Tibet

Tibet (Xizang) A mountainous country which in the fifteenth century came under the influence of the Buddhist Lama sect. From the sixteenth century, the Lamaist monks under their leader, the Dalai Lama, obtained the secular rule over the country, whereafter a unique monastic theocracy developed. Thanks to its spiritual power, it ruled for centuries, often without an army. By the the early twentieth century, however, Lamaist rule had become comparatively inefficient, so that Tibet became subject to foreign influence, as Britain (1906) and Russia (1907) recognized it as a Chinese sphere of influence. With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, it was completely independent again until 1950, when troops of the Communist People's Republic of China marched in. It was annexed in 1951, though formally it remained autonomous. In 1959, the fourteenth Dalai Lama gave up his futile attempts at cooperation and, together with 100,000 followers, left for exile in India. From then on, China sought to integrate the country through a settlement programme for Chinese people, the outlawing the Tibetian language and culture, and widespread arrests and human rights violations against Tibetan or Lamaist leaders. Aggression peaked in the early years of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, when foreign vistors were banned from entering Tibet, and in the late 1980s, around the Tianmen Square demonstrations. By 2002, China's economic investment had brought significant prosperity to Lhasa, whose Chinese immigrants now made up the majority of the population. Chinese commitment to the development of the capital was confirmed by plans to develop a ‘Special Economic Zone’. At the same time, however, modernization threatened the destruction of indigenous Tibetian culture.