The Fate of Tibet
The Tibetan delegation which reached Peking about a month ago to discuss the terms of a settlement took with it the minimum of bargaining-power ; and such details of the Chinee-Tibetan agreement as have been published make it clear that China has got everything she wanted, and got it cheap. A Chinese " military and administrative commission and military area head- quarters " are to be set up in Tibet, presumably at Lhasa. The Tibetan forces are to be reorganised and embodied in the Chinese " liberation army," and unspecified " imperialist influences " are to be .wiped out. This means that Tibet will become a puppet state, dominated by a Chinese garrison and squeezed by Chinese officials. The Panchen Lama—a pawn of Peking, just as the last Panchen Lama was a pawn of Nanking—appears to have been promoted, at any rate on paper, to a position of spiritual seniority over the Dalai Lama, an opportunist arrangement whose long-term results may prove of dubious value. The whole trans- action has a shabby air ; and its only redeeming feature lies in the somewhat negative fact that the extinction of Tibetan liberties, though accomplished by military aggression, was not preceded by widespread bloodshed and devastation. Chinese control over the country is not likely, owing to the poorness of communications, to become quickly effective. Because of lan- guage difficulties, it will have to be exerted mainly through renegade Tibetans, and it will probably be on these that the nation's resentment will be focused. That resentment is not, however, likely to find any effective expression. For the time being, at any rate, Tibet is far in the dark.
