The History of Chinese-Tibetan Relations and What It Means for the Present

I was recently asked to give a brief talk at a symposium hosted by a Tibetan organization here in Taiwan. Since they also want me to provide a paper that they can publish, I've written an article on the history of China-Tibet relations and its bearing on self-determination for Tibet. I may revise it later and I believe they want to translate it into Chinese, but I'm posting my draft version here first. A few paragraphs were taken from an older essay of mine on the topic, but most of it is new.

In almost all articles, debates and arguments about the status of Tibet and its relationship to China, the question of history is sure to arise. It could be argued that sometimes too much importance is placed on history in controversies of this kind, a point I will come back to later. But since the Chinese government and its supporters are particularly fond of making references to history in asserting China’s claims over Tibet, it is worth making an attempt to summarize the historical relationship between China and Tibet and examining whether the facts are in accordance with China’s claims.

Many wire service reports on the Tibet issue, after noting the Chinese claim that Tibet is part of China, go on to say that “Tibetans say Tibet was independent for centuries” or something to that effect. But this is not something that only Tibetans say; none but the most blatantly propagandistic Chinese account would deny that Tibet has a long history as an independent nation, even if much of that history is in the distant past. Over a thousand years ago, when the Tang dynasty ruled in China, Tibet had a powerful empire that contested with Tang China for dominance over the Tarim basin and frequently won. After the Tang dynasty went into decline, the Tibetans even succeeded in sacking the Chinese capital of Chang’an. Soon afterwards, however, the Tibetan empire itself collapsed and Tibet entered its equivalent of the European Dark Ages. But it remained independent of any sort of outside rule until the 13th century, when the Mongols under Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, conquered both Tibet and China, adding them into their empire. China now likes to claim that this was the point at which Tibet was incorporated into China. But though Kublai Khan proclaimed a new dynasty, the Yuan, his regime never became Sinicized and Tibet and other non-Chinese territories were not treated as part of China or incorporated into the Chinese administrative system, but like China itself, were just another Mongol imperial possession. In other words, Mongol rule over Tibet during this period perhaps could be used as a (very weak) historical basis for Mongolia to claim sovereignty over Tibet, but it is completely irrelevant to any Chinese claims.

After the Chinese Ming dynasty overthrew the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Tibet and other Mongol conquests regained their independence. Chinese propaganda has tried to claim that the Ming had some sort of authority over Tibet, but at best the Ming would “confirm” the titles of Tibetan officials who had already been chosen without any Chinese input. Tibet’s relationship to China during this period was equivalent to Okinawa’s; both were independent states that retained ties with China primarily for their own benefit. The Ming had no political authority over Tibet and no real say over who ruled it. In fact, Tibet’s political ties with the Mongols were much stronger for most of the Ming era than their ties with China were. It was a Mongol ruler named Altan Khan who first conferred the title “Dalai Lama” on a leading Tibetan abbot in 1578. So as of about four centuries ago, not only did Tibet have its own culture, language and religion that was completely distinct from that of China, it was politically independent of China and never been ruled by the Chinese. Indeed, at the time of the Ming dynasty, even the Chinese themselves generally considered places like Tibet, Taiwan, Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Manchuria to be non-Chinese, “barbarian” lands outside the pale of Chinese civilization.

China’s present claim over Tibet, like its claim over other outlying, non-Chinese areas, is in fact based entirely on the conquests of the Manchu Qing dynasty. In the 17th century, China was conquered by the Manchus, a non-Chinese people from Manchuria, the land to the northeast, who set up the Qing dynasty. The Manchus were regarded by the Chinese as foreigners, though over time they eventually were assimilated by their subjects. In the first decades of Manchu rule, they expanded their empire far beyond China, conquering Mongolia, East Turkestan and Tibet. These territories were imperial possessions, just as India was an imperial possession of the British, Central America was an imperial territory of Spain, and so forth. In most cases, the Manchu did not administer these territories the same way they administered China (Tibet in fact retained a high degree of local autonomy), as neither they nor the people of these regions was Chinese. The main thing these regions had in common with China was that they were all part of the same empire.

In 1912, after a long period of decline under pressure both from foreign imperialists and domestic rebels, the Qing dynasty fell and the Republic of China was proclaimed. The ROC laid claim to all the territory of the Manchu empire, despite the fact that much of it was not Chinese. The new government was unable to enforce its claims, so most of the non-Chinese regions became independent (for that matter, the central government did not even effectively control all of China proper, as most of it was ruled by autonomous warlords). However, they maintained their questionable claims of sovereignty over all the empire, so when the ROC government was forced out of China to Taiwan and the People's Republic of China was set up, the PRC in turn claimed all of the same empire (except part of Mongolia, which their Soviet allies forced them to recognize as independent). Unfortunately for places like Tibet, which had been a de facto independent country for several decades by this time, the PRC was able to enforce its claims militarily, conquering all of the non-Chinese areas that had once been part of the Manchu empire except outer Mongolia (ironically enough, before they actually gained power, Mao and other communist leaders had at times supported full independence for all these outlying regions, only to change their minds once they had the power to take them over).

Are the Chinese claims to sovereignty over these places justifiable? One way to answer that is to ask whether other imperial claims are justifiable. Did Britain have the "right" to rule India, Malaysia, east Africa, and all its other imperial possessions? Did the French have the "right" to its colonies in West Africa, Indochina, and so on? Did Russia have the "right" to rule Poland, which it did throughout the 19th century? Most people now would agree that imperialism and colonialism as practiced by the Europeans was wrong, and all of those countries were justified in struggling for independence. So is Chinese rule in historically non-Chinese areas justified? China rules these places, which they "inherited" as part of an empire, in the same exploitative fashion that the Europeans ran their colonies. In some ways Chinese rule is even worse, as the Chinese government have actively tried to suppress local culture (the Europeans did this in some places, but not everywhere) and it is using the vast population of Chinese to swamp the local people by encouraging the Han (as the ethnic Chinese are called) to move to these places in large numbers to make money. Most of the money from economic development in places like Tibet goes into the pockets of Han Chinese, so the local people see that not only have they lost their independence, but their homeland is being turned into a Han-majority region in which they will be an impoverished minority with a culture that is slowly withering away. Some businesses located in these areas even post ads for workers online that specify “Han-only”, blatantly discriminating against the local people by denying them even basic job opportunities. It is no wonder that in the depths of their despair, some Tibetans have turned to the extreme act of self-immolation as a protest against Chinese rule.

Of course, China asserts that Tibetans have benefited from Chinese rule because it has brought economic opportunity (never mind the fact that most of the opportunity seems to go to Han Chinese). However, perhaps because it is difficult for China and its propagandists to directly defend either the Chinese conquest of Tibet or the current suppression of Tibetan culture and aspirations, a common strategy is to try to change the subject. One line that seems to be popular among Chinese propagandists online recently is that before "liberation" by China, the Tibetans suffered under oppressive rule by the monks (of course this implies that Tibet was independent, contradicting their claim that it has been under Chinese rule for centuries, but logical consistency is not their strong suit). One of their key assertions is that most of the Tibetan people had to work as serfs for their monk masters. The problem with this claim is that vast majority of Tibetans have always been nomads, not peasant farmers (though now the Chinese are trying to force them to change their lifestyle against their will). This rather seriously undermines the credibility of China's claims about monkish oppression, which seem in any case to be merely a grafting of standard Marxist historical theory about slave societies and feudal societies onto Tibetan history, regardless of how badly it fits.

But the problem is not just that the Chinese version of the history of Tibet and its relationship with China is distorted or simply false; it is that the Chinese government dogmatically insists that its version is the only true one and anyone who questions it – no matter how much evidence they have for their interpretation – cannot possibly be right and is acting out of bad motives. This rigid insistence on the official version of history is not limited to the Tibetan issue, of course, as the Chinese government’s reaction to the British researchers who came up with a shorter measurement for the length of the Long March or the Chinese professor who published a less rosy interpretation of the Boxer Rebellion in Freezing Point magazine show. This attitude shows that the Chinese government is not really interested in finding the historical truth, which can only be done by open academic debate; instead, it is only interested in using history, or rather its version of history, as a propaganda tool. If the Chinese government were really confident that their interpretation of history was the true one, they would not fear debate on the subject.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, it could be argued that historical claims should matter less than the will of the current residents. For example, just because the countries around the Mediterranean were ruled by Rome for many centuries doesn’t mean Italy can claim a right to rule them now, nor can Mongolia claim the former realm of Genghis Khan. One thing that even a basic knowledge of history tells you is that nothing is forever, so Chinese claims that one territory or another is “inseparable” from China are nonsense. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years before there were any countries at all, and throughout the five thousand or so years since civilization arose, nations have risen and fallen and borders have constantly shifted. The island of Sicily, for instance, has been ruled in whole or in part by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, so the idea that a single nation or people could claim it based on history is absurd, and as long as the majority of Sicilians are content with being Italian, the history is irrelevant anyway. So while the historical evidence on the whole favors the cause of Tibetan independence, if the majority of Tibetans now preferred for their country to be part of China (perhaps with a greater degree of autonomy), then Chinese rule would be justified.

But while Chinese propaganda claims that most Tibetans support Chinese rule and that “separatists” are a minority, China does not even allow Tibetans to freely discuss the issue, much less have a vote on it. This casts serious doubt the Chinese assertions. If China were so confident that most Tibetans want Chinese rule, why doesn’t it dare to allow a Tibetan vote on the issue? Incidentally, a Chinese assertion with respect to the de facto independent state of Taiwan needs to be addressed here. Chinese occasionally make the claim that Taiwan’s future should be decided by “Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan strait”. But this is not how self-determination works. When places like East Timor, Kosovo, Quebec, and Puerto Rico have held votes on independence, only people in those places voted; the people in other parts of Indonesia, Serbia, Canada, and the US did not vote. Similarly, when Scotland votes on independence from the UK, people in England and Wales won’t be voting. So a vote on Tibetan autonomy or independence should only involve the people of Tibet, though long-time Han Chinese residents would have the right to vote too.

Perhaps the most basic point, though, is that Tibetans, like people all over the world, should have the right to freely advocate independence, whether or not the historical evidence is on their side and whether or not they are in the majority. Some Chinese seem to think that anyone who suggests that Tibet should be independent does so only out of hostility against China. But the right to self-determination and the right to freedom of opinion, including advocating independence, are universal. As the examples mentioned above show, there are plenty of Western countries with strong regional independence movements. Most Chinese and even most Americans may not be aware of it, but there are pro-independence political parties in both Alaska and Hawaii. They have little support, but they are perfectly legal and free to advocate their positions. In fact, I would say that in the case of Hawaii in particular there are also historical reasons that favor the cause of independence, since it was originally, like Tibet, an independent country with a distinct culture and ethnic makeup that was coerced by a large, imperialist neighbor into joining it, so if a majority of Hawaiians came to desire independence from the US, I would support their right to obtain it.

I challenge all Chinese to look on the cause of Tibetan independence with an open mind. Read some non-Chinese accounts of the history and objectively examine the historical evidence, keeping in mind that the version of history you learned in school may not be entirely true (just as old American history books that justified the European slaughter of the Native Americans were biased, as are Japanese history books that deny the Rape of Nanjing). What’s more, even if you still feel that Tibet should remain part of China, respect the right of other people to think otherwise, and even to openly argue their cause. Showing a respect for different opinions, including those calling for separation from China, will not make China weak. On the contrary, it will show the kind of maturity that every nation must have in order to be considered truly great.