Shangri-la Politics

Oh, but those ageing hippies, not least in the neoconservative movement, just love Tibet. And after Kosovo, why not Tibet (or, indeed, anywhere else at all)? After all, before 1959, Tibet was an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Wasn't she?

Er, no, actually. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. Well over ninety per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the "autonomy" for which it still campaigns from "exile".

There has never been an independent state of Tibet, the Tibetans themselves migrated there from further east in China, huge numbers of them never did and never have done (the Dalai Lama himself was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet), and, likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) in Tibet is nothing remotely new.

But why let the facts get in the way of reliving the glory days of flower power and Cold War Trotskyism? And, again I say, after Kosovo, then why not absolutely anywhere at all?