Kundun (1997)

Why in the film SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET (1997), Tibet has been shown an Independent Country?

The movie clearly shows that Chinese soldiers invaded Lhasa and took over Tibet. Dalai Lama had to flee to save his life.

Of course we can’t draw any conclusions from a Hollywood film or two, but if we look deeper into the issue we can see they are both based on books by in the first case a first-hand witness to life in pre-Communist Tibet, and in the second on a biography of the Dalai Lama based on extensive research and numerous interviews with Tibetans who lived in Tibet before the Chinese takeover.

Whatever value we give to these films and books in particular, I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone making any kind of research into this question that, whatever the legal or moral status of Tibet vis-à-vis China, the Tibetan government definitely ruled as if it was a free and independent government between 1913 and 1951. There were virtually no Chinese even present in Tibet, and they had no influence whatsoever over daily business in Tibet, including over the Tibetan government or the Dalai Lama.

The problem is that the Chinese still sensed they had the legal or moral right to rule Tibet, simply because the Qing Dynasty (although Manchu, not Chinese) had been the theoretical rulers of Tibet (and sometimes even had some partial influence on the Tibetan governance).

In the greater picture, this is nothing new. Tibet was subordinate to the Mongols, which means they became subordinate to the Yuan Dynasty after the Mongols conquered all China, and after the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, the Chinese in the same way kept a claim to Tibet during the Ming Dynasty. No one in Tibet saw any trace of this claim, since the Chinese governor over Tibet wasn’t even able to get into Tibet but had to reside in a nearby Chinese province, but theoretically China still saw itself as the rulers of Tibet (which doesn’t mean they saw Tibet as a part of China itself).

All in all, these facts together explain why China claims Tibet has been a part of China since at least the Yuan Dynasty (because they have always had representative theoretically responsible for governing Tibet, even if he most of the time didn’t have anything to do with the Tibetans themselves), at the same time as the Tibetans say they have been free (because they never had anyone interfere in their business or governance, except partially during the Yuan and Qing Dynasties). On the other hand, ordinary Tibetans outside the bigger cities hardly saw anything of the Tibetan government either, since Tibet was an extremely decentralized, vast and sparsely populated country, where people mainly minded their own business without worrying if the people currently having the power in Lhasa were Tibetans, Mongols, Manchus or whatever.

The first time someone actually tried to gain more influence over the Tibetan population at large was actually the Manchus just one or two years before the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, when they among other things tried to enforce a centralized tax system where the Tibetans for the first time in history had to pay taxes to Beijing or any other outside ruler.

Given the extreme decentralization, local independence and freedom they lived in since ancient times, probably the shock when the Chinese took over was not so much because they were Chinese, and hence foreigners, but simply because the rule was so much more direct, interfering in every level of life, from how they were allowed to talk, behave and practice their religion to how they should organize their lives, economy, families and work. Used to an almost total freedom from interference from the outside, suddenly every aspect of their daily lives were meddled with. And of course, the worst of all was when they were forced to give up the religious life they found meaningful and denounce the religious leaders they saw as wisdom and compassion personified.

Apart from that, the new thing the last century is not the Chinese imperial claims on Tibet, but the new redefinition of the Tibetans (and the other minorities) as actually part of China proper and as actually Chinese people, since beginningless time. That’s also one of the reasons the Chinese started their project of assimilating (“civilizing”) the Tibetans into the Chinese people. This project is still going on – as late as yesterday I read just during the last few years the Chinese have already forced 90% of the Tibetan nomads in Qinghai and Gansu to give up their traditional lifestyle and move to new, concrete houses, get a decent Chinese job and start to eat decent Chinese rice. The last 10% will be relocated from their traditional grasslands within a year: http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-28-voa2.cfm

Kundun 1997 Trailer

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