Are you sure that radar has even crossed his radar, come to that, marbs?

Oh come on R_T, you know better than to play the old 'revisionist history' card. Throughout the Qing Dynasty, from the early 18th century, Tibet fell within China's ambit. It was an integral part of the Manchu Empire. In 1906 even the UK, which had been trying to get its foot well inside the door, signed up to accepting China's dominion over Tibet. From the 1910 revolution, Tibet's local feudal aristocracy held sway, and slavery was the order of the day for much of the population. The senior lamas for long took their places alongside other senior advisors to the Chinese Emperor. There is nothing of revisionist history about the suzerainty of China over Tibet during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, the vast majority the member states of the United Nations recognize Tibet as part of China.

If anything's "revisionist", Bryn, then it's that line of argument

I notice you go to the lengths of calling Tibet's leaders a "feudal aristocracy".... and then start telling us about the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas,  a feudal monarchy who ruled Britain, conquered India and held its people in conditions of abject slavery   And these people concluded a carve-up deal with the Manchu??   Well-well, you do surprise me


ROFLMAO!!   But if it helps you feel less guilty about machine-gunning monks, Bryn, don't let me be the one to stop you.


Really??   And what does that prove - except that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel to justify what Beijing is doing in Tibet??

Here and here [ZIP file, 325,062 bytes] is the complete text of Sir Francis Younghusband's fine 1910 book India and Tibet. It may be of use and interest to Members lacking convenient access to it by other means.

Besides a full account of the British intervention (and of what really happened at Gyantse), the book relates the history of relations between Tibet China Bhutan Russia and Britain all the way back to Bogle's mission of 1774, Turner's mission of 1782, and Manning's visit to Lhasa in 1812; it also contains as an appendix the text of various conventions between Great Britain, Tibet, China and Russia.

To return to the poll that started this topic: it is interesting to note that the options Reiner offered are to do with a boycot of events, which is also the focus of all the current international protests. I have heard nobody seriously suggest a boycot of Chinese trade.

Are we, globally, in a position where a trade boycott would be possible, even if world leaders had the will to take that path? My feeling is no, we are not capable of surviving as a global civilization without Chinese trade -- and that in itself is a chilling thought, for many reasons. But it goes a long way to explaining why no world leader will dare take any significant action against the Chinese.

How could we permit any one political block to wield so much power over the entire Earth?

The problem came home to me as I was considering my own mini-boycott. I have just been forced to buy a new computer -- an American brand -- and on delivery I find that the majority of the components are made in China. If I wanted to buy a computer untouched by Chinese hands, I wouldn't even know how to begin looking! The same is true of many things that people consider "essential" to their lives.

Indeed the source is Rummel.  I accept he is heavily-criticised,  of course.  It's a moot point whether 65 million would be a more "acceptable" number of those massacred.  As you say, Rummel's critics have usually been unable to pull the ground from under his stats, but have pointed to different ways of interpreting them by way of lessening the horrifying total.  It may be that - for examples - the victims of the famine cannot be directly attributable to Mao.  This depends on whether one believes the famine arose as a result of incompetence (fuelled by arrogance) or intention.   I had cause to reconsider my views on this when I was in Turfan (whence the celebrated Fragment)   

Turfan is an oasis town, fed by snow-melt from the surrounding mountains.  However, the mountains are up to 30km away, and in the average temps of C45+,  any system of open channels or rivulets would run dry long before the water reached the crops.  The Uighurs knew this very well, and had excavated a vast network of underground tunnels, covering an area three times larger than the London Underground, beginning from the C17th.  The tunnels were cut to a great depth, ensuring that the water was kept cool, with no scope for leakage or evaporation.  It drained into underground reservoirs, where this precious resource was stored by Uighur farmers.

However, after the Revolution "specialists" were sent from the Han part of China, to "improve yields" and mechanise farming in Xinjiang. The Uighur farmers who'd previously farmed the area were executed as Enemies Of The People.  After 10 years the "specialists" had reduced Turfan to a dust-bowl, and the rich topsoil had turned to dust and blown away. 

Whose deaths do we allocate to the PRC?  Those who were directly shot as Enemies Of The People?  Or those who died because the agricultural production of the most fertile area in Western China had been wiped-out by crass incompetence rooted in ignorance? 

It all depends how you do the sums, of course - but the final results were probably of little comfort to those who died.

The story also illustrates an important and significant fallacy in the Maoist claim to have brought "progress" to the non-Han peoples subjected to Beijing's rule.

On a musical note, Turfan was the chosen home of the composer Wang Luo-Bin.  Although he wasn't originally a native of Xinjiang, Wang threw himself enthusiastically into the life and culture of the area, collecting Uighur music, instruments, poetry and folklore.  He was careful to separate authentic source-material from his own compositions, but he also wrote orchestral suites based on the Uighur melodies he'd collected.  For this crime he was arrested and imprisoned for 12 years during the Cultural Revolution.  He was released after 12 years of "corrective labour", but was a broken man.  In his old age the Governor of the Uighur Region retrospectively gave Wang a largish house overlooking a pond.   Wang turned the area around the Pond into a recreational landscaped park for local people, and turned the house into a Music Academy for traditional Uighur music.  There is now an Exhibition about his life there - but of course, it doesn't mention his 12 years in shackles.  I'm ashamed to say I had not heard of him before my Uighur friends took me there,  but I was impressed by his achievements.  His music mostly falls into the socialist-realist school - he really had no other choice but to write this anyhow.  The Uighur-inspired pieces are quite different in style from most Chinese classical music, however.  Rather interestingly he took to writing what we'd now call "New Age" music in his old age,  in the "Enigma" style, mixing sampled folk-song with electronics, around 20 years before anyone had ever heard of Enigma.  It's not at all cutting-edge in Western terms, but it's quite different from the usual CPC-loyal pentatonic pap.  It's good for parties, anyhow, and it's amazing how anyone could be locked-up for writing such pleasant, inoffensive music that lyrically showcases the voices, song and instruments of the true working people of Xinjiang 

Entirely agreed there, Ian.

Thanks, BTW, to Mr Grew for the link given above - I've only ever read Hopkirk's resumes of this material, rather than the original source-material.  Extremely valuable to have the original texts available - greatly obliged to SG for them!