This article talks about how pre-Chinese Tibet was almost uniquely brutal for the modern world, and seems to me to say that the peasant class was uniquely oppressed. Was life really terrible in pre-Chinese Tibet, or is the author taking liberties here?
The article: http://www.swans.com/library/art9/mparen01.html
It's been a long time since I read that article, probably about five to seven years now.
Michael Parenti is pretty well-known for not being very diligent with his sources and having a pretty clear anti-Dalai Lama stance. Just looking at his list of sources at the end of the article, he seems to quote extensively from The Changing Face of Tibet which was written by Karan, one of a group of Leftist thinkers and writers who were invited by the Chinese government to tour Tibet in the mid-70s (and so praised the levels of Maoist progress and development).
He also quotes selectively (and scarcely) from Donald Lopez's Prisoners of Shangri-La. Donald Lopez is a skilled Tibetologist whose work is pretty amazing. His aforementioned books is probably the book to read about when critiqueing Tibetan culture's portrayal among Western sources.
Lopez's work is about the myth that Tibet (and we can add to that all Himalayan places: Bhutan, Nepal, Ladakh, and Sikkim) were Buddhist paradises on earth, the mythical "Shangri-las" of James Hilton fame. As Parenti notes, there's a political dimension to this. The Dalai Lama and Tibetans have a vested interest in making their rule look right and legitimate, Bhutan and their government have a financial and economic interest in keeping tourist dollars coming in, etc. Opponents of those governments (specifically in this instance, the Chinese government that currently administers Tibet) obviously have a vested interest in pushing an opposite narrative.
We are so used to thinking of countries in terms of blocks of nation states like they look on the map, but Tibet was never such a thing. If there's a tl;dr to this question, it's that: Tibet was never a congealed nation-state and its brief experiment with nation-building resulted in the usual things that state-building usually leads to: rebellion, repression, violence, and execution. To say that this was "uniquely brutal" is disingenuous since at the time China was going through it's Warlord Era which fed directly into World War II and then the Chinese Civil War.
I wouldn't discount the information in Parenti's work. However he is clearly ignoring a lot of information. The tour of Leftist authors and journalists through Tibet was followed in the '80s when a delegation from Dharamsala (the Dalai Lama's government in exile) toured Tibet at the invitation of Beijing. The delegation toured Amdo first (today's Qinghai province) only for the delegation to be swarmed by Amdowas who begged for news of His Holiness and whether he had forgotten or abandoned them yet. The Chinese rushed the delegation away and assured themselves that Amdo was the Dalai Lama's home province... once they take the delegates to Lhasa, they will surely be forced to stop the locals from rioting and killing the Dalai Lama's delegates. So the tour continued and when the delegation was revealed to the Lhasa population, the Tibetan delegates had to stop the riot from forming as the people now had a focal point for their anger against the Chinese. The delegation was rushed back to Hong Kong and kicked out of the PRC. (Beijing was courting Taiwan at the time, trying to entice them back to the rule of the Motherland. Taiwan watched the Tibetan trip closely and was... not impressed.)
Westerners usually make the mistake that the Chinese made, and assume that Lhasa is the epitome of Tibet (helped along by the fact that Lhasa, U-Tsang, and Amdo/Kham have different visa requirements). It's obviously the capital, hence why the Dalai Lama's government (the Ganden Phodrang) impacted it the most. For example, when the 13th Dalai Lama (the current's predecessor) shifted budget from the monasteries to Tibet's new national army (unprecedented in Tibetan history) one of the three main Gelugpa monasteries of Lhasa^1 revolted, with many of the monks running to the Dalai Lama's summer palace of Norbulingka and shitting in his garden. (I kid you not).
In a very contradictory episode of Tibetan history, the 13th Dalai Lama abolished capital punishment since the use of it by the Qing Dynasty to maintain control in Tibet was so abhorred. But once the 13th had died, the Reformists and Modernizers in the Tibetan government had lost their biggest ally, and the Conservatives and Traditionalists took over. They closed the English schools, shut down mining surveys, and let the Tibetan National Army (which had scored some significant victories against the Chinese in the 1920's) decay. The head of the Modernizer faction, Lungshar, was captured and blinded. Though since the practice was outlawed along with execution, the people to perform it were terribly unskilled and used ancient drawings to guide them in the process.
I'd write a longer blow-by-blow critique of Parenti's essay. Just skimming it for the first time in years makes him sound like someone disillusioned that Tibet is inhabited by people and not angels. If Tibet truly was rescued by the People's Liberation Army and transformed into a Communist Paradise, it's doubtful we would have seen that reaction from locals when the Dalai Lama's delegation visited in the '80s. Yet it's not hard to find horror stories from Semi-Modern and Pre-Modern Tibet... or anywhere else for that matter.
No, Tibet was not a glorious Shangri-La. Parenti is right about that. But to describe it as "uniquely brutal," especially given the state-building in China that would continue until... well the 1990s, is sinister, and historically disingenuous.
As for what life was like for Tibetans (or more accurately, for people living in Tibetan cultural areas) before the Chinese occupation, I've written about that before here, and here.
To answer your question directly, it's hard to tell. Just trying to nail down exactly who was "Tibetan" and "peasant" is pretty difficult. I use Bhutan as a case study of life in Pre-Modern Tibet, but since literacy was low, and the region is so varied and politically charged, it's incredibly difficult to get anything resembling a reliable picture of Tibet's Pre-Communist past.
Sources: