Chinese Invasion

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party under General Mao Tse-tung defeated Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang Nationalists, who fled to Taiwan. Mao declared that Tibet was and always had been a vital part of China, and sent 80,000 troops of the Peoples Liberation Army into Tibet to “re-unite it with the motherland? On November 7th, 1950, Tibet made an unsuccessful appeal to the United Nations. Then, out of desperation, the fifteen year old Dalai Lama was enthroned and given full temporal power on November 17th.

However, it was simply too late. The young Dalai Lama went into exile and on October 26, 1951, the Peoples Liberation Army reached Lhasa. A committee of Tibetans was sent to Beijing where they signed, without authority from the Dalai Lama, the Seventeen Point Agreement which put Tibet under the administration of the Chinese and granted certain freedoms to the Tibetans (which were soon broken by the Chinese). According to international law, this treaty is void because it was signed under duress.

Given the non-violent nature of Tibetans and their past isolation from world politics, Tibet’s small and poorly organized army was no match for the invading red army. This, together with the lack of international aid from a world afraid to oppose China (and at the time concerned with the Korean War) made the young Dalai Lama realize that attempting to compromise with the Chinese was the best option. So he returned to Lhasa and accepted a position in the new government of the “Tibetan Autonomous Region?

For 8 years the people of Tibet led an uneasy co-existence with their new foreign masters. The Dalai Lama even visited Beijing and met with Mao, who told him that “religion is poison? Guerilla resistance to the Chinese in Kham (eastern Tibet) became increasingly violent, and tensions in Lhasa rose until finally, on March 10th, 1959, a massive revolt broke out in the capital city. The Chinese had invited the Dalai Lama to a “theatrical performance?at their military camp, and asked him to come without bodyguards. A crowd of 30,000 Tibetans gathered around the Norbulingka (summer palace of the Dalai Lama) in order to protect their leader and prevent him from leaving the compound. The mob rioted and took control of the city for several days.

On March 17th, the Dalai Lama formally repudiated the “Seventeen Point Agreement?and fled Tibet to India, where he set up the Tibetan Government in Exile at Dharamsala, where he still lives today. Just after he left, the Norbulingka was shelled and the revolt was crushed with astonishing brutality. An estimated 80,000 Tibetans were killed in the immediate aftermath, and over the next twenty years over 1.2 million died as a direct result of Chinese occupation. Over 100,000 have followed His Holiness into exile, with large communities settling in India, Nepal, Switzerland, the United States and Canada.

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