Tibet

Full name of country: Tibet Autonomous Region

Region: East & Southeast Asia

Official language: Chinese, Tibetan

Population: 3,600,000 (2020 estimate, Chinese Census)

Nationality: Tibetan(s) (noun), Tibetan (adjective)

Land area: 1,200,000 sq km (463,322 sq miles)

Capital: Lhasa

National anthem: “Yiyongjun Jinxingqu” (March of the Volunteers) is the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan national anthem, “Gyallu” (“Let the Radiant Light Shine”), by Tian Han/Nie Er, is not recognized by Chinese authorities.

National holiday: anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, October 1 (1949)

Population growth: Unavailable

Time zone: UTC +8

Flag: The flag of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is the flag that was in use in Tibet prior to Chinese invasion. It is modeled after Japanese military flags and presents a setting sun with bold rays of red and blue. The six red stripes represent the six original Tibetan tribes; the blue stripes represent the sky. In the foreground, a white mountain is adorned with two snow lions, representing fearlessness. The snow lions hold aloft a three-toned jewel representing Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Beneath that jewel is another two-colored jewel that represents ethical behavior. A yellow border surrounds three sides and represents the golden teachings of Buddha while one side, without the gold border, recognizes the country’s willingness to accept non-Buddhist ideas. The PRC has banned this flag.

Independence: Tibet is an occupied region of the People’s Republic of China. The PRC took control of Tibet in 1950. China claims to have had sovereignty over Tibet for hundreds of years, while Tibetans claim they had autonomy prior to the 1950s.

Government type: Tibet is officially administered by the People’s Republic of China, which is a communist state. However, the Central Tibetan Government, a continuation of the independent Tibetan government in exile from Dharamsala, India, elects its own leaders. The Tibetan government is a democracy, with the Dalai Lama serving as a spiritual leader.

Suffrage: universal for those eighteen years of age (under the People’s Republic of China and the Central Tibetan Administration)

Legal system: The Chinese legal system uses civil law influenced by Soviet and continental European civil law systems. The legislature retains power to interpret statutes; note - criminal procedure law was revised in early 2012. The Central Tibetan Administration maintains it’s own Tibetan Supreme Justice Commission with several smaller commissions that administer to specific Tibetan regions. Traditional Tibetan common law is based on Buddhist moral law.

Tibet sits high on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau on China’s southwest border. Traditionally, Tibet is made up of the three provinces of Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang. Since China took control of Tibet in 1949, its political boundaries have been redrawn to include only the U-Tsang and part of western Kham, which was designated as the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) on Chinese maps in 1965. The majority of cultural Tibet has been incorporated into China’s Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan Provinces.

China maintains that it liberated Tibet in 1950 and the region remains under Chinese authority. However, many Tibetans see Tibet as an independent nation that is occupied illegally by China. Critics point to a long list of humanitarian concerns and human rights abuse allegations that have resulted in the exile of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan nationals from the region. The “Free Tibet" cause grew in popularity worldwide in the late 1990s. Despite the international attention, China remained firm in its insistence that Tibet is a part of China.

Tibet’s spiritual leader, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, lives in exile in Dharamsala, India, with his Tibetan Parliament. He was exiled from Tibet by the Chinese government. The efforts of Tibetan refugees and emigrants to raise international sympathy for their cause have posed a challenge for Chinese international relations since 1950. For many years, the Dalai Lama traveled all over the world representing the cause of Tibetan nationals. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully.

People and Culture

Population: In the early 1980s, the Chinese government announced a policy to fund the emigration of Han Chinese people onto Tibetan lands. The first 100,000 Han Chinese emigrants settled in Tibet in 1984. Others have followed, spurring fears that China would eventually “conquer” Tibet through cultural assimilation.

According to 2020 census figures, about 90 percent of the population in the Tibet Autonomous Region is of Tibetan origin, while the remainder comprises Han Chinese (8 percent) and other ethnic minorities. According to the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), an estimated 6 million ethnic Tibetans live in the TAR and other Tibetan territories within Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces. The Chinese government places this figure closer to 3.6 million. However, the Tibetan government in exile, the CTA, feared that the Han Chinese population, both permanent and migrant, was growing at a faster rate in those areas than the Tibetan population was.

Most Tibetans are Buddhist. Some Tibetan Buddhists also practice Bon, an Indigenous religion. Much smaller numbers of Tibetans practice Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Scholars have estimated approximately five thousand Tibetans practice Islam and seven hundred practice Catholicism in the TAR. Other religious minorities include those who follow Confucianism, Taoism, or traditional folk religions.

Information on Tibet’s population, family planning, and other statistical data are limited to those official documents released for publication by the Chinese government in Beijing since 1950. As a result, much of the available data is contested by Tibetan nationals or other observers.

Chinese records since 1951 show that life expectancy in Tibet has steadily increased after what is officially known as “the peaceful liberation of Tibet” by China. In 2021 Tibetans had a life expectancy of 72.19 years, according to government statistics. An official mortality rate of 28 deaths per 1,000 in Tibet in 1950 had declined to 6.8 deaths per 1,000 in the year 2000, with death rates higher among rural populations than urban, and higher among men than women.

Infant mortality rates also show a decrease; a white paper published by China's State Council Information Office revealed record-low rates in 2021, with 7.6 deaths for every 1,000 live births.

Indigenous People: Modern-day Tibetans trace their ancestral roots back to the nomadic tribes of the Qiang. The first Tibetan Empire collapsed in 842, resulting in the disappearance of Buddhism from early Tibet. In the wake of collapse, China began reconquering its territories on the border of Tibet. The Mongols overtook the region in the thirteenth century and brought with them the return of Buddhism.

The first Dalai Lama emerged from the Gelugpa order of Buddhist monks in the fifteenth century to become the political and spiritual leader of Tibet. Since that time, a Dalai Lama is regularly chosen to lead Tibet culturally and spiritually. (The Dalai Lama also served as the political leader of Tibet until the fourteenth Dalai Lama relinquished the responsibility in 2011.)

Following a 1949 and 1950 communist invasion, Chinese policies, including those that forced the fourteenth Dalai Lama into exile, angered Tibetans and human rights advocates. These policies have caused longstanding tensions between China and Tibet. Modern-day Tibetans live under Chinese rule but continue to claim the present (exiled) Dalai Lama as the leader of their national parliament.

Education: Education in Tibet has been a matter of dispute since China’s 1950 occupation of the area. Chinese data from 2020 indicated that Tibet had the lowest levels of education of China's provincial regions. Illiteracy was said to be higher in rural areas and among women throughout Tibet. According to CTA figures reported in 2019, only 25 percent of Tibetans were literate; by contrast, a 2011 Chinese government white paper reported a literacy rate of over 90 percent.

Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, which served as cultural, spiritual, and political centers for Tibet, were the primary sites of education in Tibet prior to Chinese occupation. Chinese records from the 1950s argue that education was reserved to a select few wealthy students in the Tibetan region. In response, the Chinese-based government of Tibet has worked to establish formal, secular school systems run by the state.

Starting in 2002, Chinese authorities severely limited bilingual education in Tibetan and Chinese as well as Tibetan language instruction. However, secondary schooling and higher education are earned exclusively in Chinese dialects, and civil administrations use Chinese.

Tibet’s government in exile has released its own policy statements with regard to a Tibetan education that promotes economic and political self-sufficiency, spiritual development, and social integration under the auspices of varied Buddhist traditions.

Health Care: China’s most visible impacts on the health care sector in Tibet have been in the form of family planning. Following an early push to increase the population through encouraging pregnancy and childbirth, the Chinese-run Tibetan government has reversed that policy in recent decades. Tibetan families are now advised to have no more than three or four children. Family planning clinics, birth control, and controversial incentive policies have lowered fertility rates among Tibetan women.

The Chinese national system provides free basic health care to its citizens. Transportation issues and poverty in Tibet often impede access to health care providers.

Food: Tibet’s staple diet is a product of the rugged environment and nomadic economy. Meals focus on meats, animal products, and the nutrition-rich grains that can be grown in Tibet’s high-altitude soil.

The average Tibetan diet consists of beef, mutton, milk products, and millet or barley. Meat can be served fresh in chunks that are eaten as finger food, or more often, dried during the winter season in underground caves or bins. Meats, blood, and flour are seasoned for use in sausages.

Tibetans use the milk from cattle, yaks, or goats to make yogurts, butters, or curds, or as an ingredient in favorite drinks like milk or butter tea. Tibetans make their staple food, tsamba, by adding tea to barley flour to make small, hand-held balls that are flavored with butter, curd, or sugar. Mixed into a gruel with wheat flour, yuangen (a tuberous vegetable), and dried meat, tsamba becomes tubo.

The country’s most popular drinks are barley beer and tea made from a variety of leaves and with a variety of additives. Yogurts have been made in Tibet for at least a thousand years.

Arts & Entertainment: Tibet’s traditional music and dance varies according to region and even village. Folk dancers usually perform in a circle to music produced by voice alone or with the accompaniment of the pi wang (a type of fiddle) or the dran yen (a lute). Tibetan traditional opera is called lhamo.

Much of traditional Tibetan culture is infused with the region’s strong Buddhist traditions. Thangka painting, showing an image of the Buddha or other Buddhist spiritual figure, was done according to a complex set of rules that determined not only the style of the painting, but the behavior, training, and spiritual development of the painter.

Tibetan craftsmanship became famous outside the region with the export of traditional carpets, hand woven from high quality Tibetan sheep’s wool.

Holidays: The government in Tibet recognizes the official Chinese public holidays, including New Year’s Day (January 1), the Spring Festival and Chinese New Year (late January or early February), Tomb-Sweeping Day (April), Workers Day (May 1), Dragon Boat Festival (June 20), Mid-Autumn Festival (September 27), and National Day (October 1). Tibet Liberation Day is observed on March 28.

In addition to these official holidays, Tibetans celebrate a variety of regional festivals. The Tibetan New Year’s Festival is called Losar and is marked with pilgrimages, incense, and drama in the streets for a week in February or March. The Year End Festival, held just prior to the New Year, includes monks who perform traditional dances to purge Tibet of the old year’s evils and make way for the new.

Tibetans commemorate Buddha’s first sermon at Sarnath in August or September with the Chökhor Düchen Festival, and Lhabab Düchen in November or December marks Buddha’s descent from heaven.

Environment and Geography

Topography: Tibet lies among the earth’s highest mountains, at an average elevation of over 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) above sea level. The area’s highest point, atop Chomo Langma (Mount Everest) is also the point of greatest elevation on Earth, at 8,850 meters (29,033 feet) above sea level.

The majority of Tibetans live on the wide, arid grasslands surrounding mountain peaks or in the more fertile river valleys. High altitude forests cover portions of Tibet. Tibet’s mountains contain the headwaters to some of the planet’s largest and most vital rivers, including the Mekong, the Yangtze, the Salween, Tsangpo, and the Yellow River.

Natural Resources: Tibet has significant reserves of borax, uranium, iron, chromite, and gold. However, its greatest resource is undoubtedly the rivers that sustain most of the populations of China, India, and other surrounding countries.

Plants & Animals: Tibet’s mountainous terrain is home to wild yak, bharal sheep, musk deer, Tibetan antelope, Tibetan gazelle, pica, black-necked cranes, bar-headed geese, grebe, ibisbill, and ruddy shel ducks.

Due to the rugged terrain and harsh climate, vegetation in Tibet is mostly limited to grasses (during the summer) and forests of deciduous and coniferous trees. Chinese efforts to modernize the Tibetan economy and to extract resources for Chinese consumption have resulted in significant deforestation over parts of eastern Tibet, along with a decrease in large mammal populations.

Climate: Tibet’s high altitudes keep temperatures cool throughout the country and create extremely cold conditions on the highest mountain peaks.

Rainfall varies significantly from one region to another. January is the driest month. In July, a small amount of rain falls in the west while the east receives about thirty times as much.

Economy

Industry: Tibet is still a predominantly agricultural economy, with animal products and animal husbandry making up the majority of industrial activity. Tibet also has a significant handicrafts industry, including wool carpets and other products, and a growing tourist industry. Tibet's gross domestic product (GDP) is typically among the lowest of China's thirty-one provinces, regions, and municipalities, in part due to its lack of economic resources.

Agriculture: Most Tibetans still sustain themselves through farming and herding, and critics of the Chinese occupation charge that Chinese policies have excluded Tibetan nationals from higher education and civil service jobs in the region.

Primary agricultural products include milk, curd, yogurt, beef, mutton, and yak. Barley, tea, and root vegetables are grown in the more fertile river valley areas.

Tourism: Tourism has been a consistently significant sector in the Tibetan economy since the middle of the twentieth century. The mountainous nation was closed to foreigners from the end of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, lending the region the reputation of a kingdom isolated and lost in time. The ongoing political and cultural activities of Tibetans in exile have added to Western curiosity about Tibet.

Chinese administrative policies continue to make travel in and to Tibet difficult for non-Chinese nationals. Most tourists to Tibet must obtain special visas and travel with a tour group. However, the area’s high altitude scenery, medieval Asian architecture, and seductive history have brought in a steadily growing number of tourists. By the early twenty-first century, visitors were able to more easily access Tibet by air via Chengdu or Xining, China, or Kathmandu, Nepal. Train and bus travel from China to Tibet is also possible, though during certain periods, such as periods of unrest, China has closed Tibet to international visitors. Furthermore, the global COVID-19 pandemic, which affected tourism around the world, greatly impacted the numbers of international visitors to Tibet from 2020 to 2022. Once China relaxed its anti-Covid measures, tourism to Tibet resumed, and by 2023 international visitors neared pre-pandemic levels.

Government

The Tibet Autonomous Region has been ruled by a local government under Chinese authority since its inception in 1965. Prior to that, the Chinese military established communist rule in Tibet in 1951, following an invasion of the area in 1949 and 1950.

The Chinese government’s communist leadership prohibits the introduction of opposition parties in Tibetan politics, while guaranteeing all residents of Tibet and the Chinese provinces who are over the age of eighteen the right to vote. Tibetan nationals accuse the Chinese government of ongoing environmental and humanitarian abuses in the region.

The exiled government of Tibet was led by the fourteenth Dalai Lama and by a Tibetan Parliament, located in Dharamsala in northern India, until 2011, when the Dalai Lama's retirement as Tibet's political leader was accepted by the CTA. While the Dalai Lama remains the spiritual leader of Tibet, Tibetan exiles voted for Lobsang Sangay, a Harvard University law scholar, to serve as kalon tripa (sometimes called Sikyong), or head of the government in exile. According to Aljazeera in 2011, Sangay supported “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet under Chinese rule versus outright independence, also known as the Middle Way Approach that was proposed by the Dalai Lama as a way to peacefully resolve tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese government.

Sangay served in this position until 2021, when he was replaced by Penpa Tsering. Tsering, a Tibetan official who previously served as speaker of Tibet's parliament in exile, was thus the second democratically elected leader of the Central Tibetan Administration.

Interesting Facts

• Tibet’s traditional national flag depicts two snow lions on a background of blue and red rays. Chinese authorities have banned the flag in Tibet and the rest of China.
• Tibet’s traditional seat of government and the resting place of past Dalai Lamas is the Potala Palace, a massive fortress situated in the capital city of Lhasa.
• In 2015, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) became the first major Western food chain to open a restaurant in Tibet.

Bibliography

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