So even if it were agreed that serfdom and feudalism existed in Tibet, this would be little different other than in technicalities from conditions in any other “premodern” peasant society, including most of China at that time. This was true of most sectors of any society in Asia and elsewhere until recently, including China, and is still true today in many areas. There is no question but that Tibet was an extremely poor society for most of its members, or that the poorest were the most liable to exploitation and abuse. A conscious effort of the intellect is required to recall that one does not follow from the other. It is taken for granted that these are inseparable from serfdom. This is a matter of intense dispute, because the Chinese claim about serfdom, on the surface a factual account of social relations, in fact depends for its effects on its linkage to two other elements, which are highly contestable-feudalism and extreme oppression. What is contested is whether later scholars or politicians should use terms that imply a value judgment about the moral quality of these relations. These scholars do not disagree with the Chinese claim that Tibet had a particular form of social relations that differed from those later found in democratic and Communist countries. Coleman (1998) has pointed out that in practice the Tibetans had more autonomy than appears in the written documents, and that Tibetans could equally well be described simply as peasants with particular kinds of debts and taxation responsibilities, rather than using a politically and morally loaded term such as “serf.” Other scholars have noted that such social categories, Marxist or otherwise, are in any case rooted in European history and do not match the social system of pre-1951 Tibet, let alone the very different arrangements found among the people of eastern Tibet. Dieter Schuh (1988) showed that those who might technically be called “serfs” were in fact relatively prosperous-the majority were often poorer, but in many cases they were not “bound to the land” and so were not technically “serfs.” Girija Saklani (1978) argued that the feudal-type institutions in Tibetan society were counterbalanced by factors that reflected “the principle of cohesion and collectivity” rather than of a rigid hierarchy. Tibet also had a functioning legal system to which they could appeal in some cases (Miller 1987, 1988 Michael 1986, 1987). Franz Michael and Beatrice Miller argued that the less loaded words “commoner” or “subject” are more accurate than the word “serf,” partly because of ample evidence that a large number of Tibetans were able to moderate their obligations to their lords by paying off some of their dues, and so could move from place to place. Most Western scholars accept that this was broadly the case, but query the extensiveness of the practice and the politics behind the terms used to describe it. Melvyn Goldstein, an American anthropologist who carried out research within Tibet into pre-1959 social relations, concluded that most Tibetans before 1959 were bound by written documents to the land on which they were based and to the lord who owned that land, and so he argued that they could be described as “serfs” (Goldstein 1986,1988). Since 1990, Chinese leaders have justified this in terms of the need to ensure “stability.” This approach skirts the question of whether current conditions meet international standards and implies increasingly that individual rights have to be sacrificed for economic or social rights to exist. All Chinese sources describe the previous conditions as “feudal serfdom,” and the word “serf” occurs some thirty-five times in the 2001 edition. So they argue that conditions in Tibet are better than they were before China took over direct administration of the region in 1959. Official Chinese texts about Tibet treat the issue of human rights as comparative. Economy and culture were stagnant for centuries, life expectancy was 35.5 years, illiteracy was over 90 percent, 12 percent of Lhasa’s population were beggars, and the Dalai Lama was responsible for all of this. The serfs were liable to be tortured or killed. What were the conditions regarding human rights in Tibetīefore democratic reform? īefore 1959, all except 5 percent of the Tibetan population were slaves or serfs in a feudal system in which they were regarded as saleable private property, had no land or freedom, and were subject to punishment by mutilation or amputation.
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