On the surface, it seems absurd that Tibet could ever achieve independence from the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese government has the troops and the willingness to use its firepower to suppress dissent.

If the Chinese government was willing to shoot students in Tienanmen Square in 1989, it will have no compunctions about killing monks in Lhasa in 2008.

The president of China, Hu Jintao, was the Communist party chief in Tibet who imposed martial law in the late 1980s. It's another reason to suspect that China will never let Tibet slip away.

However, stranger things have occurred in recent history. After several decades under Soviet rule, the three Baltic republics—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—all achieved independence after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

East Timor managed to liberate itself from Indonesia after years of bloody suppression by Suharto and his minions.

Right now, there are three unmentionables in China that all begin with the letter "T": Tibet independence, Taiwan independence, and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But can China, which has already undergone economic decentralization, hold itself together in the age of text messaging and the Internet, when revolutions seem to start spontaneously?

Look what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1989 with the "Velvet Revolution".

Or Ukraine in 2004 and 2005 with its "Orange Revolution".

Then there was the "Tulip Revolution" in nearby Kyrgyzstan in 2005?

Ruthless dictators around the world, including Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, and Ceausescu in Romania have been ousted when the public finally got sick of their wickedness.

Could something similar happen in China?

Recent history has shown that just because a tyrannical government has remained in power for decades, it's no guarantee that things will remain the same going forward.

For this reason alone, the world should never write off the Tibetans' desire for self-determination, no matter how farfetched this idea might seem to be at the moment.

See also: Students for a Free Tibet on the largest Tibetan uprising since 1959 by Students for a Free Tibet’s Kate Woznow.