reflection...............Jamie

When I first thought of learning about China’s occupation of Tibet I thought it would be something really cool to learn about. I had always seen advertisements, or heard people say, “Free Tibet” or “Save Tibet”. Now I really had a reason to figure out what everyone was taking about. I thought it would be similar to learning about the Darfur Crisis, but I was wrong. I’d had some prior knowledge as to what was going on in Darfur, and thought since Tibet was on the same list of projects, I figured that they must have something to do with each other. I was right in some ways but at the same time was completely wrong.
I knew that this project would have something to do with human rights and was exited to figure out what was really going on with Tibet. When I first started to really learn about Tibet’s crisis, it made me really upset that people had the guts to discriminate against each other like that. Essentially what I had come to figure out was that Tibet realized that they wanted to become Buddhists, and fallow the Dali Lama, but in order for them to do this they would have to break from the chains of China. The rest of Chinese society was conforming to a religion that didn’t settle with Tibet.
When Tibet had announced this decision to China, they were very unhappy, and occupied all of Tibet to keep them from escaping the rest of China. Eventually, China had set up their very own set or Nuremberg Laws, which they called, “The 17 Points”. These points, slowly but surly took away all of Tibet’s rights. It also forced them to conform to a society that they didn’t belong to. China had even created it’s own Nazi party that has helped to kill off over one million people over the years, just because of their religion.
After learning all of this I thought to myself that what China is doing to Tibet sounded somewhat familiar to what Japan had done to China during World War 2. When China was being beat up by Japan, they didn’t like it, and didn’t think that it was fair that all of their people were being killed off. But what gave them the power to go after natives of Tibet with the same attitude Japan had towards China. China knew very well what Tibet was feeling like, so what would incourage their vicious activity to continue to live on?
Today the problems in Tibet aren’t as bad as they were when they were at their peak, but there are still major conflicts. China still doesn’t fully except their religion. They are also still occupying Tibet today. Tibet still does not have any political freedom, and they are forced to go along with what ever China tells them to do which isn’t fair. This conflict has been going on for so long I wonder if it will ever really come to an end. Every generation of Tibetan people continue to hope that things will change over time, but enough time has gone by.


Jamie Z................Pd 2