliff, drowning and beheading.Numerous rebellions occurred over the years against this harsh treatment, and in 1347 alone (the seventh year of Yuan Emperor Shundi’s reign), more than 200 serf rebellions occurred in Tibet.” (‘Tibet: Myth and Reality’ by Foster Stockwell, available at HYPERLINK http://inpursuitofhappiness.wordpress.com/2008/03/22/tibet-myth-reality/).

(10) Available at the anti-Communist site HYPERLINK http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tibet-faq/, citing Charles Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (Oxford, 1924) pp. 78-79.

(11) Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), p. 5 and passim.

(12) Michael Parenti, ‘Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html, citing Anna Louise Strong, Tibetan Interviews (Peking, New World Press, 1959), pp. 15, 19-21, 24.

(13) A. Tom Grunfeld, ‘Tibet: Myths and Realities’ in New China, Fall, 1975.

(14) The reactionary notion of karma, as espoused in feudal India and similar to the later prot£stant notion of predestination, was used by the high priests of serfdom, the Tibetan Lamas, to explain and justify the miserable lot of the Tibetan majority. Wickedness in past lives or “impiety” in the present was said to be the reason for the maladies associated with poverty and oppression. As in the katholic £urope of the middle ages, suffering was said to be holy and believers were encouraged to accept their lot in the mistaken belief that some thing better awaited them in the future.

(15) “Panchen” means “Great Scholar” in Sanskrit and “treasure” in Manchu. The Panchen Lama was elevated in status during the Qing dynasty so as to counter-balance the power of the Dalai Lama. Historically, the Panchen Lama has been more closely allied to the Chinese government than the Dalai Lama.

(16) Indeed, Mao himself had urged that the transformation of the social system in formerly oppressed (by landlordism and imperialism) Tibet should be relatively gradual and peaceful. Mao wrote in an inner Communist Party directive in 1952 that:

We must do our best and take proper steps to win over the Dalai and the majority of his top echelon and to isolate the handful of bad elements to achieve a gradual, bloodless transformation of the Tibetan economic and political system over a number of years, [and pursue a policy] of uniting with the many and isolating the few.

Even in 1957, in his seminal On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Amongst the People, Mao urged caution against Han Chinese chauvinism and faith in Tibetan democracy, even whilst the intransigent and counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeois and landlord forces of the Dalai Lama were all-too evident. Mao wrote:

Democratic reforms have not yet been carried out in Tibet because conditions are not ripe. According to the 17-article agreement reached between the central people’s government and the local government of Tibet, the reform of the social system must be carried out, but the timing can only be decided when the great majority of the people of Tibet and the local leading public figures consider it opportune and one should not be impatient.

The progressiveness of Maoist New Democracy was further expressed in the fact that the first schools to teach the Tibetan language to the Tibetan people, and publish works written in such, appeared under Communist rule. French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir visited China and published some information on Tibet in 1958, confirming that “Buddhism is respected out of consideration for Tibet… Elementary schools have been set up in Tibet, a people’s bank which grants interest-free loans to farmers, loans at interest to merchants and artisans; the state purchasing agency buys Tibetan wool.” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Long March (New York, The World Publishing Company, 1958) p. 367. De Beauvoir also reported that many Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques were being reconstructed by the Communists.

(17) Edgar Snow, Red China Today (London, Penguin Books, 1970), p. 563-4.

(18) Edgar Snow, Red China Today (London, Penguin Books, 1970), p. 562.

(19) Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London, Jonathan Cape, 1970), available at HYPERLINK http://www.centurychina.com/plaboard/uploads/1962war.htm.

(20) China forced India out of the areas of China it occupied, but then gave China back 68% of the 47,000 square miles of disputed border land, keeping the militarily vital road in miles of Aksai Chin. In India’s China War, (available at HYPERLINK “http://www.centurychina.com/plaboard/uploa…ads/1962war.htm” http://www.centurychina.com/plaboard/uploa…ads/1962war.htm) British journalist Neville Maxwell reports: “[Before the war, the Chinese] offered cigarettes to the tobacco-less Indians and even handled over parachuted Indian military supplies that landed on their side”.

“[During the war, the Chinese] buried the Indian dead with full military honors, in plain view of the retreating Indian comrades withdrawing south of the river”.

“[After the ceasefire] the withdrawal was slow as the Chinese had a lot of tidying up to do, and went about the task with meticulous and even fussy care. They made it a matter of principle or pride to hand back the equipment left by the retreating Indians in as good condition as possible… The weapons were collected, stacked, piled or parked; cleaned, polished, and carefully inventoried – small arms, mortars, artillery, trucks, shells and ammunition, clothing, and all the other impedimenta of a defeated army. Among the return equipment were a few American automatic rifles as the first installment of American military assistance captured at Se La, and a Russian helicopter in serviceable condition.”

“China did not publicize this extraordinary transaction, and said it was simply a gesture ‘to further demonstrate sincerity for a peaceful settlement.’ But although Indians cooperated by formally receiving the returned equipment, they bitterly resented what they perceived as added humiliation and denounced the Chinese gesture as a propaganda maneuver.”

See also James Barnard Calvin, The China-India Border War available at HYPERLINK http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib…rt/1984/CJB.htm. Some mainstream Indian observers are now prepared to accept the truth that Nehru’s government was to blame for the outbreak of the war and its bad handling by India. See Sultan Shahin, ‘Laying the ghost of the India-China war’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/DK01Df04.html and Claude Arpi, ‘Remembering a War’ available at HYPERLINK http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/oct/23chin.htm.

(21) Helen Foster Snow, Inside Red China (1939) (New York, De Capo Paperback reprint, 1979), p. 159.

(22) Kuang-ming Jihpao, 3 March 1962, cited in Edgar Snow, Red China Today (London, Penguin Books, 1970), p. 563-4.

(23) Michael Parenti, ‘Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html, citing Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), pp. 36-38, 41, 57-58 and London Times, 4 July 1966.

(24) To clarify, the term “bourgeois” refers to that group of people or ideological line which depend for their/its sustenance upon profits created by the exploited proletariat. To describe a person or ideology as bourgeois is to define them/it as self-interestedly advocating the continued oppression and exploitation of the working class.

(25) Mao Tse-Tung, quoted in Martin Nicolaus, The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Chicago, Liberator Press, 1975), p. 40.

(26) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet, Part 3: Red Guards and People’s Communes’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 944, February 15, 1998. Also found here.

(27) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet, Part 3: Red Guards and People’s Communes’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 944, February 15, 1998. It is a recurrent bourgeois myth that the GPCR fatally disrupted Chinese productivity (as though productivity, and not provision for human need, were the main end of economics). But Time magazine reported in September 20, 1976 that: “[I]ndustrial production increased from $11.2 billion in 1950 to $185 billion last year [1975]; the problem of adequately feeding the country’s enormous population was solved.” Clearly the GPCR was not the economic disaster anti-communist reactionaries purport it to be. Also found here.

(28) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet: Red Guards and People’s Communes’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 944, February 15, 1998. Also found here.

(29) See Henry Park, The Political Economy of Counterrevolution in China: 1976-88, available at HYPERLINK www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/countries/china/pecc88/index.html and Michel Chossudovsky, Towards Capitalist Restoration?: Chinese Socialism After Mao (London, Macmillan, 1986).

(30) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet: Oppression Returns- After the Coup in China’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 764, July 10, 1994. Also found here.

(31) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet: Oppression Returns- After the Coup in China’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 764, July 10, 1994. Also found here.

(32) Some 40 million Chinese peasants had their land confiscated then, with a further two million every year after that. See Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao, Cynthia M. Beall, Phuntsog Tsering, ‘Development and Change in Rural Tibet, Problems and Adaptations’ in Asian Survey, volume XLIII, no. 5, September/October, 2003.

(33) A. Tom Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet (New York, Zed Books, 1987), chapter 14, available at HYPERLINK http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/booksAndPapers/nomads/chapter14.htm.

(34) Andy Newman, ‘China and the Riddle of Tibet’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=1934

(35) Robert Weil, ‘Sewing Up The Chinese Market: The Effect of WTO Entry on the Chinese Rural Sector’ in Multinational Monitor, volume 21, Number 5, May 2000.

(36) Mobo Gao, ‘A boom financed by taxes on the poor’ in New Statesman, January 1, 2005, available at

HYPERLINK http://www.newstatesman.com/200501010011.

(37) Mobo Gao, ‘A boom financed by taxes on the poor’ in New Statesman, January 1, 2005, available at

HYPERLINK http://www.newstatesman.com/200501010011.

(38) Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao, Cynthia M. Beall, Phuntsog Tsering, ‘Development and Change in Rural Tibet, Problems and Adaptations’ in Asian Survey, volume XLIII, no. 5, September/October, 2003, p. 765.

(39) Revisionism in the Marxist sense refers to those Marxists who pretend to uphold the revolutionary class struggle which is the essence of Marxism, but actually reject the core Marxist principles of method and practice.

(40) Maoist-Third –Worldists are not pacifists, even though we understand that violence is an evil and hope to see it disappear as humanity progresses towards communism. We recognise that “power stems from the barrel of a gun” and that “without a people’s army, the people have nothing.” But it is important to be as clear as possible where violence is emanating from and where the overwhelming majority of violence in the world emanates from, namely, imperialist militarism.

(41) Barry Sautmann, ‘Protests in Tibet and Separatism: the Olympics and Beyond’ available at HYPERLINK http://www.chinastudygroup.net/index.php?action=front2&type=view&id=274. See also ‘Riot in Tibet: True face of western media, available at HYPERLINK http://youtube.com/watch?v=uSQnK5FcKas&feature=related, purportedly showing how Western coverage of the recent protests in Tibet cynically proliferated images of Nepalese police cracking down on protests to pass them off as those of Chinese police attacking Tibetan rioters.

(42) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet: Oppression Returns- After the Coup in China’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 764, July 10, 1994. Also found here.

(43) Mike Ely, ‘The True Story of Maoist Revolution in Tibet: Oppression Returns- After the Coup in China’ in Revolutionary Worker, no. 764, July 10, 1994. Also found here.

(44) Barry Sautmann, ‘Protests in Tibet and Separatism: the Olympics and Beyond’ available at HYPERLINK http://www.chinastudygroup.net/index.php?action=front2&type=view&id=274. See also ‘Why Tibet is boiling over’ by Geoffrey York in Globe and Mail, March 21, 2008 for an understanding of some of the causes of the recent protests.

(45) Michael Parenti, ‘Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth’, available at HYPERLINK http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html, citing Jim Mann, ‘CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ’60s, Files Show’ in Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1998 and New York Times, 1 October, 1998.]

(46) Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile (New York, Harper-Perennial, 1991), p. 268.

(47) Richard M Bennett, ‘Tibet, the ‘great game’ and the CIA’, Global Research, March 25, 2008, available at HYPERLINK http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8442.

(48) Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, ‘The Tibet Card’, Global Research, March 27, 2008 available at HYPERLINK http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8462. Bennett notes: “Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer has described the outrage many field agents felt when Washington finally pulled the plug, adding that a number even ‘[turned] for solace to the Tibetan prayers which they had learned during their years with the Dalai Lama’.”, a touching display of reverence from trained killers for imperialism.

(49) Heather Cottin, ‘George Soros, Imperial Wizard’ in Covert Action Quarterly, no. 74, Fall, 2002.

(50) Associated Pr£ss reports that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela considers the recent Tibetan protests as at least partly CIA-orchestrated. Chavez said: “The (U.S.) imperialists want to divide China. And they’re causing problems there in Tibet… They’re trying to sabotage the Olympics in Beijing, and behind that is the hand of imperialism… We ask the world to support China to neutralize this plan, which aims to sabotage the Olympics,” available at HYPERLINK http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/25/sports/LA-SPT-OLY-Beijing-Tibet-Chavez.php.

(51) Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, ‘The Tibet Card’, Global Research, March 27, 2008 available at HYPERLINK http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8462.

(52) Neo-colonialism is a term used to signify the domination of Third World countries by foreign monopoly capital without the traditional colonial settler and police state used to maintain the investments of such. Neo-colonialism operates by imperialism’s empowering a comprador bourgeois class who manage and siphon off monetary tributes to the foreign power dominating the life of their nation.

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