By Tsering Topgyal
Tibetan officials are in Beijing for another round of talks. The Dalai Lama, however, recently said that his faith in the Chinese government is “diminishing.”
Beijing, its apologists and other uninformed Westerners on the other hand, blame the Dalai Lama for the stalemate. They seem to rely on the work of the Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein who cast the Dalai Lama’s demands as the “greatest stumbling blocks” in his 1997 book, The Snow Lion and the Dragon, and put the burden of compromise on the Dalai Lama.
Despite Professor Goldstein’s other contributions to the study of Tibet, there are some problems with his analysis-not least in his arbitrary attribution of rational security interests to the Chinese and unreasonable nationalist interests to the Tibetans-but one example will suffice. His “solution” to the Sino-Tibetan conflict is this: the Dalai Lama should return to “Tibet/China” and accept Chinese sovereignty, abandon political autonomy for some linguistic and religious relaxation to be phased in and managed at the CCP’s pleasure, and abandon the Tibetans in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan, or the Eastern Tibetans.
As John Powers put it, it is a “wild gambit.” What has China done to inspire such Tibetan trust without the slightest guarantee of compliance? Why are Tibetan security fears ignored? Are they not as justified as the Chinese Party-State’s security concerns? The insights from security studies and ethnic or intra-state conflicts literatures are sorely lacking from the said analysis.
The Dalai Lama’s demands, watered-down even further from the 1980s compromise-“meaningful autonomy” and unification of Tibetans under one Chinese jurisdiction-are crucial to the sustainability of any settlement.
In any case, the Dalai Lama’s demands have been steadily moderating since the late 1970s and 1980s when he controversially gave up independence for a demilitarised and liberal democratic autonomous Tibet.
Especially since 2002, Dharamsala has further scaled down its demands to placate Beijing. Meaningful autonomy means political autonomy for Tibetans through the honest implementation of the Chinese Constitution and Autonomy Law. Currently, the minority rights enshrined in these documents are merely cosmetic, thanks to numerous limiting clauses and institutional and political obstacles.
Dharamsala has also moderated its position on the unification issue. Whereas it was concerned with reunifying Tibetan territories in the 1980s, today it seeks to integrate Tibetan people under one administration, signalling more flexibility on the territorial issue. Dharamsala wants to avoid Inner Mongolia’s fate, which regained territory but committed demographic suicide, more or less.
Beijing has never reciprocated in kind, choosing only to nit-pick Dharamsala’s proposals. Commentaries in China’s official press, recycling the same content with different authors and titles, dismiss the Dalai Lama’s proposals as negating the PRC constitution, being “independence in disguise” and so on.
One might ask why “meaningful autonomy” is the only way forward. Barbara Walter, an expert on intra-state conflicts at the University of California, San Diego, found that 62% of the civil wars between 1940 and 1992 were settled with agreements, but 43% of those settlements failed at the implementation stage. The culprit: a persistent fear of post-agreement exploitation, which can be addressed through two forms of security guarantees: third party intervention and power-sharing. Since third party mediation is anathema to Beijing, power-sharing in the form of political autonomy is the only plausible guarantee.
It is also true that any settlement that does not include the Eastern Tibetans will be unsustainable. We need not look far back. The signing of the “17-Point Agreement for the Peace Liberation of Tibet” in 1951-which did not cover Eastern Tibet-and its break-down in 1959 is evidence enough. The major cause of that collapse was Beijing’s imposition of different policies on the culturally and ethnically homogenous Tibetans.
For political purposes, Beijing used the legalistic distinction of whether or not they were ruled by Lhasa at the time of the Chinese invasion of Central Tibet in 1950. Those under Lhasa experienced the “gradualist” terms of the 17-Point Agreement, while those in the East were subjected to radical communist reforms, which provoked a violent rebellion that spread to Lhasa. It culminated in the March 10, 1959 uprising in Lhasa. The 17-Point Agreement collapsed.
Unification is neither a new demand nor one cooked up by exiled Tibetans. In the early 20th century, some Eastern Tibetans considered resurrecting a united Tibetan state through force and revolution. Both Lhasa and Eastern Tibetans proposed unification in the 1950s. In 1980, Tibetan cadres from Qinghai and Gansu proposed forming one Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan intellectuals attributed Tibet’s political fragmentation to a Chinese divide-and-rule strategy. In 2004, veteran Tibetan communist Phuntsok Wangyal warned Hu Jintao of the “grave mistake” of implementing different policies on the same nationality. A cursory observation of contemporary popular media reveals strong integrationist sentiments in all Tibetan regions. This year’s protests, which took place largely outside TAR, drive home this point.
A settlement that does not include political autonomy for Tibet and excludes the Eastern Tibetans will merely prolong the vexing problem of Tibet into the future. Do we want to saddle future generations with this problem?
The author is a Tibetan writing a PhD dissertation on the Sino-Tibetan conflict at the London School of Economics.
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