Full Text: Tibet's development a historical necessity

(Xinhua) Updated: 2015-04-15 11:13

I. The End of the Old System Was a Historical Inevitability

In the 1950s, when slavery and serfdom had long since been abandoned by modern civilization, Tibet still remained a society of theocratic feudal serfdom. This system trampled on human dignity, infringed upon human rights, and impeded development in Tibet, all of which went completely against the progressive trend in China and the rest of the world.

- Political and religious powers combined, with absolute supremacy held by religious power - a typical manifestation of theocracy

In old Tibet, religious power enjoyed absolute supremacy. Religious power prevailed over political power while the latter protected the former. The two combined to defend the interests of the three major stakeholders: local officials, aristocrats and higher-ranking lamas in the monasteries. Before Democratic Reform in 1959, there were 2,676 monasteries and almost 115,000 Buddhist monks and their acolytes in Tibet. Active monks accounted for one quarter of the local male population, a total that far exceeded the proportion of clergy in Medieval Europe, and was highly unusual throughout the world.

In this theocratic society religion had been distorted by feudal serfdom, and monasteries were no longer places of purity to study Buddhism and worship the Buddha, but fortresses from which the local rulers organized religious activities, exercised administration and exploitation, built up their armed forces, and passed judicial adjudication. Some monasteries even had private jails, with instruments of torture used for eye gouging and hamstringing, in addition to handcuffs, chains and clubs. A letter from the Tibetan local government department to the head of a Rabden (a theocratic and administrative organization at a lower level) in the early 1950s contains instructions in relation to the celebration of the 14th Dalai Lama's birthday, which said that all the staff of Lower Tantric College would chant the sutra on the occasion, and "during the service, food will be offered to the hungry ghosts, for which a corpus of fresh intestines, two skulls, some mixed blood and a whole human skin are urgently needed. Please have these delivered without delay." Among the three major stakeholders, the upper-ranking lamas were the biggest money-lenders, controlling 80 percent of all loans.

Since a large proportion of the population were not engaged in economic activity and reproduction, but were used as tools of oppression by the religious power, there was an acute shortage of social resources, and demographic growth had remained stagnant for a long period of time. According to "Tibet" from Annals of Military Events in Qing Dynasty written by Wei Yuan (1794-1851) in the mid-19th century, the Department of Minorities Affairs in 1737 (the second year of Qing Emperor Qianlong's reign) produced a report on the areas under the jurisdiction of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni, which found that there were more than 316,200 lamas in Tibet, from a regional population (excluding present-day Qamdo) of only 1.09 million. By the early 1950s, the local population still stood around 1 million, having seen hardly any increase in 200 years.

Using religion to maintain a tight control over society was a prominent feature of theocracy. Li Youyi, an official stationed in Lhasa by the Commission for Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs of the Nationalist Government, and a Tibetologist who worked in Tibet in the 1940s, lamented the fact in his essay "Tibet, the mysterious and the un-mysterious": "Why didn't the serfs rise up and rebel against such cruel oppression and exploitation in Tibet? I asked them this question, and was shocked by their answer. They said, 'This is the result of karma.' They believed they had done evil in a previous life, and had to suffer in this life in order to wash away their previous sins and reincarnate into a better next life. This was what the lamas preached to them, and what they firmly believed." In the words of Li Youyi, it was such thought control that made the serfs "willing to toil all their life to accumulate merits for the future, and when the aristocrats whipped them, they thought it was helping them wash away their sins."

Charles Bell, a Briton who lived in Tibet, wrote in his book Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth, "Does it not matter to you whether you are reborn as a human being or as a pig? The Dalai Lama can help to ensure that you will be reborn as a human being in a high position, or, better still, as a monk or nun in a country where Buddhism flourishes." He firmly believed that the lamas had used spiritual terrorism to maintain their influence and to hold the power in their hands.

- Rigid hierarchy and trampling on human rights - the last fortress of feudal serfdom in the East

Feudal serfdom dominated Tibet until 1959. The French traveler Alexandra David-Neel visited Tibet and its surrounding areas five times between 1916 and 1924. In 1953, she published Le vieux Tibet face a la Chine nouvelle, in which she described Tibet's serfdom as follows: In Tibet, all the peasants spent their whole lives as debt-laden serfs, and hardly any one of them could be found to have paid off their debts... To survive, the serfs had to borrow money, grain and cattle, and pay high rates of interest. But their harvests were never enough to cover their swelling interest... They had no other option but to borrow again, borrow grains and seeds... So on and so forth, year in and year out, the cycle continued on and on. They would be burdened with debts until the day they died, debts which would be passed on to their sons. From the day they started to toil in the fields, the poor boys would be oppressed by these ancestral debts, of whose origins he knew nothing... The poor could do nothing but toil indefinitely on the barren land, deprived of all freedom as human beings, and becoming poorer with every year that passed.

Under the feudal serfdom, there was a rigid hierarchy. The 13-Article Code and the 16-Article Code, which had been practiced for centuries in Tibet, divided people into three classes and nine ranks, enshrining the rigid hierarchy in law. According to these documents, there were three classes by blood and position, each class was further divided into three ranks... As people were divided into different classes and ranks, the value of a life correspondingly differed... The bodies of people of the highest rank of the upper class were literally worth their weight in gold, while the lives of people of the lowest rank of the lower class were only worth a straw rope.

This backward social structure led to a chasm of wealth in old Tibet. By the late 1950s, the three major stakeholders and their agents, who made up less than 5 percent of the population, owned almost all of the land, pastures, forests, mountains, rivers and flood plains, and most of the livestock. Before Democratic Reform in 1959, there were 197 hereditary aristocratic families, including 25 major ones, the top seven or eight of whom each possessed dozens of manors and over 1,000 hectares of land. The family of the 14th Dalai Lama owned 27 manors, 30 pastures, and over 6,000 serfs. The Dalai Lama alone had 160,000 taels (one tael = 30 grams) of gold, 95 million taels of silver, over 20,000 pieces of jewelry and jade ware, and more than 10,000 pieces of silk clothing and rare furs. Meanwhile the serfs and slaves, who accounted for 95 percent of the population, had nothing and lived a miserable life with no human rights at all. As a Tibetan proverb goes, "Life given by parents, body controlled by officials. Though they have life and body, they are not masters of their own."