History, as Mark Twain may have said, does not repeat, but it rhymes. Reading Barbara Demick’s tragic history of one Tibetan town following the recent events in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, there is no shortage of rhymes. The confrontations in Hong Kong have recently been compared to Tiananmen Square in 1989. In fact, the long and brutal process of subjugation of China’s borderlands, including Tibet, may be a better analogy.
There are many poignant echoes, beginning with a promise: the 17-point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet was a treaty signed, under duress, by representatives of the Dalai Lama’s government and the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1951. Leaving aside why, if Tibet had “always” been part of China, as Beijing claims, a treaty was an appropriate instrument to sanctify a military invasion, the terms of the deal remain noteworthy: it promises to preserve internal autonomy and that the government of the Dalai Lama can continue to order Tibet’s domestic affairs, including, but not limited to, its religious practices, leaving Beijing to take care of borders and security. It was an early version of one country two systems, the arrangement proposed by Deng Xiaoping to Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s as the Hong Kong handover was negotiated, and enshrined in a treaty between the PRC and the UK governments.
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