"Supporters of the Dalai Lama's government in Lhasa appeared to believe pre-1950 Tibet was an undeniably independent state where the inhabitants were universally happy and smiling through all adversity, a society in which not one soul could find complaint, for all needs were addressed and all were benevolently ruled in a classless paradise. It was this 'Shangri-la,' so the story continues, that the inhuman, Buddhist-hating Chinese soldiers defiled by enslaving the people for their own ends. Supporters of Beijing, on the other hand, saw Tibet as a society that had been based on the gravest inhumanities, where a handful of aristocracy -- both lay and cleric -- had enslaved the people in a European-style medieval feudalism that visited the most barbaric punishments and cruelties upon the populace until the People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet to liberate it." 2