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Comment by Volpe | Hacker News Reader

The situation is a little more complex than that, and I wasn't making any claims about Tibet itself. But since you brought it up:

Tibet is a fairly complex issue, with the crux of it being that the british (!?) agreed to 'release' tibet from being a 'satellite' of china (without involvement from china).

The Chinese viewed this as an interference of their sovereignty (I don't think many nations would view it differently had it happen to them).

The Dalai Lhama is someone who represents that same cause (independence of tibet), which is in direct contradiction to China's (unification).

The moral (in)equivalence comes with: Someone is viewed as an 'enemy of the state' and friends/allies are indulging visits from them. China is not threatening military action, it is simply saying it doesn't like this occurring.

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Yes it's complex, but one side wiped a million Tibetans of the map during 'the great leap forward' (along with another 39 million Chinese) and they label a man who in the face of that teaches non violence a 'terrorist'.

You are conflating issues.

Trying to find a 'moral high ground' by viewing history through a selective lens is never really productive.

The Chinese govt has brought a lot of 'good' to the Chinese (and Tibetan) people (despite very horrible mistakes, like the GLF, and military invasion of Tibet).

By good, you mean a lot of Chinese that made the Tibetans a discriminated minority in their own country? Look! We built you a railroad! Oh, you don't have money to use it because we have all the jobs? Too bad!

The reason the West likes Tibet is that for the brief moment of clarity that the end of World War 2 brought (that also led to the EU, the UN, welfare, etc.), we saw that Tibet was the one place that had found the right culture to avoid the horrors that were bestowed upon Europe. Then China came in and destroyed that culture and went on to inflict horrors of similar magnitude.

> Tibet was the one place that had found the right culture to avoid the horrors that were bestowed upon Europe

Perhaps, but that culture was a feudal culture. There are many nuances to the story that simply aren't reflected in popular culture/media. Overview with references here: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4111

I checked Dalai's profile on G+, it is filled with "His Holiness" this, "His Holiness" that. I don't know, it seems a bit from past centuries to have to call oneself "His Holiness".

Moreover, I have been to tibetan plateaus, I can tell you, the peasants there are much richer than Chinese peasants. They have animals, cars, SUVs, etc. Chinese peasant only have their arms. Not to say Tibetans have a better life, though. It is not easy to live there, in these cold, arid and remote places. It is extremely beautiful too, obviously.

A very astonishing thing is that any small town has it's emormous lamasserie ("temple" if you will), filled with monks who do not exert any productive work. I don't say they should. Maybe for those who believe in their faith it is normal to have a consequent part of the population living of prayers, but, well, I guess these monks really do not share very much with hackers on HN.

From the Skeptoid article:

"The only people who lost any rights under Chinese rule are Tibet's former ruling class, themselves guilty of cruelty and oppression of a magnitude that not even China can conceive. The vast majority of Tibetans, some 90% of whom were serfs, have enjoyed a relative level of freedom unheard of in their culture. Until 1950 when the Chinese put a stop to it, 90% of Tibetans had no rights at all. They were freely traded and sold. They were subject to the worst type of punishments from their lords [...]"

"China is not threatening military action, it is simply saying it doesn't like this occurring."

China imposes trade bans on countries that offend it. As China has trade surplus with almost all countries, trade becomes a powerful blackmailing tool for it which is worrying, especially for economically weak countries.

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