Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The concept of irredentism does not apply to Tibet. It was never a province of China, nor was it even involved in the normal tributary relationships that vassal states of Imperial China traditionally maintained with Beijing. The Tibetans are of Mongol origin; their country emerged as a distinct place in the seventh century, when an early version of Mahayana Buddhism took root there. China first established relations with Tibet during the Tang dynasty (618-906). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Tibet was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhists fleeing ahead of the Muslim invasion of the subcontinent. During the thirteenth century Mongol power came to predominate in Lhasa, just as the Mongols also ruled at that time in Beijing, but Mongol influence persisted in Tibet until the eighteenth century, much longer than in China itself. In 1270, Kublai Khan was converted to Lamaism by the abbot of the Sakya lamasery.

In 1720 the Manchu dynasty in China replaced Mongol rule in Tibet, and from that time on China claimed a limited suzerainty over Tibet—actually a loose arrangement in which Beijing was responsible for foreign relations and defense while Lhasa was left entirely in charge of domestic affairs. After imperial rule collapsed in 1912, Tibet became something like an independent state with its own governing institutions and even a small army, although its nationhood was not recognized by any other country. During this period the Tibetans expelled most Chinese. All this changed with the Chinese Communist invasion in 1950.

The legal status of Tibet today is clear and is similar in nature to the kind of colonial rule Japan imposed on Korea in 1910. A seventeen-point agreement, signed by Beijing and Tibetan representatives in 1950 at a moment when the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had occupied much of the country, incorporated Tibet into the Chinese state as a “national autonomous region.” This was an unprecedented status. Even then, the Tibetans never expected the Chinese to interfere in the actual running of their country. But a brutal occupation—including mass executions, forced labor, confiscations of property, and destruction of religious sites—led to a low-level revolt in the mid-1950s that exploded in March 1959 into open rebellion. The CIA covertly aided this rebellion, which may be part of the reason why the Chinese have shown so little flexibility in dealing with Tibet.⁸ Blowback from CIA support, which was cut off at about the time that President Nixon decided to pursue an opening to China, has been very costly to the Tibetans. In 1959, the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India, where he has ever since devoted himself to a campaign to publicize the Tibetans’ plight. He turned sixty-three years old in 1999—and there is every sign that the Chinese will simply try to wait him out, believing that on his death they will be able to appoint a youthful successor, as they have done with the Panchen Lama, the second-holiest lama in the Tibetan hierarchy.

China will probably succeed in maintaining its imperium over Tibet and ultimately assimilate both the Tibetan people and their culture. There are no powerful interests to save them. The Tibetans are in this sense similar to the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America. A continuing propaganda barrage from both Beijing and Taipei argues that the Tibetans are “feudal” and do not deserve to be saved. But the Chinese are very nervous about what they are doing and regularly make stupid mistakes.

A typical example was the spectacle of officially atheist China attempting to name a pro-Chinese Panchen Lama. On May 15, 1995, from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama designated a six-year-old shepherd boy as a “living Buddha” and the successor to the Panchen Lama, who had died in China in January 1989. The Chinese government responded that the Dalai Lama was interfering in China’s domestic affairs and in elaborately staged ceremonies in Beijing and Lhasa anointed a different six-year-old (evidently placing the Dalai Lama’s choice and his family under house arrest). They formally installed him on December 9, 1995, as the Eleventh Panchen Lama; he was quoted in the newspapers as having said, “Thank you, Jiang Zemin. Thank you, government of China. I will study hard and love the motherland.”⁹

It is possible that, as they regain their national self-confidence, the Chinese will invite the Dalai Lama to return and allow him to re-create something like the relationship that existed in the past between Lhasa and Beijing. This would be clever of them. As matters stand now, people in Buddhist countries like Japan and Korea (or in Hollywood) could well become as emotionally involved with the fate of Tibet as others have been with the pandas, whose fate seems destined to be similar. The most likely scenario, unfortunately, is that Tibet will become Sinified and its lamaseries will be left as nothing more than crumbling museums, as most already are.