Strategic Significance of Tibet: China and Its Peripheries
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Issue Brief # 220 May 2013 Innovative Research | Independent Analysis | Informed Opinion China and its Peripheries Strategic Significance of Tibet Abanti Bhattacharya Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi Tibet is not an identity and cultural issue post-1949 era, it gained preeminent focus for China. It is essentially a strategic and not in terms of external threats alone but security issue. Tibet being located in more due to its domestic concerns arising China’s Western frontier has been out of nation building exercise and historically a vulnerable periphery. It is a governance issues. strategic periphery not merely because of the 1962 India-China war, but more Inevitably, in the post-1949 period, after because it is a minority area located in the establishment of the Communist the southwestern periphery occupying government, the first task for China was to one-fourth of China’s landmass. consolidate and integrate its vulnerable Significantly, the flaring of the Tibetan Tibetan periphery. It militarily occupied the unrests in the recent times has exposed region with its Red Army in 1950. It sought not only the flawed nature of China’s to legally incorporate the region by minority policy but also raised questions forcing the Tibetans sign the Seventeen- on the efficacy of its security centered Point Agreement in 1951. It approach in dealing with the Tibet administratively integrated the region by question. creating the Tibetan Autonomous Region in 1965. The minority policy thus crafted China’s Tibet policy is essentially driven by does not address the concerns related to strategic considerations and periphery the Tibetan identity per se but essentially security. The focus on the periphery had provides the recipe for how to deal with been a perennial security concern right China’s vulnerable periphery. from the imperial times. However, in the This essay first looks briefly into how historically Tibet factors in China’s imperial This essay was initially presented in a conference organized by the periphery policy. Second, by exploring IPCS in collaboration with the Center for East Asian Studies, JNU China’s Tibet policy in the post-1949 and Department of East Asian Studies, JNU Maoist period, the essay shows how Views expressed are author’s. internally its minority policy, underscored in China Research Programme (CRP) 1 STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TIBET 2 the ethnic classification project and I regional autonomy system, is geared Tibet in China’s Imperial Policy: towards periphery consolidation and how Making of the Tibetan periphery externally China sought to settle its sovereignty claims on Tibet vis-à-vis India Concerns related to the security of the and attain a stable frontier. Third, the frontiers are traceable to the late Shang essay explores China’s Tibet policy in the and Zhou periods of Chinese history. It post-1978 reform period and was the Qin and then the Han who demonstrates how China has continued developed an elaborate mechanism for to address the Tibet issue from a security frontier security and development. In fact, perspective and thus has implemented it is in the Han model that the current the Western Development Strategy policies of Hanization and defence and internally and re-crafted its Nepal policy development of the borderlands are externally. Finally, the study evaluates rooted. However, it was only under the China’s Tibet policy in the larger periphery Qing dynasty, the last non –Han rulers that policy. the periphery was not only consolidated but as James Millward says, The essay also seeks to establish a critical ‘provincialized’ (Millward 2007). link between Tibet and China’s periphery strategy and argue that its Tibet policy is a Incidentally, this provincialization of the continuation of its historical quest for a periphery had taken place only in the stable periphery. Periphery strategy thus late Qing era having confronted with has dual implications, one security of the Western imperialism and modernity in the internal periphery underscored in the post-Opium War period. In the early minority policy and two security of the period of the Qing rule, however, frontier external periphery reflected in its policy consolidation was adopted not through towards India, Nepal and the Tibetan turning them into provinces but through Government in Exile. Tibet remains a sharing of power with the frontier elites. strategic and security issue for the What evolved in the early Qing period People’s Republic of China (PRC) rather was institutionalization of hybrid structures than a cultural and identity issue. Since where the Qing delegated power to the China treats Tibet as a strategic issue and local elites that of the Tibetan Buddhist not as a cultural issue, the solutions to the clergy, Turkic leaders (begs) and the Tibetan problem are invariably a security- Mongol banners (Giersch 2008). Thus, the centric response than an identity-centric Dalai Lama institution emerged as the key one. Quite inevitably then the Tibet issue to administrating Tibet. In fact, the which is a quest for Tibetan identity will Mongols first devised the patron-priest continue to pose a formidable challenge relationship that bound the Tibetans with to China’s periphery security and the the Mongol rulers which rendered high Tibet question will remain unresolved for degrees of autonomy to Tibet and kept its long time to come. socio-political structures largely intact (Norbu 2001). The patron-priest relationship was later Periphery strategy thus has dual implications, appropriated by the Qing to control its one security of the internal periphery underscored Tibetan periphery. However, with the advent of the Western imperialistic forces in the minority policy and two security of the in the nineteenth century, the late Qing external periphery reflected in its policy towards rulers departed from their pluralist policy India, Nepal and the Tibetan Government in and adopted the strategy of integration Exile. Tibet remains a strategic and security where by the indirect rule was given up and borderlands were transformed into issue for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provinces (Giersch 2008). New survey rather than a cultural and identity issue. maps and census were deployed to map 2 2 IPCS ISSUE BRIEF # 220, MAY 2013 the periphery and depict the people. In the course of provincialization apart from modern cartographic and ethnographic Fearing Tsarist expansion in Asia, the British techniques, geography, anthropology colonial power in India for the first time realized and history emerged as critical disciplines the need to define the status of Tibet. Tibetan aiding in locating the frontier people and weaving them into a national narrative. skirmish with the British over Sikkim exposed the real nature of Chinese authority in Tibet and However, the story of transformation and prompted the British to directly establish contact integration differed from one frontier to another. While Xinjiang was turned into a with the Dalai Lama Qing province by 1884 and Taiwan in 1887, the Tibet proper escaped such a fate. This was primarily because of the ‘Great Game’ between the British and that Sichuan would be rendered the Russians that engulfed the Tibetan defenseless if Tibet is lost (Giersch 2008). politics and helped it to remain virtually By identifying Sichuan as a courtyard and independent till 1950. In fact, new studies Tibet as a screen or a wall, such writings reveal that different approaches were drew the importance of periphery in the adopted by the later Qing rulers to defence of the core. The Qing state thus integrate the Kham region and the Tibet moved to ‘nationalize’ the frontier. proper in which the former saw However, they could not repeat the oppression and large-scale violence and Xinjiang story in Tibet due to the the latter saw ‘coercive expanding British forces. persuasion’ (Giersch 2008). In both cases, local elites were undermined and Fearing Tsarist expansion in Asia, the British alienated. Violence and coercion colonial power in India for the first time ultimately damaged the characteristic realized the need to define the status of patron-priest Tibetan-Qing relationship. Tibet. Tibetan skirmish with the British over Sikkim exposed the real nature of Chinese The 19th century Great Game while authority in Tibet and prompted the British altered the fate of the Tibetan vis-à-vis to directly establish contact with the Dalai the Qing, also spurred a whole new genre Lama. The British interpreted the existing of reformist writings in Qing China on the patron-priest relationship between Tibet growing imperialist threat and the need and China as some kind of ‘loose reign’ for centralized control over the periphery and consequently devised the strategy of (Giersch 2008). These writings in particular conferring China suzerain rights over Tibet. condemned the Qing pluralist policy as A recent study on the status of Tibet vis-à- reasons for foreign interference and vis China indicates that the arrangement therefore urged for direct rule. For of suzerainty was not an original idea of instance, Wang Rongmao writing in June the British, but they derived it from the 1898, enumerated four-fold strategy to existing priest-patron relationship that had implement direct rule over Tibet: one, he defined the relationship between Tibet identified foreign threats as a means to and China under the Mongols and the construct Tibet as vital national territory; Manchu rulers (Schaik 2012). two, he emphasized new forms of knowledge and institutions to reinvigorate The British strategy of suzerainty was imperial rule; three, he urged Han essentially devised to keep the Russians migration; and four, he advocated out from the region bordering India. More economic development of Tibet to than that, it meant to engage a weak integrate it with the China proper China and encourage it to play a role so (Giersch 2008). as to avoid a power vacuum in the region and thereby prevent the penetration of Similarly an article in Shuxuebao stated Russian influence in Tibet (Bhattacharya 3 3 STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF TIBET 4 forthcoming).