History of the CHINESE INVASION of Tibet

Even today there are great conflicts for independence of regions, which happen for a huge number of causes that are difficult to see from an external position, and especially if we see it with an eye away from the situation. To comment on one of these cases, in this lesson from a PROFESSOR we are going to offer you a summary of the history of the Chinese invasion of Tibet.

To talk about the Chinese invasion of Tibet we must go back decades before, to the time when the Tibet became independent, separating from China for several years.

TO early 19th century the so-called Republic of China, so a series of Chinese troops that were occupying Tibet had to return to China. This was the moment when the Dalai Lama He took the opportunity to re-control Tibet and signed a treaty with Mongolia in which both states declared their independence from Chinese control.

This situation continued for some years, until Tibet, China and the United Kingdom signed a treaty at the Simla Convention. Different solutions were discussed at the convention, one of them being the one that spoke of

separate Tibet in two, being one part for China and the other for the Dalai Lama, although this measure did not like anyone.

Behind the back of China, UK and Tibet reached an agreementThe latter becoming an autonomous state and the former obtaining a small portion of land in the area. China did not agree, since it considered that Tibet could not sign these treaties as it was not independent from them.

The arrival of internal problems in China and the beginning of the First World Wargreatly cooled the situation, causing that for some years Tibet was independent and China and the Western powers did not intervene in their policies.

To continue with this summary of the history of the Chinese invasion of Tibet we have to talk about the invasion itself. And it is that, after passing all the internal and external problems, China launched a major attack on Tibet in 1950, easily defeating the Tibetan soldiers, who had no chance against the numerous Chinese armies.

The army in charge of attacking Tibet was the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which had been sent by the new Chinese leader, Mao, since an opposition leader named Kai-shek had been hiding in the area. Tibet's refusal to help Mao is what sparked the Chinese attack, which ended the Tibetan and Kai-shek troops.

The defeat made the Tibetans have to negotiate with the Chinese government, reaching an agreement called the Tibet Liberation Plan, according to which the Tibetan government accepted its position as Chinese territory, but China maintained the system politically and economically in the region, where the majority of the population worked on land that was owned by the The most.

Tibetan rebellions

The Plan did not work in the same way throughout the region, causing two great rebellions in the area, one of them being especially serious in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. The rebellion was quickly stopped by Chinese troops, who killed thousands of Tibetans and forced the Dalai Lama and the rest of his government to flee to India.

The rebellion had been supported by different western governmentsThe biggest example being the support of the CIA. For years the Tibetan exiles kept up their confrontations against the Chinese, but the less Western aid they received, the lesser they were able to face the Chinese armies.

During these years in which the Dalai Lama was fled the country, the Chinese government placed as head of the Tibetan state Panchen lama, as a way to manage the region without making a big political change. Even so, the Panchen Lama continued to seek the independence of Tibet, seeking the support of great Western powers to help him just as the United States had done a few years earlier.

A few years later, and after abolishing much of the Tibetan system, China named Tibet as a Tibet Autonomous Region, happening to have a similar status to the rest of the provinces that made up China.

To conclude this summary of the history of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, we must talk about everything that has happened between China and Tibet since the latter was named as an autonomous region becoming a kind of province of China.

The years after the appointment were a great repression of the Chinese people towards Tibet, changing a large part of their social and economic models, and even attacking their culture and religion. The Buddhist religion was one of the main characteristics of the Tibetan country, so the prohibition of religious freedom it was a hard blow for the Asian country.

With the arrival of a new government in China the situation underwent a great change in the region, restoring the Buddhist religion in TibetAlthough it was always maintained that Tibetans should continue to be considered as part of China and accept its rule. Even so, the political system in the region remained quite similar to how it had been in previous years.

Currently, and after some changes of government, the situation between China and Tibet remains the same, with tensions between both areas, but with a fairly limited independence by the Tibetan side.