Tibet emerged as a unified empire in the north-east of the Himalayas in the 7th century. In 1950 the People's Republic of China invaded Tibet, then negotiated the Seventeen Point Agreement with the newly crowned 14th Dalai Lama's government, affirming China's sovereignty, but granting the area autonomy. The Dalai Lama government fled to Dharamsala, India, during the 1959 Tibetan Rebellion, and established a rival government-in-exile. Afterwards, the Central People's Government in Beijing renounced the agreement and began implementation of the halted social and political reforms. During the Great Leap Forward between 200 thousand and 1 million Tibetans died, and approximately 6,000 monasteries were destroyed around the Cultural Revolution.
In 1980, General Secretary and reformist Hu Yaobang visited Tibet, and ushered in a period of social, political, and economic liberalization. At the end of the decade, however analogously to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, monks in the Drepung and Sera monasteries started protesting for independence, and so the government halted reforms and started an anti-separatist campaign. Human rights organisations have been critical of the Beijing and Lhasa governments' approach to human rights in the region when cracking down on separatist convulsions that have occurred around monasteries and cities, most recently in the 2008 Tibetan unrest.
Today, the PRC governs western and central Tibet as the Tibet Autonomous Region while eastern areas are mostly within Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. Once part of an independent Tibet, Amdo is now known to the Chinese as Qinghai; Kham has been divided into the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan.
In Chapter 11 Pistono (2011) gave firsthand accounts of China's human rights abuses in Tibet. A nun in Lhasa told the author,"When we were in solitary confinement, we were whipped with the policemen's leather belts. Before they dragged us into the cells, I watched my two friends shocked by electric batons in their vaginas." There was a man whose head jerked uncontrollably from beatings in Drapchi Prison for shouting "Long Live the Dalai Lama." Many other political prisoners were tied to trees overnight during winter, or were forced to stand in the searing sun and beaten if they moved(p. 181). Following weeks of intensive "Patriotic Education" sessions in Drepung Monastery, Lhasa, a monk committed suicide, and others were arrested after they refused to denounce the Dalai Lama (p. 189).
In the third week of March 2008, there was a full-scale uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet, which had never seen since the 1950s. It began on March 10, on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising preceding the Dalai Lama's fleeing into exile. Thousands of Tibetans --monks, nuns, nomads, poets, teachers, farmers, businessmen.... from Lhasa, Kandze, Xining, Chengdu, Kirti, Labrang, Machu, Nyarong, and elsewhere rose up to say that it is the Dalai Lama who represents their interests, not the Chinese government. The protests spread like wildfire all over the plateau. Most of the protests were peaceful, but some, notably those in Lhasa on March 14,turned violent. The Chinese authorities sealed off Tibet, kicking out foreign journalists and cutting off the Internet, and other telecommunication services. Despite the blackout, reports from thousands of Tibetans detained and cell phone images and videos of unarmed monks and farmers shot dead while they were peacefully demonstrating, and of imprisoned protesters being stopmed on and beaten with Chinese police's batons in Lhasa were quickly received by the world outside Tibet. The reports, images and videos only confirmed Chinese brutal force and intimidation against Tibetan peaceful protestors.
(pp. 209-211)
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet
Pistono, Matteo. In the Shadow of the Buddha (New York, NY: Dutton, Penguin Group, 2011).
