Is Tibet China's Colony: The Claim of Demographic Catastrophe COMMENT IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY?: THE CLAIM OF DEMOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE BARRY SAUTMAN" I. INTRODUCTION ............................................. 82 H. DEMOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE IN THE CLASSIC COLONIES ...................................... 83 mI. TIBET AND CLASSIC COLONIALISM .............. 89 IV. "DEMOGRAPHIC ANNIHILATION" ................. 90 A. FAm m DEATHS ............................................. 93 B. OTHER"EXCESS DEATHS" ................................. 99 V. "DEMOGRAPHIC AGGRESSION" ........................ 103 A. POPULATION TRANSFER ...................................... 103 B. THE "OUTNUMBERED" TiBETANS ........................... 111 C. FAILY-PLANNING AND 'DEMOGRAPHIC AGGRESSION" 120 VI. CONCLUSION: POPULATION, COLONIALISM, & TIBET ............................................................ 129 Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LA W I. INTRODUCTION Although the world's states universally recognize that Tibet is part of China, the discourse on Tibet 'i the West and parts of Asia has largely been one of Tibet as a colony. Tibetan dmigr~s in India and grassroots foreign supporters have expectedly played a key role in positioning the discourse as anti-colonial.' Based on the authority of the Dalai Lama, antagonism towards the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime and other factors, they have succeeded in eliciting support for the Tibet-as-colony position from politicians,2 journalists3 and a few scholars.' The Tibet-as-colony position is not the metaphorical use of colonialism that many scholars deplore as a turning away from the specific historical realities of colonialism.' Rather, proponents of the concept aim to establish that Tibet is as much a colony as were the lands held by European powers, the US and Japan from the 16th to late 20th centuries. Tibet, they argue, thereby takes on a right to self-determination, including independence.' Indeed, proposals for association, federation and "genuine autonomy" for Tibet, successively advanced by the dmigr~s since 1987, have '. See INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR TIBET, TIBET "TRANSFORMED": A PICTORIAL ESSAY DOCUMENTING CHINA'S COLONIZATION OF TIBET (1994); UNREPRESENTED NATIONS AND PEOPLES ORGANIZATION [UNPO], CHINA'S TIBET: THE WORLD'S LARGEST REMAINING COLONY (1997); Paljor Tsarong, Understanding Decolonization andlts Implicationsfor the Tibetan Movement, TIBETAN REV., Nov. 1997, at 14; Dawa Tsering, Dui Xizang De Zhimin Yu Zangren de Shengcun Weiji [The Colonization ofTibet and Tibetan Survival Crisis], 173 CHINA SPRING 63 (1998). 2. See Eric Cleven & Chungdak Koren, The Correct Route to Independence, TIBETAN REV., June 1995, at 17; EU MP Olivier Supuis's Letter to the President of the EU Re: Remarks on Tibet, WORLD TIBET NETWORK NEWS, Dec. 1, 2000 at http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/2000/12/1_3.htmil; Vijay Kranti, Pilgrim's Progress, PIONEER DAILY (New Delhi), Dec. 21, 2000, in WORLD TIBET NETWORK NEWS, available at http://www.tibet.ca/wtnarchive/2001/l/1 7_2.html (Jan. 17, 200 1). '. See Philip Bruno, Ombre Chinoises au Pay des Neiges [Chinese Shadows in the Land of Snows], LE MONDE (Paris), Mar. 1, 1999; Mary McGroy, Not What the Founders Hadin Mind, WASH. POST, July. 4, 1999, at B 1; William Safire, The Biggest Vote, N.Y. TIMES, May 18, 2000, at A3 1. 4 See Dasid Goodman, Guizhou and the People's Republic of China: The Devefopment of an Internal Colony. in INE RNAL COLONIALISMI ESSAYS AROUND A THEME 107-123 (D W. Drakakis-Smnith & Stephen Wyn Williams eds, 1983); Peter Bishop. Caught in the Cross.Fre Tibet, Media. and Promotonal Cultur, 22 MEDA,. CuLTuRE & SOC'Y 645 (2000); Ronald Horvath, A Definition of Coloilaism, 13 CURRENr ANrTtIROPOLOoy 45-51 (1972). Can= Lecocardi. Ethntc Confltct and Prejudice n a Colontal Contet The Case of Tibet, 23 INT'LJ. GROUIPTENSIONS 193-224(1993); lan Johnson, Iow a Chnee Cty TorturedandKdlledto Curb Falun Dafa. ASiAN WAL ST. J, Doc. 28, 2000, atL 5 See Chandra Mohanty, Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and ColonialDiscourse, in THIRD WORLD WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF FEMINISM 51-80 (Chandra Mohanty et al. eds., 1991) (1984); Sara Suleri, Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Post-colonial Condition, 18 (No. 4) CRITICAL INQUIRY 756 (1992); George Landow, The Metaphorical Use ofColonialism and Related Terms, at www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/landow/post/poldiscourse /colony2.html (2001). 6 See Andrew Dulaney, RESOLVING CLAIMS OF SELF-DETERMINATION: A PROPOSAL FOR INTEGRATING PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW WITH SPECIFIC APPLICATION TO THE TIBETAN PEOPLE (1993); Robert McCorquodale & Nicholas Orosz, TIBET: THE POSITION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW (1994); Warren Smith, History ls Not CompleteAnswer to Tibet's Future: A Reply to Michael van Walt, TIBETAN REV., Feb. 1999, at 19-20. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? incorporated the right to self-determine Tibet's territorial status or mode of governance.7 If, per contra, Tibet is not a colony, self-determination is not required and a compromise must then be forged. It would likely involve retaining Tibet's status as part of China and much of its governance system, but with power shared by the CCP and the Dalai Lama's forces, a solution that is now within the contemplation of some Tibet specialists in the People's Republic of China (PRC).8 An assessment of whether Tibet is a colony requires delineation of the contours of classic, modem, external colonialism and explication of the theory of internal colonialism.9 Here we note only that colonialism has several prominent features. First, many colonized regions experienced population depletion so severe that one can speak of demographic catastrophe. Second, a panoply of legal inequalities privileged citizens of the metropoles (including settlers) over colonial subjects, especially as to political power and cultural hegemony. Third, the exploitation of colonies in many cases led to economic decline, not only in relation to the metropoles, but even in absolute terms. In the present paper, we consider one feature of classic modem colonialism in examining the claim advanced by Tibetan dmigrds and their Western supporters that Tibet has suffered a demographic catastrophe comparable to that experienced by the victims of European colonialism. It is determined that there is no basis for the claim of a colonial-style cataclysm of the Tibetan population. Rather, the overall increase in the number ofPRC Tibetans after 1949 markedly contrasts with the population disasters that befell colonized peoples over decades and sometime even centuries. II. DEMOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE IN THE CLASSIC COLONIES In a well-known lyrical passage ofDas Kapital, Karl Marx observed that Europe's "primitive accumulation" was based on [T]he discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies [and] the turning of Africa . See Barry Sautman, Association, Federation and "GenuineAutonomy". The Dalai Lama's Proposals and Tibet Independence, 14:2 CHINA INFO. 31 (2000). 8. See Barry Sautman, Resolving the Tibet Question, I1 J. CONT"IEP. CHINA 77-107 (2001); Lixioung wang, Zhu CengDiXuan Zhi Yu Afinzhu Zhi:Jiejue A'iang 1enti de Fangfa Biiao [L-cl- by-level Successive Choice or Democratic System: A Comparison of Methodsfor Resolving the Tibet Question), 9:1 ZHONGGUO SHEHuTi KExUE JIKAN [CHINA SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY] (2000). 9 s5 NfiLJfeher .L7u Lowunn MC FaE ~LrM'P±Z r (Tht 3 VzcI V, 3) # 195 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins.' 0 The most elemental effect of these depredations was the extinction of a significant part of the native population in the colonies of the Americas, Africa and other regions. Most colonies were created by invasion, without a prior history of contact that could give rise to a colorable claim of sovereignty. Wars of subjugation were perpetually waged in the colonial empires; indeed the British army was engaged in a colonial war during every year of Queen Victoria's 64-year reign." Britain's 19th-century architect of colonialism, Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain, alluding to a Roman practice of keeping a certain place of worship open round-the-clock for prayers in wartime, stated: "In the wide dominions of the Queen, the doors of the temple of Janus are never closed."' Gutto has summed up the effects of continuous wars of subjugation waged by the European colonialists against Africans: [N]umerous cases of massacre and genocide of African people could be established against Britain, Holland, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Colonialists routinely practiced torture, cruel and inhuman treatment on the African people. They committed crimes against humanity such as sexual assault on African women. They plundered wealth, expropriated and privatized African land and domestic animals; they decimated African wildlife and plants; and they destroyed and looted Africa's cultural property. A large proportion of African cultural heritage is to be found in private and public collections in Europe and North America. 13 Wars, diseases, enslavement and economic ruin brought by the colonialists had a devastating demographic effect. The populations of the post-colonial Americas and late-colonial Africa and Asia did eventually stabilize and then rapidly increased, not surprisingly as it was in the interests of colonialists to have an adequate labor force for their exploitation of land, minerals and other resources. Indeed, the population increase in late colonialism may have played a role in ending colonialism, as it boosted the potential return to the "subversive activity" of extralegal appropriation of the profits of colonial companies." In the early and middle stages of 10. Krl M-. I CAPrrAL 751 (1954)(1867) 1. See Byron Farwell, QUEEN VICTORIA'S LITTLE WARS (1972). 12. H.L. Wesseling, IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM: ESSAYS ON THE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN ExPANSION 9 (1997). '. Shadrack Gutto, HUMAN AND PEOPLES' RIGHTS FOR THE OPPRESSED: CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THEORY AND PRACTICE FROM SOCIOLOGY OF LAW PERSPECTIVE 58-59 (1993). 14. Hershel Grossman & Murat Iyigun, Population Increase and the End of Colonialism, 64 [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA 'S COLONY? colonialism, however, demographic catastrophe affected many colonies. The New World indigenous population of 75 million to 145 million declined by three-fourths in the 16th century and by 95% if a longer time frame is used. This occurred not only because of Old World diseases, but also through repression and forced labor for the colonialists.'3 Jackson"s and Jackson & Castillo," for example, analyzed the demographic collapse of indigenous populations in the Spanish colonial missions of northwest New Spain and found that it resulted mainly from epidemics in some areas and mainly from working and living conditions in others. The number of indigenous dead due to colonialism in the Americas about equaled the total population of China in 1500 or Europe (excluding Russia) in 1750.1 There were population losses in Australia and Oceania as well. The 300,000 indigenous people in Australia in the 1700s, declined to 60,000 by 1900. Native Hawaiians who numbered 300,000-800,000 in 1778 were 48,000-70,000 in 1900, despite Hawaii's nominal independence until 1898. The Chamorro people of Guam and other islands were 80,000 in 1668, but only 1,500 by 1783.29 By no means can these losses be mainly attributed to disease; wars of extermination were waged against the peoples of these regions."' Some 18 million African slaves were traded from 1600-1800. More than nine million were exported, 3.5 million in British ships and 5.8 million by non-British slavers. An additional 5.6 million slaves were exported in the 19th century.2' Millions of Africans died in the slave trade and Africa's share of the world people fell from 18-20% in 1500 to 12% in 1800.' Demographic decline also accompanied the last wave of colonization, in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Africa's total ECONOMICA 483-93 (1997). 15. SmJflL B"fiTIM COLOMMM'S!ODELO,11ENVO1D GL Ova .ra- L ItTA IFA, H 192 S~r'.'k & Wo rw lBr,,a F.S&A'y N PO?LI,.1,NOH ll'X .!-XCA'92II C,* ." t 197I11~. DFz I..-G G t'¢ s S. , 2. A NEW WCOJ, 268 (1992). 16. See Robert Jackson, INDIAN POPULATiONDECLINE: THEMISSIONSOFNORTHWERNNEV SPAIN, 1687-1840 (1994). 17. See Robert Jackson & Edward Castillo, INDIANS, FRANCISCANS AND SPAr.ISH COLONIZATION: THE IMPACT OF THE MISSION SYSTEM ON CALIFORNIA INDIANS (1995). . John Durand, Historical Estimates of WorldPopulation: An Ealuation, 3 POPULATIO. & DEv. REv. 259 (1977). '. CuLTURAL SuRVIvAL, STATE OF THE PEOPLES: A GLOBAL HLm'iAN RIGHTS REPORT ON SOCIETIES IN DANGER 74 (1993). 20. Scz Bn Et4 . BLOOD 014 T7E WIL'.TI1 !&STSTMA U%5.LT h!I9NT CT A~.Lv 3 SZ ST 17IM 6926A L=- L -m Rt c z,h'd" T:e 1873 r. tw= i,- Cdd=j. 10 1 R.. 111ST 4942 (1975 ( 21. PSdTjoy.TR-,S1SEOS-dATST1\SNSL4VSTEY.,AH YIOOcSLWWNASE=-cA6.S.-5, .kS-..I-'a-7-, - PEE-I DCS2LASocE', 1500-1800 165 at P .1120). 22. BLAUT, supra note 16, at 112. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW population was no more than 120 million, with 80-90 million in the sub- Sahara. 3 The population of the Belgian Congo under King Leopold's regime of slave labor-like rubber production declined by half over several decades. The net loss often million people was partly caused by disease, but mainly by murder, starvation and an attendant plummeting birth rate. 4 The roots of the poverty in central and southern Africa that persists today can be traced to colonial population and economic disasters. 5 In what is now Namibia, German troops exterminated 80% of the indigenous Hereros and half the Namas in 1904-1907. The entire tribal property, including land and stock, of the scattered survivors was confiscated and Africans could thereafter acquire neither without permission of the colonial governor. The military commander von Trotha stated that "the [Herero] nation must be annihilated as such."26 Speaking of the survivors, Germany's Commissioner for Settlement averred that "[o]urjob is to strip the Herero of his heritage and national characteristics and gradually to submerge him, along with other natives into a single colored working class."27 In what is now Tanzania, up to half a million Africans died as a result of Germany's scorched earth policy in suppressing the 1905-1906 Maji Rebellion." Three-fourths of British imperial subjects resided in India, where colonialism also produced huge population losses, in the first instance through repression. The 18th-century Scottish writer James Callender stated: In Bengal only, we destroyed or expelled within the short period of six years, no less than five millions of industrious and harmless people; and as we have been sovereigns in that country for about thirty-five years, it may be reasonably computed that we have strewn the plains of Indostan with fifteen or twenty millions of carcasses... The persons positively destroyed must, in whole, have exceeded twenty millions. These victims have been sacrificed to the balance of power, and the balance of trade, the honour of the British flag.29 See J.C. Caldwell, The Social Repercussions of Colonial Rule: Demographic Aspects, in 7 GENERAL HISTORY OF AFRICA 486 (1985); Durand, supra note 19, at 259 24 Adam Hochschild, KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONiAL AFRICA 233 (1998), 2. See Neil Parsons & Robin Palmer, Introduction: Historical Background, in THE ROOTS OF RURAL POVERTY IN CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN AFRICA 1-32 (Robin Palmer & Neil Parsons eds., 1977). 26, Tilma Dedering.A Certain Rgorou Treament ofAUParisoftheNation TheAnmhdiatonofthe Hrro in GermnSouth Ve.lAfrlca. 1904. in THE MASSACRE IN HISTORY 211 (Mark Lene and Prny Robrts eds, 1999) 27. Horst Dreschler, "LET Us DIE FIGHTING": THE STRUGGLE OF HERERO AND NAMA AGAINST GERMAN IMPERIALISM (1884-1915) 213-14 (1980); Albert Wirz, The German Colonies in Africa, in VON ALBERTINI 388-417 (1982). 28. See C.J. Martin, Population Census Estimates and Methods in British East Africa, in ESSAYS ON AFRICAN POPULATION 49-62 (Kenneth Barbour and R. Mansell Prothero eds., 1961). 29 Ned Dawdson. TIlE ORIGINS OF ScoT'rrsH NAiIONHOOD I 0(2000). [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? Economic decline wrought by British colonialism, especially after the Raj was established in 1813, also contributed to population loss. The destruction of indigenous industry, especially textile production, through colonial laws designed to create a monopoly for British goods and an administrative neglect of infrastructure never witnessed inpre-colonial India, increased dependence on agriculture while reducing the size of peasant holdings. In the period from 1700 to 1890, India's share of world GDP was halved, from 22.6% to 11% and fell to 3.8% by 1952."' India's share of world manufacturing output fell from 24.5% in 1750 to 2.8% in 1880 and 1.7% in 1900.1' Poverty in India has in large measure been a proximate result of colonialism. Laborers in 18th-century South India had higher earnings and greater financial security than their British counterpartsez and the mean standard of food consumption was higher in pre-Raj India than in the India of the 1960s.11 The economic decline fostered famines, during which colonialist Malthusian policies led to the death of millions. Estimates of mortality from the famines of 1876-1879 and 1896-1902 alone range from 12.2 million to 29.3 million. Population growth was negative during several decades before the 1920s.1 Life expectancy for ordinary Indians during the height of the Raj, from 1872 to 1921, fell by 20 percents Famines were not endemic to India. Walford 6 showed that there were thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule, but only seventeen recorded famines in the previous two millenia. G.V. Josh estimated in 1890 that half of the net savings of India was confiscated as revenue."' Military and police expenditures amounted to one-third of colonial India's budget;" public works expenditures of all kinds were only 4% of the budget." The tax burden for colonial administration caused a shift from subsistence to commercial crops exported to feed Britain's industrial revolution and an increase in the frequency and severity offamines. These grew dramatically worse after the 30. Ang=us om'n CH\ E3C00% PERu.i3LN TI L\8 Rr40 19;51 ]. Mike Davis, LATE VIcTORIAN HOLOCAUST: EL NINO FAINES AND THE MAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD 294 (2001). 32. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Rethinking Wages and Competitheness in Eighteenth Centun, Britain andSouth india, PAST & PRESENT, Feb. 1998, at 82-87, 105-06. 33. Ashok Desai, Population andStandards of Livng in Akbar's Time, 9:1 INT'L ECON. & SOC. HIST. REV. 40-52 (1972). 34. See Davis, supra note 32, at 7. 35.Id. at 8. 36. C. WVlfod, T-eF jr.e of the cr .4-ras rdPr I413J. ST.T. S "'Y433 (1878). 37. Bipn t nm Co lr-.a- B,-ti-h ,,,. 1r.-7. fDXz:-J 34 I E 8 I0 9 ( HIST. 461-506 (1993). 39. Bm, StcAH wRY oF.,LZ63 (1998). 2001] COL UMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW Suez Canal opening in 1869 cut sailing time from India to Britain by half. Nothing was done by the Raj to curtail exports during famines and commercial interests were encouraged to profit from famine prices.4" Ireland, Britain's closest colony, also experienced colonial-induced demographic catastrophe. Potatoes became an Irish staple in the 17th century when landlords found that they yielded more calories per acre than wheat and could thus reduce the land needed for tenant sustenance. In 1740, when Ireland's population was some three million, there was a devastating famine after the potato crop failed, but over the next century the losses were more than recouped as demand for labor to produce grain for the British market swelled. The population reached 8.2 million in 1841. At the same time, Ireland's economy came more completely under British domination. About a thousand people, all British or Anglo-Irish, owned half the land, Irish Catholics having long been forbidden from purchasing the land. Absentee landlords resident in Britain controlled one-fourth of Ireland's territory. By 1840, the landlords had turned half of Ireland's land to cattle and pig breeding for the British upscale and military markets; about 10% was used to produce potatoes for animal fodder and 20% was planted in potatoes for human consumption. Remaining land was devoted to flax and wheat for export to Britain. To force this shift from a subsistence- to a colonial-commercial economy, the landlords, backed by the state, drastically decreased the size of tenant plots and increased rents. A potato blight hit Ireland in 1845. Over the ensuing decade landlords, including Prime Minister Russell and Foreign Minister Palmerston, forced almost two million people to emigrate, with vast numbers dying at sea or in quarantine abroad, while about 1.5 million in Ireland died of starvation or famine-related diseases. Meanwhile, the British government passed legislation expediting the process of land concentration and eviction. Exports of food to Britain actually increased during the Great Famine because the price of Irish grain fell when Britain repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, forcing tenants to sell more foodstuffs to make their rents. After the Famine, the threat of starvation did not abate; in the western province of Connacht, which lost 29% of its population between 1841 and 1851 and had a declining population over the next three decades, a famine hit between 1879 and 1880. Between 1855 and 1914, another 3.5 million emigrants left Ireland." 40, See B.M. Bhatia, FAMINES IN INDIA: A STUDY OF SOMEASPECTS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY OF INDIA (I 967)Mai Hawris & Eric Rosm DEADI. SEX AND FtRtU Y POPULAION REGULATON IN PRED;USTRALANDDEvNI.OpimSiOE Es 138-43 (1987); Michelle McAlpin. Fame. Epideilcs and Population Gooh" The Case of ldlia. 14 J. INTERDISC. HMT. 351-66 (1983). 41. See Joseph Lee, THE MODERNISATION OF IRISH SOCIETY, 1848-1918 6 (1973); Eric Ross, Potatoes, Population and the Irish Famine: The Political Economy of Demographic Change, in CULTURE AND REPRODUCTION: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION [15-.1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY.? Demographic catastrophe for native peoples was thus a signal characteristic of colonialism. Population calamity attendant to conquest occurred in the pre-colonial world as well, for example in the depredations of the great medieval Central Asian leaders Timur and Genghis Khan. The scale of demographic catastrophe caused by colonialism was however historically unique and came to be matched only by the genocidal ethnic slaughters of the 20th century. III. TIBET AND CLASSIC COLONIALISM None of the main contours of classic colonialism are found in the Tibet case. In some respects - the limited, but significant industrialization in Tibet is an example - an outcome opposed to archetypal colonial practice (de-industrialization) is present. Other aspects of the Tibet case superficially resemble colonial practice, but are in fact distinct. There is repression in Tibet, but in contrast to colonialist practice, where native people who opposed the state were treated more harshly than metropolitan political opponents, the PRC state represses potential opponents even among apolitical Han Chinese with as much vigor as it does Tibet independence activists. The campaign against Falun Gong, with its public police beatings and torture, is the latest example of harsh repression of an overwhelmingly Han group.42 Tibetan 6migrds stated that in greater Tibet in late 2000, an area with 5 million Tibetans, there were 451 known political prisoners, two of whom died during the year.43 The Tibet Information Network (TIN), however, put the number of political prisoners in January 2001 at 266, 74% of whom are monks and nuns (the longstanding social base for separatism among Tibetans) and one-third of whom are from outside the Tibet Autonomous Region (the TAR or the central-western ethnic Tibetan areas).!4 TIN reckons that in the preceding five years, about 1,855 Tibetans have been political prisoners and 37 have died as a result of abuse in prison.4 5 This death rate (0.4% per annum) incidentally appears to be lower than the rate of THEORY 196-220 fV. Penn Handwerker ed., 1986); E.D. Steele, IRISH LAND AND BRITISH POLITICS: TENANT-RIGHT AND NATIONALITY 1865-1870 3 (1974); Denise Silvester-Carr, Ireland's Famine Museum, HIST. TODAY, Dec. 1996, at 20-32. 42. Danny Schecter, FALUN GONG'S CHALLENGETO CHINA: SPIRITUAL PRACTICE OR"EVIL CULT"? (2000); Francesco Sisci, Falungong, ASIAN TIMES, Jan. 27,30,31,2001 at http:afimes.com/china/CA27AdOl.html, http:atimes.comfchina(CA3OAdO1.html, http:atimes.com/chinaICA3lAdOl.html. 4. See TIBETAN CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMocRAcy, ENFORCING LOYALTY: ANNUAL REPORT 2000 (2001). 44. Mz, "lx.bmLs no 22.z 4S-',4. 41. Id at 45-95. 20011 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW death among prisoners, not to speak of Russian prisoners. 6 Falun Gong asserted some 16 months after the start of the campaign against it, that 50,000 followers had been arrested, more than 5,000 were imprisoned and over 100 had been "persecuted to death. 47 Western sources estimate that as of late 2000 "tens of thousands" of Falun Gong followers had been arrested, more than 10,000 were in custody and 77 had died.48 The repression of Tibetan separatists and Han Falun Gong adherents is thus of roughly the same order. Tibet's alleged demographic catastrophe is based on oft-repeated claims of the "demographic annihilation" of Tibetans and "demographic aggression" against them, and these are the elements of 6migr6 ideology most widely and unquestioningly repeated in the West. Evidence of a population cataclysm is lacking however, calling into question the representation of Tibet as a colony. IV. "DEMOGRAPHIC ANNIHILATION" A fall in the indigenous population of many colonies and the arrival of a substantial number of settlers in some of them were the main demographic consequences of colonialism. We will first consider 6migr6 assertions that "the Chinese" have killed a significant part of the Tibetan population and then take up the claim that non-Tibetans now outnumber Tibetans in the ethnic Tibetan areas of the PRC. Emigrd leaders and supporters speak of "demographic annihilation" of Tibetans and a policy that "aims at the extermination of the Tibetan race." 49 The Dalai Lama has invoked visions of the Holocaust by speaking of the "extermination of the Tibetan race" and a "final solution" being plotted by China, 50 an irony given the 6migr6 defense of the unrepentant Nazi Heinrich Harrer, whose tale of seven years in Tibet became 46. Jon Auerbach, Amid Reports ofAbuses, Russia's Jails Aren't Improving, BOSTON GLOBE, Jan. 11, 1994, at 2; Rama Lakshmi, Reading, 'Riting, Rehabilitating: Inmate School Becomes a Model for India's Prison Reform Efforts, WASH. POST, Aug. 7, 2000, at 4. 47. Falun Gong Followers Take Part in Peaceful Street March in Taipei, CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY (Taiwan), Dec. 24, 2000; James Kynge, Beijing Gets Tougher on Falun Gong, FIN. TIMES, Oct. 11, 2000, at 10. 48. Elliot Abrams, Don 'tAllow China to Smash Religion, INT'L HERALD TRIB., Jan. 6,2001, at 8; Chinese Police Detain Falun Gong, UPI NEWS, July 22,2000; Johnson, supra note 4, at 1; Michelle Malkin, CoverforPRC's Record, WASH. TIMES, May 12,2000, at A20. 49. s" TIBETAN YOUTH CONGRESS, STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY: CHINESE POPULATION TRANSFER IN TIBET AND ITS IMPACT 4 (1994); Pema Thinley, Editorial: Who Says Colonialism Has Ended?, TIBETAN REV., Jan. 2000, at 3. 50. Gi rja Saklan, THE UPROOTEnDTIBErTANS IN INDIA: A SOCIOLOGICAL STDYOF CO NNUTAND CHANGE 265 (1984); China MAoltFvr~d- Nation (MFN) Stats Heneg Before the Senate Commn on F-ie , 104TH CONG. 81 (1997) (Statement by His Holiness the Dali Lama to the Foreign Afais Committee of the Folkietmgets Udtnsudalg, Dentmark in staten t of Lodi G. Gyare, prestdent. International Campaign for Tibet); Dalai Laina. Fiv Point Peace Planfor Tibet (1987),a t httpJfww' tibLetrcon p VSlpointhttnl. [15A1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? Hollywood's contribution to the "Free Tibet" campaign.5' The Dalai Lama's claims are echoed by supporters, who assert that "[w]hat we are seeing is genocide," that 1.2 million Tibetans were "killed by the Chinese" before 1979, and that "since then, the death toll is believed to have reached 1.5 million."52 The claim of 1.2 million unnaturally dead Tibetans is repeated in many Western media reports5 3 and linked to colonialism. 54 The 6migr6s and their supporters further allege that as a result of "population transfer," 7.5 million "Chinese," not including troops, outnumber 6 million Tibetans in greater Tibet.55 The claim that 1.2 million Tibetans "died of unnatural causes during the years of Chinese occupation" was first made by the Tibet Government- in-exile (TGIE) in 1984. It is based on a seemingly precise breakdown of deaths arising from six causes in three ethnic Tibetan areas of the Tibet Plateau: U-Tsang (central-west), Kham (east) and Amdo (northeast). This breakdown is provided in Table 1.56 Table 1: Deaths Attributed by Tibetan tmigres to PRC Actions in Tibet, 1949-1979, by Former Ethnic Tibetan Regions. Cause U-Tsang Kham Amdo Total Prisons & 93,477 64,977 14,784 174,138 Camps Execution 28,267 32,266 96,225 156,758 Battle 143,255 240,410 49,042 432,607 Starvation 131,253 89,916 121,982 413,151 Torture 27,951 48,840 15,940 92,931 Suicide 3,375 3,952 1,675 9,002 Total 427,478 480,261 299,648 1,278,387 .See Orville Schell, VIRTUAL TIBET: SEARCHINGFORSHANGR/-LAFRO.M THEHMALWYASTO HOLLYWOOD (2000); M. Brown, His Holiness - Mv Brother, DAILY TELEGRAPH (London), Nov. 7. 1997, at 23. 52. JohnBillington, PowerBefore Prver, INDEPENDET (London), Oct. 12,1997, at5; Damien McElroy, Tibet's Cultures and Vultures Clash, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH (London), Nov. 19,2000, at 37. 53. John Crace, Forbidden Territory The Dalai Lana Has Been in Erile for Forty Years, GUARDIAN (London), Mar. 9, 1999, at 10; Teresa Watanabe, DalaiLana Urges Local UnityAgainst China, L.A. TIMES, June 26, 2000, at 1. 54. Fox Butterfield, Tibet's Days ofDespair and China's Harsh Response, N.Y.TIMES, Mar. 12, 1989, at 3. 5s. Brown, supra note 52, at 23; Michael Hoffman, ChineseBlustcrHidesHistory ofButche)y, MAINICan DAILY NEWS, Nov. 25, 1999, at 9; Tsering Sandup, Murdoch Should Listen to Tibetans, CANBERRA TIMES, Sept. 21, 1999, at 8. 56 Sue Baker, Exiled Tibetans Say 1.2 illion Killed During Chinese Rule, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL, Sept. 17, 1984; Tseten Samdup, Chinese Population - Threat to Tibetan Identit , 3 (1993) at www.tibet.comlHuman rightsfpoptrans.htmL 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW Figures at this level of specificity are meant to impress, but the 6migr6 approach to numbers is quite elastic. In a 1990 book widely circulated by the TGIE, the number of famine victims is given as 343,000, not 413,000.17 In 1991, the Dalai Lama stated that 200,000 Tibetans had died from starvation,58 less than half of what had originally been claimed. These discrepancies are not surprising; some of the statistics are based on citation to documents that do not contain the figure at all 59 or have not been made public by the 6migrds. Other figures employed in the claim of "demographic annihilation" derive from interviews with Tibetan refugees in India.60 Such informants are not likely to be reliable. Lois Lang-Sims, a leader of the pro-TGIE Tibet Society of the UK, wrote that statements of refugees examined in the years after the Dalai Lama arrived in India have "an extreme and inevitable unreliability," which she contrasts with the "ring of authenticity" she encountered in Jewish refugee accounts of Nazi atrocities. 61 The US anthropologists Melvyn Goldstein and Cynthia Beall, who have done years of fieldwork in Tibetan areas, also state that refugee reports are often exaggerations designed to show support for the 6migr6 cause. 62 Another US anthropologist reports that her informants in the Tibetan community in India imparted "information" that reflected their goal of promoting the 6migr6 political cause.63 Hyperbole pervades the responses of Tibetans interviewed in the early 1970s by an Indian scholar sympathetic to the 6migrd cause: The Tibetan respondents reported that soon after the Chinese occupation, they had been deprived of all basic freedom and rights, in their own country, such as freedom ofprofession, marriage, religion, property, thought and action. It was expressed that China took away their land, property, religion and teacher. 64 The proportion of unnaturally dead Tibetans to the total Tibetan population was initially said to be one-seventh, but was later raised to one- 57. Paul Ingram, TIBET: THE FACTS 297 (1990). 58 McLaughlin 's One-on-one: Interview with the Dalai Lama, FED. NEWS SERVICE, Apr. 19, 1991. 59. See Hao Yan, Tibetan Population in China: Myths and Facts Re-examined, I ASIAN ETHNICITY 20 (2000). 6. See Samdup, supra note 57, at 3. 61. Lois Lang-Sims, THE PRESENCE OF TIRer 132-33 (1963). 62 Melvyn Goldstein & Cynthia Beall, China's Birth Control Policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region: Myths and Realities, 31 ASIAN SURV. 301 (1991). 63 Amy Mountcastle, Tibetans in Exile: The Construction of Global Identities 121 (1997) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY). 64. See SAKLANI, supra note 51, at 265. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? fifth.65 In 1994, the same dmigrd official who used 1.207 million in the 1993 TGIE official report cited above, spoke of 1.5 million Tibetan deaths, which amounted to a fifth of the Tibetan population. 66 No explanation was given for the additional 293,000 deaths or for how 1.5 million can be one- fifth of a Tibetan population that the 6migrds always peg at 6 million. In any case, the 1.5 million figure was picked up by politicians; 200 members of the French parliament used it in demanding that China withdraw from Tibet67 and the ultra-nationalist governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro employs it in his fulminations on the "China threat."68 A. Famine Deaths Both the 6migrds and Western journalists claim that there were hundreds of thousands of famine deaths among Tibetans. Some assert that 500,000 Tibetans starved to death in the early 1960s because their crops were seized and transported to China proper to alleviate the famine there.69 This scenario is highly improbable given the few roads in Tibet and the PRC petrol shortage in those years. Others proclaim that Tibet was the region worst hit by China's famine of 1959-1962. ° These claims, however, are not based on statistics gathered in Tibetan areas, but on anonymous refugee reports that lack numerical specificity. The British journalist Jasper Becker devotes a chapter to Tibetan famine deaths in his work on the PRC famine of 1959-1962. 71 Becker provides only one local statistic about Tibetan famine deaths, based on an interview with an official in the Dalai Lama's birthplace, Pingan County, Haidong Prefecture, Qinghai, an ethnically-mixed area on the edge of the Tibet Plateau where Han greatly outnumber Tibetans.72 He asserts that there "at least 50 percent of the population starved to death" and "as many 65. John Avedon, China's Tibet Problem, N.Y. TiWES, June 23, 1984, at 23; McLaughlin Is One- on-one: Interview with the Dalai Lama, supra note 59. 6. Communism in the Land of the Gods (CNN television broadcast, Dee. 26, 1994). 67. The China Trap, TIMES (London), June 26, 1996. 63. See Tokyo Governor Meets Tibetan Foreign Minister-in-arile, KYODO, Oct. 15, 1999. 69. See Robert Adams, Tibet: Brutal Chinese Policies Cnsh Local Buddhist Culture, INTER PRESS SERVICE, May 12, 1993. '0. See Secret Panchen Lama Report Confirms Chinese Atrocities?, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Oct. 5, 1996. 71. Jasper Becker, HUNGRY GHOSTS: MAO'S SECRET FAMINE (1996). 72. See Elizabeth Zingg, DalaiLama Remains Taboo Subject in Home Region, AGENCE FRANCE PRSSE ENGLISH WIRE, Aug. 10, 1999. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW Chinese as Tibetans died of hunger."73 Pingan had 110,000 residents in 199974 and, given Qinghai's overall growth rate, likely had half as many four decades earlier. Even if the famine in Pingan were as devastating as Becker claims, some 15,000 famine-dead Pingan Tibetans would account for only 3% of the Tibetans that he asserts perished from starvation in the PRC. Becker writes that the Tibetan "population may have declined by 500,000 and that one in six may have perished" through starvation. 75 This claim is based on a very rough estimate of 3 million Tibetans in China made in 1962 by the Panchen Lama.76 The Panchen Lama, however, made no estimate of the number of Tibetans before the famine and even had the PRC Tibetan population declined by 500,000, it does not mean that most of the decline resulted from famine deaths. More to the point, however, Becker provides no data about the other 97% of the supposed 500,000 dead. There are in fact no reliable direct estimates of the number of Tibetans who died in the famine because there was no accurate tally of Tibetans before the PRC's 1990 census. The Chinese government averred in 1907 that there were 6.43 million Tibetans; 15 years later it said there were 1.5 million.77 Richardson, a British diplomat posted to Tibet from 1946 to 1950, could be no more exact about the Tibetan population than to say that it was 2 million to 3 million.78 Other speculative figures about the number of Tibetans before and at mid-century are discussed later in this essay. The PRC 1953 and 1964 censuses, the national population estimates closest in time to the famine years, were not direct surveys, i.e., an enumeration of individuals. In Tibet as elsewhere in China, they were "a product of an 'administrative estimate," 79 a rough estimate made rougher in infrastructure-poor areas like the Tibetan Plateau. The early censuses thus had something of the character of the surveys described by Chen and Murray: "A rural Third World survey is the careful collection, tabulation and analysis of wild guesses, half truths and outright lies meticulously recorded by gullible outsiders during interviews with suspicious, intimidated but outwardly compliant villagers." 80 Even the same government agency may make different retrospective estimates at different times of the number of 73. Becker, supra note 72, at 166-67. ". QINGHAI TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 37 (2000). ". See Becker, supra note 72, at 181. 76 Panchen Lama, A POISONED ARROW: THE SECRET REPORT OF THE 10TH PANCHEN LAMA (1998) (1962). 77. Parshotan Mehra, THE YOUNG HUSBAND EXPEDITION 22 (1968). 78 Hugh Richardson, A SHORT HISTORY OF TIBET 6 (1962). 79 Leo Orleans, A Note on Tibet's Population, 27 CHINA Q. 120-22 (1966). 8. K.H. Chen & G.F. Murray, Truths and Untruths in Village Haiti: An Experiment in Third World Survey Research, in CULTURE, NATALITY AND FAMILY PLANNING 241 (John Marshall and S. Polgar eds., Carolina Population Center 1976). [15:1 ]COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA 'S COLONY? Tibetans in an area in the 1950s. The 1993 Qinghai province statistical yearbook, for example, states that in 1957 there were 513,415 Qinghai Tibetans, while the 1996 Qinghai yearbook puts the number in 1957 at 486,269." The estimate ofPRC Tibetans in 1953 was 2.753 million and in 1964 it was 2.501 million, a decline of 250,000 or 9.2%.82 The 1953 estimate of Tibetans in the future TAR, 1.274 million, has been described however as only an approximation "not meant for close scrutiny."' 3 It was later revised to 1.05 million.84 If that revised estimate is accepted, then the 1953 estimate for all PRC Tibetans is 2.529 million and the decline by 1964 is 28,000 or 1.1%. There is moreover no reason to believe that estimates of the number of Tibetans elsewhere in China were other than rough approximations. The immediate famine-era (1959-1962) decline in the number of PRC Tibetans would have been greater than the Tibetan population loss between the 1953 and 1964 estimates, as the Tibetan population grew both before and after the famine. Whatever the decline that did occur had several causes, however, and we cannot know with any precision the degree of decline or even the share of the decline caused by famine. Starvation was nevertheless likely to have been less common among Tibetans than non- Tibetans. The population of Qinghai, the area on which most discussion of famine deaths among Tibetans has centered, was one-quarter Tibetan in 1957 and Qinghai had the third highest increase in mortality among PRC provinces in 1959-1962.85 Its population dropped an estimated 352,000, from 2.425 million in 1959 to 2.073 million in 1963 (19.2%).86 The death rate rose from 1.3% in 1958 to 4.0% in 1960 and dropped to 1.2% in 1961; the concomitant fall in the birth rate (delayed by a year) was from 2.8% in 1958 to 1.14% in 1961, rising to 3.57% in 1962. The numbers of deaths and births per year indicate about 100,000 more deaths in Qinghai than would have been expected had there been no famine and roughly 60,000 less births. 87 The remaining half of the population decline had other causes; some were related to the famine, but were not famine deaths, such as migration ". QnGHAI TONGJINIANAN [QINGHAI STATISTICALYEARBOOK] 75(1993); QLINUA! TONOJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 48 (1996). '. ZHONGGUO MINGZUTONGJINIANJIAN 1949-1994 [CHINAETHNICSTATISTICS YEARBOOK 1949-1994] 155 (1995). 83 Orleans, supra note 80, at 121. 84, State Council White Paper on Human Rights, XINHUA (China), Nov. 2, 1991. 85 QINGHAI SHENG SHEHUI JINGJI TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI PROVINCIAL SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STATISTICALYEARBOOK] 129 (1989); QINGHAITONGJINIANJIAN [QINGIIAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 75 (1993); DALI YANG, CALAAMIYAND REFORM IN CHINA: STATE, RURAL SOCIETY AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE SInCETHE GREATLEAP FORWARD 57 (1996). ". QINGHAITONGJINIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 74 (1993). ". QINGHAI SHENG SHEHUI JINGJI TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI PROVINCIAL SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STATISTICAL YEARBOOK], supra note 86, at 129. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW from the hard-hit province. As for Qinghai Tibetans, their numbers declined from an estimated 477,994 in 1959 to 408,132 in 1963.88 The decline of almost 70,000 (14.6%) was due not only to famine and reduced births, but also to non-famine factors found especially among Tibetans. Battle and imprisonment played some role, but transnational migration by Tibetans was likely the most important Tibetan-specific factor, and not only in the case of Qinghai. Some 30,000 Amdowas and Khampas, from the northeastern and eastern Tibet Plateau, were among the 70,000 Tibetans who left China during or soon after the Dalai Lama's departure in 1959;89 30,000 more left in the next few years.90 Amdowas (from Qinghai and south Gansu) accounted for about 20,000 of the 6migrds and eastern Tibetans continued to migrate to what became the TAR even after the suppression of the Lhasa revolt.91 Even if famine deaths had the same influence in a population decline among Qinghai Tibetans as they did in the decline in the number of all Qinghai people (less than three-tenths), that would mean that some 20,000 Qinghai Tibetans died of famine or one-fifth the number the dmigrds claim for Amdo. There is reason, however, to surmise that the death rate from famine among Qinghai Tibetans was lower than for Qinghai as a whole. The increased morbidity in the part of Qinghai with the lowest percentage of Tibetans, Xining, was even higher than the increase in the province as a whole. Xining is the only large urban area in Qinghai and has a city and six rural counties. Its 1958 population was 25% of Qinghai's total.92 Because Xining's death rate was so high and because urbanites fared better than peasants during the famine, it is not surprising that it was Xining's rural counties (including the present Haidong Prefecture), where few Tibetans lived, that were the areas of Qinghai most deeply affected by the famine.93 The hyper-development schemes that caused the famine could more easily be applied in these densely populated, largely non-Tibetan areas than in the scattered Tibetan settlements high on the Plateau. 88. QINGHAI TONGn NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK), supra note 87, at 75. 89. Warren W. Smith, Jr., TIBETAN NATION: A HISTORY OF TIBETAN NATIONALISM AND SINO- TIBETAN RELATIONS 600 n.8 (1996). p0. Huayang Sun & Xiru Li, Zhongguo Zangzu Renkou de Yanbian he Xianzhuang [Evolution and Situation of China's Tibetan Population], 51 ZHONGGUO RENKOU KEXUE [CHINA POPULATION SCIENCE] 36 (1995). 91. Saklani, supra note 5 1, at 46. Saklani cites "20%" from which the number 20,000 is derived by taking 20% of 100,000 - the total number of people estimated to have emigrated from Tibet from 1959 to the late 1970s when Saklani did his survey. .See QINGHAI TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 129 (1989); RENMIN XINING 50 NIAN [FIFTY YEARS OF PEOPLE'S XINING] 277-78 (1999). 93. Tibet Information Network, THE POLITICS OF POPULATION TRANSFER: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL SURVEY OF HAIDONG AND HAIXI 5 (1999) available at www.tibetinfo.net/news- updates/nu281099.html. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? In this respect it is worth noting that the Panchen Lama, upon whose writings the charges of a massive famine among Tibetans mainly rest, is said to have only visited three counties in "Tibet" prior to writing his report in 1962. These were Pingan, Hualong and Xunhua and his comments on the famine pertain to his home county, Xunhua.94 All three counties are in Haidong Prefecture, an area whose population is 90% non-Tibetan and not in "cultural" Tibet. A former TAR leader, moreover, disputes that the Panchen Lama visited any Tibetan areas during the famine.95 While there is no accurate direct method to estimate the total famine deaths among Tibetans, Hao Yan96 has used indirect methods. Preliminarily, he notes that 6migr6 claims would, if accurate, mean that Tibetans died in the famine at a rate four times above the national rate. This is counter-intuitive, as Tibetans in the future TAR were not exposed to the policies that induced the famine, but were recent beneficiaries of a land-to-the-tiller program and tax exemptions that increased their production. There is thus no indication of a famine in U-Tsang (the central-western Tibetan area) in this period.97 Many Tibetans elsewhere on the Plateau, moreover, were peasants or pastoralists in very remote areas, where Great Leap Forward policies could hardly be applied. Yan examined the Tibetan age-sex cohorts in the 1990 census and determined that there is an extraordinarily low male-to-female sex ratio among Tibetans who were 20-34 years of age in 1960. The ratio indicates a sharper decline during the famine years among young males than among other Tibetans, which is more compatible with emigration or death in prison or battle than with famine, as famine tends to equally impact men and women and especially harms the very young and old. Yan also shows that the birth decline among Tibetans in the famine period was 11.5%, while among Han it was 40%.98 The decline in Han births was solely because of the famine, while there were additional reasons that account for the smaller decline among Tibetans, including the political turmoil in the Tibetan areas. Yan estimates the national excess death rate during the famine period as 1.2% of the PRC population per year. Even if it were assumed that famine had the same degree of causality in the decline in Tibetan births, because the Tibet birth decline was proportionately one-quarter of the decline in Han births, the Tibetan excess death rate would have been 0.3%. If there were 3 94. J1pBde. Mo~ B ~O ~ 5 I t = 112-13. 95. Jasper Becker, Tibet Elder Scorns "Fantasy"Filn, S. CHINA MORNINC POST, Mar. 30,1998, atl. 96. See Yan, supra note 60, at 22-26. 97 Robbie Banett, Preface, in PANCHEN LAMA at xvi (1997) (1962). 99 Yan, supra note 60, at 26. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW million PRC Tibetans at the outset of the famine -- and there were likely less -- fewer than 30,000 Tibetans would have died of starvation in the famine years, a number one-fourteenth that claimed by the 6migr6s. The most serious history of modem Tibet by an 6migr6 scholar advances a much smaller estimate of famine deaths than the TGIE. Shakya states that in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu, "thousands of Tibetans... were either killed in the suppression of the revolt or died as the result of economic disaster." 99 The pro-independence Tibetan Youth Congress, in a work on development in Tibet, fails to mention a famine associated with Great Leap Forward. It does claim that during the late Cultural Revolution period in U- Tsang "tens of thousands of Tibetans" died as a result of over-cultivation of land sown with wheat. 00 Shakya, however, states only that "economic setbacks" resulted from the failed wheat cultivation, 1 1 while Zhang, in a study of wheat cultivation in Nyemo County, in the TAR, during this period states that the population increased.102 In short, a number of scholarly sources diverge from the TGIE's inflated famine death claims. Finally, it should be pointed out that even had famine deaths been on the scale claimed by the TGIE, this would not amount to an association with colonialism. The demographic catastrophes in classic colonies had no counterpart in Europe. Colonized peoples died by the tens of millions from starvation and epidemics, but Westerners did not. Indeed, Harris & Ross speak of the "demographic rewards of colonialism" for Britain. 103 Wealth flowing in from the colonies sped the reduction of mortality, while the sharp rise in the English population from the late 18th century was based on growing demand for child labor occasioned by the expansion of exports to the colonies. In the Chinese case, however, the Han were the principal victims of the famine and very likely to a much greater extent than Tibetans. The worst-hit province by far was Anhui, with a 99% Han population. Far from being subject to massive population depletions from diseases moreover, the life expectancies of Tibetans were rapidly raised through the development of a system of medical care that wiped out the worst communicable diseases and sharply lowered infant mortality, beginning as early as the 1950s. The average TAR Tibetan life expectancy, which was about 35 years in 1950, has according to PRC statements, 99. Tsering Shakya, DRAGON IN THE LAND OF SNOWS: A HISTORY OF MODERN TIBET SINCE 1947 504 n.91 (1999). '0. Tibetan Youth Congress, DEVELOPMENT FOR WHOM? A REPORT ON THE CHINESE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES IN TIBET AND THEIR IMPACTS 18-19 (1995). '01.See Shakya, supra note 100, at 356. 102. Rongzu Zhang [Chang Jung-tsu], CASE STUDY ON MOUNTAIN ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT: NYEMO COUNTY 21 (1989). 103. See HARRIS & ROSS, supra note 41, at 105-09. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA 'S COLONY? increased to 68 years, three years lower than the PRC national average. 104 Given the health disadvantages of life on a high plateau0 5 that means that, certisparibus, TAR Tibetans have the same longevity opportunities as Han, despite Tibet's relative poverty. If this is so, it is most likely because health care is provided free to rural TAR Tibetans, 106 while the population of China proper must pay for it. The ratio of health care providers in Tibet moreover exceeds the national average. 10 7 While official estimates of present-day life expectancies have yet to be independently confirmed, even if expectancies were somewhat lower, they would still stand in marked contrast to the predicament of indigenous peoples elsewhere. The average life expectancy of Australian aborigines has been reduced since the mid-1990s and at 56 years for men and 63 years for women, it is 20 years less than the average for white Australians. 10 8 B. Other "Excess Deaths" Accurate direct estimates of Tibetan deaths from causes other than famine are not available, as data on such matters is a state secret in the PRC and dmigr6 witnesses have only localized, problematic knowledge. The testimony of witnesses as to executions, for example, has been found to be contradictory and incredible. 10 9 Many estimates were made of battle deaths after 1959, but not of deaths in prison-settings, which include most executions, torture deaths and suicides. China has asserted that 5,600 Tibetans were killed, wounded or captured in the Lhasa revolt of March 1959.10 The Dalai Lama and the Trikamdas, the head of the International Commission of Jurists (IC) (a CIA- funded organization at the time) both claimed in June 1959 that there were 65,000 Tibetan battle deaths. The number was not repeated in the ICJ's subsequent reports on Tibet however and the figures on Tibetan deaths in the Lhasa revolt provided by the dmigr6s and their supporters range from the hundreds to 15,000.111 The other source of battle deaths was fighting on the eastern Plateau between 1956 and 1959. Emigr6 leaders maintain that most 14 ZHONGGUORENKOUTONGIINIANJIAN [CHINA POPUIATION STATISTCALYEARBOOK] 335 (1998). 105TLAUL ZHANG, POPULATION DEVELOPMENT IN TIBETAND RELATED ISSUES ii-iii (1997). 1 0 6.See generally Chinese Go'ernment's Tibet Polio. XINIIUA (China), Feb. 28, 1999. o7. Barry Sautman & Irene Eng, Tibet:Developmientfor htom?, 15:2 CIINA INFO. 1-42(2001). los.RosemaryNeill, Wh72ereReconciliationBccomcs a CruclJoke, AUSTRALI N, Feb. 23,2001, at 15; Siobhain Ryan, Statistics Highlight Aboriginal Tragea., COURIER MAIL (Australia), Aug. 31, 2001, at 2. 109. Stephen Shalom, DEATHS IN CHINA DUETO COMwMUNISM: PROPAG -NDA VERSUS RFALITY 74-75 (1984). "o. Anna Louise Strong, WHEN SERFS STOOD UP 75-76 (1976) (1959). 11.See Shalom, supra note 110, at 160 n.149-50. 2001) COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW of the "anti-China" struggle took place in Amdo and Kham" 12 and it was migrant Amdowas and Khampas who led the Lhasa revolt." 3 Andrugtsang, the Khampa guerrilla leader whose memoirs 114 are credited by the 6migr6 scholar Dawa Norbu, states that his units suffered 204 casualties (both killed and wounded) from August 1958 to April 1959, the peak of the struggle in Amdo. 15 There thus seems to be no basis for a claim of 65,000 battle deaths. From the mid-1960s, however, the Dalai Lama upped his claim of the number of battle deaths. He is quoted by Bradsher as stating that based on "secret documents," 87,000 died in the Lhasa Revolt; 116 Bradsher himself states that 3,000 or more died.' 17 The Dalai Lama's source is a 1960 PLA document, Xizang Xingshi he Renwu Jiaoyu de Jiben (Basic Teaching Materials on Education About Tibet's Situation and Tasks), said by the TGIE to have been captured by Tibetan guerrillas in 1966. It states that "87,000 enemies were eliminated" in central Tibet from March 1959 to October 1960.18 The Chinese term xiaomie, however, is as ambiguous as its English equivalent, "eliminated." Elsewhere, moreover, the TGIE and its supporters do not cite the PLA document, but state that the figure of 87,000 dead was heard on an unverifiable Radio Lhasa broadcast of October 1, 1960.19 The TGIE has also stated that 5,000-10,000 people died in the Lhasa revolt, 120 itself a questionable figure, given that Lhasa then had only about 40,000 inhabitants and Tibetans who were there at the time do not attest to the loss of a large part of the city's population.' 2 1 In any event, the 6migrd leaders continue to publicize the figure of 87,000 dead, 122 a "fact" frequently repeated by Western media. 123 The TGIE claim of more than 432,000 battle deaths thus comes out of nowhere and cannot be taken seriously. 112. Tokyo Governor Meets Tibetan Foreign Minister-in-exile, supra note 69. 113. Diane Wolff, The Pitiless Measurement of History: China and Tibet, Past, Present and Future, at http://www.peocities.comiCapitolHill/1730/pmh_5.html. "4.Compo Tashi Andrugtsang, FOUR RIVERS, SIX RANGES: REMINISCENCES OF THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT IN TIBET 89 (1973). 115. Dawa Norbu, The 1959 Tibetan Rebellion: An Interpretation, 77 CHINA Q. 93 (1979). 116 Henry Bradsher, Tibet Struggles to Survive, FOREIGN AFP., June-July 1969, 763. I7.ld. at 755. "8. Department of Information and International Relations (Central Tibetan Administration-in- exile), TIBET: PROVING TRUTH FROM FACTS 37 (1993); GOVERNMENT OF TIBET-IN-EXILE, HUMAN RIGHTS, at w w,.tibet.conVWhite Paper/white5.html; Ingram, supra note 58, at 356-57. 19. Samdup, supra note 57. 120. Central Tibetan Secretariat, TIBET UNDER CHINESE COMMUNIST RULE: A COMPILATION OF REFUGEE STATEMENTS, 1958-1975 (1976). 121 1. Barbara Erickson, TIBET: ABODE OF THE GODS, PEARL OF THE MOTHERLAND 197 (1997). 122. Phinjo Gombu, A 966-km March to Save Tibet, TORONTO STAR, Mar. 11, 1997, at A3; China Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) Status: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. on Finance, supra note 51. 123. China's Tibet Policy Reminiscent of Cultural Revolution: Dalai Lama, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Mar. 10, 2000; Julian Schvindlerman, The Coddling ofArafat, JERUSALEM POST, Jan. 1,2001, at 55; Tibetans Confident of Change - at Last, INTER PRESS SERVICE, Mar. 10, 1998. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHMA 'S COLONY? We cannot surmise how many Tibetans died in prison settings, but we can discount unreasonably high figures. The claims of 175,000 Tibetan prison/labor camp deaths and 866,000 deaths from all non-famine causes, most of which would have happened in confinement, are untenable. Shalom examines the welter of assertions made about the number of such deaths in China generally. 124 He concludes that even making "assumptions that are likely to err in the direction of overestimating the number of deaths," perhaps one million died in China's prisons and labor camps from 1950 to 1970.125 If this estimate and dmigr6 figures are both accepted, then Tibetans would account for a very high proportion - anywhere from 17% to 85% - of PRC prison deaths. Tibetans, however, amount to less than one-half of one percent of the PRC population and there is no evidence that they were disproportionately imprisoned or subjected to harsher conditions of imprisonment than non-Tibetans. The vituperatively anti-Communist writers Domenach l 6 and Courtois12 7 have made the highest claims of mortality among Mao-era prisoners: 5% of 10 million detainees each year, for a total of 20 million, including 4 million from the 1959-1962 famine. Even applying an analogous estimate, the TGIE figures on Tibetan deaths are implausible. To achieve the same death rate as for all PRC prisoners, based on the claimed 174,000 Tibetan prison deaths, no less than 116,000 Tibetans would have had to be imprisoned during every year from 1950 to 1979; that is, about 3- 4% of the Tibetan population. If one assumes that more than 50% of all executions, deaths through torture, and suicides ofTibetans from 1950-1979 also tookplace in prison settings, then about 450,000 people or some 10% of all Tibetans would have had to be imprisoned during every one of those years. Domenach and Curtois claim, however, that 1-2% of Chinese were in some form of imprisonment at any given time in the Mao era. 2 Although the "anti-China" struggle in Tibetan areas surely resulted in thousands of Tibetans being imprisoned, major PRC political campaigns that led to imprisonments and deaths generally touched Tibetan areas more lightly than China proper. Tibet is remote and most campaigns mainly affected urban 124. See Shalom, supra note 110. 12S.Id. at 109-10. 1 26 .Jean-LucDomenach, CHINA: L'ARCHIPELOUBuE [CHINA: TiE FORGOTrENARCIIPELAGO] 242 (1992). 127.Stephane Courtois, et al., THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM: CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION 498 (1999). 128. The figure one percent to two percent is based on the claim of Domenach and Curtois (see preceding paragraph in the text) that 10 million Chinese were imprisoned in any given year ofthe Mao era. Since the Chinese population was 540 million in 1949 and about 930 million in 1976, the imprisoned population would be roughly 1-2%. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIANLA W areas, while nine-tenths of Tibetans lived in the countryside. China's violent land reform and the Great Leap Forward were rural phenomena, but Shakya 29 and other scholars report no executions or imprisonment of Tibetan landlords for past oppression of peasants, in contrast to the policy in China proper, while the Great Leap produced famine, not executions and imprisonments. The campaigns attended by large-scale imprisonments, such as the Anti-Rightist Movement of the late 1950s or mass executions, e.g., the Purifying of Class Ranks and anti-May 16th Movement campaigns of 1968- 1970, are not reported to have impacted Tibetan areas. If Tibetans died in imprisonment at the same rate as prisoners in China proper, then based on Domenach's and Curtois' claimed rate of PRC prison death rates - 5% each year of 1-2% of the total population - Tibetan prison deaths would have been 75,000-100,000. It is unlikely however that the highest estimates are an accurate gauge of prison deaths in China or that Tibetans were imprisoned at the same rate as Chinese generally, or that dmigr6 claims of Tibetan prison deaths do not involve double counting deaths from execution, torture and suicide. 130 It should also be borne in mind that "excess" deaths are those above normal mortality in the general population, so that a portion of prison deaths are necessarily not "excess." There is thus no evidence of special repression of Tibetans, let alone "demographic annihilation," but only of a harsh state response to any political challenge to CCP-rule in any part of China. State organs involved in suppressing separatism have often violated the rights of those seeking independence through beatings and torture, but the suppression of separatism is not per se illegitimate under international law. The consensus of international organizations, states and scholars is that states are allowed to use military and police measures to prevent secessionist activities, except in the special circumstance where to do so would endanger international peace and security.131 The suppression of Tibetan separatism has been no more brutal than the repression that accompanied many political campaigns waged during the PRC's first four decades and no more egregiously violent than more recent actions against dissident Han organizations. The lack of a sharp dichotomy in the degree of repression against majority and minority people distinctly contrasts with the practices of the colonial era. 129. See Shakya, supra note 100. .30 See Shalom, supra note 110, at 108. 3. See generally Jerri Duursma, FRAGMENTATION AND THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS OF MICRO-STATES 427-28 (1996); Jonathan Charney & J.R.V. Prescott, Resolving Cross-strait Relations Between China and Taiwan, 94 AM. J. INT'L. L. 453-75 (2000); Anne Hsiu-an Hsiao, Is China's Policy to Use Force Against Taiwan a Violation of the Principle ofNon-use ofForce Under International Law, 32 NEw ENG. L. REV. 715-42 (1998); Marc Weller, The International Response to the Dissolution ofthe Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, 86 AM. J. INT'L L. 572 (1992). [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? V. "DEMOGRAPHIC AGGRESSION" The Dalai Lama often refers to "demographic aggression."' 132 It is said to be carried out as part of China's "deliberate policy of cultural genocide in Tibet" and efforts to "destroy the integral core of Tibetan civilization and identity" in order to bring about the "complete subjugation of the Tibetans."'133 The claim is based on an asserted state-sponsored population transfer that has caused "Chinese" to outnumber Tibetans in greater Tibet and family-planning limitations on the growth of the Tibetan population. These two aspects are coupled in a charge that China seeks to extinguish the Tibetan ethnic group, with dmigrds and their supporters employing the formula: population transfers + coercive birth control = cultural genocide.134 A. Population Transfer The dmigrd use of the appellation "population transfer" is misleading because the form that migration to Tibet takes is not within that international law term of art. In 1993, the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities issued a Preliminary Report on the human rights dimensions of population transfer. 35 Not coincidentally, the Unrepresented Nations and People's Organization (UNPO), an NGO of separatist and other ethnic organizations headed by the Dalai Lama's legal counsel Michael Van Walt, had held a conference on the same subject the year before. 136 Van Walt had long argued that population transfer threatens the survival of Tibetan identity. 137 Sub-Commission members who attended 1 32 .Dalai Lama Condemns China for "Excessive Use of Force," UPI NEWS, May 25, 1993; Dalai Lama: Will Seek Return to Tibet to Urge Patience, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Oct. 9, 1991; A.S. Padmanabhan, Tibet, China andindia, HINDU, Apr. 4,2000. 3. China's Tibet Polic' Reminiscent of Cultural Revolution: Dalai Lama. supra note 124; European Parliamentarians Meeting on Human Rights in Tibet, WORLD TIBETNETWORKNE%:S, Jan. 16,2001 athttp./%lwww.tibeLcawtnarchive/2001/l16.2.html; Tibetan Wbmen Stage Protest in India, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH VIlE, Mar. 12, 1998. 134.-7 Ingrain, supra note 58; Berkeley Waves a Flag for Tibetan Freedom - Only' US. Cit, to Do So, S.F. CHRON., Mar. 9, 1996, atAl 1. "'.AAwn Shawhat AI-Khasawneh & R. Hatano, Preliminary Report on the Human Rights Dimensions ofPopulation Transfer Including the Implantation ofSettlers, UN ECSCOR, Commission on Human Rights, Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 45th Sess., U.N. Doe. EICN.4/Sub.21199317 (1993). '. David Goldberg, HUMAN RGHTS DIMENSIONS OF POPULATION TRANSFER: CON.FERNCE REPORT ON UNPO INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE HELD INTALLINN, ESTomIA, JANUARY 11-13,1992 (UNPO 1992). 137 See Michael Van Walt van Praag, POPULATIONTRANSFERANDTilE SURVIVALOFTHETIBET IDENTVrY (1986). 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW the UNPO meeting later sponsored a resolution on which the Preliminary Report was based. One member has stated that the UNPO had formed a coalition in 1990 which succeeded in "reawaken[ing] the UN Sub- commission's interest in [population transfer] issues."'138 The Preliminary Report states that population transfer "involv[es] the movement of people as a consequence of political and/or economic processes in which the State Government or State-authorized agencies participate."' 139 The Tibet Support Group of the UK (TSGUK) 40 and the Tibet Youth Congress, 141 pro-Tibet independence organizations, emphasize a passage of the Preliminary Report that declares that in moving a population: The State's role . . .may be active or passive, but nonetheless contributes to the systematic, coercive and deliberate nature of the movement of population into or out of an area ... the State's role may involve financial subsidies, planning, public information, military action, recruitment of settlers, legislation or other judicial action, and even the administration ofjustice. 142 The dmigr6s and their supporters thus seek to have it deemed that a state engages in population transfer if, even without sponsorship, it allows a movement of population opposed by a host population, because the movement may be "coercive" of the latter. 43 International law does not, however, require states to seal off parts of their territory from migration merely because a host population objects to the influx. In fact, as Palley notes, "no international standard specifically addresses and outlaws the act of population transfer itself and its various forms.'' 144 Because the case for forbidding states to passively permit migration over the objection of a host population is weak, the dmigrds and supporters also infuse the law of military and colonial occupation into the discourse of population transfer. 145 The Preliminary Report suggests that "population transfer" is used generically for deportation and forced relocation.' 46 It also "3. Claire Palley, Population Transfers, in BROADENING THE FRONTIERS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ASBJoRN EIDE 222 n.6 (Donna Gonien ed., 1993). 139. A1-Khasawneh & Hatano, supra note 136, at 6. 140 Tibet Support Group U.K., NEW MAJORITY: CHINESE POPULATION TRANSFER INTO TIBET 8 (1995). 141 Tibetan Youth Congress, supra note 50, at 6. 142 Al-Khasawneh & Hatano, supra note 136, 15, at 6. 143 See generally Palley, supra note 139, at 226. .ld. at 231. 145. See generally Tibetan Youth Congress, supra note 50, at 6-7; TIBET SUPPORT GROUP U.K., supra note 141, at 9-13. 146. AI-Khasawneh & Hatano, supra note 136, 17, at 6. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? may involve movements carried out to assuage ethnic tension, such as the population "exchanges" of Greece and Turkey after World War I and India and Pakistan in 1947, movements that are permitted even where they contain a coercive component. 147 Scholarly treatment of population transfer thus mostly concerns deportations and forcible transfers, with Nazi actions and the post-war expulsions of Germans serving as early examples. International law now disapproves such actions, even if it did not when they occurred. 148 Since 1949 Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention has forbidden an occupying power to deport or forcibly transfer civilians from occupied territories or transfer parts of its own civilian population into such territories. Protocol I to the Fourth Geneva Convention 149 extends its prohibitions to any "armed conflict in which people are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination." Protocol II, however, sets out a different standard where population movements occur during non- international armed conflict. The TSGUK recognizes that under Protocol II states may organize population movements during internal wars, provided persons are treated "humanely, without any adverse distinctions founded on race, color, religion or faith." 15o It claims however that "the conflict in Tibet" is an international armed conflict because Tibet was supposedly independent from 1911-1950.151 The Sub-Commission Progress Report includes under the rubric of population transfer the "implantation of settlers" or "settler infusion,"'5 2 but these are in most cases lawful. Settler implantations are banned under the Fourth Geneva Covention and Protocol I - and will be criminal if an International Law Commission draft code is adopted- only if they feature in occupation arising from an international war or colonial domination.Y5 3 The "occupation" must be clearly established, as it is in the Palestinian case. 5 4 There are many cases in which claims of "occupation" are problematic. For 147 Graham Fuller, Redraving the Jorld's Borders. 14 WORLD POLICY J. 11-30 (1997); Chaim Kaufman, Possible and impossible Solutions to Etinic Ciril Wars, 20 INI'L SECURIMT Spring 1996, at 136. 148.See Alfred De Zayas, The Right to One's Own Homeland: Ethnic Cleansing and the InternationalRight to One's Homeland, 6 CRLM. L.F. 257 (1995). 149. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of ivilians in Times of iar, Aug. 12, 1949, 75 U.N.T.S., 207. '. Tibet Support Group U.K., supra note 141, at 13. 151'..~ Id 1S2. Eri Kolodnr. Popu ',~ Th-Ef 1.'- F Yl Li LN''LL&POL 159(1994). 153.Report of the International Law Commission on the Mork of the Fort -third Session, U.N. GAOR, 46th Sess., Supp. No. 10, at 250, U.N. Doc. A46110 (1992). 154.See John Quigley, State Responsibilio,for Ethnic Cleansing, 32 U.C. DAVIS L REV. 341 (1998). 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OFASIANLAW example, Palley concludes that it is not clear that Russians were unlawfully settled in the Baltic states after their 1940 annexation by the Soviet Union, even though Baltic independence had been widely recognized and some key states continued their recognition thereafter. 155 A resettlement program not carried out under occupation may be undertaken with an illegitimate goal in mind, such as ethnic homogenization directed against minorities.'56 Human rights instruments, e.g., the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination or the Convention Against Genocide, may then be invoked. ' Absent occupation or a clear illegitimate aim, settler implantation does not violate international law no matter how objectionable the host population finds it to be. The transmigration program funded by the Suharto-era Indonesian government and the World Bank, which intended to permanently resettle Javanese peasants in outlying parts of the archipelago, is an example of settler implantation.'58 It was considered objectionable because of the inadequate preparations for resettlement, but was not condemned in international law, except as to East Timor, whose occupation by Indonesia the UN condemned as interfering with de-colonization. Tibetans have not been deported or forcibly relocated on account of their ethnicity. There is no occupation of Tibet arising from international conflict because it was not a state during the period of "independence" claimed by the 6migr~s. States did not recognize it as independent before or after Tibet's reintegration with China. It was long debated whether state recognition constituted a community as a state or merely declared that the community had attained the criteria of statehood. Until the 1990s, the declaratory view generally prevailed over the constitutive approach. State practice changed when the USSR and Yugoslavia dissolved. The recognition of the former Yugoslav states and non-recognition of Chechnya evidence the constitutive doctrine in operation.159 155. See Palley, supra note 139, at 240. 156. s" Susan Martin, Development and Politically Generated Migration, in 1 UNAUTHORIZED MIGRATION: ADDRESSING THE ROOT CAUSES 301-26 (Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development 1990). 157. Nicole Procida, Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Case Study: Employing United Nations Mechanisms to Enforce the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 18 SUFFOLK TRANSNAT'L L. REv. 655-66 (1995); Quigley, supra note 155. 158. See Margot Cohen, Losing Ground, 163 FAR E. ECON. REV., Mar. 30, 2000, at 36; Rcbc Elmhirst, A Javanese Diaspora? Gender and Identity Politics in Indonesia's Transmigration Resettlement Program, 23 WOMEN'S STUD. INT'L F. 487-500 (2000). 159 s" genrlly DUURSMA, supra note 132, at 111, 175; Thomas Grant, Betveen Diversity and Disorder: A Review of Jerri C. Duursma, Fragmentation and the International Relations of Micro- states: Self-determination and Statehood, 12 AM. U. J. INT'L L. & PRAC. 647 (1997); Duncan Hollis, Accountability in Chechnya: Addressing Internal Matters with Legal and Political International Norms, 36 B.C. L. Rev. 793 (1995); Trent Tappe, Chechnya and the State ofSelf-determination in a Breakavay Region of the Former Soviet Union: Evaluating the Legitimacy of Secessionist Claims, 34 COLUM. J. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA 'S COL ONY? Even if the declaratory doctrine were hegemonic and recognition not necessary to constitute a state, Tibet did not fulfill any of the four international law criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to conduct its own foreign relations. 160 A permanent population is construed by scholars as requiring that the claimed state's residents first live together as one people and form a national community, i.e., that the permanent population identify itself as a single cohesive unit. 161 Before the 1950s, most of the people who now term themselves Tibetans only had regional (Khampas, Amdowas, etc.) or sub- regional (Lhasans, Goloks, etc.) identities. Indeed, the Tibetan word now used for Tibetans, bod-pa, was originally applied by Khampas and Amdowas to U-Tsang people and not themselves. 162 Tibet also did not have a territory in the sense required for statehood because the Republic of China had a conflicting claim overall Tibetan areas. James Crawford, the leading specialist on the creation of states in international law, observes that for an applicant to be admitted to the UN as a state, it must be free of claims over its entire territory by existing states.163 Tibet had no government in the sense of the criterion for statehood. The Dalai Lama's bureaucracy administered political Tibet, while various Tibetan, Han, and Hui rulers controlled cultural Tibet in the period before 1950, albeit through formations not sufficiently centralized for some scholars to be convinced that a "state" in the accepted sense existed.164 These rulers had no legal authority to govern their areas as anything other than parts of China, any more than did "last emperor" Pu Yi and his Manchukuo minions have authority to administer Manchuria in 1931-1945 as anything other than a part of China, no matter how much "de facto independence" from China existed. That Manchukuo was recognized by few states' 65 and Tibet by none, shows that the world's states were cognizant of this lack of authority for independence. That China reasserted its control as soon as it could over Tibet and other territories lost to its administration during four decades of civil and international war demonstrates that China never retained its claim to these areas. Finally, old Tibet had no legal capacity to enter into foreign TRANSNAT'L L. 255 (1995). 16D. See Convention on Rights and Duties of States (Montevideo Convention), Dec. 26,1933,165 L.N.T.S. 19. 161. See Rebceteenings&ArEurV=%s Lc=== Lz-x 121 (1- cl 19M~ 162. Tara Corry, et al., Tibetans in Exile (Oxford University study), at http:/Ibrookland.mech.uva.edu.aufbameyltibetA-iteup/vriteup.htlml. 163.JAMES CRAWFORD, THE CREATION OF STATES IN INTERNATIONAL LAWv 37-38 (1979) 164. See Geoffrey Samuel, Tibet as a Stateless Society and Some Islamic Parallels, 61 J. ASIMZ STUD. 215 (1982). 165. PHILIP JESSUP, THE BIRTH OF NATIONS 334 (1974). 2001) COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW relations. Anziloti, the legal scholar and judge of the Permanent Court of International Justice, pointed out that by the sovereignty required of an independent state "is meant that the State has over it no authority other than that of international law."'166 Scholars underscore that the Montevideo Convention, in requiring the capacity to enter into relations with other states as a criterion of statehood, refers to independence in the same manner as Anziloti. 167 The classic international law treatise Oppenheim's states that sovereignty on the international plane means "legal authority which is not in law dependent on any other earthly authority."'168 Tibet was thus by no means sovereign. Even Britain, which tried to gain an advantage in Tibet by terming China's sovereignty "suzerainty," sought to negotiate with the Dalai Lama through the Chinese government. 169 As Crawford 170 argues, if a state is subject to the sovereignty of another entity, then it is incapable of entering into independent foreign relations and thereby cannot meet the criteria for statehood. Tibet was in precisely that situation. If Tibet was not a state, it could not have been occupied in an international conflict; thus the Fourth Geneva Protocol does not apply. Tibet is not recognized as a colony either by the UN Committee of 24 or any state; 171 Protocol I therefore does not apply. There has been no internal armed conflict in Tibet for a generation, so Protocol II does not apply. The characteristics of migrants to Tibet moreover are radically different from those of "settlers." Scholars, including some who support the 6migr6 cause, as well as the US government, have concluded that the vast majority of migrants to Tibet come at their own initiative. The minority of migrants with state employment receive the same benefits as similarly-placed Tibetans, while those who come as "temporary migrants" are second-class citizens in terms of social welfare. 172 Even the "lao Xizang" (long-resident non- Tibetans) have not fared well as "settlers." In the late 1990s, hundreds of them staged a sit-in in Lhasa to protest the erosion of their pensions by inflation. At the same time, ethnic Tibetans are entitled to certain preferential policies. Tibetans must, by law, occupy the highest state positions in the TAR. They are exempt from the "one-child policy" (see 166. CRAWFORD, suprdnote 164, at 51. 167. See HARRIS & ROSS, supra note 41, at 106-07. 168. JENNINGS & WAT-rs, supra note 162, at 122. 169. See MELVYN GOLDSTEIN, A HISTORY OF MODERN TIBET: THE DECLINE OF THE LAMAIST STATE4 5 (1989). 17. CRAWFORD, supra note 164, at 52. .See Barbara Crossette, As It Seeks Nev Status, Island Helps a UN. Panel, N.Y. TIMES, June 8, 1997, at 19. 172. See ERICKSON, supra note 122, at 206-09; Melvyn Goldstein, Outside Instigation and the Disturbances in Tibet: A Rejoinder to Sharlo, 2 J. CONTEMP. CHINA 94 (1993); Office of the President of the United States, Report to Congress of Extension of Waiver Authorityfor the People's Republic of China, 10 INT'L TRADE REP. (BNA) 919 (June 2, 1993). [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA S COLONY? below) and can be admitted to university with lower test scores than Han. 17 The population flow to Tibet is not sharply different from that to other PRC regions: most migrants enter urban areas, while the countryside remains populated mainly by local people. 174 The Tibetan areas are more rural than China proper and thus stay largely Tibetan, and in these areas, unlike in China proper, few migrants plan to become long-term residents, although some may stay on due to lack of opportunity in their place of origin. The Tibet case can thus be distinguished from Indonesia's transmigration program: most migration is not state-sponsored and most migrants do not intend to stay. Nor do Tibetans universally dislike the "Chinese presence" or object to all changes that it has brought; many Tibetans are reconciled to a multi-ethnic society and some benefit from it.175 Western leaders often invoke the dmigr6 idea of "population transfer" and argue that it threatens Tibetan ethnic continuity. US Secretary of State Colin Powell has stated that "the Chinese sending more and more Chinese in to settle Tibet... seems to be a policy that might well destroy that society"; 176 yet many new practices in Tibet that the dmigrds decry as culturally corrosive 177 enter through China proper but originate elsewhere. Billiards, a diversion for male unemployed Tibetans, is a Western invention. Karaoke, which many urban Tibetans enjoy, was born in Japan. Prostitution and drugs are universals. Some of these "vices" are also found in Dharamsala, the Tibetan 6migr6 capital, and even among Buddhist monks elsewhere, 178 while politicians in Tibet order the same ineffective anti-vice sweeps that occur elsewhere. 79 "Cultural erosion," such as the adoption of words of foreign origin, is a phenomenon in Dharamsala as much as is it in 'T.See JAN ,VONG, JAN WONG'S CHINA: REPORTS FROM ANOT-SO-FOREIGNCORRESFONDeT 98, 175 (2000). 174.See TIBET SUPPORT GROUP U.K., supra note 141, at 153. 75. See Id. at 154; WENYU QIN, SHENMI XUEYU: XIZANG SAN LISHI SHIMAN [MYSTERIOUS SNOWLAND: THREE TIBETAN HISTORICAL EVENTs] 219 (1993); ZHEN YU & ZHENLI. GL'O, ZHONGGUO ZANGZHUQU XANDAIHUA: LILUN, SHUIAN, ZHENGCE [MODERNIZATION OF CHINA'S TIBETAN AREAS: THEORY, PRACTICE, AND POLICY] 81 (1998); Nicholas Kristof, In Corner of Tibet, Chinese Now Predominate, N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 9, 1991, at Al; Maggie O'Kane, Sacred and Profane, GUARDIAN (London), Mar. 14, 1998, at 33; John Pomfret,In Ti beta Struggleofthe Soul, WASH. POST, July 16, 1999, at 1; Lisa Keary, Terrain of Struggle: the Tibetan Nation and the Chinese State 159 (1999) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University). 176. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Questions Sccretar) of State Designee Colin Powell (CNN television broadcast, Jan. 17, 2001). 17. See China's Tibet Poli' Reminiscent of CulturalRevoluiion. DalaiLama, supra note 124. 17. See Ajay Singh,LetterfromLittleLhasa, AM. SPECTATOR, Apr. 1999, at 60-63; Thailandto Host WorldBuddhism Summit Without Dalai Lama, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Nov. 2, 2000; Julian West, TibetansAccuseDalaiLama ofSpiritualBetrayal, SUNDAYTELEGRAPIi (London), Apr. 26, 1998, at 32. 179.Regional Government Chairman Raidi Intervicwed by Austrian Reporter (BBC television broadcast, Sept. 5, 1997). 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LA W Lhasa 80 and is not necessarily negative. Interestingly, while dmigr6 and Western leaders object to Han cultural influence in Tibet, they are not concerned about the effect of Western influences on traditional culture there. 18' Western analysts also do not consider that, alongside legitimate concern about Han chauvinism in Tibet, the complaints of some Tibetans about an "alien presence" may evince ethnocentrism, as do such complaints in many parts of the world affected by migration. Many objections to the erosion of Tibetan ethnic identity by migration seem akin to nativist discourse in developed countries. 82 Both Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's ultra-right Front National, and the Dalai Lama refer to "cultural genocide" in epitomizing the effects of migration on their native lands. 83 The 6migrds' talk of the impending obliteration through migration of "the rich traditions, centuries in the making, which have contributed to the Tibet culture' 184 evokes a condemnation by a conservative Oxford University don of the "ethnic displacement" of native Britons by migrants: The ordinary population [of native Britons], having lost its hegemony, might find it difficult to preserve much continuity or faith in its own values or future. A long national tradition developed over many centuries, could diminish for no better reason than its inability to control its own borders. 185 Ethnocentrism in Tibetan settlements in India moreover is a source of tension with Indians and mirrors key aspects of Han chauvinism in Tibet, as the "entrepreneurial" Tibetans disdain their "lazy" native Indian neighbors.'86 The characterization of the flow of migrants to Tibetan areas as "population transfer" is thus inapt and politically-motivated. Like other charges leveled in the discourse of Tibet-as-colony, it contributes nothing to our understanding of the Tibet Question and is detrimental to its solution. 180. See Mounteastle, supra note 64, at 190. '. See Dalai Lama in Slovakia Says Tibetans Facing Cultural Genocide (BBC television broadcast, Oct. 18, 2000. 182. See, e.g., SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER (1996). 183 Allison Tarmann, The Flap Over Replacement Migration, 28:4 POPULATIONTODAY 1 (2000) '". See TIBETAN YOUTH CONGRESS, supra note 50, at 20. 1s3. David Coleman, Identity Crisis, SPECTATOR, Jan. 6, 2001, at 1I. 186.See Mountcastle, supra note 64, at 177, 202. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COL ON? B. The "Outnumbered" Tibetans More than 93% of all PRC Tibetans in 1990 lived either in the TAR or one often Tibetan autonomous prefectures and two Tibetan autonomous counties in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnanprovinces. Less than one- half of one percent of Tibetans lived outside the TAR or these provinces.1 7 The non-TAR Tibetan areas are regarded as "ethnographic" (cultural) Tibet, as opposed to political Tibet, because they have not been ruled from Lhasa for one to two centuries. 188 The US government has termed Tibetan dmigrd claims about "Chinese" migration into Tibet "inaccurate, incomplete and misleading."'189 The TGIE assertion that "Chinese" outnumber Tibetans in greater Tibet is based on statistical sleight-of-hand in which the northeastern part of Qinghai is included in Tibet in order to show that 7.5 million "Chinese" there outnumber 6 million Tibetans. The TSGUK does the same in order to claim that 5 million to 5.5 million "Chinese" in greater Tibet in 1990 outnumbered the 4.6 million Tibetans and thus constituted a "new majority" in the Tibetan areas. 190 The TSGUK does so despite acknowledging that northeast Qinghai "has had a substantial Chinese population for centuries." In fact, the Han and Hui (Muslim Chinese) are an "old majority" in northeast Qinghai, which is not part of political or cultural Tibet. The historic Tibetan area of Amdo corresponds to much, but not all of Qinghai and came under the jurisdiction of the Chinese city of Xining in 1724. Xining, at the edge of the Tibet Plateau, was "a true Chinese frontier outpost for the centuries it has served as the last major Chinese stronghold on the route to Tibet."'191 Tibetans last ruled the city and its environs a thousand years ago. Under the Qing dynasty, northeast Qinghai was part of Gansu province, until Qinghai became a separate province in 1929. Most of Qinghai was ruled by imperial representatives (ambans), imperially- designated local chiefs (tusi) or Muslim warlords. Its northeast part was diverse; in fact, a leading Tibet scholar and supporter of the dmigrd cause, noting that the Dalai Lama was born in this area, has stated that "the Dalai Lama himself [came] from an area and a family that were not Tibetan- speaking.' ' 192 There was a Han and Hui majority in the Xining area, in what 87 .See Zhang, supra note 103, at 13-15. 's. See Melvyn Goldstein, THE SNoW LION AND THE DRAGON: CHiNA, TIBET AND TIlE D.LA LAMA 16 (1997). I9.Beijing s Backed by Administration on Unrest in Tibet, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 7, 1987, at Al. I9 .See Tibet Support Group U.K., supra note 141, at 159. '9 .Piper Rae Gaubatz, BEYOND THE GREAT WALL: URBAN FORM AND TRANSFORMATION O.' THE CHINESEFRONTIERS 55 (1996). 192. Elliot Sperling, EXLE AND DISSENT: THE HISTORICAL AND CULTUAL CON.TEXT34 (2000). 20011 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW is now Haidong (a prefecture detached from Xining in 1987) and in parts of Haibei Prefecture, well before the CCP took power.193 Only one Xining county became an (Hui and Tu) ethnic autonomous area; the Dalai Lama's birthplace, Pingan County, did not. Xunhua, the 10th Panchen Lama's birthplace, became a Salar minority autonomous county. Three other Haidong areas became Hui and/or Tu minority autonomous counties. Despite the long absence of Tibetan rule or demographic preponderance in Xining and Haidong, the 6migr~s claim these areas for Tibet because they contain 65% of the Qinghai population. Their incorporation into "Tibet" by dmigr6 leaders thus bolsters their argument that "China hopes to drown Tibetans in a sea of Chinese."' 194 Xining in 1990 had 1.087 million people, only 2.76% of whom were Tibetan. Haidong had 1.908 million, 8.6% of whom were Tibetan. 195 The two jurisdictions thus have about 194,000 Tibetans and 2.8 million non-Tibetans. That they are not part of Tibet is recognized even by some Western "Tibet activists"1 96 whose maps of Tibet include the TAR and all other Tibetan autonomous areas, but neither Xining nor Haidong. What of other prefectures in Qinghai? Han came to Haixi in the 1950s to develop the industrial city of Golmud, famed for its potash production. They migrated to Haibei, an ethnically-mixed hinterland of Xining with a Tibetan majority before 1949, to work on state farms. These two jurisdictions, unlike the four other Qinghai Tibetan autonomous prefectures, thus have a relatively low percentage of Tibetans. Table 2 shows the relative populations in the six autonomous prefectures. t97 Table 2: Population of the Six Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures in Qinghai, 1990 Jurisdiction Total Pop. % Tibetan % % Other Tibet- Pop. Han minorities ans Qinghai Auto. 1,460,000 49.19 circa 36.4 14.41 718,542 Haixi 312,000 9.94 circa 75.96 14.10 193. See Gaubatz, supra note 192, at 57-62; Jonathan Lipman, FAMILIAR STRANGERS, A HISTORY OF MUSLIMS IN NORTHWEST CHINA 160 (1998); Tibet Information Network, supra note 94, at 2. 194. Douglas Wade, Tibet Beginning to Drown in Sea of Chinese Migrants, S. CHINA MORNING POST, Jan. 30, 1994, at 7. 195. QINGHAI TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 175-76 (1991). 196. See Katia Buffretrille & Charles Ramble, TIBETAINS 1959-1999:40 ANS DE COLONISATION [TIBETANS 1959-1999:40 YEARS OF COLONIZATION] 18 (1998); TIBET SINCE 1950: SILENCE, PRISON OR EXILE (Melissa Harris & Sidney Jones eds., 2000). 19. Zhang, supra note 106, at 14; Sun & Li, supra note 91, at 37; Yan, supra note 60, at 30. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? 31,013 Haibei 258,000 20.16 52,336 46.12 33.72 Huangnan 182,000 63.74 115,813 10.99 25.27 Hainan 361,000 53.74 194,399 37.67 8.59 Guoluo 120,000 88.33 105,645 10.00 1.67 Yushu 227,000 96.48 219,336 3.08 0.44 Tibetans in Qinghai were almost 20% of all Tibetans in the PRC and about half the population of the six Qinghai autonomous prefectures in 1990.198 Tibetans and other minorities were 58.4% of Qinghai autonomous area populations in 1997.199 The proportion of Tibetans in Qinghai as a whole diminished sharply from 1952 to 1978. Their numbers however rose by over 48% in that period and by 102% from 1952-1999 or on average 2.85% per annum, slightly higher than the 2.77% average annual increase in the TAR from 1953 to 1999. Since 1978, the proportion of Tibetans in the Qinghai population has slightly increased, as shown in Table 3.200 Table 3: Number of Tibetans and the Percentage of Total Population of Qinghai 1949 1952 1978 1982 1990 1999 1933 circa 454,510 673,790 753,897 915,900 1,064,000 circa 438,500 400,000 - 27.5% 18.5% 19A% 20.4% 20.87% - Table 4 shows that about 35% of PRC Tibetans live in the Tibetan autonomous prefectures of Sichuan (Aba and Ganze), Yunnan (Deqen) and Gansu (Gannan) and two Tibetan autonomous counties (Muli in Sichuan and Tianzhu in Gansu).01 Table 4: Populations of Tibetan Autonomous Areas ofSichuan, Yunnan and Gansu, 1990 Jurisdiction Total Pop. % Tibetan Tibetan Pop. % Han % Other minl. Sichuan Auto. 1,708,700 60.30 circa 1,084,980 26.42 13.28 193.Zhang, supra note 103, at 12. 199. Z Ra_ m G n S zc : ckefD. ,cfA'Pc'$ R cf L ] 63 (I9 0'. QINGHA TONGJI NIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] supra note 75, at 37; XUEYUAN TIAN, et al., ZHONGGUO GESHENG QU SHAOSHU MINZU RENKOU [THE ETINIC MINORITY POPULATION OF EVERY PROVINCE AND REGION OF CHINA] 539 (1998). 2. QINGHAI TONGJINIANJIAN [QINGHAI STATISTICALYEARBOOK] supra note 196, at426;YU & GUO supra note 176, at 38; ZHANG, supra note 106, at 14; Sun & Li, supra note 91, at 37; Yan, supra note 60, at 30. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LA W Aba 765,000 48.41 375,551 28.60 22.99 Ganze 831,000 75.68 627,034 19.50 4.82 Muli 112,700 73.11 circa 82,395 Yunnan Degen 315,000 33.10 104,366 16.20 50.70 Gansu Auto. 791,800 41.96 332,184 50.80 7.24 Gannan 582,400 47.67 276,645 45.90 6.40 Tianzhu 209,400 26.52 55,539 66.67 6.80 In the four Tibetan autonomous prefectures outside Qinghai in 1990, Tibetans comprised 51.2% of the total population. Han were 27.6% and other ethnic groups were 21.2%.2 As in Qinghai, the Han in these prefectures concentrate at the edge of the Tibet plateau where they have been present since dynastic times. For example, about half the Han in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan live in Luding County, the eastern part of the prefecture that borders on Han areas of Sichuan.2°3 As in Qinghai, the TGIE claims as part of Tibet ethnically-diverse areas in Sichuan and Yunnan outside the Tibetan autonomous areas, 0 4 which further inflate the number of "Chinese settlers" in Tibet. As in Qinghai, the Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu Tibetan populations grew greatly from the 1950s to 1990s. Average per annum rates were Sichuan, 2.19%, Gansu, 2.14% and Yunnan, 1.79%. See Table 5.2o5 Table 5: Tibetan Populations in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan Province Early 1950s 1964 1982 1990 1999 Sichuan 580,000 (1950) 605,537 921,984 1,087,758 Gansu 204,630 (1953) 192,494 304,573 366,718 Yunnan 66,890 (1953) 65,258 95,925 111,335 120,700 Tibetans were about half the census population in Tibetan areas outside the TAR in 1990, while in the TAR the figure was almost 97%. Han Chinese were 26.9% of the population of "greater Tibet" and numbered about 1.52 million.20 6 Tibetans outside the TAR totalled 2,374,362 in 1990 (52.1% of autonomous area Tibetans); TAR Tibetans numbered 2,096,700 202. Yan, supra note 60, at 31. 203 Karl Ryavec, Research Note: Regional Dynamics of Tibetan Population Change in Eastern Tibet, ca. 1940-1982, 20 POPULATION & ENV'T 248 (1999). 204 See Tibetan Youth Congress, supra note 50, at 14. 2052 SICHUAN SHENG RENKOU PUCHA BANGONGSHI [SICHUAN PROVINCE CENSUS OFFICE], SICHUAN ZANGZU RENKOU 22 [SICHUAN'S TIBETAN POPULATION] (1994); TIAN, supra note 201, at 420,462, 521; YUNNAN TONGJI NIANJIAN 2000 [YUNNAN STATISTICAL YEARBOOK 2000] (2000). 206. Lixiong Wang, Xizang: Ershiyi Shyi Zhongguo de Ruanlei [Tibet: China's Twenty-first Century Soft Spot], 1 ZHANLUE YU GUANLI [STRATEGY AND MANAGEMENT] 21 (1999). [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHNA 'S COLONY? (46.9% of Tibetans). 207 With 4,275,500 persons of all ethnic groups in Tibetan areas outside the TAR and a total TAR population of2,180,520, the 4,471,062 Tibetans in the Tibetan autonomous areas were therefore 69.3% of these areas' 6,456,020 people. These figures have two drawbacks. First, they are based on the 1990 census, and thus are dated; 2000 census figures may be available in late 2001. The Dalai Lama first made the claim that 7.5 million "Chinese" (excluding soldiers) outnumber 6 million Tibetans in Tibet in his Five Point Peace Plan in 1987, however. 08 He did so even though the dmigrds had just claimed that in 1985-1986 there were only 6.2 million "Chinese" civilians in greater Tibet.209 However, since the claim of 7.5 million non-Tibetans in Tibet was already made before the 1990 census, it is appropriate to answer it with data from the first census held after the claim was initially advanced. The second drawback of the 1990 census statistics about the number of Tibetans in the Tibetan autonomous areas is that these figures include only those persons whose household registrations (Itkou) are in the Tibetan areas or who had lived there for at least one year prior to July 1, 1990. Statements about migration to the Tibetan areas based mainly on those who transfer their hukou may be misleading; for example, the conclusion that 70% of the 98,500 migrants to the TAR in 1964-1994 were ethnic Tibetans from outside the TAR210 does not account for "temporary migrants." Most migrants who do not transfer their hukou are apt to be non-Tibetans. Temporary migrants should thus be taken into account, although with the recognition that they do not impact Tibetan society to the same extent as fully-resident migrants. The number of "Chinese" who dmigr6 leaders and supporters claim "China has settled" in Tibet, 7.5 million, has not changed since 1987211 and is based on a conjecture of"at least one unregistered Chinese against every two registered ones."212 There are no scholarly estimates of the unregistered- to- registered "Chinese" ratio in Tibetan areas, although the TSGUK has stated that "the ratio of Chinese who work in the TAR on a short-term basis is much higher than in the other autonomous areas."213 If the ratio claimed by the TGIE is applied, however, to the 1990 count of non-Tibetans with hukou in Tibetan areas, there would have been a total of 2.98 million 207.yu & Guosupra note 176, at 38; Yan, supra note 60, at 30. 208. Dalai Lama, supra note 51. '0. See DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, supra note 119; John Elliot, AnAppeal to the West From a Culture in Eile, FIN. TINIES, Oct. 9, 1987, at 6. 210. MaRong, XIzANGDERENKOUYU SREHUI [TIBET'S POPULATIONAND SOCIETY] 65 (1996). 2n. See Michael Hoffman, Tibet Impaled on Its Own Histor., MAINICHI DAILY NEWS, June 1, 2000, at 9; Tibetans Confident of Change, supra note 124. 2'2. DEPARTM,1ENT OF INFORMATION AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, supra note 119. 213. Tibet Support Group U.K., supra note 141, at 154. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW registered and non-registered non-Tibetans. That number, however, includes 465,000 people with hukou in Tibetan areas who are neither Han nor Tibetan and who 6migr6 leaders may or may not regard as "Chinese." It also takes in double-counted people. These persons' hukou are elsewhere, but they were included in the 1990 census because they had lived in a Tibetan area for a year or more and are thus part of the "registered" population to which the ratio is applied. Because their hukou is not in a Tibetan area, they may also be counted as among the "unregistered" group, however. The number of such people is considerable: 17.5% of Han counted in the TAR in 1990 fell into this category.214 Assuming the TGIE's ratio to apply, the number of Han with and without hukou in the Tibetan areas in 1990 was thus likely no more than 2.2 million and other non-Tibetans no more than 600,000. Indeed, the TSGUK puts the number of Han and Hui in all Tibetan autonomous areas at 2.5 million to 3 million. 215 Their conclusion accords with that of the human rights organization Asia Watch that the number of non-Tibetans in Tibetans areas is much lower than 7.5 million.216 Not only is the 6migr6 claim exaggerated, but it is also reasonable to regard migrants who keep their hukou elsewhere as having less impact on local society than long-term residents. This group is not entitled to social benefits, such as low-cost education and health care. Most do not bring their children to Tibet, they do not intend to stay long and they remain in Tibetan areas on official sufferance.217 Studies of the number of migrants in all Tibetan autonomous areas are few and even estimates of non-Tibetans in the TAR or in Lhasa differ widely and are often vague.2 18 A US official has spoken of "hundred of thousands of non-Tibetans [who] have come to Tibet in recent years., 219 "Independent experts" are cited as asserting that "several hundred thousand Chinese migrant workers, professionals, soldiers and small entrepreneurs live in Tibet., 220 The TSGUK states that in the late 1980s there were 60,000- 140,000 migrants in the TAR and in the mid-1990s 250,000-300,000 214 . See Wang, supra note 207. 25 See Tibet Support Group U.K., supra note 14 1, at 158. 216 Asia Watch, MERCILESS REPRESSION: HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN TIBET 73-74 (1990). 217.See Goldstein, supra note 189, at 94; Tianlu Zhang & Rongqing Huang, ZHONOHUO SHAOSHU MINzU RENKOU DIAOCHA YANJIU [INVESTIGATIVE STUDY OF CHINA'S ETHNIC MINORITY POPULATION] (1996); Tibet People's Broadcasting Station (BBC radio broadcast, June 6, 1992). 218. See Erickson, supra note 122, at 200-03; Yan, supra note 60, at 31-32; Sautman & Eng, supra note 108. 219. The Situation of Tibet and Its People: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations, 105th Cong. 13 (1997) (statement of Jeffrey A. Bader, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs). 220. Reese Erlich, Freedom to Worship, Not to Support DalaiLama, INTER PRESS SERVICE, Nov. 26, 1996. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA"S COLONY? "Chinese" in the TAR, including soldiers.2" US scholars who visited the TAR in 1991 received an official "guess" of 100,000 migrants.?- Chan reports unofficial figures that show that non-Tibetans in the TAR number about 150,000.223 Gittings states that "Chinese" in the TAR, including the army, "may number two or three hundred thousand."2' 4 The US official's estimate of the Lhasa prefecture population - a registered population of 400,000 (including 52,000 Han) and a "floating population" of about 200,000,225 would yield only a quarter million non-Tibetans, assuming that all "floaters" are non-Tibetan, which of course they are not. Emigrd sources, however, have claimed 1.7 million or even 2 million "Chinese" in the TAR, with 638,000 in Lhasa alone.226 Emigr6 leaders often assert that the PRC authorities are dispatching ever-increasing numbers of non-Tibetans to "settle" Tibet. 2 7 More than 100,000 Han went to Tibet as administrators and service professionals from the 1950s to 1970s. From 1980 until at least the early 1990s, however, net transfers of cadres and net migration of "permanent" residents to Tibet have been negative.228 The total number of Han and Hui with hukou in the TAR at the end of the 1990s was much lower than in 1980 and the same as in the mid-1980s, i.e., some 72,000. Table 6 shows the number of Han and Hui in Tibet during this period,' 9 Table 6: Number of Han and Hui in Tibet, by Year Year Han Hui 1980 122,400 1982 91,720 1985 70,932 1,529 22. Tibet Support Group U.K., supra note 141, at 96, 106, 153. .Harold Saunders, et al, TIBET: ISSUES FOR AMERICANS 9-11 (1992). n'. Vivien Chan, Tibet Fears Sparked by China Flood of Workers, S. CHINA MORNING POST, Apr. 2, 1996, at 1. z". John Gittings, Analysis Tibet: One Country Two Systems -Mark 11., GUARDIAN (London), Apr. 14, 1998, at 15. 25. See The Situation of Tibet and Its People: Hearing Before the Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations, supra note 220. 226 Tsering, supra note 2, at 64. 227. See John Pomfret, A Wave of ChineseJob-scckers 7hreatens to Swamp 7Ibet's Culture, INT'L HERALD TRIBUNE, Nov. 2, 1999, at 5. .. Judith Banister, Impacts of lgration to China 's Border Regions, in MOVING TARGETS: DFIOGRAPHY AND SECURITY (forthcoming 2001); Shangzhi Sun, XIZANG ZIZItIQU JNGI DIU [ECONOMffC GEOGRAPHY OF THE TIBET AUTONOMOUs REGION] 36-37 (1994); Yasheng Huang, China's Cadre Transfer Policy Toward Tibet in the 1980s, 21 MODERN CHINA 198 (1995); Wang, supra note 207, at 27. 22 .See XIZANG TONGJI NLANJIAN 1999 [TIBET STATISTICAL YEARBOOK 1999] 36 (1999); XIZANG TONGji NANjzAN 2000 [TIBET STATISTICAL YEARBOOK 2000] 33(2000); Wang, supra note 207, at 28. 2001) COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW 1990 67,407 2.269 1993 64,890 1995 67,772 2,357 1996 68,725 1997 69,205 1,933 1998 73,841 1,848 1999 70,145 2,098 The "registered" Han and Hui are highly concentrated in Lhasa. In 1990, two-thirds of Han with their hukou in the TAR (44,939) resided in the Lhasa "prefecture" (technically Lhasa is a municipality, with a city and counties) and half lived in Lhasa City. Of those living in Lhasa prefecture, 90% (40,400) lived within the city limits and were 29% of the city population. 230 The congregation of non-Tibetans in the cities creates a misleading impression of a Tibet overwhelmed by outsiders. Troops in Tibetan areas should also be taken into account, although their impact on Tibetan society is less than that of more socially-integrated migrants. The estimates are again wide-ranging. In his Five Point Peace Plan, the Dalai Lama23 1 asserted that China had 300,000-500,000 troops in greater Tibet, 250,000 of them in the TAR, while "Western estimates put the number at tens of thousands. ' 32 June Dreyer, a specialist on Chinese minorities and the PLA, stated in the late 1980s that there were about 30,000 troops in the TAR,233 whilejournalists have written of 40,000 troops.234 The head of TIN, Robbie Barnett, has reported estimates of 40,000-50,000 troops in the TAR and himself estimates the number at 80,000-100,000.231 Other figures for troops in "Tibet" are 40,000-60,000 soldiers and paramilitary police [wujing],236 50,000,237 250,000,238 300,000 soldiers and wujing,239 and 250,000-500,000.240 In 1997, a TAR official denied that the PLA had 300,000 troops in Tibet and stated that "the number was under 200,000. "24I 2 30.See Zhang, supra note 106, at 17; Zhang & Huang, supra note 218, at 37; Pomfret, supra note 176, at 1; Wang, supra note 207, at 28. 23. Dalai Lama, supra note 51. 232. Dalai Lana Urgea Chtm to Sham Pow-r with Tibet, ASSIATED PRESS, Junte 1, 1988. 233 Ke"y Dumaugh, TIBET: DISPUTED FACTS AmD THE SITUATION IN TIBET 23-24 (1988). 234. See Wong. supra note 174, at 177; O'Kane, supra note 176, at 33. 235. Robbie Barnett, Testimony on Tibet to the Federal Republic of Germany's Bundestag, S. CHINA MORNING POST, June 19, 1995. 236. Lena Sun, Ethnic Animosities Reborn as Chinese Traders Flood Tibet, WASH. POST, Sept. 15, 1994, at A27. 237 Speaking Our Language, ECONOMIST, Aug. 8, 1987, at 26. Jim Mann, Tibetans Begin to Fear that Peking May Never Let Dalai Lama Return, L.A. TIMES, June 22, 1986, at 8. 239. Authorities in Tibet Brace for Renewed Violence, UPI NEWS, Mar. 3, 1990. 240. Tibetan Statistics Often Contradictory, DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, Nov. 2, 1994. 2 4 .Mark O'Neill, OfficialDeniesArmyPuts Burden on Tibet, S. CHINAMORNING POST, Sept. 8, 1997, at 8. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? A higher official termed the claim of 250,000 troops in Tibet "sheer lies and rumour-mongering." 242 It is not clear whether the questioners and officials were referring to the TAR or greater Tibet. Expectedly, the dmigrds and their supporters provide the highest estimates. The TYC, citing a 1985 TGIE document, claims that there are 500,000 troops in greater Tibet.243 Jane Bay puts the number at 400,000244 and a work by an dmigrd-US group states that there are 500,000 troops in the TAR alone.245 Even if there were a quarter-million troops in "Tibet," this would hardly be evidence of an "occupation" directed against Tibetans. Greater Tibet amounts to about one-fourth of all PRC territory, so it would not be unusual to find one-tenth of China's army of 2.5 million2 46 stationed there. India, with the world's fourth largest army, has serious border disputes with China along a 4,000 km Tibetan frontier and has an "anti-China" defense minister. 247 As many as 300,000 Indian soldiers are on the Tibetan frontier in times of crisis,248 and at least 150,000 are there in less tense times.249 While there are more non-Tibetans in Tibetan areas than before internal migration in China accelerated in the mid-1980s, the assertion that most migration is officially-sponsored and has a malicious intent is not proven. Tibetans are far from being singled out by being overwhelmed by migrants. The proportion of "registered" Han in the population of the Tibetan areas is only half the proportion of Han in PRC minority areas generally (54.6% in 1997).250 The outsider presence in Tibetan areas is comparable to that in Beijing, where 3.3 million "temporary migrants" live in a city of 12 million25' and are resented by many native Beijing people. Officials and experts sent to Tibet hardly go there to make their fortune: they now generally are posted for only three-year terms - with half that time often spent on home leave - rather than the previous eight-year terms. Most other Han and Hui migrants to Tibetan areas are plebian and bent on returning 242.Regional Government Chairman Raidi Interviewed bv Austrian Reporter supra note 180. 243. Tibetan Youth Congress, supra note 51. 244.Jane Bay, PRECIOUS JEWELS OF TIBET: A JOURNEY TO THE ROOF OF THE WORLD 108 (1998). 245. TibetanNyingmaReliefFoundation, FROM THEROOFOFTHE WORLD: REFUGEESOFTIBET 50 (1992). 246. Holger Jensen, China Overplaying Taiwan Cards, WASH. TIMES, Mar. 1, 2000, at A14.247 .See China Bigger Threat to lndia than Pakistan:Def ense Minister AGINCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, May 3, 1998. 248. Brahma Chellaney, India Moves to Defuise Tensions with China, ClRiSTiAN Sc. MONITOR, June 12, 1987, at 10.2 49.Hands Across the Himalayas, ECONOMIST, Sept. 11, 1993, at 31; Teresa Poole, China: Draconian Family Planning Has Desired Effect, INDEPENDENT (London), Jan. 12,1998, at !1. 25.See ZHONGGUO RENMIN GONGHEGUO ZILIAO SHOUCE [HANLDBOOK OF DATA OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA], supra note 200, at 63. 25 .See LeilaAbboud, Schools Keep Afigrants'Educatian Hopes Afloat, HONG KONG 1!,=4IL, Jan. 18, 2001, at5. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LA W home when they have some savings.252 The social profile and impermanence of these migrants thus greatly contrasts with that of classic colonists. C. Family-planning and "Demographic Aggression" Apart from Han migration, family-planning also figures in the charge of "demographic aggression" in Tibet. Some 6migr~s or supporters who have spent time in Tibet and seen the many large families do not agree that the number of Tibetans is diminishing or is even being involuntarily retarded. Barbara Erickson concludes: Tibetans are more numerous today than at any time in recent history. Population growth has been rapid and continuous and there is no sign that China wants to wipe out the Tibetan race.253 Those who do not concede that the Tibetan population has grown claim that there were as many Tibetans in 1950 as there are today. They argue that "demographic annihilation" and family planning have prevented growth despite the overall decline in mortality. Thus, Yangcheng Kikhang asserts that: [China's family-planning] policy [is] imposed by a colonial power through the act of military occupation. The resulting birth control programme has had a devastating impact on the Tibetan population which, it is widely agreed, was around six million before China's invasion in 1950.254 It is, however, not "widely agreed" that the ethnic Tibetan population of the PRC in 1950 was around 6 million. An atlas edited by Sun Yat-sen in 1899 gave this figure, but the basis for the estimate is now thought to have involved all Tibetans in the world."' Several years later, Britain's secret agent Sarat Chandra Das came up with roughly the same figure, based on projections from the number of monks listed in the Lhasa archives. 56 The American Tibetologist William Rockhill, however, estimated that there were 3 million Tibetans. 7 As we have seen, the Panchen Lama estimated the 252 See Lixioung Wang, TIAN ZANG: XIZANG DE MINGYUN [SKY BURIAL: THE TIBET FATE] (1998); Sautman & Eng, supra note 108; Wang, supra note 207. 253. Erickson, supra note 122, at 194. 254. Yangchen Kikhang, Women Face Cultural Genocide on the Roof of the World, in GENDER AND CATASTROPHE 110-116 (Ronit Lentin ed.,1997). 256 See Zhang, supra note 106, at 4. 2Sarat Chandra Das, Monasteries of Tibet, 1 J. ASIATIC SOC'Y OF BENGAL 105-16 (1905). 257 William W. Rockhill, The Ethnology of Tibet, U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM REPORT, Part 2 [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHIM4 S COLONY? number ofPRC Tibetans to be 3 million in 1962, as did Richardson."' Karan, writing in the mid-1970s, states that "a population of three million [Tibetans] may not be far from correct for the present." ' Meanwhile, estimates of the population of what is now the TAR by the Lhasa government or by foreign visitors generally ranged from 1 to 1.5 million.-' While retrospectively doubling the number of Tibetans in 1950, the 6migr6s claim that there are presently also 6 million Tibetans, a figure used by the Dalai Lama for two decades or more."' The implication is that the population level has stagnated. Viewed in historical perspective, however, population increases in the last half-century depart from traditional Tibet's low rate of natural growth caused by a sharply differentiated society, a low level of technology, reliance solely on local medicines, pervasive monasticism and polyandric practices. See Table 7.21 Table 7: Estimated Number of Tibetans (in Millions) in Areas Now the PRC and TAR Year All PRC Ethnic Tibetans TAR Tibetans 1268 1.0 1737 -- 1.0 (.316 monks; .127 lay families) 1900 1.0 1935 -- .7-1.0 1953 2.552 1.05 1957 1.270 1960 1.197 1964 2.501 1.251 (1895). 2. Richardson, supra note 79, at 6. 5. Pradyumna Karan, THE CHANGING FACE OF TIBET: THE IMPACTOF CHINESE COMM. NIST IDEOLOGY ON THE LANDSCAPE 52 (1976). 260. See Orleans, supra note 80, at 120. 261 Bill Corbett, [Untitled], UPI NEWS, Oct. 22, 1980; Dalai Lana Celebrates GoldenJubilee as Tibetan HeadofState, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Dec. 3,2000; Michael Keats, Letcr fromLhasa: Hello andBye-Be, UPI NEWS, Oct. 13, 1980.262- Ju~t hB .On~QAt GP kL 22.23 1S7); " rr wie" 2, 33 ;ZHONGGUO RENKOUXIZANG FENCE [CHINA'S POPULATION: TIBETVOLUy.ME] 52-53 (1988); Melvyn GoldsteinNewPerspectires on Ti betan Fertilit ,and Population Decline, 8 AM. ETHNOLOGIST 721-29 (198 1); William W. Rockhill, Tibetfromn Chinese Sources, J. OFTHE ROYALASIATIC SOCIETY OF GREATBRITAIN& IRELAND (1891); Tibet Backgrounder(14): Population, XINIIUA, Feb. 26,1991; Zhang, supra note 106, at 3-4. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW 1982 3.870 1.787 1990 4.593 2.096 1995 -- 2.269 1999 -- 2.388 The claims of "demographic aggression" usually imply that China is engaged in forced intermarriage and imposes on Tibetans a regime of birth control more onerous than that among the Han in order to marginalize Tibetans demographically. The Dalai Lama has stated that "Chinese, especially ex-servicemen, are being settled in Tibet and encouraged to marry locally. The aim is to make us a minority in our own land. At the same time they are forcing strict family planning rules on my people. ' 63 The likely sources of the first part of this claim are two 1970s refugee accounts, one published by the Dalai Lama's Office and the other individually. 264 These assert that Tibetan women have been pressured into marrying Han men, while marriages between Han women and Tibetan men are prohibited. One Western writer has alleged a policy of "diluting Tibetan racial stock through forced intermarriages that amount to 'ethnic cleansing,' '2 65 while even the US scholar Warren Smith repeats the charge of coerced intermarriages. 266 Assertions of coerced or encouraged Han-Tibetan marriages are fanciful. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Han CCP members and soldiers were forbidden to marry Tibetans because of fear that this might create ethnic tension. Some Han-Tibetan marriages formed anyway.267 Necessarily, most such marriages involved Han men and Tibetan women because the vast majority of the Han in Tibet were men, owing to the conception in China proper that women would have great difficulty in adjusting to the rigors of life in impoverished Tibet. There were few "mixed" marriages, however: a reporter who visited Tibet at the end of this period could aver that "there is almost no intermarriage. 268 PRC officials have insisted that the state does not encourage intermarriage between Han and minorities. At least into the 1980s intermarriage was discouraged in Xinjiang.269 The generally laissez faire policy toward intermarriage in China today contrasts with the situation in Tibetan 6migrd communities, where women and, in some places, both sexes are admonished to maintain "racial purity" by not marrying or even 263. Tibet Issue Is "Alive and Kicking, " Says Dalai Lama, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Sept. 13, 1987. 264. See Paljor Choeden, LIFE IN RED FLAG PEOPLE'S COMMUNE 21 (1978); Kunsang Paljor, TIBET, THE UNDYING FLAME 44 (1971). 265. PiCo Iyer, China's Buddha Complex, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 3, 1995, § 4, at 15. 266. Smith, Jr., supra note 90, at 560. 267.See Lena Sun, Tibet Family Lives in Two Worlds, WASH. POST, Sept. 17, 1994, at A8. 268. Michael Keats, Letter from Lhasa: Hello and Bye-bye, UPI NEWS, Oct. 13, 1980. 269. Graham Eamshaw, Relations with Minority in Northwest China Still Not Ideal, REUTERS, June 4, 1986; Intermarriage Between Ethnic Groups Are on Increase, XINHUA (China), Feb. 15, 1989. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA S COLONY? dating non-Tibetans.27 ° It is also asserted that in order to encourage Han to move to Tibet, urban Han who marry Tibetans are allowed two children.271 This liberality can hardly induce Han migration. China's natal program is inaccurately termed a one child-policy,272 but officially the average outcome is a 1.8- child-per-family policy273 and it actually is anywhere from a 2.1- to 2.6-child policy. A PRC official has been quoted as stating that 90% of rural families have two children and others have more.2 74 Only six of China's 31 provinces limit most rural families to one child; in 19 provinces a rural couple is allowed a second child if the first is a girl and the remaining six permit rural households two children regardless of the first-born's gender.275 Peasants primarily seek to have a son, and ultra-sound and sex-selective abortions now guarantee that 80% of rural births are male. 6 If they have additional children, their land will have to be further divided among those offspring who decide to farm. Many peasants no longer work the land, moreover, but are employed by township and village enterprises and have a diminished need for more children than they are allowed. Some peasants can avoid registering an out-of-quota birth; others are too poor to be fined for having one. Many rural officials no longer discourage couples from having additional children because they profit from fines while faking family planning reports. 277 There is no strict one-child policy in urban China. Among urban families, 30% have more than one child. For the remaining 70% of urban families, which have only one child, the children of those families would be allowed to have two children under an exception to the policy which allows them to do so if they marry another only child.278 Many urban couples ineligible for this exception can afford to pay the fine for having a second 270. See Religious Beliefs Unite Tibetans, TORONO STAR, Mar. 9, 1990, at C4; Mountcastle, supra note 64, at 202. 271 See Tibet Information Network, SURVEY OF BIRTH CONTROL POLICIES IN TIBET 12 (1994); Robert Barnett, Birth Control Rule Revealed, S. CHINA MORNING POST, Oct. 7, 1992, at 11. 272. A. onJow'e, Cwj ,. Th.- O. T o, .r -r rF CA" . &.0," 15' ., - 1 .o 2t1,i 273. Gwynne Dyer, Battle Against Overpopulation Is Being Won, GAZETE (Monteal), Mar. 20, 1999, at B5. 274. Elisabeth Rosenthal, Rural Flouting of One-child Policy Undercuts China's Census, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 14,2000, at A6. 27. See Poole, supra note 250. 276. Mary Kwang, 67% of One-childFamilies in China Have Son, STRAITs TIMES (Singapore), Feb. 1,2000. 277. See M. Giovanna Merli & Adrian Raferty, Are Births Underreported in Rural China? Manipulation ofStatisticalRecords in Response to China'sPopulation Policies, 37 DEMOGRAPHY 109- 26 (2000); John Ponfret, Chinese Search for New Values, WASH. POST, Sept. 26, 1999, at Al; Rosenthal, supra note 275.271. See China Relaxes One-ChidldPolicy: QO9cial, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Jan. 31,2000. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW child.279 The reduced birthrate in China is increasingly based not on coercive power, but on acceptance of population control or agreement with the state that shao sheng, kuaifu (fewer births means getting rich faster). 280 There is thus little incentive for a Han to move to a Tibetan area to intermarry and have multiple children. In fact, most Han in Tibetan areas live at urban sites where they face more strictly-enforced family planning policies than in their places of origin. Under TAR birth-planning rules, Han members of the "floating population" who have an out-of-quota birth are to be fined 8,000 yuan, a sum which, at the time of enactment, was the equivalent of about two years of an average wage.281 Even if the PRC encouraged intermarriage, that would not tip the demographic balance in favor of the Han. The vast majority of offspring of Han-Tibetan marriages - said to be 10% of marriages in some Tibetan areas - are officially registered as Tibetans and are so regarded by other Tibetans. 82 Incidentally, there has been one scheme that did encourage intermarriage involving Tibetans, but it was not "the Chinese" attempting to absorb Tibetans. Instead, the ethnic Tibetan majority government of neighboring Bhutan offered the Nepalese minority financial inducements to intermarry, while mandating that all minorities speak Tibetan and wear Tibetan dress. 283 _migr6 leaders also allude to forced abortions and "discriminatory birth control practices" affecting Tibetans. 84 A former U.S. Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, Julia Taft, has noted however that Tibetans "receive preferential treatment along with 54 other minority ethnic groups in marriage and family planning policies. 2 85 TIN has stated that "Chinese who work in the Tibet Autonomous Region face much stricter limits than Tibetans on family size." 286 The TAR was the last PRC region to establish a birth-planning regime. Family planning was first advocated for Han cadres, workers and 279. Seth Faison, Chinese Happily Break the "One Child"Rule, N.Y. TIMES, Aug. 17, 1997, at 1. 28. Cecilia Milwertz, ACCEPTING POPULATION CONTROL: URBAN CHINESE WOMEN AND THE ONE-CHILD FAMILY POLICY (1997). 2s1. Tibet Autonomous Region, Tibet Provisional Procedures for Birth-Planning Management (For Trial Use), CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 82. 22. See Erickson, supra note 122, at 235; Wong, supra note 174, at 173-75; Kristof, supra note 176, at Al. 283. See Christopher Thomas, Buddhist Bhutan Fights to Stem Nepalese Cultural Tide, TIMES (London), Apr. 2, 1994. 284. Human Rights Group Claims Increased Repression in Tibet, ASSOCIATED PRESS, Jan. 6, 2001. 285. U.S. Policy Considerations on the 40th Anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising and the Dalai Lama 's Flight into Exile: Hearing Before the House Comm. on International Relations, 106th Cong. 6 (1999) (statement of Julia V. Taft, Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues, U.S. Department of State). 286. Tibet Information Network, supra note 272, at 12. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA "S COLONY? staff in 1975 and enforced among them from 1980 as a one-child policy 8 7 It was first advocated among Tibetan cadres, workers and staff in 1983 and enforced from 1985 as a two-child policy.28 8 The 1985 regulations allowed urban residents other than cadres, workers and staff to have two children and a third child under certain circumstances. 28 9 Under the 1983 directive, urban Tibetans were permitted two children, peasants and herdsmen three children, or four under certain circumstances. Tibetans living in border regions or sparsely settled areas or who were members of small minorities had no restrictions. Documents issued several years later specified however that there are no birth limits for rural Tibetans, but only "propaganda and education.' '290 The TAR issued procedures for birth-planning management in 1992 that carried on the 1986 regulations, but no longer entitled any Han urban residents to two children.291 Article 10 continued the policy of not advocating rural birth quotas. TAR Committee for Family Planning head Punbur Zhoima has stated that sterilization is available only for Tibetans with three or more children and abortion not at all.292 Rural women are urged to have "no-more-than- three," but there is no mechanism to impose this ideal and a TAR official has stated that in rural areas "there are no specific restrictions - people can have 10 children if they want. '293 Erickson confirmed that peasants and nomads she interviewed were unaware of any restraints on family size and related that "[t]he Tibetans I met never spoke of birth control as a Chinese plot to exterminate their race. Many of them, in fact, supported family planning. " 94 The number of high parity Tibetan women is decreasing, but still high. In 1989, 53% of all births among PRC Tibetans were to women who, as a result, had three or more children, compared to 14.2% for Han in China 287.See Tibet Autonomous Region Party Committee, Circular on Grasping Birth Control, CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 57; Tibet Autonomous Region People's Govemment,Provisiona!Birth PlanningRulesforHan-Chinese Cadres, Ifiorkcrs. andStaqfTibr ing in Tibet (lTibet GovernmentDocumentNo. 39/1979), CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 58. 288. See GUANYUXIZANG ZIZHUQU DERENKOU YU JIHUA SHENGYU GONGZUO [ONTHETIBET AUTONOMoUS REGION AND FAMILY PLANNING WORK] 3 (1998); Thomas Scharping, Guest Editor's Introduction, CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Spring 2000, at 5, 8; TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION PARTY COMMIrrEE, Directive on UfoldingBirth Planning Throughout the Region, CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 59. 289.See Tibet Autonomous Region Leading Group for Birth Planning, Heoss on the Revision of Tibet Government No. 39/1979 (Tibet Birth-planning Document No. 111986). CHINESE SOC. & ANTHROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 64.29 .See d.; Tibet Autonomous Region People's Government, supra note 288, at 59. 291.See Tibet Autonomous Region, Tibet Provisional Procedures for Birth-Planning Management (TibetBirth-planningDocument No. 6/1992), CHINESE SOC. &ANritROPOLOGY, Summer 2000, at 82 (Art. 11). Tibetans Seek Family Planning, CHINA DAILY, June 29, 1999, at 4.293 Conor O'Clery, A Week Inside Tibet, IRISH TIES, June 27, 1988, at 62. 294. See Erickson, supra note 122, at 195-96. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW as whole.295 In 1998, the figure for Tibetans was 36.3%.296 TIN alleged in 2000 that official figures show that overall TAR net population growth dropped by over half from 1.82% per annum in 1990-1994, to only 0.73% in 1994-1998, less than the 1.02% per annum growth for the PRC as a whole. The official statistical yearbook states otherwise: it records a natural growth rate in 1994-1998 of 1.14%.97 The birth rate and family size in the TAR (23.20 and 5.25 in 1999) remain far above the national averages (15.23 and 3.63) and the average for all other regions in China.298 Less is known about family planning in Amdo. Qinghai's temporary provisions of 1982 applied only to Han, who were allowed one child in urban areas, but sometimes two in the countryside.299 Each autonomous prefecture was to work out its own measures and submit these to the provincial government.3 00 Evidently this occurred in some Tibetan prefectures because at a 1988 demonstration in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture by a few monks and hundreds of high school students, some protesters demanded an end to family planning practices. 30 1 In 1992, Qinghai promulgated family-planning regulations under which Tibetans in cities and agricultural areas are permitted two children or three in pastoral areas.30 2 Where one spouse is Han, the rule applicable to the minority side or local regulation applies. 30 3 These are general Qinghai rules and autonomous prefectures are entitled to enact their own regulations with provincial-level approval. In Gansu's Tibetan prefecture and Tibetan county, urban Tibetans may have two children, but those in the "semi-agricultural, semi-pastoral areas" are allowed three.30 4 Regulations issued in 1978 in part of Kham - Ganze Prefecture, Sichuan - allowed urban Tibetans three children and rural Tibetans four.30 5 This changed in 1989. The Ganze Tibetan birth rate (20.65) was lower in 1990 than in the TAR (27.60), but household size (5.12) was still much 295 ZHONGGUO RENKOU TONGJI NIANJIAN [CHINA POPULATION STATISTICAL YEARBOOK] 199, 204 (1996). 296. Official Says No Mandate for Sterilization in Tibet, XINHUA (China), Feb. 29, 2000. 2. XIZANG TONG)I NiANJIAN 2000 [TIBET STATISTICAL YEARBOOK 2000], supra note 230, at 30. 29 1.ld. at 461, 473. 299. See Kristof, supra note 176. 300 Tetoporary Qmghai Provisions on Birth Control (Qinghati Radio broadcast. Jtoe 4,1982, translated to BBCISWB. June 10. 1982) 30. Jane McCartney, [Untitled], UPI NEWS, Mar. 11, 1988. o2. Jingxin Sun, ZHONGGUO ZANGZU RENKOU [CHINA'S TIBETAN POPULATION] 147 (1994). 303 Hongbi Deng, ZHONGGUO SHAOSHU MINZU RENKOU ZHENGCE YANJIU [A STUDY OF CHINA'S ETHNIC MINORITY POPULATION POLICIES] (1998). 4. See Sun, supra note 303, at 147.305 .Id at 147-48. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA'S COLONY? higher than among Ganze Han (2.76).306 Thereafter, Ganze allowed the same number of children for Han and Tibetans as in the TAR, except that rural Han are allowed two in Ganze, but only one in the TAR, and rural Tibetans are limited to three in Ganze, but are without restriction in the TAR. 30 7 Ganze's People's Congress submitted a bill to the Sichuan People's Congress in 1999 to change the prefecture's family planning regulations, presumably to reduce the number of children allowed, 308 but it is not clear what reduction was contemplated or whether the bill was adopted. Elsewhere in Kham, in Yunnan's Deqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, urban Tibetan couples or couples with one Tibetan spouse may have two children and rural Tibetans may have three.30 9 Whatever the regulations in the non-TAR Tibetan autonomous areas, Qinghai Tibetans appear to have increased from the 1950s to 1990s at a somewhat faster rate than TAR Tibetans, with rates in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan slower. See Table 8.310 The accuracy of estimates from the 1950s remains problematic and many factors apart from family planning policies could account for the difference in rates. Table 8: Ethnic Tibetan and PRC Percentage and Per Annum Percentage Population Increases from the 1950s to 1990s Period Population % pop. increase % p.a. pop increase 1953-1999 Yunnan Tibetans 80.4 1.75 1953-1990 Gansu Tibetans 79.2 2.14 1950-1990 Sichuan Tibetans 87.5 2.19 1952-1999 Qinghai Tibetans 134.0 2.85 1953-1999 TAR Tibetans 127.5 2.77 1952-1999 PRC all ethnicities 117.5 2.50 Differences in the rate of increase of Tibetans in the TAR and various provinces from 1982 to 1990 cover a period in which family planning programs of one sort or another were being set in place in Tibetan 36. Xianrnin Cheng &Yi Yi,Sichuan zangut Renkou Zhuangkutang Cixi [InitialAnalIs Softhe Situation of Sichuan's Tibetan Population], in DANGDAI ZIIONGGL'O XIZANG RENKOU [CONTEMPORARY CHINA'S TIBET POPULATION] ofthe BUoWU YUAN RENKOU PUCiLt BANGONGSHI [STATE COUNCIL POPULATION GENERAL RESEARCH OFFICE] 396413 (1992). 307.See Tibet Information Network, DOCUMIENTS ONBIRTH CONTROL 31 (1994). 3"s. Tbetans in Soutlnvest China Having Fewer Children, XINHUA (China), June 23, 1999. 309.See Sun, supra note 303, at 148. 310 Se I ' ZHO0CGGtO TONNLa tQct S h1LYLX z u 351 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF ASIAN LAW areas. See Table 9.311 Table 9: Tibetan and All-China Population Increases from 1982 to 1990 Area % population increase % p.a. pop. increase Yunnan 16.1 2.00 Gansu 20.4 2.55 Sichuan 18.0 2.25 Qinghai 21.5 2.69 TAR 17.3 2.17 All PRC Tibetans 19.4 2.42 PRC (all ethnies) 11.6 1.44 It is not clear what factors varied the rate among Tibetans or why the TAR rate was lower than in Amdo (Qinghai and Gansu). That the Amdo and Kham rates equalled or exceeded those in U-Tsang does however make it unlikely that Amdowas and Khampas were in practice subject to more stringent control than TAR Tibetans. In sum, among the rural 85% of Tibetans, three-child families are in practice permitted in cultural Tibet, and families of unlimited size are allowed in the TAR, while in cities in Tibetan areas, Tibetan or mixed couples may have two children. Local policies and birth rates vary greatly, however. Interviews in 1998 in three TAR prefectures, as part of a joint project of Tibet University and the author, revealed that in Shannan, urban Tibetan cadres are allowed three children, while in Linzhi they are only permitted two. Fines for Tibetan violators in Linzhi are Y500 (Y300 if one parent was unemployed); fines for Han are Y3,000. A 1998 TAR document describes fines for Tibetans as "symbolic economic penalties, 312 and few cannot afford the penalty, although a violation might also affect job promotion. In 1995, 96.3% of Linzhi Han households had one-child certificates, while only about 15.7% of Tibetans had one. Nagchu officials stated that in 1990 the prefecture's overall rural and urban birth rates were 3.17 and 3.27; in 1995, the rates were 2.98 and 2.67 (the overall TAR rate was 2.49.313 The still high Ngachu rates are again a function of low fines for Tibetans: Y500 for "double cadre" couples and Y300 for a couple where only one spouse is a cadre. 311. Se tables above; XIZANG ZANGZU RENKOU [TIBrT's ETHNIC TBrAN POPULATION] 27 (1997); ZHIONGGUO MM UTONO3 NIANHAN 1998 [ChINA ETHNICSTATISTICAL YEARBOOK 1998] 369(1998). 312. GUANYU XIZANG ZIZHUQU DE RENKOU YU JIHUA SHENGYU GONGZUO [ON THE TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION AND FAMILY PLANNING WORK], supra note 289. 313.ZHONGGUO RENKOU TONGJI NIANJIAN [CHINA POPULATION STATISTICAL YEARBOOK], supra note 296. [15-1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHIM "S COLONY? Tibetans are among the fastest growing ethnic groups in China. Their 1994 birth rate was about the same as the PRC national average in 1973. The age dependency ratio of Tibetans - at 76 non-working people (i.e., aged 0-14 or 65-plus) to 100 working people in 1990- was the highest of any ethnic group in the country. The result of this high population growth is not wholly positive, however: in the TAR it offset about two-thirds of the increase in grain production from 1952 to 1992.314 A TAR family-planning document states that the average landholding per capita was 2.5 mu "in the early years after liberation," but had been reduced to 1.5 mu per capita due to population growth.315 The increase in the population of nomads and their herds also contributes to over-grazing. VI. CONCLUSION: POPULATION, COLONIALISM & TIBET The discourse on Tibet is often based on polemical hyperbole writ large. Some hyperbole is easily seen as such, e.g., the Dalai Lama's claim that "[e]ven the majority of the Chinese people [are] in favor of Tibet's independence.316 Both sides encase distortions in statistics however and Western media often reproduce those provided by 6migr6 sources. The claim of demographic catastrophe should be considered in the context of this politically-driven penchant for distortion. Supporters of the dmigr6 cause claim, for example, that one in every 100 Tibetans is in prison.317 The implication is that this very high incarceration rate is a function of state racial discrimination. The PRC puts the all-China incarceration rate at just under one per thousand,318 while Western specialists say that it may actually be 1.66, higher than the world average of 1.05 per 1,000, but not hugely so.319 The US is said to have the world's highest rate: in 2000 it had 7.12 inmates per 1,000,320 almost seven times the world average. The next contender, Russia, had 9.6 inmates per thousand until it began a large-scale amnesty program in 1999.321 The US 314.See Zhang, supra note 106, at 7,53-60,70. 3GUANYU XIZANG ZIZHUQU DE RENKOU YIJ JIHUA SHENGYU GoNGZUo (O\ TilE TIBET AUTONOMOUS REGION AND FAMILY PLANNING WORK], supra note 289. 316 China Cannot But Address Tibet Issue, Says Dalai Lama, HINDU, Jan. 26, 2001. 3 17 . Jude Barlow, Strangers in TheirLand, CHRISTCHURCH PRESS (New Zealand), Sept. 17,1999, at 11. a.State Council 97ite Paper on Human Rights, supra note 85. 319 James Seymour, Inflating Prisoner Statistics Counter.productive, S. CIIINA MORNING POST, Mar. 30, 1998, at 18. 320 Nation's Prison Population Climbs to over 2 Million, WASH. POST, Aug. 10, 2000, at A04; U.S. System Is Not a Perfect Modelfor Canada, GAZETTE (Montreal), Apr. 24, 2000, at B2. "21.John Dillin, The Incredible Shrinking Russia, CHRISTIAN SCI. MONITOR, Feb. 22,2001, at 15; Yuri Senatorov, 94,000 Convicts to Be Set Free, KOM.IERSANT DAILY, Jan. 29, 1999, at 3. 2001] COLUMBIA JOURNAL OFASIANLAW rate was nevertheless lower than the incredible rate of 10 per 1,000 claimed for Tibetans by the 6migrrs and their supporters. The incarceration rate for TAR Tibetans, according to the PRC, is about 0.7 per 1,000,322 seven-tenths of the official all-China rate. In the US, black males are incarcerated at eight times the rate for white males,323i.e., 80 times the TAR Tibetan rate. Qinghai has 1,200-1,500 Tibetan prisoners under any form of detention, with most in local jails324 and over 1 million Tibetans. Qinghai Tibetans are thus incarcerated at 0.12-0.15 per 1,000 or one-seventh to one-eighth of the all-China rate and one four-hundredth the rate for black Americans. Tibetans are mainly rural people, while African- Americans are mainly urban, so a significant difference in incarceration rates is expected. The gap between the rates is so enormous, however, that it indicates that racial discrimination is much more likely to be a factor in the latter than in the former case. Some 6migr6 claims reach fantastic proportions. A Japanese magazine, responding to Chinese criticisms of the Japanese government for not being forthright about World War II atrocities, published an article by Tibetan 6migrd researcher Pema Gyalpo in which he claimed that there are 2 million political prisoners in Qinghai. 325 "Tibet activists" have asserted that there are more than 100,000 Tibetan political prisoners.326 Human rights groups quote much lower numbers. Asia Watch has stated that there were 1,710 people of all PRC ethnic groups known to be imprisoned due to political, ethnic, or religious activities.327 Amnesty International pegged the number at 2,000,328 as have more recent Western estimates.329 Others claim that the number may be as high as 10,000.330 Tibetans are a disproportionate percentage of PRC political prisoners, but this is a function of the existence of the 6migr6-supported separatist movement and does not betoken any special repression against Tibetans per se. In contrast to the fate of many colonized peoples, Tibetans have not diminished in number during the first half-century of Communist rule, but 322 What Is Going on in Tibet's Prison, XINHUA (China), Apr. 17, 2000. 323.A Land of Bondage, ECONOMIST, Feb. 13, 1999, at 33. 2 James Seymour & Richard Anderson, NEW GHOST, OLD GHOSTS: PRISONS AND LABOR REFORM CAMPS IN CHINA 168 (1998). .See Hoffman, supra note 56, at 9. 326 See Avedon, supra note 66. 327 Asia Watch, DETAINED IN CHINA AND TIBET: A DIRECTORY OF POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS PRISONERS (1994). 328. Amnesty International, CHINA: NO ONE IS SAFE- POLITICAL REPRESSION AND THE ABUSE OF POWER IN THE 1990S (1996). 319 Please Shout Quietly, GUARDIAN (London), Oct. 19, 1999, at 19.330 China's Communist Regime Crushes Dissent with Iron Fist 50 Years on, AGENCE FRANCE PRESS ENGLISH WIRE, Sept. 26, 1999. [15:1 COMMENT: IS TIBET CHINA"S COLONY? have proliferated, as shown in Table 10.331 Table 10: Number of Tibetans in the PRC by Census Date 11953 11964 11982 11990 2,753,081 2,501,174 3,847,875 4,593,072 It is inaccurate then to claim, as does Chalmers Johnson,332 that demographic catastrophe comparable to what befell indigenous Americans with the arrival ofthe Europeans has affected Tibetans. The latter increased by about 150%, from some 1 million in 1268 to about 2.5 million in 1950, a period of almost seven centuries; they have likely more than doubled to over 5 million since then. Despite the large and growing economic and social gap between Tibetans and Han, the proliferation of the Tibetan ethnie evidences a key distinction from one of the main contours of colonialism. "3.ZHONGGUO MINZUTONGiNIANJIAN 2000 [CHINAETHNIC STATISTICALYEARB0OK2000] 431 (2000). 332 Chalmers Johnson, BLoWBAcK: THE COSTS AND CONSEQUENCESOFAMERICAN EMPIRE 166 (2000). 20011