Serfdom in Tibet

Existence of serfdom in Tibet have arisen and been debated by Tibetologists since Western scholars first encountered the region. Accusations of the existence of unfree labour of all sorts has been a recurrent theme, the accusations covering periods both before and after the People's Liberation Army invasion of Tibet (1950–1951). The question of whether any of these accusations are accurate has become highly politicised. Sympathisers with the Communist regime highlight statements by the government of the People's Republic of China that - prior to 1959 - 95% of Tibetans lived in "feudal serfdom". Sympathisers with the Tibetan separatism have highlighted reports of Communist-run forced labour camps in the region.

Pre-Communist social structure

Prior to 1959, there were three main social classes in Tibet: ordinary laypeople, lay nobility, and monks. The ordinary layperson could be further classified as a peasant farmer (shing-pa) or nomadic pastoralist (trokpa).

Anthropologists have presented different taxonomies for the lower social classes, in part because they studied specific regions of Tibet and the terms were not universal. Both Melvyn Goldstein and Geoff Childs however classified the population into three main types:

• taxpayer families (tre-ba or khral-pa)
• householders (du-jong or dud-chung-ba)
• landless peasants (mi-bo)

Taxpaying families could be quite wealthy. Depending upon the district, each category had different responsibilities in terms of tax and labor. Membership to each of these classes was primarily hereditary; the linkage between subjects and their district was similarly transmitted through parallel descent. The taxpayer class, although numerically smaller among the three subclasses, occupied a more superior position in terms of political and economic status.

Taxpayer families

The tre-ba or khral-pa taxpayers lived in "corporate family units" that hereditarily owned estates leased from their district authority, complete with land titles. In Goldstein's review of the Gyantse district he found that a taxpayer family typically owned from 20 acres to 300 acres of land each. Their primary civil responsibility was to pay taxes (tre-ba and khral-pa means "taxpayer"), and to supply corvée services that included both human and animal labor to their district authority. They had a comfortable standard of living. They also frequently practiced polyandry in marriage and other practices to maintain a single marriage per generation and avoid parceling land holdings.

Householders

The householder class (du-jung or dud-chung-ba) was comprised of peasants who held only small plots of land that were legally and literally "individual" possessions. This was different from the taxpayer families who owned land as a familial corporation. Land inheritance rules for the householders were quite different from taxpayer family rules, in that there was no certainty as to whether a plot of land would be inherited by his son. The district authority — either governmental, monastic, or aristocratic — was the ultimate landowner and decided inheritance. Compared to the taxpayer families the householders, however, had lighter tax obligations and only human labor corvèe obligations to their district authorities. These obligations, unlike the taxpayer family obligations, fell only on the individual and not on his family.

Landless peasants

The landless peasants (mi-bo) were not obligated to and did not have any heritable rights to land. In contrast with the taxpayer families and householders, they had the freedom to go wherever they wanted even though they still had tax responsibilities to their districts. When farming, they might lease land from taxpayer families and as payment take on work for those families. Like the householders the landless peasants also used resources in their own individual capacity which were non-hereditable.

Comparison to serfs

One of the early publications to apply the term serf to Tibet was Marxist Anna Louise Strong's When serfs stood up in Tibet (New World Press, 1960). Another seminal promoter of the idea is historian A. Tom Grunfeld, who based his writings on those of a few British explorers, especially Sir Charles Bell; it has been argued that this material was not supported by traditional Tibetan, Chinese, or Indian histories, and that Grunfeld's extracts from Bell were taken out of context to mislead readers. In 2003, political scientist Michael Parenti produced an essay based largely on the preceding work of Strong, Grunfeld, and Suart and Roma Gelder.

Melvyn Goldstein uses the term serf to describe the peasant classes including the wealthy taxpaying families. In his book A History of Modern Tibet he argues that although serfdom was prevalent in Tibet, this did not mean that it was an entirely static society. There were several types of serf sub-status, of which one of the most important was the "human lease", which enabled a serf to acquire a degree of personal freedom. This was an alternative which, despite retaining the concept of lordship, did not bind the so-called serfs to a landed estate.

Barbara Crossette in the New York Times, however, summarized the use of the term in 1998:

" Scholars of Tibet mostly agree that there has been no systematic serfdom in Tibet in centuries. The label was again a Eurocentric one. In 1879, an Indian scholar who had spent his life in the Himalayan area, Sarat Chandra Das, traveled to Lhasa and studied the social order. He found no trace of bonded servitude. He described a place (unlike caste-ridden India) where the rich may bestow their daughters on the poor; the daughter of a poor man may become the bride of the proudest noble in the country."

Slavery

Author Israel Epstein, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that - prior to the Communist takeover - poverty in Tibet was so severe that in some of the worst cases peasants had to hand over children to the manor as household slaves or nangzan, because they were too poor to raise them.

In 1904 the British army invaded and held the Tibetan Chumbi Valley, in the border region adjacent to Bhutan and India. Sir Charles Bell was put in charge of the district from September 1904 to November 1905 and wrote that slavery was still practiced in Chumbi but had declined greatly over the previous thirty years. He noted that only a dozen or two dozen slaves remained, unlike nearby Bhutan where slavery was more widespread. Bell further remarked, "The slavery in the Chumpi valley was of a very mild type. If a slave was not well treated, it was easy for him to escape into Sikkim and British India."

Tibet: region or regions?

The term Serfdom in Tibet can be misleading since Tibet cannot simply be defined as one political entity or social system, its political and socio-economic structures having varied greatly over time and between sub-districts. Although the central leadership in Lhasa had authority for various periods this did not imply the kind of political control of modern Western states. According to Luciano Petech, in the 18th Centry CE "K'ams [Kham] was practically independent of Lhasa under its great lamas". Even the definition of Tibet has been contested with a map of competing claims identifying six distinct types of Tibetan region claim. Scholarship available frequently represents a limited survey, restricted to the central region of Tibet and may not accurately represent the whole of Tibet or all Tibetan speaking peoples.

Local regions where Tibetan Buddhism - and therefore Tibetan culture as a whole - have traditionally been found include Bhutan, northern India, Nepal, southwestern and northern China, Mongolia and various constituent republics of Russia. Regions of Russia with a Tibetan cultural influence that are in the environs of Tibet include: Amur Oblast, Buryatia, Chita Oblast, Tuva Republic, and Khabarovsk Krai. However Tibetan cultural influence has spread as far as Kalmykia, a part of Russia which constitutes the only traditionally Buddhist region with a claim to being European, being located in the in the Northern Caucasian territory dividing Asia from Europe.

Additionally, not all Tibetan-speaking peoples in the area have historically dwellt within the even the broadest of the disputed Tibets.

Bibliography

• Charles Bell, Tibet Past and Present
• Crossette, Barbara (1998) " The World: Searching for Tibet; The Shangri-La That Never Was" in The New York Times July 5, 1998
• Goldstein, Melvyn C. (1971) "Stratification, Polyandry, and Family Structure in Central Tibet", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27(1): 64-74.
• Goldstein, Melvyn C. (1971) Serfdom and Mobility: An Examination of the Institution of "Human Lease" in Traditional Tibetan Society The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3, (May, 1971), pp. 521-534
• Childs, Geoff. 2003. "Polyandry and population growth in a Historical Tibetan Society", History of the Family, 8:423–444.
• Laird, Thomas (2006) The Story of Tibet ISBN 0-80211-827-5
• Snellgrove, David; Hugh Richardson (1968). A Cultural History of Tibet, London: George Weidenfield and Nicolson Ltd.