Oh boy...I have to totally disagree with you here. It somewhat reminds me of the attitude of some anthropologists who, when living/studying tribal cultures, refuse to provide medicine when they are sick or food when they are starving on the grounds that doing so would be 'interfering with their society'. It's the philosophical inverse of the well intentioned but misled paternalistic belief that it was the 'white man's burden' to uplift less developed civilizations, and I think it is just as wrongheaded.
Although culture is important, in the end culture is still fundamentally just an artificial social construct, intended to provide a framework for satisfying people's wants and material needs, be it safety, food, or modern convenience. The only people who think 'preserving culture' is greater than satisfying people's needs are those who have never really wanted for anything. Political disputes and repression aside, there is a reason why the Dalai Lama himself, a man who certainly loves his people, repeatedly says that China has brought many benefits in modernizing Tibet, and that joining the modern, developed world is good for Tibet (he mainly wants more political and religious freedom). There is also a reason why the loudest calls for 'preserving Tibet' and returning it to as it was before China took over and reverse the trends of modernization comes from white faces. The whole 'return Shangri-La to its ancestral roots' thing is just fetishism and another form of objectification.
I think the whole backlash from old school cultural chauvinism has created a philosophy which artificially values culture, especially 'local culture', beyond all reason. Whereas old school paternalism became an excuse for exploiting lesser-developed societies, this inverse 'respect for local cultures' has become an excuse for ignoring the plight of others. In both cases, the specters of 'the white man's burden' and 'native culture' are often mere excuses for people to justify their own actions, be it exploitation or indifference. In both cases, there is an objectification of the lesser developed/modernized societies, and people who presume to speak for 'what they want'.
Not to go off on you in particular, you understand; just expressing my thoughts about this line of thinking as a whole, which annoys me no bounds