Tibet

Tibet governed itself as an independent state in practice between 1912 and 1951, and the ambiguity of that sentence is the whole of its modern history. The thirteenth Dalai Lama expelled the Qing garrison in 1912 as the dynasty fell and issued a proclamation of independence the following year. No major power ever recognised it. The Simla Convention of 1914, which drew the McMahon Line between Tibet and British India, was signed by Britain and Tibet and rejected by China, and that line is still disputed between India and China today. Lhasa ran its own currency, postage, army and foreign contacts, and kept out of the Second World War. It was also deeply conservative: an aristocratic and monastic order held most of the land, and attempts at modernisation by the thirteenth Dalai Lama were resisted by the monasteries and largely abandoned. The People's Republic invaded Chamdo in October 1950, weeks after entering Korea. The Seventeen Point Agreement of May 1951 was signed by a Tibetan delegation under duress, with seals that had been made in Beijing, and made Tibet part of the People's Republic while promising its system would not be altered. That promise dissolved through the 1950s. The uprising of March 1959 was suppressed and the fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India, where he still leads a government in exile. Whether Tibet was ever a sovereign state remains the central legal question in the dispute. Its army numbered under ten thousand men in 1950. The thirteenth Dalai Lama had died in 1933 and the fourteenth was fifteen years old at the invasion. Tibetan appeals to the United Nations in 1950 were shelved after Britain and India declined to sponsor them. The territory's status was left deliberately vague by every power that dealt with it.

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