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Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy
China's Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands
Sulmaan Wasif Khan
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Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy
China's Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands
Sulmaan Wasif Khan
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About This Book
In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa, leaving the People's Republic of China with a crisis on its Tibetan frontier. Sulmaan Wasif Khan tells the story of the PRC's response to that crisis and, in doing so, brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters: Chinese diplomats appalled by sky burials, Guomindang spies working with Tibetans in Nepal, traders carrying salt across the Himalayas, and Tibetan Muslims rioting in Lhasa. What Chinese policymakers confronted in Tibet, Khan argues, was not a "third world" but a "fourth world" problem: Beijing was dealing with peoples whose ways were defined by statelessness. As it sought to tighten control over the restive borderlands, Mao's China moved from a lighter hand to a harder, heavier imperial structure. That change triggered long-lasting shifts in Chinese foreign policy. Moving from capital cities to far-flung mountain villages, from top diplomats to nomads crossing disputed boundaries in search of pasture, this book shows Cold War China as it has never been seen before and reveals the deep influence of the Tibetan crisis on the political fabric of present-day China.
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Chapter One: The Road to Lhasa
Sky Burial
In 1951, Yang Gongsu received orders to move to Lhasa. The Peopleâs Republic of China was knitting Tibet into its sovereign territory, and as part of this process, the Foreign Ministry needed more diplomats to staff that distant borderland. So Yang and some of his colleagues made their way to Chengdu.1 From Chengdu, they began the long, uncomfortable journey northwestward to Tibet. The green plains gave way to mountains. Some of the mountains were thick with forests of spruce, larch, and pine; others were a bare, rusty red. When the day was clear, they could see glaciers in the distance; the closer peaks, with their caps of snow, were reflected in the blue river beside them. Now and then, the low, howling cry of a wolf would break in upon the night.
The highwayâit was not so much a highway, really, as a rock-strewn track along which a powerful vehicle could bump and bounceâended in Ganzi, a town at an altitude of some four thousand meters. In the strange cartography of the PRC, Ganzi was categorized in the province of Xikang, separate from what the Chinese state considered the locality of Tibet, but the people swaggering around the streets were Khambasâeastern Tibetansâand their religious allegiance lay with the Dalai Lama. And it was in Ganzi that Yang Gongsu saw his first sky burial. A death had occurred and the locals set about burying the body according to Tibetan custom, while the Chinese newcomers watched from a distance. On a mountain slope, the lama presiding over the funeral chopped the corpse into pieces, muttering prayers as he did so. Then he stepped back, and the vultures that had gathered in anticipationââgray, yellow vultures as large as a small cow,â Yang would rememberâdescended on the body. When they had eaten the flesh, the lama ground the bones and the skull, so that the vultures could eat those too. Nothing was left. After returning, Yang recalled: âMany comrades threw up and could not eat their food. I too felt very nauseated. According to what the Tibetan people said, this [the sky burial] was very natural. The person was returning whence he had come. He had already ascended to heaven, and they wished him good fortune in the life to come.â2 In Yangâs bemusement at how natural the sky burial was to the Tibetans, in his recollections of his own queasiness, one hears an old note: that of a traveler caught in a strange, disquieting land. These people were not his people, their ways not his ways.
Yet he was being asked and trained to respect their customs. In telling the story of how the PRC set about state-building in the Tibetan borderlands, one is struck by how much central authorities relied on local collaborationâsomething that required respect for local mores. In the early fifties, Beijing sought to perpetuate its rule in Tibet by giving Tibetans a loose rein. PRC governance of Tibet formed an imperial structure, but it was empire-lite.3 And because Tibet was a frontier region where the line between East and South Asia blurred, sovereignty over Tibet required a foreign policy. Largely unremarked by scholarly accounts of the Chinese conquest of the region, the Tibetan frontier became a key source of Chinese foreign policy, one that would provide Beijing with a template for dealing with the Cold War in the third world.4
The View from Beijing
The borderlands that Yang had come to govern were vast. They rolled out over an area four times the size of France, embracing alpine grasslands and Himalayan desert, mountains and great saline lakes. There were valleys unconnected except by nomads and their yaks; if you ascended a peak, you could look out over miles and miles of emptiness and rock. The sheerness of the slopes and the snow that blocked the passes meant that travel was hard; it took Yang more than twenty days to make the relatively short trip from Ganzi to Chamdo.
Perhaps it was this forbidding geography that made it difficult for Tibet to function like a nation-state. Even at the peak of its power in the eighth century, when the Tibetan empire had struggled for mastery of east-central Asia with the Tang Dynasty and the Uighurs of Xinjiang, the Tibetan plateau looked more like a collection of small fiefdoms than a cohesive national power; local valleys had their own chieftains and life went on largely unimpeded by centralized authority.5 When the Mongols swept across Eurasia, they conquered China proper, Tibet, and a host of other places: this unification in the form of the Yuan dynasty would later form the basis for Chinese claims that Tibet had always been a part of China. The Mongols were supportive of Tibetan Buddhism, as they were of most religions; some Tibetans occupied key administrative posts in the new government.6 The relationship lapsed when the Ming dynasty took charge, but the government of China did not abandon its claim to Tibet. Only after the arrival of the Qing dynasty in 1644, however, did the government of China move to assert control over Tibet. The Qing government intervened in the recurring disputes between the Dalai and Panchen Lamas (the two leading figures in the Tibetan religious establishment), thereby strengthening its grip on the region. Curiously, the priest-patron relationship was reforged: the Qianlong emperor was, among other incarnations, a practicing Tibetan Buddhist who took the Dalai Lama as his spiritual guide.7 But even though the Chinese government had representatives in Lhasa, Tibet continued to feel like a world apart from the established stateâa cluster of valleys, each going its own way, not unified by state authorities.
The gradual decay of Qing power only underlined the statelessness. When British troops led by Francis Younghusband stormed into Tibet in 1903â4 to get a trade agreement, what was surprising was how many different people they had to work with to conclude it. The British-Chinese convention of 1906 did confirm the 1904 treaty, but it was more because the British did not wish to offend Beijing than in recognition of its actual control over the Himalayan trade marts.8 With the fall of the Qing in 1911, whatever was left of Chinaâs authority over Tibet came to an end. There were cultural and religious connections between the Tibetan plateau and China proper, but in terms of governance, Tibet was separate, going its own way.9 The Tibetan plateau was more a part of the fourth world: a mĂ©lange of indigenous peoples and tribes that existed without a state. This is not to argue that Tibet had always been part of China, though the Chinese state had often sought to exercise control over the region; rather, being a place where the stateâs grip was often infirm or absent, Tibet had ways of life defined by statelessness. âZomiaâ is a term social scientists have recently popularized to describe a non-state zone.10 Tibet was such a place.
The new Chinese state did not abandon its claims to the Tibetan plateau. Sun Yat-sen, who had spearheaded the republican cause against the Qing, claimed that the different ethnicities of China formed part of a larger Chinese family. His successor, Chiang Kai-shek, who headed the Nationalist Party in China, maintained the same line. The Tibetans were one of âfive peoples designated in China,â he argued; they were part of the âwhole Chinese nation.â11 Chiang did manage to defend Chinaâs claim to Tibet at an international level; the United States and Britain did not recognize an independent state of Tibet, though the Tibetan Kashagâa council of ministers that conducted Tibetâs secular affairsâreached out to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in an attempt to get such recognition. For practical purposes, however, Chiangâs authority over the Tibetan plateau was nonexistent.12
For much of his tenure, Chiang was engaged in a bitter civil war against the Chinese Communists. It was the civil war that provided the Communists with their first experience of Tibet. In 1934, almost entirely beaten by the Nationalists, the Chinese Communists began the famous Long March from Jiangxi to Yanan. Weary, defeated, they trudged a route that took them along the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau, where Khambas and local Muslims alternately fed and attacked them. The experience would stay with a young Mao Zedongâwho rose to power on the Long Marchâas a lesson in how deeply ethnic tension ran through the Tibetan borderlands.13 For the time being, at least, he could do nothing about it. A contest was under way for mastery of China, but none of the contestants had any real authority over Tibet.
The Nationalists and the Communists did suspend hostilities during World War II to fight the Japanese army that had invaded China. But in 1945, with the Japanese threat gone, the two parties resumed battle. The Chinese civil war was not decided easily; only in 1949 did it become clear that the Communists would win.14 The emergence of the Cold War in the late forties meant that those ideological and geopolitical rivals, the United States and the USSR, had an interest in the struggle for mastery of Chinaâa point not lost on Tibetans in Lhasa. In July 1949, the Kashag decided to expel a number of Chinese living in Tibet; they were to be escorted by a Tibetan bodyguard to the border crossing with India, from where they could make their way to Kalimpong.15 What was most interesting about the decision was the language the Kashag used in explaining its decision to Indian authorities:
There is fighting between the Chinese Kuomintang and the Communist. It seems that wherever there is Chinese Government officers and forces there rises Communism and trouble. Therefore we cannot risk the trouble that might rise to the Chinese representative in Lhasa. Moreover there are many talks saying that there are suspicious Chinese and barbas who are the people from western China staying in Tibet Lhasa etc. It is difficult to pick them out from amongst others. All the people of Tibet are very worried that such bad system communism [may] come into being in Tibet where there is the religion of Lord Buddha which is the source of happiness of all beings. For the benefit of both the Chinese and the Tibetan govt and in order to have a long reign of Budhism we must send away all the suspicious men of being Communist secret servicemen. . . . We have ordered the Chinese representative in Lhasa and his staff, the wireless officer, the school teacher, the hospital worker and the suspicious Chinese and barbas to leave for their respective places soon.16
The emphasis on the evils of communism, the defense that the expulsion was an anticommunist moveâthe phrasing showed that the Kashag was aware of developments in the larger international system, and that it would take advantage of the Cold War to further its own agenda. The Kashag had no proof that any of the Chinese being expelled were communists. Many of them seem to have been nothing more than local traders who happened to have run afoul of local authorities; in later years, after the Kashag had fallen from power, the expulsion of the Han would be cited as a move designed to destroy unity among peoples.17 But communism was a good pretext to rid Tibet of any Chinese influence. The Kashag knew that old British civil servants had remained in India to help the new government; it knew too that in the Cold War, the British were, broadly speaking, on the side of the anticommunists. Fear of the âKoumintang [sic] party falling under Communist controlâ was the justification the Kashag offered for asking for British intelligence on the progress of the Chinese civil war. Anticommunist the Kashag might have been, but the other concerns it raised with the Britishâthe progress of the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang, the direction fleeing Guomindang forces would take, the status of the Sino-Tibetan frontier18âsuggest that it might well have been pondering what a unified China would mean for its own authority. It was one thing to maintain power in Lhasa when China itself was in chaos; it was quite another when China was united under a war-hardened leadership. There was reason to be wary. The Chinese Communistsâthough still locked in battle with the Guomindangâfound time to make a public response to the expulsion of the Chinese from Lhasa. The expulsion, according to the official Xinhua news agency, had been planned by British and American imperialists and carried out by reactionaries in Tibet. âTibet,â it went on to say, âis Chinaâs territory, and we will never allow it to be invaded by foreign forces; the Tibetan people are an integral part of the Chinese, and we will never allow them to be separated from the Chinese nation.â19 Tibet had become a theater in the Chinese civil war and the Cold War.
The CCPâs statement marked a change in its views on the borderlands. In 1934, reporting on CCP minority policy, Mao Zedong had made an impassioned defense of minoritiesâ rights to self-determination. In the past, ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and the Hui, the Mongols and the Miao, had suffered oppression, not least in the Guomindangâs model of a âfive peoplesâ republic.â The Chinese Soviet republic, by contrast, recognized ethnic minoritiesâ rights to ânational self-determination,â even to the point of âseparating from China, establishing their own independent, free countries.â There was an answer, Mao thundered, to âimperialism the world over (including the Chinese Guomindang).â20 It was a fascinating vision; it held forth an idea of China as something undefined, changeable, a place that had yet to be built and that could define itself in ways which excluded peoples who did not wish to be part of it. Perhaps the statement was merely tactical, a means of getting support from ethnic minorities as the CCP struggled for survival. But these were the days when the communists were young and revolutionary and idealistic: it seems quite conceivable that Mao genuinely meant what he said, that as a good anti-imperialist, he was sincere in championing the Tibetansâ right to determine their own destiny.
Just why that vision changed with victory remains unknown. But as the Chinese Communists gained strength in China proper, their policy toward the borderlands changed too. By September 1949, as the Communists appeared poised for victory in the civil war, Zhou Enlai was already explaining that while no one doubted the minoritiesâ rights to self-determination, imperialists were trying to split âour Tibet, Taiwan, even Xinjiang.â Given this situation, he hoped that the minorities would not listen to imperialist provocation. And therefore, he continued, the country would be called the âPeopleâs Republic of China, and not be called âfederation.ââ21 It was a telling speech. Zhou had still held out self-determination as an optionâbut he had also pointed out that Tibet, Taiwan, and Xinjiang were âours,â that there were attempts to âsplitâ them under way. It was a very different view of China from the one Mao had proclaimed in 1932; China in the new formulation had a powerful claim to certain territories, which were being split from it by imperialist conspiracies. There was a defined, cohesive China, which included Tibet, in this view, rather than a still evolving entity that Tibet might or might not opt to join.
In October, 1949, after the Chinese Co...