About Tibet, let’s calm down and look at the evidence!

This is a section of a long post about Tibet-China issue , and I recommend anyone who are interested in that topic to read this post and think about what happened recently.

Let us look at the evidence. If Tibetans were so fiercely suppressed, and if Chinese leaders in Beijing were really out to Sinocize Tibet by increasing the ethnic ratio of Han to Tibetan, then why are all Tibetan families permitted to have up to three children, and are only fined small amounts of money if they exceed this number? Tibetan families in Tibet average 3.8 children, larger than Tibetan families in India. In fact, the population of Tibet in 1959 was only about 1.19 million. Today however, the population of Greater Tibet is 7.3 million, of which, according to the 2000 census, 6 million are ethnic Tibetans. If we consider the Tibet Autonomous Region only, then according to the census conducted in 2000, as referred to in Wikipedia, “there were 2,616,300 people in Tibet, with Tibetans totalling 2,411,100 or 92.2% of the current regional population. The census also revealed that the Tibetan's average lifespan has increased to 68 due to the improving standard of living and access to medical services.” In 1950 the average lifespan was only 35, and “infant mortality has dropped from 43% in 1950 to 0.661% in 2000.”

As Barry Sautman, who is Associate Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology points out in his study on “Tibet and the (Mis-)Representation of Cultural Genocide”, “the state sponsored transfer [of Han Chinese] to Tibet is on a small scale. From 1994 to 2001 the PRC organized only a few thousand people to go to Tibet as cadres. Most serve only 3 years and then return to China. Those who move on their own to the Tibet Autonomous Region usually return to China in a few years. They come for a while, find the cities of Tibet too expensive, and then return to China. Some of the 72,000 Chinese who maintain their “hukou” [household registration] in Tibet don't really live there. Pensions are higher if your household is registered in Tibet.”

These facts are supported by articles in the “Columbia Journal of Asian Law” and by an Australian Chinese demographer in “Asian Ethnicity in 2000”, and show that the claims of ethnic swamping in Tibet are misleading. "What I think these articles show,” says Barry Sautman, “is that there is no evidence of significant population losses over the whole period from the 1950s to the present. There are some losses during he Great Leap Forward but these were less in Tibetan areas than in other parts of China. Where these were serious were in Sichuan and Qinghai, but even there not as serious in the Han areas of China. There are no bases at all for the figures used regularly by the exile groups. They use the figure of 1.2 million Tibetans dying from the 1950s to the 1970s, but no source for this is given. As a lawyer I give no credence to statistics for which there is no data, no visible basis."

In fact, as Michael Parenti has pointed out in his article on “Friendly Feudalism: the Tibet Myth”, “both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin Choegyal, claimed that ‘more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.’ But the official 1953 census - six years before the Chinese crackdown -recorded the entire population residing in Tibet at 1,274,000.33 Other census counts put the ethnic Tibetan population within the country at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then whole cities and huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of Tibet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves - of which we have not seen evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese military force in Tibet was not big enough to round up, hunt down, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.”

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M.A.Jones