By James Rose
Small black dots move in a line against a backdrop of gray – Tibetan pilgrims walking through the snow near the Nepalese border, trekking to see the Dalai Lama in India.
On a ridge, a Chinese soldier plants his feet, takes aim, and shoots. One pilgrim falls, dead. A second falls, dead. It’s all captured by a European TV film crew.
As a symbol of the recent glad- handing between political and business leaders of China and India, the images could not be starker. Or more depressing.
China and India have always shared a tense relationship over Tibet. The fact that India actually recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet in 1954 is overshadowed somewhat by the fact that the acknowledgement was not actually formalized until 2003 and by the fact that India is the home- away-from-home for the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, much to China’s chagrin.
There is also the small matter of the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, which China has claimed as part of Tibet/Xizang, despite the fact it has been officially Indian for decades.
All this, it seems is being glossed over in the name of increased trade between Asia’s two emerging super- powers.
Business ties, we are told, have the ability to help nations engage, to bring greater freedom and access in the wake of increased trade and business opportunities. This indeed it can do. But it is not happening here.
The China-India 10-point plan purports to cover all the bases in the name of collective prosperity. The words dialogue, consolidating, connectivity, and trust pop up in appropriate spots in the joint strategy inked in New Delhi. But, the real clincher is this: seeking early settlement of outstanding issues.
For that, read: Tibet ceases to exist.
It marks the capitulation by the world’s largest democracy to the world’s largest authoritarian regime, over the fate of one of the world’s smallest, least powerful countries.
The agreement calls for the establishment of a Joint Working Group on the China-India Boundary Question which will no doubt talk around the issues and divert attention from the fact that India has caved in to China’s forced occupation of Tibet, now well into its sixth decade.
Rather than business and trade being used as a tool to reconcile differences between China and Tibet, there is evidence they are being used as weapons to force compliance with China’s intentions. Tibet’s pre- modern ways and earthy rituals are, for instance, seen as obstacles to the greater truth of the market, against which the forces of market-based globalization are aligned.
A time-honored Tibetan ceremony to show a family’s respect for a beast about to be slaughtered for food in this context becomes an annoying impediment, a kind of anti-market quicksand, holding back the commercialized slaughter of animals to feed the hungry market.
Any business joining in with this scurrilous procession would need to come up with a hell of an argument to justify its role and to counter claims it is directly aiding an unfair and untenable regime in Tibet. Most have not managed to do so. Few have bothered to try.
The example of the Golmud-Lhasa railway is a testimony to the shabby complicity of business interests in Tibet. A US$4.2 billion (HK$32.76 billion) engineering marvel, the rail line linking Tibet and greater China, is forecast to bring, with its subsidized tickets and the marketing weight of the party itself, around one million people a year to the tiny Buddhist theocracy. There are now more Chinese in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, than Tibetans.
It is a symbol of the overwhelming numbers of incoming ethnic Chinese into Tibet to undermine the country’s very social foundations in the interests of China’s geo-strategic, pro-market agendas.
India and China might have made much of the people-to-people links as characterized by those pilgrims trudging over the Himalayan foothills in a true spiritual quest. That may have been the symbol of the potential in the relationship between them and a channel for a freer, fairer future for Tibet. But, those pilgrims are excised as nuisances. Instead the image of trade in Tibet is that of the steel rails and sheltered world of the Tibet railway, bringing streams of Chinese to break the back of Tibetan resistance.
Business does indeed have a positive role to play on such matters as Tibet. India, as the home of Tibet’s exiled communities and as a democracy had/has a vital role to play in using its weight to enforce better human rights and freedom in Tibet.
But, the China-India agreement is the antithesis of that. China, of course, knows the game and has worked for just such an outcome.
History may well shame those responsible. Tibet by then, however, may be long gone.
James Rose is editor of www.corporategovernance-asia.com
