The
Tibetan independence movement is a movement for the independence of
Tibet and the political separation of Tibet from the
People's Republic of China. It is principally led by the
Tibetan diaspora in countries like
India and the
United States, and by celebrities and
Tibetan Buddhists in the United States and
Europe. The movement is not supported by the
14th Dalai Lama, who although having advocated it from 1961 to the late 1970s, proposed a sort of high-level
autonomy in a speech in
Strasbourg in 1988, and has since then restricted his position to either autonomy for the Tibetan people in the
Tibet Autonomous Region within China, or for the autonomy to extend also to areas of neighboring Chinese provinces inhabited by Tibetans.