In October 1950, forces of the newly established People's Republic of China entered eastern Tibet and defeated Tibetan forces at Chamdo. In May 1951, Tibetan representatives in Beijing signed the Seventeen Point Agreement, which affirmed Chinese sovereignty over Tibet while nominally preserving the Dalai Lama's status and Tibetan autonomy. Tibetan exile authorities say the agreement was signed under duress and is invalid, while China regards it as a legitimate reassertion of longstanding sovereignty. The agreement's terms broke down over the following years, leading to the 1959 uprising and the Dalai Lama's flight into exile.
The People's Liberation Army entered Tibet in 1950; the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement, which Tibetan exile authorities say was signed under duress, formalized Chinese central government control
The figure is itself part of the dispute. Chinese registration in 1953 recorded about 1.27 million people in the area that became the Tibet Autonomous Region, a figure exile authorities regard as an undercount of a nomadic and monastic population; the Central Tibetan Administration counts a greater Tibet including Amdo and Kham and puts the Tibetan population at about six million, most of whom lived outside the territory the Seventeen Point Agreement covered. Roughly a tenth of the male population lived in monasteries.
For the 1950-51 annexation itself the figures are small and contested: Tibetan-derived accounts of the October 1950 Chamdo campaign give about 180 Tibetan troops killed or wounded and roughly 3,000 captured, while PRIO has estimated around 2,000 casualties including non-combatants on each side; Chinese military memoirs claiming thousands 'liquidated' are treated by historians as inflated. The Tibetan government-in-exile's much-quoted figure of 1.2 million Tibetan deaths refers to 1950-1979 and chiefly to the 1959 uprising, collectivisation and famine rather than the annexation, and its underlying records have been publicly challenged by researchers including Patrick French.
China