Page 2 of 3 Tibet a defining issue for
China By Francesco Sisci
is applied to political relations between Beijing and other "territories", say
Korea or Siam (now Thailand), that are now "safely" out of the Chinese empire.
But the English might have felt the weak and vague word fit their encroaching
ambitions over the Chinese empire. The Russians were nibbling at the Qing
Empire from the north; the French were established to the south in Vietnam and
were aiming north; from their Indian base, the English wanted to reach the
bordering Himalayan plateau. It was in the interests of all these powers to
affirm, de facto or de jure, the weakness of Chinese rule over Tibet or other
territories.
From a modern perspective, the kind of pervasive rule the Chinese communists
applied on Tibet after 1950 has no precedent in history. But similarly
unprecedented was the pervasive rule of the
Chinese communists over the country. Former dynasties were happy with some
100,000 officials over a population 400 million in Qianlong times [5] .
Even if we multiply the number by 20 - thinking that on average one official
might have employed a staff of 20 clerks, guards and secretaries - we still
have just one official for every 200 people. Besides, it was a two-tiered
system. The mandarins depended directly on the center, while the guards and
secretaries depended on the local officials. In this way, the center would have
a hard time bypassing a local official who could act as a local emperor. This
left the administration of villages largely in the hands of resident grandees,
members of rich local families who may have been related to a present or
deceased official.
Conversely, the communists established party cells in every hamlet and quickly
expanded party ranks. They enforced strict party discipline and education that
allowed Beijing to reach out very effectively to every corner of the country.
Modern telecommunication systems further enhanced this drive. There are now
over 70 million party members in a population of less than 1.4 billion people.
This is more than one official for every 20 people - an official-per-person
ratio 10 times higher than in the previous dynasty.
Furthermore, in theory, all the officials depend directly on the center and can
be centrally monitored. Theoretically, nobody can behave as a local emperor for
long as the center has the ability and the organization to bypass middle or
low-ranking officials. In a way, the party's new clout over Tibet can be seen
as similar to its clout over the whole of China.
These arguments are important because they provide the necessary legitimization
for the present Chinese rule in Tibet. Without it, China could claim Tibet on
the basis of sheer force, a move that could weaken its stand abroad and at
home. This idea came about after 1950.
With the
establishment of the People's Republic, China had a government that, for the
first time since the collapse of the Qing, marshaled both the capability and
the determination to assert its domination over Tibet. For the leadership of
the PRC - particularly its intellectual cadre - the vagaries of random
conquests and submissions in the past no longer sufficed in making sense of
history; in the environment of dialectic materialistic historiography, Tibet's
inclusion within the Chinese state was now something to be asserted, proven,
and justified scientifically. The ideological imperative obliged the PRC to
deal more specifically with the nature of Tibet's historical inclusion within
the Chinese state. Out of this milieu evolved the interpretation that has been
in place for several decades now: the affirmation that Tibet became an integral
part of China during the period of the Mongol empire when the Mongol rulers of
China united Tibet and China. [6]
The ideology of the time
could not accept the Chinese expansion on the Tibetan plateau based on purely
geopolitical reasons. It had to produce an ideological discourse that justified
the new PRC control over Tibet both in terms of liberation of the local people
(befitting the communist ideal) and in historical terms (befitting the Chinese
history of which the PRC wanted to be the heir).
These reasons introduced a drastic change in the vocabulary used for Tibet.
Nationalist China was happy to describe Tibet within Chinese "sovereignty" (zhuquan
[7] or as a "vassal" (fanshu) [8].
But the two definitions were tainted with politically incorrect colonial
connotations that revolutionary China could not officially assume. Then, in the
1950s, China coined what has become the present standard designation of Tibet: zhongguo
de yi bufen ("one part of China"). This is vague enough to withstand
close scrutiny of the real nature of the past historical relationship between
China and Tibet. But it was precise enough for the political purpose at hand:
it can affirm that Tibet was firmly within the PRC. Then, the PRC produced a
whole library of books documenting this historical precedent.
Yet this strong reliance on history also complicates the matter. Force, and
victory by force, is not a sufficient basis to gain popular consensus. There
must be more educated and more educating reasons, history being best considered
as practical, based on precedents. This approach is certainly more "civilized",
and it can work much better than sheer fist-banging on the table. However, it
needs complicated acts of manipulating history and education - acts which can
leave many loopholes to be exploited by competing interpretations of history;
the longer the stretch of history being examined, the more loopholes. Western
historians have noted time and again that, for instance, during the Ming
Dynasty, there was no political authority over Tibet, that is: "there were no
ordinances, laws, taxes, etc, imposed inside Tibet by the Ming". [9]
This casts a shadow on claims about the nature of the vassalage between Tibet
and China. Traditionally in China, these loopholes were made up for by
enforcing a politically expedient view of history, with all competing views of
history suppressed. This is possible in a closely guarded environment,
impermeable to competing views.
This approach worked until the mid-19th century, when the rest of the world was
peripheral for China and the Chinese people. But modern China, in this world,
is hardly impermeable, and attempting to enforce an "educated history" weakens
the stature of official views overall. That is, if one doubts China's official
claims on Tibet, then one will also doubt all other official claims.
Because of all of the historical controversies surrounding Tibet, it is
apparent to both Chinese and foreigners that the issue is fuzzy. There might be
more reasons for Vietnam - a country that has used Chinese writing for
centuries, speaks a language close to southern Chinese dialects and was
"conquered" during the Han Dynasty - to be considered part of China than Tibet.
The latter speaks and writes a language very different from Chinese and has
only more recent contacts with China proper. But recent history decided
otherwise, so Tibet is within China and Vietnam is independent. Similar
arguments could be made about Korea.
The case of Vietnam is of particular interest. In 1950, when China reached to
Tibet and the Vietnamese border, Vietnam was held by France and encroaching
there would risk war with a great power. Tibet, conversely, was without any
strong protector. Great Britain, which left India in 1947 but still retained
large Asian interests, could have moved in by setting up some sort of
protectorate in Tibet and by providing assistance, including military
assistance. It could then have placed troops on the Himalayan plateau
overlooking the sprawling Chinese plains. It is understandable that newly born
Maoist China wanted to avoid this situation.
Furthermore, New Delhi - embroiled in the Pakistani secession and the first
Indian-Pakistani war - could not have the energy and will to stretch its claims
over Tibet. India, recently independent from Britain, also had more than one
reason to prefer the Chinese presence to a massive British comeback in the
Himalayas, which also overlook the Indian plains. Even after the Dalai Lama's
flight to India from Tibet in 1959, Jawaharlal Nehru was said to have consulted
with Mao Zedong over the possibility of granting a safe haven to Tibetan
refugees. Mao was said to have told Nehru that, after all, it would be better
for the Tibetans to stay in friendly India than in unfriendly America.
This was reason enough to send Chinese troops to Tibet. Especially since the
issue of territorial expansion was not then the blasphemy that it is in current
political philosophy.
Territory or colony?
This also casts a different light on how we can understand and politically
translate into contemporary terms what the English at the time recognized as
Chinese "suzerainty" over Tibet. We should remember also that for Beijing
"suzerainty" was different in Siam or Korea, and thus also in Tibet. How did
"suzerainty" stand vis-a-vis the status of colonies at the time? We officially
no longer have colonies, but some large countries, such as Russia and the
United States, have fully integrated what might be regarded as former "colonial
expansion" into their territories.
They were able to do so because of territorial continuity, which was missing
with British or French colonies. There are similarities in China's claims over
Tibet. In fact, the Lifan Yuan, which handled Tibetan affairs, is commonly
translated as "office of colonial affairs," and Chinese writers at the time
compared the Qing efforts in Tibet with contemporary colonial enterprises of
the British, American, French and Dutch. [10]
Certainly, to reclaim colonies in the 1950s, a time of decolonization, was not
appropriate for the PRC, as we have seen above. However, we can also see - for
instance in the cases of Russia, America and other countries - that territorial
continuity helped to preserve territories conquered or claimed in colonial
times and "under-populated" by the original inhabitants.
In fact, in the 19th century, state organizations were different and even
border respect was different. There were European states with clearly defined
frontiers as well as commonly shared rights and mutual obligations. And there
were territories that did not recognize the European political grammar and were
thus considered land for conquest by the Western states. Qing China was a
special case: too powerful to be rolled over, but organized along political
lines different from those of the European political grammar. At the time,
foreign diplomats (and possibly also later historians) tried to translate these
Chinese political territorial claims in self-serving ways. These "translations"
were very important because they could justify and legitimize all kinds of
territorial encroachment on the Qing Empire.
In response to this process, at the beginning of the last century, Sun Yat-sen
and his Nationalist party made claims that "retranslated" for his domestic and
foreign audience the Chinese territorial position. Those claims became the
landmark definition of modern China and included Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia.
Furthermore, to stress the nobility of Chinese people vis-a-vis the aggressive
"barbarians" from the West, Sun claimed 5,000 years of history, making China a
few millennia older than the Western civilization born in the first millennium
BC in Greece and Rome. This also became the standard measure to gauge the
nobility of other nations. Countries just a few hundred years old were deemed
young, thus unworthy, and could be looked down on.
It was clearly a political contraption that was useful at the time to boost
morale among Chinese who felt they were being trampled by young, energetic,
advanced and modern foreigners. Sun was saying that young was no good - old,
ancient even, was the reason for true civilization. This was something that
resonated in Chinese traditional culture, with its stress on old age: no
country was older, thus worthier, than China.
Nationalist history and geography were the basis of the "Chinese
characteristics" Mao's communists brought with them to power. However, despite
the official nationalist position, since the fall of the Qing Dynasty (1912),
no Chinese ruler was strong enough to
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