Briefly and somewhat halfheartedly, yes. The Dalai Lama remarks in his Memoirs that people often blame the international community for not doing enough to bring up the Tibet Question, or essentially watched as the PLA took Tibet without as much as a strongly worded letter, without considering that Tibetans themselves tended towards conservative governance, a hermit-esque foreign policy, and did not make enough efforts at getting the world to recognize Tibet, so the outcome of the world not really caring what happened to Tibet was more or less predictable from the standpoint of the Tibetans' attempts at obtaining recognition.
However there were essentially three attempts at international recognition, all of them could be considered de facto successes, as the world at large acknowledged and treated Tibet as an independent country afforded to others in the Westphalian system. Tibet's independence and autonomy was respected in these three cases, and as you've noted, Tibet was all but recognized as an independent state.
The first of these cases was the 1914 Simla Convention. Representatives of the Government of India (i.e. British), the Dalai Lama's government in Lhasa, and delegates from the Republic of China, all met in Simla, India to knock out a treaty determining both the borders of Tibet, and the relationship between the three regional partners. All accounts told, the Chinese showed up in Simla essentially thinking it was going to be them and the British hashing out a trade agreement and walking all over the Tibetans. For context, simultaneous revolutions took place in China and Tibet in 1911. The Chinese overthrew the Qing Dynasty, and the Tibetans overthrew their Qing Amban overlords, who they viewed as tyrants ever since they came in and took charge of Tibet in 1796. However, the Republic passed a law essentially saying they inherited the Qing Dynasty's borders (a claim that is still true today, as the Republic of China (i.e. Taiwan) still claims not only all of the territory of the People's Republic of China, but also the entirety of independent Mongolia, the Tana Tuva Republic which is an unambiguous part of the Russian Federation, and a few other spots that the Qing had control of in Central Asia). These borders, of course, included Tibet since Tibet was unambiguously controlled by the Qing since 1796 (though between 1656 and the final takeover in 1796, the situation was far more ambiguous and changed constantly). Prior to the Simla Convention, the Chinese and Tibetans had wildly different perspectives on what the borders of Tibet were. See the maps from Tsering Shakya's Dragon in the Land of Snows for perspective.
So while the Chinese came to Simla with all their bluster, and probably feeling a little overconfident just coming out of a victorious revolution, the Tibetans came armed with documentation of tax and tributes, showing that territories the Chinese claimed were a part of Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces, had in fact, a history of paying direct tribute or taxation to Lhasa. The British, ever the bureaucrats, tended to take the Tibetan side in the face of this kind of documentary evidence. Although, they still needed to deal with the Chinese, and so essentially came up with a compromise border (see the maps in Dragon), drew the McMahon Line, which forms the de jure borders of India, Nepal, and Bhutan, and got the Tibetans to agree to Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, but not full sovreignty. This infuriated the Chinese delegates and they left Simla without signing the treaty. The British and Tibetans signed it themselves, stapling a message to the front of it saying they would abide by the Treaty, and the Chinese could join it at any time they wished. (Spoiler alert: they never would.)
During World War II, the United States and Britain needed a route to supply their Chinese allies without the threat of the Japanese shooting down their planes. So President Roosevelt reached out to the Dalai Lama (who was only a child at the time) requesting permission to use Tibet as a landing ground for Allied supply planes. The Dalai Lama thanked President Roosevelt for respecting Tibetan neutrality in the war, and then denied him permission to use Tibet as a landing ground for supply crews. This letter was delivered to President Roosevelt along with a thangka painting. Both the letter and the painting hang in the Smithsonian (as per the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the Roosevelts couldn't take the gift personally). President Roosevelt sent the Dalai Lama a watch. It seems like it was the first of his collection, and it sparked an interest in mechanics, specifically watch repair. A hobby the Dalai Lama talks about with a lot of passion in his Memoirs. The watch went with him into exile in 1959, as he claims to still have it (no emoluments clause in the Tibetan Constitution pre-1959).
After World War II, Tibet set about seeking international recognition, and allegedly, to try to secure Tibetan finances abroad in case of problems back home. The finance minister, Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa and a small team, the Tibetan Trade Delegation, were issued passports from Lhasa and went on a world tour to talk to foreign ministers abroad. The passport was lost in the chaos that followed the 1950s, but was recovered in Nepal in 2004, and authenticated. A copy of the passport (of weirdly ridiculous size) is found in Shakabpa's Tibet: A Political History, and includes stamps from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, Pakistan, Iraq and Hong Kong. As you can imagine, recognition of the passport's use and stamps is a common argument from Tibetan independence activists, as it presents an image of de facto recognition. I.e. you can not typically travel with a passport from a country that the nation you are trying to enter does not recognize. Therefore, the argument goes, Tibet was recognized by the following countries. Indeed, as per the Simla Agreement, which was in effect in a vestigial fashion until 2005 (when Britain officially changed their recognition of China's role in Tibet from suzerainty to sovreignty) it would follow that the government of Pakistan, at least in the years between 1947 and Sino-Indian War of 1962, had inherited the treaty as well. Indeed, the war in 1962 was, as Shakya writes, a war essentially over the status of Tibet. China as the winner of the war, proved that they had unquestionable sovreignty over Tibet.
Even what I wrote earlier about the Simla Treaty being vestigially in effect until 2005 isn't totally accurate. China still has a border conflict with India, Bhutan, and Nepal owing to the fact that the latter three countries consider the McMahon Line their northern border, while neither the People's Republic of China nor the Republic of China (Taiwan) are signatory to the treaty, and thus do not recognize the McMahon Line to this day. Which triggers border clashes every so often (as recently as earlier this year in Ladakh).
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