IT MUST take a considerable degree of doublethink simultaneously to oppose the US-led occupation of Iraq and support the Chinese occupation of Tibet. That doesn’t stop some on the left giving it a go, of course.

The idea of a right to self-determination is common coinage for liberals and socialists alike. If Iraq deserves that privilege – and I think that it does – then Tibet surely merits it as well.

After all, it was Karl Marx himself who suggested that ‘a nation that oppresses another will never itself be free’, and the force of that observation is not diminished simply because the oppressor nation makes some sort of claim to adhere to socialism.

The business of the left is to oppose all occupations, and if we are to be consistent, that stance should not be conditional on who is doing the occupying.

I have been thinking about this question as a result of reading programme here in Hong Kong, which over the last couple of weeks had taken in many aspects of China’s politics. A number of books have left me yet clearer than I was before that the country can be characterised as imperialist, at least in the pre-Leninist usage of the term.

The Tibetans are clearly distinct in religious, linguistic and ethnic terms, and Tibet must be classified as a nation on any standard theoretical basis. Any argument that it has been ‘part of China’ for centuries is patently historical nonsense. In short, China shouldn’t be there.

Beijing – and therefore its fellow travellers – make much of the notion that Tibet was for centuries nominally a tributary state. But then so was the Vatican, as far as Han supremacists are concerned. The designation is effectively meaningless.

Nor can too much store be set by the 1950 ‘liberation’ of Tibet by Maoist armed forces. This was simply a de facto handover of an independent country to foreign rule by Quisling elements in the ruling theocracy over the heads of the population.

China has since then systematically exploited Tibet’s natural resources, and has resettled Han Chinese colonists there to the point where Tibetans are at risk of becoming a minority in their own homeland.

Yet the literature – even the most anti-communist of it – concedes that Chinese rule has meant social advance, most notably the eradication of serfdom and extensive land reform.

An argument can be constructed that the occupation has been historically progressive, in the sense that Marx used the term to apply to British imperialism in India. While Marx was absolutely clear that this contention should not be adduced to justify continuing British presence, the impact is worthy of dispassionate note.

Yes, I know. The catchphrase ‘but it was historically progressive, comrade’ long formed a favourite construct in the lexicon of apologists for Stalinism. Seemingly there was nothing that the USSR did that could not somehow be excused with reference to the notion. Heaven help those who got in the way.

Which brings me back to Iraq. I don’t resile from the idea that the invasion was wrong, and still want to see withdrawal in short order.

But is it entirely heretical to suggest that in the long-run, the overthrow of a wicked dictatorship and the re-emergence of a legal political left and an organised working class will prove to have been, well, historically progressive, comrade?