1. Do you think the armed resistance and connections with CIA 50 years ago was the right method how to oppose Chinese regime and why?

2. Do you see any chance for armed resistance or in fact any kind or resistance against Chinese rule in the present time?

3. Chine often says it brought modernity into feudal Tibet. What did Beijing bring into Tibet in your opinion?

4. What would you say about Tibet future especially after Dalai Lama`s death as he is the most visible symbol of the opposition?

Answers:

Allen Carlson, Cornell's Department of Government

1.This is a difficult question to answer, especially in light of how different the world was in 1959. The PRC was less than a decade old, the Korean War, which brought US and Chinese forces into direct military conflict, was of an even more recent vintage, and the Cold War was well under way. At the time, the US was looking to put pressure on the Communist bloc using whatever means it could utilize, while many in Tibet were coming to the realization that Chinese rule was not something about which they were especially receptive. Under such conditions it is not surprising that some in the Tibetan resistance/independence movement turned to US support, nor is it surprising that Washington attempted to make use of the Tibetans in the struggle against communism. The result, a failed uprising, was also rather predetermined in light of the limited resources at the Tibetan's disposal and the emphasis which Beijing placed on maintaining PRC control over Tibet.

2. Armed Tibetan resistance against China today strikes me as highly unlikely. To begin with, unlike during the 1950s, there is no international support for such a development. In addition, the Dalai Lama has made his opposition to violent opposition to Chinese rule quite clear. Moreover, Chinese control of Tibet is so pre-dominant that I doubt there is any space for Tibetans to mount such a campaign. This being said, it also seems that there are a smattering of more radical voices within Tibetan and the Tibetan exile community who have recently begun to advocate for more direct confrontation with Beijing, and it is possible that after the Dalai Lama passes some Tibetans may attempt to push their movement in this direction.

3. Prior to the 1950s Tibet, like much of the world, was essentially in a pre-modern state. Over the past fifty years the PRC has done much to transform such a condition through the promotion of economic development in the region. As a result of such policies living standards in Tibet have risen, however, such advances have not led to wide-spread acceptance of Chinese rule. On the contrary, due to the paradoxes inherent in China's Tibet policies, opposition to Beijing has persisted, and Sino-Tibetan relations have remain contested.

4. This Dalai Lama has been at the center of the Tibetan exile community ever since his flight from Tibet in 1959. In addition, at least since the 1980s, his charismatic personality has been instrumental in making Tibet into a cause célèbre on the world stage. Without him I suspect that incipient differences among Tibetans over how to respond to Chinese rule will become more pronounced, at the same time Tibet will not attract as much international attention. Neither outcome bodes well for the Tibetan movement.

Barry Sautman, Associate Professor of Social Science at the Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology

1. Your question assumes that China should have been opposed on the Tibet issue, an assumption I disagree with,as neither the UN nor any state denied that Tibet was part of China. The armed resistance to China accomplished nothing positive for Tibetans and resulted in many thousands of deaths. Those who defend it today (such as the US-based exile polemicist Jamyang Norbu and the former Tibetan-handler CIA agent Knaus) try to portray as heroes people who fought to preserve or restore an "abysmally feudal" social system, to use the words of the exile historian Tsering Shakya. As for the CIA, it only used Tibetans to harrass China; its leaders knew that the exiles had no chance of defeating the Chinese army. By the way, the head of CIA, Allen Dulles, was told by an aide that there was an uprising in Tibet. He turned to a world map on his wall and asked "Where's Tibet? Is it here?", pointing in the general direction of eastern Europe.

2. There have been violent incidents in the past two decades in Tibet, including at least a dozen bombings and outbreaks of ethnic murder, beating and arson directed at Han Chinese in Lhasa on two occasions, 1989 and 2008. There were also attacks by crowds on government buildings, police, etc. in several other Tibetan areas in 2008. There has not been "armed struggle" per se and likely won't be any while the Dalai Lama is alive. After the Dalai Lama is gone, it is quite likely that a wing of the Tibetan exiles will try to organize violent and perhaps terrorist actions. They may succeed in killing a few people (mainly Tibetans)and wrecking one of Tibet's pillar industries, tourism, thus throwing many people out of work, but they will not significantly damage the state.

3. The Chinese state brought modern education and health care to Tibet, as well as infrastructure, such as roads, dams, bridges, electricity, etc. The life expectancy of Tibetans almost doubled. Most of all, it brought a less hierarchical society, with the end of aristocratic and theocratic rule. Tibetan exiles argue that all this would have happened anyway, but it would have happened much slower (see neighboring Bhutan and Nepal). Slavery in the US would have ended eventually, without Abraham Lincoln, be he should still get some credit for ending it.

4. Tibet's future after the Dalai Lama may involve great disappointment for most Tibetans -- if he dies outside Tibet. Pressure on the Chinese government to continue its high level of subsidization of Tibet's economy and shift to concentrating on providing increased vocational and other educational opportunities for Tibetans may diminish as the "Tibet movement" fractures and the support of Western governments for the exile cause ebbs. Tibet's development will proceed, but those features beneficial to Tibetans (a high rate of employment in government, preferential policies for business loans, etc.) may end, replaced by the more Dickensian capitalism of the Han areas. These possibilities should provide impetus for the Dalai Lama to accept that Tibet is legitimately part of China and get on with negotiations with the Chinese government.

Elliot Sperling, Associate Professor of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University

1. Right or wrong, if Tibetans had not resisted 50 years ago there would be no Tibetan movement today, no viable exile community, and the issue of Tibet would be largely unknown.

2. Today there is little chance for armed resistance, in part because Tibetans in exile have foresworn violent resistance and in part because the balance of power is so disproportionately in favor of the Chinese state.

3. It is not a question of Tibet being made more modern (that's the case with most of Asia in the last 50 years), it is a question of what the Tibetans would have done left to their own devices. It should be remembered that Tibetan society, though backwards, was not torn by social conflict as other societies were. It is not unlikely that change would have come to a Tibet under Tibetan rule. It would not have come with th violence that Chine inflicted on it, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. Indeed, it can reasonably be said that the society inflicted on Tibet in the 1960s and 1970s brought Tibet to the worst state of impoverishment and cultural destruction that Tibetan society had ever known.

4. This is an open question: China is basing its policy on waiting for the Dalai Lama to pass away, after which it will name its own Dalai Lama. It is also possible that there may be one or more candidates selected in exile, and that exile society will experience the fractures of factionalism. Nevertheless, I would not dare to make any solid prediction.

Robbie Barnett, Adjunct Professor, Director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University

1. This is an important question, but I think it is not for me as an outsider to say what is right or wrong. However, I talked last week with the former head of the CIA's Tibet task force, Ken Knaus, who said he wishes now that he had called the operation off earlier, because human lives were lost for little military or political result. But he also said the Tibetan armed resistance did send an important political message to the UN that Tibetans were serious about their claim for independence and other rights. Those messages are important. But the CIA was greatly flawed by lack of information about Chinese military preparedness – they didn't expect Beijing to be able to send so many troops, trucks or airplanes to the region. But the Tibetans wanted to win back a country and the CIA wanted just to cut off China's supply lines, very different objectives and only the second one worked, and that only partially. A major result was that the Chinese sent much larger numbers of troops to Tibet than expected, and have been on a military footing there ever since, plus it cemented the widely held Chinese perception that all Tibet politics is Amercan anti-China politics in another form. But it's very hard to say if Chinese rule in Tibet would have worked out any better if there had been no armed resistance - ultra-leftists were waitng to destroy Tibetan culture, society and religion anyway, and would already have been active in Tibet in the early 50s if Mao had not overruled them then.

2. Some people see armed resistance as the dream option for the Chinese policymakers, since it would then justify an even stronger crackdown and no foreigners would have an argument to contest that. The Dalai Lama on 25th Feb in hs New Year message to Tibetans very strongly suggested that Chinese officials are looking to provoke violence and called on Tibetans to avoid that. He has a point when he says that violent methods against China would never work. Conversely, it's fairly clear that China is a powerful state with weak legitimacy - the Party's claim to be the rightful rulers of the country is always vulnerable if they can't maintain the claim that the people support them. So symbolic, non-violent, even implicit political dissent or non-cooperation can be disproportionately significant and even effective in this kind of regime, much more so than in democratic regimes.

3. China sad from 1950 that it was bringing liberation from imperialism - meaning the British and the Americans - as a gift to Tibetans, and then in 1959 it said it was bringing liberation from serfdom and so-called brutal oppression (they have documented evidence of the first but very little of the second), and then in 1979 it said it was bringing modernity and development. So the tune stays the same but the words change. This tune is a little embarrassing, because it is so similar to those sung by all colonial powers in recent history, what is sometimes known as the White Man's Burden. China certainly brought roads, railways, shopping malls, television, computers and commodities to Tibet, and many Chinese seem deeply offended that Tibetans seem ungrateful for these gifts. And China
also continues to charge a high price for providing what any healthy state gives to its subjects, truncating some aspects of culture, trashing the central figures in the religion, forbidding debate and discussion of policies, banning all students and government employees in Tibet from any religious practice, ordering a single view of history, and so on. And for years it has insisted there is only one kind of modernity and one kind of development - China's modernity, with ugly massive concrete buildings, and Chinese development, rapid GDP growth which draws in non-Tibetan migration in large numbers to the towns without much local involvement, instead of human capacity building. Short sighted, destructive policies sure to produce cultural and environmental damage along with political conflict, all decided by Jiang Zemin at a conference in 1994 called the Third Forum on Work in Tibet, which Hu Jintao seems powerless to reverse.

4. People will be devastated, appalled, and embittered for decades if not generations if he dies outside Tibet with the situation still unresolved, and they will say the Chinese leaders - and in the last year many Chinese intellectuals as well, including those abroad - destroyed the one opportunity in history to resolve the issue peacefully by talking to this man. The Chinese argument is that he can't be trusted, as if any political or religious leader can be, but that argument will not look very strong when it's too late to change.