At a recent news conference in Washington on the Tibet issue, Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Clinton whose law firm (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe) has three offices in China was asked about his views.
"I have the greatest respect for the Dalai Lama," says Davis, "but there is another side to the story."
That story is now beginning to emerge.
Or perhaps it was always there but decades of the international media, peddling the America-supported-and-financed views of the Dalai Lama, turned a blind eye to the real Tibet under the "man-god" and his spiritual predecessors.
And that Tibet is not the Shangri-la "paradise" the world has been led to believe and often portrayed by the western news media, travel books, novels, and particularly, Hollywood films. The peace-loving socially-mobile Utopian society that the Dalai and his followers-in-exile have been preaching is now being unceremoniously exposed for the blatant fallacy that it is, was.
Some Western politicians and media still want to believe China is an oppressive and negative power, especially when it comes to the Tibet Autonomous Region, said He Rulong, doctoral scholar with the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, School of Law, China University of Political Science and Law, photo from China Daily.
The truth is, prior to the takeover (or retake, as Tibet was part of China for 700 years since Genghis Khan) of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army in 1959, Tibet was a brutally oppressive theocracy under the lamas.
Some 95 percent of the population were serfs and slaves, bought, sold and abused at the whim of the three ruling classes- the lamas who controlled the monasteries, the aristocracy-descendants of kings and Tibetan nobility- and government officials.
So what was it like being a serf in pre-1959 Tibet?
Here's an extract from Michael Parenti's revealing, if not chilling, book Friendly Feudalism: The Tibetan Myth.
"The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery…"
According to Gorkar Mebon, the mayor of Lhasa in the 1950s, when the death sentence was administered "it was in the form that made no person responsible for the death: by hurling the person from a precipice or sewing him in a yak skin and throwing him in a river. Lighter sentences were of amputation of a hand, both hands, a leg or both legs, the stumps being sterilized with boiling butter." ("Tibet", Winnington)
The whip was also a common form of punishment, Mebon says. "If a person had 300 strokes of it properly applied he would almost certainly die afterwards." In this way it could be said that the government, in accordance with religious law, had directly killed no one."
After the overthrow of Tibetan feudalism in 1959 the serfs opened an exhibition of the torture instruments used against them. The exhibition was presented as a show on the "abuse of religion" and the execution of "evil deeds under cloak of religion."
Anna Louise Strong who visited the exhibition describes the torture equipment 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, ships, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition represented 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."