Even to the names of fruit, and I kid you not. The Kiwi fruit we all associate with New Zealand was, until the 1950s (supremacy of Mao & Communists) called a Chinese Gooseberry. The name was changed in the 50s so that NZ could still sell them here without raising suspicions of communist sympathies.

American media were not controlled by government directly, but the drunken shameless Senator McCarthy made it very difficult for people in public life to express, not sympathy for communism, but even the tiniest glimmer of fair-mindedness. He used the House Un-American Activities Committee to hound them out of business and blackballed them in any way possible. Did incalculable harm to U.S. politics and public life (Ronald Reagan was elected partially on the strength of his having made anti-communist speeches for 25 years), and to any hopes of unbiased reporting from abroad.

One thing I picked up from the book was that the Chinese authorities have been influential in Tibet’s choice of lamas for some time; early on (I think in the mid 1850s) Chinese officials noticed that the “reincarnations” of previous lamas all tended to come from families tied suspiciously closely to the old lamas and power brokers. So after the various candidates (very small boys) underwent the various tests in Lhasa, the Chinese insisted that lots for the winner be drawn from a cauldron to try to even the odds – at least if you can trust a cauldron, which we all know after Harry Potter IV you can’t.

On a more serious note, when you read the book you’ll find that Tibet’s army, what there was of it, was incredibly badly armed and ill-fed (once DL #13 died, his attempts at fielding a proper army mostly died with him). So although I know nothing whatever of China’s invasion of Tibet, any incursion of properly armed forces would either have met with total surrender or have resulted in a bloodbath; I guess the latter is what happened. The Panchen Lamas (9 & 10) seem to have agreed that Tibet drastically needed modernization; I guess future historians will let us know whether it had to happen at the price of so much gore. Might be that the lama system of governance was so broken down that there really was no alternative?

Thanks for putting the information here! I hope the book comes out soon.