The Snow Lion and the Dragon. Melvyn C. Goldstein

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      THE SNOW

      LION AND

      THE DRAGON

      China, Tibet, and

      the Dalai Lama

      MELVYN C. GOLDSTEIN

      University of California Press

       Berkeley · Los Angeles · London

      This book is an expansion of China, Tibet and the United States: Reflections on the Tibet Question. Occasional Paper, The Atlantic Council of the United States, 1995.

      University of California Press

      Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

      University of California Press, Ltd.

      London, England

      ©1997 by

      The Regents of the University of California

      First Paperback Printing 1999

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Goldstein, Melvyn C.

      The snow lion and the dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama / Melvyn C. Goldstein.

      p. cm.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-520-21951-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

      1. Tibet (China)—Relations—China. 2. China—

      Relations—China—Tibet. 3. Bstan-'dzin-rgya-mtsho, Dalai

      Lama XIV, 1935-

      I. Title.

      DS786.G636 1997 97-2562

      CIP

      Printed in the United States of America

      16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

      14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6

      The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

       To

       CMB

      Contents

       Preface

       The Imperial Era

       Interlude: De Facto Independence

       Chinese Communist Rule: The Mao Era

       The Post-Mao Era

       The Future

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       Illustrations follow page

      Preface

      The Tibet Question, the long-standing conflict over the political status of Tibet in relation to China, is a conflict about nationalism—an emotion-laden debate over whether political units should directly parallel ethnic units. This question pits the right of a "people" (Tibetans) to self-determination and independence against the right of a multiethnic state (the People's Republic of China) to maintain what it sees as its historic territorial integrity.

      Such nationalistic conflicts have no easy answers, for the international community has arrived at no consensus about when a people is justified in demanding self-determination or when a multiethnic state has the right to prevent secession. The current United Nations Charter illustrates the ambiguity Whereas article 1 (section 2) states that the purpose of the UN is to ensure "friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination article 2 (section 7) states that "nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state."¹ Force is often the final arbiter, as when the United States went to war to settle the threat of Confederate secession.²

      Although Tibet occupies a remote part of the world, the Tibet Question has captured the imagination and sympathy of many in America and the West and resonates throughout the American political landscape. It has also become a significant irritant in Sino-American relations. But the conflict is not well understood. Typical of nationalistic conflicts, the struggle to control territory has been matched by a struggle to control the representations of history and current events. Both sides (and their foreign supporters) regularly portray events in highly emotional and often disingenuous terms intended to shape international perceptions and win sympathy for their cause. History is a major battlefield, and the facts of the conflict have become obscured by an opaque veneer of political rhetoric. Interested observers are deluged with contradictory claims and countercharges that render a dispassionate and objective assessment of the conflict excruciatingly difficult, even for specialists.

      The aim of this book is to peel away the layers of this veneer. In the following pages the anatomy of the Tibet Question will be examined in a balanced fashion using a realpolitik framework to focus on the strategies of the actors.

      While issues such as cultural survival and population transfer will be discussed, this book does not focus specifically on violations of individual human rights in Tibet, such as abusing prisoners or arresting monks for peaceful political demonstrations. These rights violations exist and are deplorable, but they are not at the heart of the problem. The Tibet Question existed long before there was a People's Republic of China, and it also predates the recent Western interest in universal human rights. In fact, if there were no human rights violations in Tibet and if Tibetans could, for example, practice peaceful political dissent, the Tibet Question would be every bit as contentious as it now is. The Tibet Question is about control of a territory—about who rules it, who lives there, and who decides what goes on there.

      We must also clarify the meaning of "Tibet." Ethnic Tibetan populations are distributed over an area as vast as Western Europe. They are found not only in China but also in India (Ladakh, Sikkim, northern Uttar Pradesh, and Arunachal Pradesh), Nepal, and Bhutan. Within China, the 1990 census reported 4.6 million ethnic Tibetans divided between two major regions—46 percent in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and 54 percent in the west China provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan.³ The former area—usually referred to as "political Tibet"—is equivalent to the polity ruled by the Dalai Lamas in modern times; the latter—ethnographic Tibet—corresponds to the borderland areas occupied by various traditional Tibetan native states. Hugh Richardson, the British diplomat who served in Lhasa as an official for the colonial Indian government in the 1930s and 1940s, explained this distinction as follows:

      In "political" Tibet the Tibetan government have ruled continuously from the earliest times down to 1951. The region beyond that to the north and east [Amdo and Kham in Tibetan]…is its "ethnographic" extension which people of Tibetan race once inhabited exclusively and where they are still in the majority. In that wider area, "political" Tibet exercised jurisdiction only in certain places and at irregular intervals; for the most part, local lay or monastic chiefs were in control of districts of varying size.