China's Tibet Policy

Dawa Norbu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781136797934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This major study analyses the traditional modes of Sino-Tibetan relations in order to unearth general patterns beyond partisan points of view. It sheds light on contemporary issues in the Sino-Tibetan dialogue, and discerns possible future structures for conflict resolution in occupied Tibet. With its economic reforms, China is changing and will ch

Part I

Patterns of the Sino–Tibetan Past and Current Political Realities

“The fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all of our lives. This also constitutes a transformation of consciousness.”

Peter L. Berger¹

“The issuance of patents of office by the emperor of China to his tributaries was roughly equivalent to modern diplomatic recognition in the West, where political entities that have no international diplomatic status are not considered to exist legally. However, the imperial patents did not themselves affect the constitutional structure of the tributary societies.”

Mark Mancall²

“So you see how data dictate theory.”

K. C. Chang³

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¹ James M. Henslin, (ed.) Down to Earth Sociology (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 5.

² Mark Mancall, China at the Centre (New York: The Free Press, 1984), p. 39.

³ K. C. Chang, Current Anthropology Vol. 36, No. 62. (April 1995), p. 311.

Chapter 1

The Origins of Tribute Relations and the Buddhist Factor in Sino–barbarian Relations

In this first part, I present some of the main findings of my study. I do so by surveying the recorded history of Sino–Tibetan relations from the seventh to the mid-twentieth centuries, highlighting the turning-points and different stages in the evolution of those relations. The purpose of this seemingly sweeping survey is to unearth different historical structures and degrees of domination of Tibet by imperial China implicit in the Sino–Tibetan relations over time. In this way, we will see glimpses of historical structures and religio-political mechanisms by which pre-modern China, directly or indirectly, exercised varying degrees and types of political influence over traditional Tibet. This exercise of power (or more appropriately influence) was expressed through rituals and ceremonies in their periodic bilateral relations.

However, by the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, the symbolic domination and ceremonial relations fundamentally changed with the emergence of modern political ideas of Chinese nationalism and nation-state within which the Chinese Nationalists first and then the Communists sought to integrate Tibet, based upon a unitary conception of a Han-dominated state. But the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party differed on the degrees of integration and areas or spheres to be included in integration. This is not trivial; it is rather pertinent to the present Sino–Tibetan discourse and dialogue. For between the degrees of and areas for integration may reside the Tibetan aspiration for a genuine autonomy.

Any search for the origins of prehistoric Chinese economy and culture must begin with some speculations and assumptions. I do so along the lines suggested by Owen Lattimore.¹ Lattimore’s thesis has great heuristic value for our prologue. It demonstrates and explains convincingly why from the earliest beginnings of Chinese history until the end of the nineteenth century, there was never any decisive spread of Chinese culture in Inner Asia, either by colonization or by the assimilation of the steppe people. For centuries, the Chinese hinterland and Inner Asia, though geographically contiguous to each other, stood worlds apart, divided more by two antagonistic types of economy and society than by the Great Wall. In order to understand this historical fact, we must transport ourselves from the present high-tech world which has practically conquered the forces of nature to the primitive era of Yellow River loess communities whose struggle for existence largely depended on the givens of geography and whims of nature. It is at such a tender age of man’s existence that a materialist interpretation of history makes sense.

The earliest signs of Han culture began in regions where intensive agriculture based on irrigation was possible. Therefore, the primary focus of Chinese prehistory was in the middle Yellow River valley and secondarily in the middle Yangtze valley. The lower Yellow River, flowing across the Great Plain of northern and middle China, frequently flooded and changed its course. Such challenges posed by geography necessitated organized social labour such as clearing, draining and tinkering that went beyond the isolated primitive man’s lonely effort and struggle for survival. From the Yellow River valley, the early Chinese spread to the Yangtze valley where they found even more favourable conditions for intensive agriculture. This agricultural technique spread predominantly from north to south and west to east along with migration and conquest.² All this, it should be noted, took place within the agricultural core of ancient China: the Jing and Wei rivers in Shaanxi, the Fen River in Shaanxi, and the lower Yellow River. Where conditions for irrigation-based intensive agriculture were not favourable such as the Mongolian steppes, or Tibetan wasteland, neither migration nor conquest took place.

In fact Lattimore demonstrates that the first known case of distinction between Chinese and “barbarians” appeared among the Chinese themselves, referring to the same ethnic stock (Han) but to those whose agricultural technique was less evolved. Similarly the so-called barbarian wars in Sheng Shang China were not nomadic conquests from the steppes but internal wars among different social groups belonging to essentially the same ethnic stock – Han. They differed on the lines of agricultural technique and economic development. The social cohesion made possible by intensive agriculture led to a wide expansion of the groups who practised it. These groups became “Chinese” co-terminus with civilization.³ Any other group in the Chinese hinterland not familiar with the Yellow River technique became “barbarians”. Therefore, in the ultimate analysis, the distinction between civility and barbarity in ancient China depended on a geographical accident: which side of the loess highlands you were. The eastern side was more fertile than the western side. The internal barbarians were in fact regarded as detachments lingering in territories into which the Yellow River culture was expanding.

They may not have been ethnically distinct from the Chinese. Possibly, and even probably they were backward, less developed groups of the same stock as that from which the Chinese had evolved – a stock anciently holding the whole of North China, both the loess Highlands in the west and the Great Plain in the east.⁴

In short, the early Chinese, after developing their ingenious agricultural technique in the Yellow River basin and after perfecting it in the Yangtze valley, expanded all over the Chinese mainland except the north. Subsequently, their migration and diffusion extended beyond China proper to regions or islands where the objective conditions for intensive agriculture were favourable such as the Korean Peninsula, the Japanese islands and the Indo-China region by the first century AD. This meant that if the environment was suitable for intensive agriculture, they, especially the Southern Chinese, dared to cross the seas and set up colonies by conquest and assimilation, migration and diffusion. But not to the Inner Asian steppes, even though such steppes were contiguous to China. In this region the Chinese agriculturists encountered an altogether different world, the world of nomadic pastoralism which produced a society and economy entirely different from the Chinese. Here the pre-modern Chinese expansion stopped. “The major environment that resisted Chinese penetration was steppe, and the steppe society was obdurate in setting itself against the society of China.”⁵ Reasons were rooted in their different economies and societies as well as in their early formative adaptation patterns. If the Chinese gravitated towards intensive agriculture, which in turn encouraged the closeness of society and therefore high degrees of social cohesion, the Inner Asian nomads’ way of life and economy were dependent on mobility and dispersal. The former conditions prevailed in the Chinese hinterland; and the latter, in the steppes.

Primitive man was really at the mercy of nature, and his adaptation to his environment, most of the time, followed the laws of nature: lines of least resistance. Geography virtually put such major ethnic groups in their ecological niche which shaped their formative characteristics and psychological pre-dispositions. Such early influences predate that of world religions. All this might sound like an unnecessary academic exercise in antiquity. However, the Sinic world of Han peasants, and the Inner Asian world of nomads and semi-nomads continued to be worlds apart for nearly 3,000 years; today their prehistoric legacies weigh heavily as they, especially the Central Asian peoples, struggle for their identity and freedom in the modern world. Their reluctance to identify themselves with either the Russian or the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century is neither ideological nor purely political. It is essentially rooted in their ancient legacy of two radically different types of economy and society, which, for centuries, functioned antagonistically, resulting in the formation of two distinct categories of culture: Sinic and Inner Asian types.

Along with intensive agriculture there developed in the same regions – the Yellow River basin and the Yangtze valley – some of the defining characteristics and peculiar institutions of what we today call Confucian civilization. This Confucian-Taoist culture tended to follow wherever the Chinese intensive agriculture techniques spread, first over the Chinese Mainland, then gradually, through migration and partial conquest, to the islands to the Northeast and finally to Indo-China. Intensive agriculture provided the economic foundations for a trans-border Confucian cultural ideocracy, based on shared Confucian cosmological beliefs, ancestor worship, a pictographic writing system and similar bureaucratic institutions. It appears that this Confucian ideocracy did not, in its early and pure form, include those regions which, even though contiguous to China, such as Inner Asia, lacked the necessary conditions for intensive agriculture based on irrigation. Confucian culture spread along with their agricultural technique, thereby providing both a common economic base as well as a cultural common ground for the wide acceptance of the Son of Heaven (tianzi) as the legitimate overlord who reigned the Confucian common-wealth or trans-border ideocracy that extended from Northeast Asia to the greater part of Southeast Asia, with regional variations.

Just as the early Chinese intensive agricultural technique was a typical product of the agro-friendly environment of the Yellow River basin and the Yangtze valley, the Taoist–Confucian culture was a typical early Chinese response to the Sinic agrarian world. The main characteristic of the Confucian civilization, as it evolved gradually from the Yellow River days to the present day fast-growing economies of East Asia, is not its profundity or its originality. Its unique feature lies in its confrontation with and meditation on the concreteness and facticity of man and his territoriality which constitutes his universe. What is amazing is its carefully nurtured antiquity such as ancestor worship, a pictographic writing system, its longevity and its sheer retention capacity whereby an incremental achievement of one generation or era – ranging from an agricultural technique to painting – is intensively practised and retained within the Great Wall of China before exporting it to similar environments. And if any metaphysical speculations developed at all such as the concept of tian necessary for the legitimation of Confucian order, it proceeded from the notions of simple man that divinity resides high in the “skies”, which constitutes the centrality of the Chinese belief-system.

What are the generic traits of Confucian culture that continue to influence the ways of thinking of millions of Chinese (Han), Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese? We should discuss such traits as they developed within the agricultural core of China and subsequent regional variations, based on the Chinese pattern in Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

In China intensive agriculture tended to favour the closeness of community and such closeness drew early Chinese attention to the characteristically Chinese objects of meditation which are concrete and immediate: the ancestor, the family, the clan. Therefore, the early Chinese religious ideas “centered on the clan and its deities, often identified as ancestors”,⁶ and ancestor worship has been one of the oldest religious beliefs of Confucian culture.⁷ This ancestor worship is directly related to another equally potent feature of the Confucian culture: an extraordinary sense of territoriality. Ancient Chinese families drew fences around their houses and walls, and early Chinese states built walls to defend their territories culminating in the construction of the Great Wall of China. The belief is that the spirits of their ancestors reside in the ancestral land where their bodies are buried. In other words, ancestor worship, focused as it is on one’s ancestral land, tends to sanctify territory. In the present era, Chinese and Vietnamese Communists displayed strong territoriality in their nationalisms. This characteristically Confucian sense of territoriality contrasts sharply with the Central Asian nomads’ sense of almost borderless open space.

In feudal China (pre-300 BC) some of the core Confucian political doctrines and institutions germinated which were subsequently extended to the Confucian culture areas outside China, to govern centre–periphery relations within the Confucian commonwealth. Feudalism as such is often understood as essentially unegalitarian property relations with a consequent involvement of exploitation. Such a normative or economic approach misses the political characteristics of feudalism. Politically, feudalism may be defined as the absence or weakening of a centralized state with consequent war among feudal lords being the permanent condition of feudalism. From 1000 BC to the wars of ever increasing intensity in fifth, fourth and third centuries BC; the so-called barbarian wars and the warring states conflicts created much social disorder and dislocation: a popular hunger for peace grew. Chinese social response, as typified by Confucius (551–479 BC), was to create a supra-regional order among the warring feudal states by emphasizing “ancient religious conceptions of a high god, Shang-ti, the Lord on High, presiding over the fate of man, especially of those called to put the world in order”. As Robert Krammer continues:

The highest power is also often referred to as tian heaven, and it takes precedence over all other gods who are honoured with the cult. It chooses the sovereigns to bring civilization to the people and to instruct them in the correct human relationships. The ruler’s charisma is sanctioned by the mandate they receive from the tianming and it is by this sanction that they exercise their power and ensure a ritual order in the symbiosis of gods, ancestors, and men in which each has proper station.⁸

Therefore, central to the Confucian political cosmology which sanctions and legitimates the reign, if not the rule, of the “Son of Heaven” (tianzi) over “all under heaven” (tianxi) is the ancient pre-world religion concept of and belief in tian usually translated as heaven: tian may be considered as the ancient Chinese equivalent of god expressed in typically Chinese concrete geographical space terms, the sky above the earth. It predates any of the world religions. The emperor or king is conceived as the son of tian reigning over his earthly kingdom expressed as “all under heaven” (tianxi). Therefore, the imperial sounding term “all under heaven” is neither a geographical concept in the sense “the Ch’in or Han Chinese still subscribed to the view that China embraced the whole world”,⁹ nor is it really an imperial concept in the sense that the “Son of Heaven” ruled o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• Map of Tibet and Her Neighbours
• Introduction
• Part I: Patterns of the Sino–Tibetan Past and Current Political Realities
• Part II: China and Tibet in War and Peace
• Part III: Tibet in Communist China
• Part IV: Tibet in International Politics
• Part V: Tibet’s Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index