Before 1959 the vast majority of Tibetans were subjected to slavery and serfdom, a major issue that is chronically ignored in any popular assessment of Chinese-Tibetan history.

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “[Free Tibet]” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off,

from https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/