Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

DEBATING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Wang in fact is very critical of the Chinese regime and actually argues
that the present Chinese religious policy is destroying Tibetan
Buddhism (Wang 2003) and that the Chinese presence in Tibet and the
way Tibet is run by the Chinese is a kind of imperialism (Wang 2004).
Wang is one of the few mainland Chinese scholars who actually tries
to argue that the Chinese claim that Tibet is historically part of China
is at least open to dispute.
Shakya has reasonable grounds to claim that the Chinese presence
in Tibet is a form of imperialism or colonialism. However, we have to
make a crucial difference between what we may term Chinese imperialism
and Western imperialism elsewhere, or the British imperialism in
India and Tibet, for a number of reasons. The first reason is that China
and Tibet have had a long historical relationship because of geographical
proximity. You can call it suzerainty or tributary or whatever
relationship, but there is a long historical relationship and therefore
there are areas that were already part of Chinese provinces before the
Communist takeover where both Tibetans and non-Tibetans, including
Han Chinese, have been living together for generations. The second
reason is that:
No major state recognized ‘de facto independent’ Tibet because
China had a claim to sovereignty. A United States State Department
spokesman noted in 1999 that since 1942 the United States
has regarded Tibet as part of China, and during the 1940s
United States actions repeatedly affirmed that view.
(Sautman 2001: 278)
Let us remember that this US acknowledgement was not made in the
seventeenth or eighteenth century when colonialism was rife but in the
1940s when nationhood, national liberation and national independence
were the main features of the day and when the CCP had yet to take over
power in China. Therefore, it is hard to sustain an argument that the
Communist regime was a colonialist that invaded an independent state.
The second reason why the PRC was not colonialist in the traditional
sense is that as an ethnic group the Tibetan population has
increased under the current Chinese control. While the Chinese
government has implemented a family planning policy to control
China’s population, it has much more lenient policies towards ethnic
minorities, including Tibetans. This is in contrast to what Western colonialists
have done. As Sautman points out, under Western colonialism
the colonized perished in droves through famine, disease and repression
while colonial settlers gained demographically. This happened in
America, where native Americans lost up to 95 per cent of their population,
and in Australia, where the aboriginal Australians have almost
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