Free Tibet

Because Free China.

Oh, but those ageing hippies, not least in the neoconservative movement, just love Tibet, and are beside themselves that we have "betrayed" her this week. Of course, 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. ("Dalai" is a family name - only a member of the House of Dalai can be the Dalai Lama.) 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". Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.

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) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new.

The one child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans' own fault, if they even see it as a problem. It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama as "their spiritual leader"; few are those who would view him as such, and even fewer are those of that mind inside Tibet.

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? Well, apart from South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria or Nagorno-Karabakh, of course...