Tibet Policy Journal Vol. VI No. 2 2019 The Tibet Policy Institute Published by: Tibet Policy Institute Central Tibetan Administration Dharamshala - 176215 H.P. INDIA Website: http://www.tibetpolicy.net Editor: Tenzin Desal Contact: [email protected] First Edition : 2020 June No. of copies : 500 ISSN No. 2394-2983 Printed by Narthang Press (DIIR) Editor’s Note The articles in this volume should have been inked, stapled, glued and bounded at the press a little earlier, but the pandemic that has overwhelmed us all had caused a slight delay. Nevertheless, we are delighted to share it with you despite tardiness. This volume is truly an in-house enterprise. All the articles published here are contributed either by the researchers at the Tibet Policy Institute or by promising interns who spent their last year’s monsoon months at our office. I tip my hat to them for coming out with impressive research output during their relatively short stint at our institute. Since the advent of the internet, the world is being wired in a way unprecedented in human history. This has enabled us to conveniently access information and communicate. For our age, internet is serving as an indispensable vector for ideas and data. After several failed attempts by California-based tech giants to penetrate the hugely profitable Chinese market, China has instead created a parallel internet ecosystem. The Chinese internet ecosystem is hermetically sealed by the great firewall of China where only specialized applications (VPNs) provide glimpses into what lies beyond its internet frontiers. In China, before Xi Jinping came to power, internet provided a limited yet vibrant space for its citizens to engage politically. But now, China has the most sophisticated online censorship operation that seeks to curtail and shape its political discourse. Tenzin Dalha’s article looks at the ways by which the Chinese state could act trans-nationally on the exile Tibetan population by disrupting their communication channels and furtively planting what has now become a common parlance of political discourse -- “fake news.” Dalha’s article merits from first-hand documentation of such cases with the staff members of the Central Tibetan Administration. Tenzin Choedon’s paper is a critical examination of the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy, 2014. In the earlier volume of this journal, we have published an article where the author viewed this policy through foucauldian lens and his concept of governmentality. Here, Choedon examines the liminal space occupied by exile Tibetans through conceptual framework developed by Agamben and Arendt. She outlines i practical challenges by examining diversity of Tibetan settlements in India and other impediments in the implementation of this policy. She shares her findings from a small random sample survey she had conducted in Dharamsala and selective interviews with concerned authorities. To her, notwithstanding this policy, the precarious status of the Tibetans in India persists where questions surrounding their land rights and legal status are still unaddressed. For China, its economic rise and engagement with the world has resulted in extension of its clout over global affairs. Its ambitious project to connect the world through a complex trading network where Chinese state is initially bankrolling the cost was greeted with as much fanfare as nervous protestation calling it a neo-colonialist adventurism. The engagement of such tenacious ambition requires understanding of the world that is constantly changing. Here Tenzin Lhadon’s article looks at the genesis of the study of International Relations theory in the People’s Republic China, a sort of an archaeology of Mao to Xi in the field of IR theory. She points to the salience of this discipline in PRC by alerting us to theorists returning to ‘indigenous’ thinkers on statecraft and state-state relations to develop International Relations theory with ‘Chinese Characteristics’. Anyone who is remotely interested in the Himalayas and Tibet would be aware of the significance of Tibet and its geographical positioning. Dubbed as the third pole of the world for the volume of water conserved here in solid state, Tibet in anthropocene is undergoing geological, climactic, social, cultural and political transformation. In a thought provoking recent environmental history of Buddhists across Asia, where the author contends, quite convincingly, about Buddhists ecological footprint. This could be a new line of academic enquiry by bringing Tibetan studies in conversation with burgeoning scholarship on environmental history. More pressing to us is the unfolding global climate crisis, and here Dechen Palmo’s article looks at secondary reports on a Tibetan river that flows through to many countries and China’s involvement in building of dams along the Mekong River. She argues that the mechanism to equitably share the water resource is vulnerable to China’s hegemony. With the recent publication of Atwill’s work on the Tibetan Muslim population in Lhasa, this has added to a sizable scholarship on this community despite paucity of sources. When the historical sources ii are short in supply, a rich ethnography could open a new register for our knowledge repository on a population that has received relatively less attention in Tibetan studies. Tenzing Wangdak’s article is such an attempt, looking at the ways through which the Tibetan Muslim population became part of the fabric of cosmopolitan Lhasa in the 17th Century. His article asserts to carve a narrative that has eluded broader national history. As with the case with all national histories, marginal histories suffer from neglect by historians practicing the craft of writing national history. Foregrounding the role of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in resisting China’s rule over Tibet, Tsering Kalden’s article is framed to revisit the Tibetan singing nuns in one of the China’s most notorious prisons in Tibet, Drapchi. Recorded at great risk, a collection of resistance songs were later smuggled out of Tibet. Their songs spoke of their condition, despair and hope. For Kalden, their songs which are rich in metaphorical allusions could be deconstructed to analyze subtle ways through which Tibetan nuns are resisting oppression. By transmitting messages through what James Scott called “hidden transcript,” these Tibetan nuns relayed their conditions in most trying of circumstances through music. This study, to me, problematizes a widely employed analytical trope in western academia of Tibetans in Tibet and exile -Tibetans dichotomy. The library of the Tibet Policy Institute recently acquired a sizable collection of Tibetan works published in the People’s Republic of China. Among the valuable acquisition, the collected works of Muge Samten formed the basis for my study on the question of Tibetan identity and ethnicity under the occupation of People’s Republic of China. I look at two essays embedded in the sixth volume of his collected works on the question of “Baima” Tibetans. Locating him beyond the binary described by Chomsky of an intellectual either working with the state or someone speaking truth to power, his essays reveal to us that he employs his intellectual capital to subtly resist and even subvert the Chinese state discourses on Tibetan ethnicity and identity. His role as an intellectual could be tentatively placed under the rubric of vernacular cosmopolitan intellectual, an idea, I must admit needs to be developed further in Tibetan context. In a discursive representation against the state discourse on Tibetan ethnicity and its transition from Marxist-Leninist nationality to ethnicity with a bureaucratic sleight of hand, I look at the evidence in modern Tibetan literature and popular iii culture to understand strategies for expression of Tibetan nationalism. This is still a working paper and I intend to develop certain ideas and cast a wider net on other vernacular sources to explore this dynamics. We have introduced a new book review section to this volume. Tenzin Tsetan reviews Fabienne Jagou’s biography on the ninth Panchen Lama. Initially accessible exclusively to the francophone world, the English translation by Rebecca Biesset Buechel helped us map the life, time and journeys of this extraordinary modern Tibetan figure at the cusp of calamitous changes. It should go without saying that I thank all the contributors for not only submitting papers but duly replying to my queries and responding to my suggestions. At the same time, we would like to disclaim that content published in this volume are the outcome of labour and intellectual enquiry by the authors, hence it doesn’t reflect the opinion of the editor and by extension the Tibet Policy Institute. Tenzin Desal Dharamsala June 2020 iv Contents Tenzin Dalha China’s Cyber War and the Exile Tibetans: A Policy Analysis .......................................................................................................1 Tenzin Choedon Rehabilitation or a Temporal Adjustment: An Assessment of the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy, 2014 ........................................................15 Tenzin Lhadon The Development of International Relations Theory in China and the Significance of Chinese Characteristics ..................................39 Dechen Palmo Beijing’s Politics on Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) and Its Implications for Mekong Subregion Countries ..............................55 Tenzing Wangdak Lhasa Khache and Bhod: A Brief Overview of Tibetan Muslims in 17th Century Lhasa and the Narratives