I'm just a guy, so it's just one perspective. I'm also not that well read so I'm likely to be mistaken so I apologize ahead of time given the sensitivity of the topic.

First, as much as I think the internet is a great knowledge spreader, it's not an amazing medium for mutual understanding. Me not paying the cost of time and money to get to a cafe to talk with you and the extreme ease of lobbing self-satisfying, snarky sound bites and closing the tab makes it really hard to talk about politics. It's really shaped by the accumulation of everything you experienced and everything you read as a person so not starting from the beginning is a disservice to communication. But alas, we can't.

FWIW, I align more with Buddhism than any other spiritual thought system. I'm sympathetic to his journey and think he and his followers are thrown into, and nominally became figureheads in a bigger clash that he can't control nor (I think) care very much about.

I don't think he himself, for instance, championed or was very fond of the CIA operation to take 2,000 Tibetans to be armed and trained in Colorado and then paradropped back into China for guerrilla warfare [1] (he was also just 20 back then). While I do think theocracy and political control [2] shouldn't mix, I don't think their social structure is anyone's business and I think he would be right to fight for self-determination. So it is unfortunate that he's stuck between having no means of opposing China vs taking US backing [3], which forces China's hands further (when China just very much finished fighting a hot war with the US).

If the world were in a vacuum, I very much believe in self-determination of all groups as Woodrow Wilson would define it. Anyone should be able to split off and do as they'd like. But as optimistic as he was going into the war, Wilson himself ultimately didn't persevere through the old world colonial powers to demonstrate that he believed it himself enough to even back a member of the victor side for self-determination [4]. Given the historical context (and the contemporary US overthrow of Albania 1949 [5], Iran 1953 [6], Guatemala 1954 [7], Greece [8], Indonesia 1958 [9], all of which decidedly did not end up with any 'self-determination' [10]), I wouldn't see China concluding that giving up Tibet in 1960 would somehow translate into Tibetan 'self-determination' rather than colonization [11].

That isn't to say though that China should be accepted for descending into absolute savage levels in the following decades of destruction. I absolutely do wish that the residents at Dharamshala could return to China if they choose so. But unfortunately I don't think the world of geopolitics is sterile enough to let it be a simple 2-party bilateral discussion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_Tibetan_program

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/tibet-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/world/world-news-briefs-d...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong_Problem

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Subversion

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27état

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27état

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia

[10] https://truthout.org/articles/us-provides-military-assistanc...

[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/24572145?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...