And why are they unemployed? Because in Tibet ALL JOBS AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS GO ONLY TO THE CHINESE. Tibetans are left with nothing, and are made to be second-class citizens in their own country.

In this very complex field , I suggest to trust not in goverments , presses or NGOs but in independent scholars and historian. By the way , the author of this post is discussed but yet not highly respect in that forum.

Please read the interesting article entitlted “Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth” by Dr. Michael Parenti in the Global Research (globalresearch.ca) website. The Centre for Research on Globalisation(CRG) is an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists. The CRG is based in Montreal. It is a registered non profit organization in the province of Quebec, Canada.

Dr. Michael Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. Some of his writings have been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

In his article, he pointed out: “In reality, old Tibet was not a Paradise Lost. It was a retrograde repressive theocracy of extreme privilege and poverty, a long way from Shangri-La.” Following are excerpts from his article:

(Begin excerpts)
…….Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers………..

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.” Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed…………….

The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation–including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation–were favoured punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die.“ The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.

In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away……………

Not all Tibetan exiles are enamoured of the old Shangri-La theocracy. Kim Lewis, who studied healing methods with a Buddhist monk in Berkeley, California, had occasion to talk at length with more than a dozen Tibetan women who lived in the monk’s building. When she asked how they felt about returning to their homeland, the sentiment was unanimously negative. At first, Lewis assumed that their reluctance had to do with the Chinese occupation, but they quickly informed her otherwise. They said they were extremely grateful “not to have to marry 4 or 5 men, be pregnant almost all the time,” or deal with sexually transmitted diseases contacted from a straying husband. The younger women “were delighted to be getting an education, wanted absolutely nothing to do with any religion, and wondered why Americans were so naïve [about Tibet].”

The women interviewed by Lewis recounted stories of their grandmothers’ ordeals with monks who used them as “wisdom consorts.” By sleeping with the monks, the grandmothers were told, they gained “the means to enlightenment” — after all, the Buddha himself had to be with a woman to reach enlightenment.

The women also mentioned the “rampant” sex that the supposedly spiritual and abstemious monks practiced with each other in the Gelugpa sect. The women who were mothers spoke bitterly about the monastery’s confiscation of their young boys in Tibet. They claimed that when a boy cried for his mother, he would be told “Why do you cry for her, she gave you up–she’s just a woman.” (End excerpts)

My opinion after reading Dr. Michael Parenti’s article:

So this is Tibetan culture. The Chinese authorities had made a big blunder by not pursuing the Tibetan policy of the Yuan and Ching Dynasties. The emperors of the two dynasties were crafty enough to give the Tibetans so much freedom that they were fighting among themselves, killing one another, exploiting and making slaves of their own people. In other words, the Tibetans in old decadent Tibet had been given the freedom and ropes long enough to hang themselves.

Instead of stirring up the hornet’s nest of Tibetan lamas, overlords and slaves, the Chinese authorities should have pursued their Yuan/Ching predecessors’ policy of taking charge of defence and foreign affairs, and let the Tibetan overlords and lamas continue with their slavery and oppressive feudal system in Tibet.

The Chinese government had poured massive amount of money into the development of Tibet. However, the Tibetan separatists and their foreign supporters seem to have no appreciation and gratitude for such actions. On hindsight, the government should use the scarce resources for the development of China’s more productive eastern coastal areas, and let the Tibetans scrape out a living for themselves by slavery on whatever means on the infertile desolate plateaus.