Outrage as ‘China propaganda’ star handed ESPYS honour

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A lot to unpack so let's start with this. Chang Kai Shek was a warlord (agreed) and was reliant on the criminal underworld (Green gang), however he had the backing of western countries. The China lobby in the US collected money for Change Kai Shek so had he been able to resist the communists then he would have been installed by the US as a leader of China and forced to implement a semblance of democracy (not unlike other Chinese democracies like Singapore) but the country would have been controlled behind the scenes by his KMT. He would also have checked territorial ambitions as not to aggravate his close relations with the US. Tibet would therefore have been left alone.

You are trying to justify Mao's invasion and control over Tibet on the basis of slavery. The tibetans practiced a form of serfdom which most of the population to fuedal lords which was a system common in medieval Europe and was present in Russia up to the Russian revolution. Whether this constituted slavery as you content is a matter of contention but countries that practiced slavery in North Africa and the middle east up to the 1970s eventually banned this practice without the need for invasion. Mao's reason for invasion had nothing to do with emancipation since he allowed the practice to continue for 10 years after China invaded.

One of the central points of contention in the debate about labour and human rights in the historical region of Tibet before and after its incorporation into the modern state of the People's Republic of China is the very definition of Tibet and serfdom itself, with some scholars claiming that the debate is framed around Eurocentric, Sinocentric and anachronistic ideas about statehood and society which are projected onto the history of the area in a way that distorts understanding. Some western scholars reject claims of "serfdom in Tibet" outright based on the view that "Tibet" cannot be defined as one political entity or social system; its political and socioeconomic structures have varied greatly over time and between sub-districts. The various polities comprising Tibet have changed significantly over the past 2,000 years, and even during the modern period there have been dramatic changes in what Tibet is, as anthropologist Geoff Childs writes:

"[Tibet] has undergone numerous political transformations from a unified empire (640–842) incorporating parts of what are now Nepal, India, Pakistan, and several provinces of China (Gansu, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan), to a collection of independent and sometimes antagonistic kingdoms and polities associated with various monasteries (842–1248), to protectorate under the power of an expanding Mongol empire (1248–1368), back to a collection of independent and sometimes antagonistic kingdoms and polities associated with various monasteries (1368–1642), to a centralized state under the clerical administration of the Dalai Lamas (1642–1720), to a protectorate of the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1720–1911), and finally to a nation having de facto independence under the clerical administration of the Dalai Lamas (1911–1951)"

Although the central leadership in Lhasa had authority of these areas for various periods, some Western writers claim that this did not imply the kind of political control seen in modern Western states. According to Luciano Petech, "K'ams [the Kham region, largely synonymous with the province of Xikang which was abolished in 1950] was practically independent of Lhasa under its great lamas" in the 18th century CE. Furthermore, the areas of Qinghai with large Tibetan populations were not continuously ruled by Lhasa, including in the period leading up to the establishment of the PRC (in the late 1930s and 1940s) when the Kuomintang Muslim warlord Ma Bufang ruled Qinghai within the Republic of China (ROC).

The definition of Tibet has been contested with a map of competing claims identifying six distinct types of Tibetan regions claimed by various entities. In the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) and in the ROC (1912–1949), the part of Tibet governed by Lhasa was limited to the modern Tibet Autonomous Region, and did not include the Kham (Xikang) Province of China. Meanwhile, the western part of Xikang (i.e. Qamdo) and Qinghai was only occupied by Lhasa in the Tibet-Kham War which lasted from the 1910s to 1930s.

Generally, the government of the PRC also limits Tibet to the area it has designated the Tibet Autonomous Region, consisting of the traditional areas of Ü, Tsang, Ngari, along with Qamdo (i.e. the western Kham/Xikang) which was legally incorporated into the TAR when Xikang Province was abolished by the NPC in 1955. The Tibetan government in exile claims that other ethnically Tibetan areas to the east and to the north also belong to Tibet, i.e. "Greater Tibet". These areas now respectively belong to Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, Sichuan Province and Yunnan Province of China. Scholarship frequently represents a limited survey, restricted to the central region of Tibet, and may not accurately represent the whole of cultural Tibet or all Tibetan speaking peoples.

Discussing the social structure of Tibet inevitably leads to difficulties with defining terms. Not only may serf and feudalism be Western terms inappropriate for Asian use but the geography and peoples of Tibet vary according to interpreter.The lack of agreement of the various sides as to terminology highlights that the "serfdom in Tibet" controversy is a politicised debate, with the term "feudal serfdom" largely being used by the People's Republic of China as a justification for their taking control of Tibet.
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Melvyn Goldstein has produced many works on Tibetan society since the 1960s and used "serf" to translate the Tibetan term mi ser (literally "yellow person"; also translated as peasant") and to describe both the landless peasant classes and the wealthier land holding and taxpaying class of families. He has written, "with the exception of about 300 noble families, all laymen and laywomen in Tibet were serfs (Mi ser) bound via ascription by parallel descent to a particular lord (dPon-po) though an estate, in other words sons were ascribed to their father's lord but daughters to their mother's lord." In his 1989 book A History of Modern Tibet Goldstein argued that although serfdom was prevalent in Tibet, this did not mean that it was an entirely static society. There were several types of serf sub-status, of which one of the most important was the "human lease", which enabled a serf to acquire a degree of personal freedom. This was an alternative which, despite retaining the concept of lordship, partially freed the mi ser from obligations to a landed estate, usually for an annual fee. In 1997 Goldstein used the term "serf" in the following, more cautious, way "...monastic and aristocratic elites ... held most of the land in Tibet in the form of feudal estates with hereditarily bound serflike peasants." Powers has characterized Goldstein as "generally pro-China" but also called his History of Modern Tibet "the most balanced treatment". Goldstein describes himself as having conservative political views. According to William Monroe Coleman, China misrepresents Goldstein's usage as support for their version of Tibetan history.
Goldstein distinguished serfdom from feudalism, and applied the term "serfdom" but not "feudalism" to old Tibet.Furthermore, he made some effort to avoid appearing to support China's invasion of Tibet, writing that the PRC left the traditional system in place, not only after the invasion of 1950, but even after the Dalai Lama's flight into exile in 1959. He pointed out that in 1950, Chinese rhetoric claimed that China was freeing Tibet, not from serfdom, but from imperialist influence. Nevertheless, his usage has been misinterpreted as support for the Chinese Marxist viewpoint, in which feudalism and serfdom are inseparable, and old Tibet is consistently described as "feudal serfdom".
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Slavery:
Israel Epstein wrote that prior to the Communist takeover, poverty in Tibet was so severe that in some of the worst cases peasants had to hand over children to the manor as household slaves or nangzan, because they were too poor to raise them. On the other hand, Laird asserted that in the 1940s Tibetan peasants were well off and immune to famine, whereas starvation was common in China.According to other sources, the so-called "slaves" were domestic servants (nangtsen) and managers of estates in reality.

In 1904, a British expeditionary force occupied the Chumbi Valley for four years, in the border region adjacent to Bhutan and India. Sir Charles Bell was put in charge of the district from September 1904 to November 1905 and wrote that slavery was still practiced in Chumbi but had declined greatly over the previous thirty years. He noted that only a dozen or two dozen slaves remained, unlike nearby Bhutan where slavery was more widespread. Bell further remarked, "The slavery in the Chumpi valley was of a very mild type. If a slave was not well treated, it was easy for him to escape into Sikkim and British India."

There are two indications that the Chinese incursion has not benefited the traditional landowners of Tibet.

The first is that in 1949 when Mao invaded Tibet there were no Han living in this independent nation. Today that proportion has shifted with 12% of the population now Han.

Second the Chinese government, offers lucrative incentives including better accommodation and employment opportunities with higher salaries to Han Chinese, The CCP has encouraged Han to move to Tibet as part of their “population transfer policy”. This, in turn, has resulted in a large-scale migration of Han Chinese to Tibet and has, hence, severely impacted the use of the Tibetan language in the urban regions of the region as the economy is largely controlled by Han immigrants. According to the US Department of State report on Tibet states that Han migrants are benefiting more from the government’s subsidized economic development policies than Tibetans.

Ironically this model of economic domination is how the overseas Chinese population have largely taken control over the economies of most of South East Asia. This is best exemplified by the Chinese population in Thailand. The proportion of ethnic Chinese in Thailand is exactly the same as in the Tibetan autonomous region (approx 12%). Yet incredibly 90% of Thailand's manufacturing sector and 50% of Thailand's service sector is controlled by ethnic Chinese. In Indonesia they only make up 5% of the Indonesian population but they control 70% of the wealth (interestingly this is the same as South African whites who also hold 70% of the countries wealth despite giving back control of South Africa to the local black people).

Based on these statistics I imagine the economy of Tibet is probably 100% controlled by Chinese Han, I have watched a documentary on urban business sector in Lhasa and Han own all the businesses and the Tibetans are only employed to do menial work. I very much doubt the local Tibetans are satisfied with this arrangement. If Tibetans want work in their own country they must learn Mandarin.

Tibetan welfare after the Chinese takeover
Just as the Chinese and the Tibetan exile community argue over whether common Tibetans suffered or flourished before the Chinese takeover, they take diametrically opposing views on the fate of ordinary Tibetans since 1950. This is understood to be highly important in persuading readers of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Chinese rule. Chinese sources in English claim rapid progress for prosperous, free, and happy Tibetans participating in democratic reforms. Tibetans, on the other hand, write of Chinese genocide in Tibet, comparing the Chinese to the Nazis. After the Cultural Revolution, according to Powers, scholar Warren Smith, whose work became focused on Tibetan history and politics after spending five months in Tibet in 1982, portrays the Chinese as chauvinists who believe they are superior to the Tibetans, and claims that the Chinese use torture, coercion and starvation to control the Tibetans.

The Tibet Autonomous Region is much poorer than other provinces of China. In 1980, in order to help Tibet out of poverty, the 1st Tibet Work Forum (moderated by Hu Yaobang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party), decided to give the Tibet Autonomous Region financial support, in order to build a "united, prosperous, civilized new Tibet". After this Forum, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, all taxes on agriculture and animal husbandry were waived, while other provinces had to wait until 2006 for the same. The old “people's commune” economic system was dismantled (while in other provinces it was ended in 1985), so farmland started to be used by the household, and livestock started to be owned and used by the household. In the People's Republic of China, the Tibet Autonomous Region is the only provincial level administrative region that enjoys some tax incentives, and after 1988 is the only provincial level administrative region that receives growing substantial quota subsidies from the central government. Under the "partner assistance" policy, all the rich provinces and municipalities directly under the Central Government, most of the Central Government organs, and some central enterprises respectively assist the prefectures and cities of the Tibet Autonomous Region. With this assistance, in 1988, the Tibet Autonomous Region eliminated its fiscal deficit for the first time in history. As the only provincial level "poverty-stricken areas which lie in vast, contiguous stretches" in the People's Republic of China, the Tibet Autonomous Region developed a lot of anti-poverty programs, and the impoverished population has been shrinking substantially. However, there are still many difficulties in poverty reduction.Until the end of 2012, the social security system in the Tibet Autonomous Region has been completely established. This system not only includes ordinary people, but also all the 29,000 monks and nuns of Tibetan Buddhism in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

There is also evidence of human rights infringements, including the 2006 Nangpa La shootings. See human rights in the People's Republic of China and Human rights in Tibet (include all the Tibetan areas) for an overview. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2008: Events in China 2007 states:

Widespread and numerous instances of repression target ordinary citizens, monks, nuns, and even children in an effort to quash alleged "separatism." Seven Tibetan boys in Gansu province were detained for over a month in early September after they allegedly wrote slogans on the walls of a village police station and elsewhere calling for the return of the Dalai Lama and a free Tibet. Ronggyal Adrak was detained and charged under state security offenses by police on August 1 after he called for the Dalai Lama's return at a horse race festival in Sichuan province. He is awaiting trial. The Chinese government has failed to bring to justice those responsible for the shooting death by People's Armed Police officers of a 17-year-old nun, Kelsang Namtso, while trying to cross the border into Nepal on September 30, 2006.

It is notable in this report that most of the examples are not in the Tibet Autonomous Region, but in other provinces of China, such as Gansu Province and Sichuan Province (Tibetan areas in Sichuan are the eastern part of Kham). These areas (i.e. the Tibetan areas in Sichuan Province, Gansu Province, Yunnan Province and Qinghai Province) were not included in political Tibet, so they were not involved in the Serfs' Emancipation, which was in the Tibet Autonomous Region. During the "reform and opening up" after 1978, when the central government of the PRC gave numerous support policies and substantial financial support to the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Tibetan areas in the four provinces did not get the same. Although some of them (such as the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan) are rich enough, others of them are not rich, and some of them in Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai are poor enough. The Tibetan areas in the four provinces ask the central government to benefit them as the Tibet Autonomous Region. And the poverty in these areas makes some of their Tibetan residents support the idea of "Greater Tibet" which is claimed by Tibetan exile groups.

In 2010, on the 5th Tibet Work Forum, the central government declared its intention to make the Tibetan areas in the four provinces steadily progress as well as the Tibet Autonomous Region. The goal is to bring the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas in the four provinces in line together with the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in an all-around way in 2020.

living here is extremely painful for people who don't live for generations. You need more subsidies to let people from other places continue to work here.
For Chinese people in other regions, even short-term travel may be life-threatening due to air pressure. Even if there is no death, those adverse reactions also make the work efficiency greatly reduced..

I agree that Tibetan people are not developed so not trained in the ways of running businesses, manufacturing or tourism. I also agree that in order to attract Ham people from China to live in Tibet you need to provide economic incentives. I imagine with time the indigenous Tibetans may benefit from attending higher education but the problem is that in order to integrate into this economy that it requires them to sell their culture/language/buddhism in order to assimilate. This seems to be a high price to pay. I also highly suspicious about Chinese motives for bringing Han into this region other than to generate wealth for the central government.

In the documentary I watched the younger generation of Tibetan people are completely disconnected from their culture. Thye prefer Chinese karaoke bars and CHinese celebrities to Tibetan. The intention is clear, convert the population (the process is called sinification) and then set up infrastructure to mine mineral wealth in the country for the future. I am also aware the CCP has long term goals of setting up hydoelectric schemes including diverting rivers to dams which will cause massive environmental damage.

This cultural war is ironically happening in the regions on the east of India such as Sikkim and Assam (In india these are called far-eastern territories) where younger people are attracted to east Asian culture, A lot of young people in these regions are rejecting Hindi as second language and choosing Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. Many are choosing to work in Shenjen, Tokyo and Seoul rather than the traditional route for education and work in Delhi and Mumbai.

Cultural divorced is definitely one thing, so is the preference for non Tibetan culture.
But I doubt the role of the central government here.
I tend to think that this is a free choice for young people. If the characteristics of a certain ethnic minority culture do not affect the mode of production, the consistent style of CCP is to encourage or even exaggerate such cultural characteristics.

The US does not have concentration camps and have not invaded whole countries the size of Tibet.

It might surprise you to know that the dark skinned ancestors of the Australian aborigines and the people of Melanesia and the Ainu of Japan and indigenous people of the Ryuku islands and Taiwan were the original inhabitants of North and South America.

The ancestors of the east Asians migrating through Siberia and into Alaska (your ancestors) wiped out the entire population of aborigines. The darker skinned indigenous people of north and South America created the earliest empires such as the Olmecs who's heads are decidedly non-Mongolian. The level of genocide must have been quite thorough. Remnants of the aboriginal populations survive in Hokkaido in northern Japan and in Tierra Del Fuego on the southern tip of Chile.

The dark skinned inhabitants of Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand, Phillipijnes and much of South Easat Asia were also wiped out by the incoming asiatics. They borrowed their sailing skills and some like the Moari of NZ also ate the people they came across.

But of course, if time is an issue then there is a statute of limitations right?

Lest we forget what this thread is about.

If a historic nation can't be identified as responsible and no modern nation can be identified as the successor to that historic nation it's impossible to identify who's responsible in a meaningful way.

A meaningful example is the Manchu Qing Dynasty. It is a prison for all ethnic groups, including Manchu.

One of the most typical acts of genocide can be called the Jungar massacre.
This is not to say that there are fewer massacres of other ethnic groups, but 500000-800000 people and 80% of the Jungar Mongols died within two years.

Its commanders were Manchu nobles, and the army had many different ethnic groups.
But this has nothing to do with blaming modern Manchu.

Manchu people in Northeast China were imprisoned on barren land by "compatriots" who invaded major areas of China in order to maintain the tradition of "places where dragons thrive". They, who rather than the Manchu people in Beijing as rulers, inherited the Manchu language, together with the assimilated Han nationality who later entered the northeast, formed the modern Manchu ethnic.
The ethnic group that really committed atrocities was the Manchu aristocrats in Beijing, who were actually mixed Manchu and Han. When the Qing dynasty fell, in order to avoid revenge, most of them changed their names and pretended to be Han people.

I'thinking almost along the lines of trying to find a successor in Italy (or on earth) to blame for Julius Caesar's acts of genocide against Gaulish nations.

I thought that problem was taken care of by these guys.

Picture didn't work but the reference is deeply appreciated.

I fixed the picture please see above.

It's official, this is now the Asterix thread. Post Gauls.