The thing with feudal Tibet was that the monks didn't actually interfere with the average Tibetan's life too much. Unlike authoritarian China, dissenters in Tibet were by and large tolerated. For example, the newspaper Tibet Mirror was widely circulated in Tibet before the Chinese invasion, particularly among the ruling clerical strata, despite propagating Christian ideas and calling for political reform. That stopped very quickly after 1950.

Another thing largely tolerated in pre-Chinese Tibet was slavery. Which also stopped very quickly after 1950.

There are priorities. Chinese broke something of a lesser priority (free press), while providing something of a much higher priority (abolition of slavery).

It’s funny that in America we got those values inverted - freedom of the press first, and equality for other races and cultures much later. Both China and America are still dealing with their legacies of human rights violations, which continue in both countries today.

True but that came at the cost of being subservient to the CCP.

I don't think comparing 1950 feudal Tibet to modern day Tibet under Chinese rule is entirely fair. The assumption being that an independent Tibet wouldn't have changed at all in the last 70 years.

They were feudal country in the fifties. That suggests being rather slow at social changes.

Also, "figures show that since the early 1960s, the Tibetan population has been increasing, probably for the first time for centuries" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Tibet).

My guess is that an independent Tibet would have developed at about the same pace as neighboring Bhutan, which abolished slavery in 1958 and turned into a constitutional monarchy in 2005.

There are still human rights issues in Bhutan, but it's a far cry from where they were 70 years ago.

Okay. Is there some comparison of living conditions between modern day Bhutan and Tibet?

I guess such comparisons are hard to make and bound to be subjective.

According to [1] Bhutan's HDI was 6.17 in 2018, while according to [2] the regional HDI of Tibet was 5.85. So at the very least they're not particularly far apart from each other.

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/BTN

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisio...

Bhutan almost haven't changed. Only in 2008 they had first elections.