China's Tibet Policy Quotes

“In the Indian subcontinent, India denied self-determination in Kashmir but fought for the self-determination of Bangladesh. Pakistan has insisted on the right of the Kashmiri people to self-determination but denied it to Bangladesh. The Communist record is no better. The Chinese Marxists in the early 1920s and 1930s promised the Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs the right of self-determination and even of secession. But after the seizure of state power in 1949, Mao Zedong denied self-determination even to the deserving minority nationalities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Many more cases of such double standards may be cited, but our point is clear. National self-determination, as an emanicipatory ideology, has enormous appeal to other-determined peoples everywhere, and because it invokes popular sovereignty as its core social message, hardly anyone in the democratic age can openly challenge it. But its implementation has serious implications to empires and their contemporary successors, multinational states which number over 200 in the UN.”
― Dawa Norbu, China's Tibet Policy