Tibet isn't a colony

The justifications for these actions are that China is a colonial power holding Tibet against its will or that, even if Tibet is part of China, Tibet's intrinsic culture is being eroded by a mass influx of Han Chinese.

The idea that China is or could be a colonial or imperialist power is nonsense.

Where are its colonial possessions and when did it carry out a global offensive to conquer or dominate weaker countries militarily or economically to bring them into Beijing's thrall?

Until just 60 years ago, China was a poverty-stricken land, laid waste by decades of civil war, occupied and sacked by Japanese militarism and subject to the machinations of the imperialist powers.

Warlords, feudal despots and religious tyranny exercised untrammelled power in their fiefdoms. This applied to Tibet as much as the rest of China.

It was the People's Liberation Army, under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, that began to unify the country and put an end to these brutal and corrupt fiefdoms.

For the first time, when the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949, the peoples of China were able to stand up and to chart their own way in the world.

Not every decision that the country's leaders have made has been wise.

But, for all the mistakes, the successes have been tangible, with huge improvements in living standards.

Nowhere is this more true than in Tibet, where the abolition of slavery and serfdom liberated the mass of the people, prompting the landowners and feudal lords to resort to force of arms in the 1950s to halt social progress and revert to the old pre-revolutionary regime.

Their comprehensive defeat in 1959 was a prelude to raising Tibetan educational, health and living standards.

Last year's opening of the Qinghai-Lhasa railway on the roof of the world was a major step forward for Tibet's economic and cultural development, enhancing links with the rest of China and assisting some migration to and from Tibet.

However, the reality that no more than 5 per cent of Tibet's population is either Han Chinese or from any other of China's 56 national minorities gives the lie to claims of ethnic swamping or dilution of Tibet's cultural essence.

What kind of culture can only be sustained by being hermetically sealed off from the modern world? Only one based on superstition, ignorance and feudalism.

China is modernising, casting off such chains. It is also reuniting colonial enclaves such as Macao and Hong Kong, although Taiwan remains divided from the homeland.

The most sacred human right is the right to life and China's economic progress has ended the mass starvation that so recently engulfed the country on a regular basis.

Those who lecture China on human rights, especially from the US and Britain, should perhaps, in light of the illegal invasion of Iraq, which has brought about more than a million dead, ponder the relationship between stones and glass houses.