Government and Policy

Commentary: Facts speak louder than words

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2010-02-21 15:29

II. The Dalai Lama group's description of old Tibet totally ignores historical fact.

The Dalai Lama group's glorification of old Tibet's social conditions in their article flies in the face of truth for the following reasons:

-- Describing the severe punishment and harsh laws based on old Tibet's strict hierarchy as an "advanced" and "civilized" rule of law.

In order to glorify the old Tibet legal system, the Dalai Lama group claims in the article that the "legal system, and the rule-of-law (in the old Tibet), became more advanced over the centuries," and that the essence of old Tibet's laws were that "the rulers should act as parents to their subjects," which was reflected in the "Thirteen Guidelines of Procedure and Punishment, " and other codes of laws issued by the old Tibet's rulers. "On the whole the system worked equally well for rich and poor (in the old Tibet)," they said.

However, these codes of laws, which were practiced in old Tibet for centuries, divided people into different social ranks. According to the rank, the value of the lives of the higher ranked people, such as princes and living Buddhas, was equal to their body weight in gold.

For the lower ranked, such as women, butchers, hunters and craftsmen, the value of their lives was equal to a straw rope. Courts and prisons were set up by the local governments of old Tibet, as well as by big monasteries. Religious and secular landlords were entitled to set up their own private jails. Punishment was extremely savage and cruel at the time, and included the gouging out of eyes, the chopping off of hands or legs, the pulling out of tendons, skinning and drowning. US scholar Tom Grunfeld once quoted a Briton who lived for two decades in old Tibet as saying that she had witnessed countless eyes gouging and mutilations, while another in the late 1940s reported that "all over Tibet I have seen men who had been deprived of an arm or a leg for theft."

-- Describing the extremely backward and poverty-stricken feudal serfdom society as a "self-sufficient" one.

The Dalai Lama group claimed in the article that the old Tibet was an "economically self-sufficient" society. "A very small percentage of the population - mostly in Central Tibet - were tenants. They held their lands on the estates of aristocrats and monasteries, and paid rent to the estate-holders in kind or in physical labor," the Dalai group wrote in the article, suggesting that those tenants were "relatively wealthy and were sometimes even in the position of loaning money or grain to the estate."

However, the fact was that all the arable land, pastures, forests, mountains, rivers and beaches, and most of the livestock in old Tibet were owned by government officials, aristocrats, and high-ranking monks, as well as their representatives. These people made up only five percent of old Tibet's population. Meanwhile, tenants, who had no means of production and personal freedom and survived by working on rented land, made up about 90 percent of the population. Another five percent of the population had been slaves for generations, and were regarded as "tools that speak."

According to statistics from the 17th century during China's Qing Dynasty, Tibet had about 200,000 hectares of arable land. About 30.9 percent of the land was possessed by the local feudal government, 29.6 percent owned by aristocrats, and 39.5 percent by monasteries and high-ranking monks. The dominance of the means of production by the above three classes in old Tibet did not change ever since that time.

In his book, "Tibet Past and Present," Sir Charles Bell wrote that children were sometimes stolen from parents to become slaves in the old Tibet. Parents who were too poor to support their children would also sell them in exchange for sho-ring, or "price of mother's milk," to other people, who would bring up the children, keep them, or sell them again as slaves, he said. He also wrote in the book "Portrait of a Dalai Lama: the Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth" that the spread of diseases "caused the population, so sorely needed, to grow less and less. The huge number of monks, who are celibate, leads to the same result. Pneumonia, goiter, influenza and smallpox are also prevalent, the last being greatly dreaded... Children have to rough it in food and other ways, and many die young."

The Dalai Lama group said in the article that "throughout her history Tibet never experienced famine and the number of beggars could be counted with your fingers." In fact, due to its low levels of abilities to resist natural disasters, and the corrupted reign of the feudal serfdom under theocracy, the old Tibet was hit by various levels of snow and frost disasters as well as wars and plagues almost every year. Aside from Buddhist prayers, there was no effective way to deal with those natural and man-made disasters, which often led to famine, mass deaths of people and livestock, widespread disease, and the rampant presence of beggars. Flocks of beggars, including the old, women and children, could be seen in Lhasa, Xigaze, Chamdo, and Nagqu in old Tibet. According to statistics, of the 37,000 people living in Lhasa before the peaceful liberation of Tibet, about 5,000 were beggars.