No international issue is more neuralgic than Tibet and nothing recently published on Tibet will cause more outrage than The Dragon in the Land of Snows. There will be indignation in Beijing, Washington, the Dalai Lama's exile headquarters in Dharamsala, and in support-Tibet circles. At the book's London launch Tibetans and friends of Tibet loudly cheered its author, Tsering Shakya; I asked him afterwards how many would still cheer him after they read his book; a realistic man, he chuckled.

The outrage will ignite at once. In his introduction Mr Shakya, a Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, characterises Beijing's description of pre-1950 Tibet as a "hell on earth ravaged by feudal exploitation," and the pro-Tibet version of a "land of happy and contented people" as "both part of political myth-making." Neither Chinese nor Tibetans, Mr Shakya asserts, "want any complexities to intrude on their firmly held beliefs."

Instead of simply depicting the Chinese as the sole monsters during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, Mr Shakya writes that thousands of Tibetan youths, under Mao's spell as deeply as young Chinese in China, became Red Guards; they sacked monasteries and drove monks and nuns into secular life. ( That young Tibetans often led the way in these depredations was confirmed to me by monks in several monasteries. )

I had no idea that traditional Tibetan sources regularly referred to the Manchu emperors as Buddha-incarnations, defining them, therefore, not merely as secular protectors of Tibet but as occupants of the Buddhist pantheon. This puts paid to the common assertion by many Tibetologists that the Dalai Lama-Emperor relationship was merely that of priest and patron.

But outrage will be most acute in Beijing. It will condemn Mr Shakya's claim, agreed with by most historians of Tibet outside China's control, that Tibet was independent between 1913 and 1950 and that for most Tibetans the Chinese are not liberators but intruders who have caused "the sky to fall. " It was even the private view, he shows, of the British Foreign Office in 1950 that Tibet "must be regarded as a State." Nonetheless, ambassador to the UN Sir Gladwyn Jebb telegraphed London that Britain must "create a situation which does not oblige us in practice to do anything about the Communist invasion of Tibet," and should argue that the legal status of Tibet was obscure. (Such has been Britain's dealing with Beijing on most issues ever since.)

The Dragon in the Land of Snows begins with the British withdrawal from India in 1947 and provides a detailed account of events until the late Eighties. It then trickles more or less up to the present. Unlike the few other English-language histories, such as Tibetan Nation by Warren Smith, which spans all of Tibet's known history based on secondary Western sources, and Melvyn Goldstein's A History of Modern Tibet 1913-1951, which is a near-pioneer in its use of Tibetan materials, Mr Shakya's study concentrates on the modern period, uses Tibetan, Chinese, and English primary sources (he expertly employs Foreign Office and State Department papers) and interviews with Tibetans, one of whom, a CIA agent in the rebellion of the late Fifties and Sixties, he has known since their childhood.

He shows how divided and unprepared the Tibetan upper class and officials were for the Chinese incursion on 7 October,1950, which he suggests was accelerated by the Americans responding to the invasion of South Korea by crossing into the North on the same day. But Mao wanted the drive to reintegrate Tibet into China to proceed, as he proposed, slower than a snail's pace, which Mr Shakya says is what happened. He says, too, that during the first years of occupation many Tibetans welcomed China as a modernising force. Poor Tibetans briefly benefited from the seizure of upper-class estates (but opposed taking over monastery lands) and many aristocrats collaborated with the invaders. He says as well that in 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India, supposedly to escape a Chinese kidnapping, for which, Mr Shakya states "there is no evidence." Some of the Dalai Lama's entourage had provoked uproar in Lhasa, he asserts; he has interviewed some of the provocateurs. The Chinese were caught by surprise; this explains why the Dalai Lama was able to escape so easily from Lhasa. Now convinced that Tibet was under internal and external attack, the Chinese initiated the brutal policies which remain their hallmark.

Mr Shakya observes that while the CIA was delighted by the Dalai Lama's escape and minimally aided it, the Agency did not cause it, although the CIA's activities over the next decade, which he shows to have been scattered and usually ineffective, further convinced Beijing that the Dalai Lama was involved in a Western anti-Chinese conspiracy. In fact, Mr Shakya insists, and I agree with him, the United States has never had any intention of driving the Chinese from Tibet which the Americans exploit as "an anti-Chinese irritant" and never as " a priority of the Western powers."

But while he criticises the Dalai Lama for abandoning his people to the Chinese in 1959 and for insisting on the independence of parts of Tibet which Lhasa has not controlled for over 200 years, Mr Shakya reserves his fundamental criticism for Beijing's consistent attempt to crush Tibetan Buddhism which wholly infuses Tibet's civilisation and identity. Tibetans,therefore, have seen the Chinese since at least 1959 both as "outsiders, " and "enemies of the faith. " (Mr Shakya should have included the Dalai Lama's own account of his final conversation with Mao in 1955 when he suddenly concluded that the Chairman personified " the Destroyer" of Buddhism. )He asserts that their religion united all Tibetan factions (not including some of the upper class ) and gave them a focus for resistance This Chinese conviction that Tibet would be better off without Buddhism persists and ensures more years of instability in the Region. On 8 January of this year the Party Committee in Tibet proclaimed that "It is an important measure to strengthen the struggle against separatists, to resolutely resist the Dalai clique's reactionary infiltration, and to help peasants and herdsmen free themselves from the negative influence of religion. "

The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947
by Tsering Shakya, Pimlico ( Random House, London )

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Last updated: 5-Feb-99