The Dragon in the Land of Snows

"It’s a history of a very weak state that is desperately trying to establish itself within the international community at a point when it’s far too late for it to succeed in doing that. The Tibetans had hidden themselves away from international relations ever since the British rejected their claims to have their independence recognised in 1913 – the British had instead recognised Tibet as being under Chinese suzerainty. This story of the Tibetan withdrawal from the challenges of modernity and their failure to establish themselves internationally is very well told in Melvyn Goldstein’s history of Tibet in the first half of the 20th century. Here Tsering Shakya, the leading Tibetan scholar of his generation, takes that history into the second half of the century. He shows the efforts of Tibetans to reach out to the British, Americans and other Western powers at the time when they realised that Mao was going to win in China and come into Tibet. Then he shows the period after the arrival of the PLA, with an even-handed discussion of the Chinese attempts to deal with the Tibetans, at first quite carefully and then more aggressively. All these nuances are picked out by Shakya, at the same time as describing the responses of the international community to what was happening in Tibet from the 1950s up to the 1980s, and the dramatic, disastrous efforts to transform Tibet into a revolutionary socialist society after 1959. The book is a very careful, detailed study of all these questions."