Unmasking China's Tibet Propaganda: Sovereignty Myths Exposed

China has long claimed Tibet was always part of its territory and that 1950 military entry was a 'liberation'. This narrative, critics argue, is built on historical revisionism and ignores Tibet's long period of effective self-rule before invasion.

New Delhi: China, for many years, has been talking with one voice on the issue of the Tibetan plateau. The origin of the Chinese story on Tibet is that the region has always been a part of the great motherland China, and the so-called Chinese "invasion" of Tibet in 1950 was actually a "liberation" from feudalism. This official version of the story is so relentlessly repeated by China's diplomatic and media apparatus that it has become accepted by many as the truth. Yet, a thorough study of the records and an observation of the local governance disentail that this account is a falsehood purposely constructed. It is a huge rewriting of the history to cover a colonial occupation story under the pretext of national unity.

Historical Revisionism as a Legitimacy Project

The main basis of Beijing's argument is a retroactive imposition of the concept of nation, state sovereignty as we understand it today on ancient, very loosely defined relationships. The Chinese Communist Party claims that Tibet has been a part of China continuously since the Yuan Dynasty in the 1200s. This trick is a gesture that tries to merge two very different historical contexts into one. The Yuan Dynasty was a Mongol empire that conquered both China and Tibet as separate territories within its larger empire. To claim that Mongol overlordship of Tibet is the same as historical Chinese sovereignty is like India claiming Australia as its territory just because both were former colonies of the British Empire.

Scholars and historians note that the relationship between the Tibetan lamas and the Mongol or Manchu emperors was one of priest and patron, not ruler and subject in the Westphalian sense. During the Qing Dynasty, while there was a Manchu resident in Lhasa, the Tibetan government exercised significant autonomy. More importantly, in the period between the fall of the Qing in 1911 and the invasion in 1950, Tibet functioned as an independent state in every practical sense. It possessed its own currency, postal system, and legal code. It signed treaties and issued passports which were recognised by other nations. Beijing currently expends vast resources to scrub this period of effective self-rule from the global consciousness, reinterpreting it as a mere interim of local separatism abetted by foreign imperialists.

The Myth of Benevolent Liberation

To rationalise their military takeover of Tibet, Beijing heavily leans on the figure of benevolent emancipation for the argument. The state propaganda apparatus portrays Tibet before 1951 as a hellish place of serfdom and religious tyranny, thus representing the People's Liberation Army not as conquerors but as rescuers. Tibet before modern times was indeed divided and socially unequal, but the exaggerated caricature of total slavery is mainly for political use: it masks the "sin" of the invasion.

The narration conveniently ignores the coercive nature of the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement. This agreement, which legitimised Chinese domination, was signed by Tibetan representatives who were directly threatened with an overwhelming show of military force and personal danger. It was a typical case of an unequal treaty in which a powerful aggressor imposed its will on a weaker neighbour. Instead of having the promised autonomy, Tibet in the following years suffered the breakdown of its traditional social structures. The 1959 uprising and the Dalai Lama's escape were not, as Beijing argues, the desperate actions of a reactionary elite intent on the retention of unpopular power, but a mass refusal of foreign domination.

Cultural Erasure as Continuation of Occupation

The occupation remains a fact today, only the form of change in focus from military victory to the killing of local spirit by bureaucracy. The autonomy that was promised is only for show. The power of Tibetan officials is negligible compared to that of Communist Party secretaries of China who are the real masters of the region. The present policy under President Xi Jinping continues to be harsh on the culture of Tibet, which reflects a clear intention to destroy the cultural and religious identity of Tibet and substitute natural loyalty to the state.

This situation demonstrates the most dramatic in the farce around the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. The Chinese government, which is atheist in principle, has declared that it has the exclusive right to find and appoint the next incarnation of Tibetan Buddhism's highest spiritual leader. This contradiction reveals how hypocritical their ruling style is. They want to use the institutional role of the Dalai Lama as a means to forcibly appoint a Chairman's loyalist as the next incarnation who will support the Chinese government's policies. Besides that, the replacement of Tibetan with Mandarin as the language of instruction in schools is a kind of cultural genocide in slow motion which disconnects the youth from their literary and religious inheritance.

Global Disinformation Campaign

Beijing knows that internal repression does not play well in the public eye. Hence, it has engaged in a worldwide disinformation campaign to whitewash its record. It is a part of this effort to limit foreign journalists and diplomats' interaction with Tibet, either by denying them access altogether or by deceiving them through empty Potemkin tours where staged happiness hides the surveillance state. At the same time, the state agency continues to harass Tibetan refugees and has even weaponised social media to drown out critical voices. Academics who question the official history are not given visas, and publishing houses are pressured to limit their content. By saturating the information environment with attractive, state-produced content featuring infrastructure development and picturesque landscapes, Beijing aims to divert the attention of the world from the essential absence of political freedom.

The story of an eternally united Tibet is a fictional narrative created to justify the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese state. It is based on the misrepresentation of history, the demonisation of the past, and the silencing of the present. The world must understand that stunning infrastructure projects and rising GDP figures cannot mask the truth about the people whose right to self-determination is being denied. Acquiescing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narrative means consenting to the disappearance of a separate nation and culture.