West in dark on Tibet, basic facts shed light

The prevailing political opinion on Tibet in the West is so much based on simplistic conceptions, so as a Chinese scholar I find it worthy to reveal some key facts about Tibet.

First and foremost, Tibet was never a political and social Shangri-La before the peaceful liberation of Tibet in 1951. The social and political systems there were extremely medieval: brutal serfdom, totally authoritarian theocracy, and the unlimited privileges and parasitic rule of a priest class whose huge size was almost incredibly disproportionate to the size of the Tibetan population as a whole. It was neither an independent region in the sense that from the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th Century to the early Qing in the 17th Century, the legal supremacy of China's central government over Tibet had been gradually established. The legitimacy of theocratic rule of the successive Dalai Lamas was created, re-confirmed and re-granted by the central governments from the early Qing Dynasty to the end of Kuomintang-ruled China in 1949.

Despite an agreement between Dalai Lama and Beijing on maintaining the social and political status quo, theocratic serf-holders rebelled in Tibet in 1959, which ended the above "status quo" agreement. Afterwards serfdom and theocratic rule were abolished, the Tibetan people for the first time realized their fundamental human rights, and the Dalai Lama and his residual followers fled to India and set up an "exile government". Largely through its half-century subversive activity and deceptive propaganda, the West's "romanticism" about Tibet emerged and then went on a rampage.