The eight years between the 1951 ratification and the 1959 uprising are the residual period of the Ganden Phodrang government's existence on Tibetan soil. The institutions of the Lhasa government continued to operate in central Tibet — Ü, Tsang and the western districts — in formal continuity with the pre-1951 administration, but under a progressively more interventionist Chinese military and political-administrative apparatus and within a progressively more contested social environment, particularly in the Khampa-and-Amdo eastern territories that the 17-Point Agreement had not covered and which the Chinese state was attempting to integrate by direct administrative reform on the Sichuan-Qinghai pattern.
The 1956 Kham rebellion
The substantive trigger of the long collapse was the Sichuan-Qinghai land reform programme of 1955–56, which extended the standard collectivisation policies of the People's Republic to the eastern Tibetan-speaking territories that lay outside the 17-Point Agreement's autonomy guarantee. The reforms — the elimination of monastic estates, the redistribution of land, the suppression of monasticism, the political-indoctrination programmes — produced an armed insurrection in Litang in June 1956 and a substantial expansion of fighting across Kham and Amdo through 1956–58. The Khampa rebellion, organised through the Chushi Gangdruk ("Four Rivers Six Ranges") guerrilla movement, was substantively a counter-revolutionary uprising of a traditional society against modernising state action, and it was suppressed by the People's Liberation Army with substantial brutality — including the systematic destruction of monasteries (Litang, Batang, Riwoche, and many smaller establishments), the execution of monastic leaderships, and the displacement of populations.
The Khampa refugees who fled west across the Yangtze into central Tibet from 1956 onwards — eventually approximately 100,000 individuals — brought with them the substantive experience of the Chinese reform programme and a determination not to permit its extension to central Tibet. By 1958 a Khampa guerrilla force was operating from the Lhoka region (southern Tibet, between Lhasa and the Indian frontier) with substantial CIA logistical support — the Tibet Task Force of the U.S. CIA, established in 1956–57, was providing limited arms supply and training to Khampa fighters at Camp Hale in Colorado from 1958. The Tibetan central government was, through 1957–58, in a substantially impossible position: substantively unable to control the Khampa insurgency on its territory, substantively unable to prevent its continuation, and substantively unable to acknowledge to the Chinese authorities the extent of the insurrection.
The 1959 uprising
The crisis of March 1959 was triggered by a Chinese invitation, communicated to the Dalai Lama in late February, to attend a theatrical performance at the People's Liberation Army's Lhasa headquarters on the 10th of March — an invitation that the Lhasa population, by the morning of the 10th, had interpreted as a Chinese kidnap plot. By dawn approximately 30,000 Lhasans had gathered at the Norbulingka summer palace to prevent the Dalai Lama's departure. The crowd remained through the day and the following nine days, growing in size, despite the Dalai Lama's repeated requests through emissaries that it disperse. The Chinese authorities at Lhasa, headed by General Tan Guansan, formally protested at the breach of the protocol and demanded the dispersal of the crowd; the Tibetan government's substantive inability to comply with the demand, in the face of mass popular sentiment, was the immediate cause of the breakdown.
The Dalai Lama left the Norbulingka secretly with a small party on the night of the 17th of March 1959, in disguise, intending to cross the Indian frontier through the Lhoka region. The Chinese assault on the Norbulingka commenced on the 20th of March; the suppression of the uprising in Lhasa took three days and produced an estimated 800 to 1,500 Tibetan deaths in central Lhasa and substantial further casualties in subsequent operations across central and eastern Tibet through April and May. The Dalai Lama's party — accompanied by an escort of Khampa guerrillas — crossed the McMahon Line into Indian territory at Khenzemane on the 30th of March and was formally received by the Indian government at Tawang on the 31st. He has remained in exile in India ever since.
Dharamsala
The Indian government's accommodation of the Tibetan government-in-exile from 1959 onwards is one of the more substantive diplomatic acts of Indian foreign policy of the period. The Nehru administration had no substantive interest in the political position of the Tibetan government-in-exile — its support for Tibetan rights to autonomy and religious practice was clear, its support for Tibetan independence was substantially absent — but the practical reality of approximately 80,000 Tibetan refugees crossing into Indian territory in 1959-61 produced a substantial diplomatic question that the Indian government resolved by the offer of permanent residence in the hill stations of Dharamsala (Himachal Pradesh), Bylakuppe (Karnataka), Mundgod (Karnataka), Bir-Tezu (Himachal Pradesh) and several other settlements.
The Dalai Lama's government, after a brief residence at Mussoorie in 1959, was relocated to Dharamsala in 1960, taking up residence in the McLeodganj hill station. The Central Tibetan Administration — the formal name of the government-in-exile from a 2011 reorganisation, though commonly still called the "Tibetan Government-in-Exile" — has maintained its administrative seat at Dharamsala ever since, with a sustained programme of religious-cultural preservation, refugee education and welfare, international advocacy and political representation. The Tibetan Children's Villages, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, the Norbulingka Institute and the rebuilt Drepung, Sera and Ganden monastic seats in southern India have been the principal institutional achievements of the period.
The 1989 Nobel Prize and the Middle Way
The international political position of the Dalai Lama from 1959 onwards has evolved substantially. The initial position of the 1960s — a demand for Tibetan independence on the basis of the 1913 declaration — was modified in 1973 to the Middle Way Approach, which seeks "meaningful autonomy" for Tibetan-speaking territories within the People's Republic of China, including substantive religious, cultural and educational self-government but excluding sovereign independence. The Middle Way Approach has been substantively negotiated, intermittently, with the Chinese government in nine rounds of formal contact from 2002 to 2010; the Chinese response has been substantively rejecting and the dialogue has been suspended since 2010.
The 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama on the 5th of October 1989 — three months after the Tiananmen Square events and during the 1989 Lhasa uprising and the subsequent declaration of martial law in Tibet — was the substantive international recognition of the Tibetan cause that the 1948 Shakabpa mission had failed to obtain. The political effect on the Chinese government was the cessation of any continued willingness to permit international NGO or foreign-press access to Tibet that had been the practice through the early 1980s. The substantive diplomatic effect on the Tibetan government-in-exile was the conversion of the cause into a substantial element of the international human-rights advocacy programme.
The question of the succession
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama, born in 1935, has indicated through a succession of statements since 2007 that the matter of the Fifteenth incarnation will be decided either by his own personal selection — possibly through the device of emanation rather than rebirth, possibly through a female rebirth, possibly through a non-Tibetan rebirth — or that the institution may be allowed to lapse. The Chinese government's position, formalised in a 2007 State Religious Affairs Bureau regulation, is that all "Tibetan living Buddha" reincarnations are subject to Chinese government approval and that the Fifteenth Dalai Lama will be selected through the Qing-era Golden Urn procedure under Chinese government supervision. The position has been substantively rejected by the current Dalai Lama and by the Central Tibetan Administration.
The practical outcome of the succession question is therefore likely to be the parallel existence of two Fifteenth Dalai Lamas — one selected by the Central Tibetan Administration and the diaspora institutional structure, one selected by the Chinese government — with substantively different international and religious followings. The Panchen Lama dispute of 1995 (in which the Dalai Lama's recognition of a candidate, the boy Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was followed by the Chinese government's substitution of an alternative candidate, Gyaltsen Norbu, and by the disappearance of the original recognised boy) is the practical precedent. The constitutional question of independent Tibet — whether the institutions of the Ganden Phodrang can be sustained in exile across an additional generation — remains the central political question of the diaspora.
Tibet, as a political entity in the sense of this volume, ended in 1951. Tibet, as a continuing question of human, religious and political rights for the population of the plateau and the diaspora, has continued for seventy-five years and will continue for the foreseeable. The volume is about the first thing.
End of Chapter VIII