Not all national particularisms are progressive. The Bapa Phuntso Wangye explains that during the Second World War the Tibetan leadership favoured an axis victory, as the one most likely to further their ends (A Tibetan Revolutionary, Goldstein et al, 77, 88). The feudal system of tithes and bondage was one that could not absorb change.
The real failure of the Chinese Stalinists was *not* to encourage reform in Tibet, but to seek co-existence with the backward social forms of the Tibetan monasteries. In 1955 the Dalai Lama talked with Zhou Enlai saying that Tibet was 'backward and its people poor ... clearly there was a large gap between Tibet and China and that Tibet needed to gradually reform'. But Zhou, rather than welcoming this point, counselled against reform on the grounds that 'The central Committee's policy is that stability is the priority' (A Tibetan Revolutionary, p 201-2).
The pro-capitalist governments that came to power in 1978 have taken a different line, and promoted development in Qinghai province, which has tended to put pressure on the old monastery system (which is in any event a shadow of its former self) draw more ethnic Han Chinese into the region, and to cast the Tibetans as a cultural rather than a socio-economic identity, negotiating for a better deal from the state.