I support John McCain. But I do not agree at all with his support for the Free Tibet.
The more I learn about a possible Free Tibet the less I like it. The Free Tibet Constitution (http://www.tibet.com/Govt/charter.html) is a veritable theocracy with a fig leaf of a democracy. I do not think that this fact is widely known or understood.
Mao’s troops overthrew the Dali Lama almost without a shot. The CIA had a lot to do with the subsequent violence that occurred several years later in Tibet.
In addition, Tibet is only one of several regions of China with similar claims for autonomy or independence. Mongolia, Turkmen and several others all have similar claims.
Not only does Free Tibet dispute the Tibetan-Chinese border, if memory serves me correctly, they also challenge the Tibetan-Mongolian border, the Tibetan-Indian border and the Tibetan-Burma border. The Chinese-Burma boarder area, the Turkmen and Mongolian territories have all been disputed for centuries.
China may be heavy handed, even brutal at times in handling these disputes. And that is not defensible either. But these disputes go back centuries. In fact, the last invasion of Tibet was repelled by the Chinese army not the Tibetan army.
The violence in Tibet earlier this year was in large part assaults on ethnic Hans by ethnic Tibetans. That was glossed over in most media as well.
The trend in China for a very long time is to increase local autonomy. Eventually I suspect and hope that China the trend will continue especially in Tibet.
Finally the root of most of these problems lies in the long history of China. Often, for extended periods, the central government was weak or non existent. Local and regional rulers such as the Dali Lama were the norm by default. This is just one of several periods in which a strong central government reasserted control over the whole country.
