Sino-Indian Conflict and the Sino-Soviet Alliance } 149
Many, possibly most, Tibetans believe that they are not Chinese but
Tibetan, and that their land, Tibet, has historically been and should remain
distinct from China. Whatever may have been the relation between Tibetan
monasteries and China’s imperial court in centuries long past, many Tibetans
believe the land of Tibet is the land of the Tibetan people, not part of China.
These notions of Tibetan nationalism did not spring into full-blown existence
in the 1950s, but emerged only gradually as Tibet was drawn into the Chinese
revolutionary process. Probably few Tibetans thought in such sweeping po-
litical terms in the 1950s, and many initially welcomed the CCP as prom-
ising a materially better life. As more and more Chinese—soldiers, road
construction crews, administrative cadres—poured into Tibet in the 1950s,
a sense mounted among Tibetans that their land was being taken over by the
Chinese. Clashes in ways of life between deeply religious Tibetans and the
militant atheism of the CCP jarred. The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR)
was exempted from the socialist reforms that began in the mid-1950s (collec-
tivization of land, seizure of private property, suppression of religion). But
ethnically Tibetan areas of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu, and Yunnan were not
exempt and were drawn into the maelstrom of the transition to socialism. As
lands and herds were collectivized and monasteries and religion repressed
in those ethnically Tibetan areas outside the TAR, many Tibetans fled to the
TAR, and especially its capital, Lhasa. By 1959, Lhasa’s population had dou-
bled, swollen with Tibetan refugees from communist rule. An armed insur-
gency among the Kham Tibetan tribes of western Sichuan added further to
the sense of crisis. There was increasing Tibetan talk of armed resistance to
the “Chinese invasion.”
In early March a rumor began circulating in Lhasa that the PLA command
in that city planned to detain the Dalai Lama, whom most Tibetans viewed
as a living god, a reincarnation of a bodhisattva of compassion, and the polit-
ical and spiritual head of the Tibetan government and people. As the rumor
spread, crowds of Tibetans spontaneously assembled outside the Dalai Lama’s
palace in Lhasa to “protect” him. Demands for Tibetan independence and the
withdrawal of Chinese from Tibet welled up. Crowds quickly became mobs
and began attacking symbols of Chinese authority. Demonstrations spread
to other towns and became a virtual national uprising of the Tibetan people.
In the midst of the confusion, the Dalai Lama fled clandestinely to India. The
PLA quickly went to work suppressing the rebellion in a ruthless and effec-
tive fashion. Thousands were killed, and tens of thousands of Tibetans fled to
northern India.^3
India, like China, had a long and special relation with Tibet—not political,
as in China’s case, but economic and religious. Trade between India and the
Lhasa region was much easier than between that region and China proper.
Successive waves of Indian religious ideas had shaped Tibetan Buddhism for
over a millennium. Tibet’s monastic system derived from India. Ordinary