President Bush is likely to urge Chinese President Hu Jintao to negotiate with the Dalai Lama and let him visit Buddhist sites in China, when they meet today. Will all that be enough to resolve the Sino-Tibetan conflict?
It will not be easy. It is a conflict over territory, history and interpretations of contemporary events. A juxtaposition of their stances reveals a yawning gap. The asymmetric balance of gestures is also revealing.
Beijing claims that there is no Tibet issue; it enjoys “autonomy.” The Dalai Lama can return upon declaring Tibet as an “inalienable” part of China. He cannot live in Tibet. Most Tibetans, including the Dalai Lama, demand a re-unified, democratic Tibet with ‘genuine autonomy’ in matters except defence and foreign affairs. Tibet should be a zone of peace. Human rights violations and population-transfer must cease.
Yet, is the gap unbridgeable?
Understanding the barriers—insecurity, power imbalance, mistrust and nationalism—reveals hope and an opportunity for Hu Jintao.
Chinese insecurity—a relic of the colonial and Cold War era—is fostering what it fears in Tibet. When the Dalai Lama returns, the Tibet movement will wane in appeal and credibility. No state intervened for Tibet when the PRC was weak. Why would one do so against a rising, nuclear China?
Yet, if Beijing ignores the Dalai Lama, great-power rivals might exploit Tibetans to destabilize China in the future. CIA Cold War adventures, Soviet romance with the Dalai Lama, and increasing salience of Tibet in the emerging US-China rivalry should worry the realists in Beijing.
Remembering past independence and suffering under Chinese rule, insecure Tibetan nationalists will join any anti-Chinese fronts, given half a chance of meeting their nationalist objectives. How Beijing deals with the Dalai Lama now will matter. Tibetan insecurity is a function of the nature (democratic or imperial) of state-building in the PRC—whether it is inhibitive or conducive to the growth of Tibetan identity. Some Chinese know this. Wang Lixiong calls Tibet “China’s… underbelly” and the Dalai Lama “the key to the Tibet Issue.”
Consistent with Chinese realpolitik,itspower relative to Tibet tempts Beijing to discount the Tibet issue. Beijing’s argument denying ‘one country, two system’ status to Tibet as it has been liberated is an ideological euphemism for saying that Tibetans are powerless, unlike Taiwan and Hong Kong, backed by America and Britain.
Yet, realpolitik counsels moderation in policy and flexibility in tactics, means and ideology, not narrow focus on relative capabilities. Realpolitik entails that Beijing moderates its hard-line policies in Tibet, reciprocating the Dalai Lama’s gestures to resolve the Tibet issue without blood-shed. Chinese national interests dictate it and Sun Tzu counsels so.
Tibetan weakness compels them to seek allies. Beijing’s intransigence exacerbates it. Greater the power-imbalance and less receptive Beijing is, more zealously the Tibetans will court allies. Narrow focus on current balances of power and threat is flawed realpolitik. In the prison of present complexities, the future gets short-changed. Bismarck’s alliances unravelled into war and Kissinger’s anti-Soviet balance nurtured a new rival for America. Beijing underestimates Tibet’s cancerous potentials.
Both sides have reasons to suspect the other’s intentions. Beijing knows that even in death the Dalai Lama can serve or damage its interests. It fears what he might do upon his return. Beijing’s conditions for his return reveal these fears. He must return with his harmful potentials shorn off. The Dalai Lama forswears political offices in post-settlement Tibet. Further, Beijing’s position will be enhanced, complementing material control over Tibet and the Dalai Lama with the legitimacy that his return confers. His contribution to unity, stability and harmony in Tibet and China will not be insignificant.
Beijing also worries that Tibetans see autonomy as a stepping stone. The Dalai Lama, who commands near universal respect in Tibet, is the best weapon against that improbability. He will under-cut the extreme nationalists. If the Dalai Lama’s role in the 1950s was ambiguous, he is no longer the inexperienced twenty-something. As Clinton told Jiang in 1998, he is also “an honest man.”
However, the Dalai Lama will return only if there are credible security-guarantees to protect Tibetan identity. Without such guarantees, he will leave the Tibetans a fighting chance in a future democratic or embattled China. Tibetans will appreciate it more than an agreement that gives away important weapons—himself and legitimacy—for an accelerated fait accompli. The love and respect that the Tibetans have for the Dalai Lama will remain undimmed either way.
The Tibetan leadership must also avoid unilateral concessions. Compromise, like force, persuasion, and attraction, is a legitimate tool of diplomacy, especially to meet tactical requirements of the situation. Yet, in the real world of international politics, the instrument of compromise goes hand-in-hand with the principle of reciprocity. The unilateral, highly specific and high-profile concessions of the late 1980s (Five Point Peace Plan and Strasbourg Proposal) have undermined latter Tibetan negotiating positions. Beijing has not moved an inch since. The Tibetologist Melvyn Goldstein cites authoritative Dharamsala sources to indicate that the Dalai Lama is willing to make further concessions. If the Tibetan leaders had been more cautious and subtle in making those compromises in the eighties, some of the concessions under consideration could have been avoided, i.e. more diplomatic flexibility now. Preserving flexibility of objectives and tactics for the future is central to any diplomatic strategy.
One can say that we are negotiating from a position of weakness, which is a fact. Yet, endless concessions in the absence of reciprocal security guarantees undermine the strategic objectives of survival and perpetuation of Tibetan identity in post-settlement Tibet. The final outcome in such a Tibet may not be very different from the one that drives the current search for a negotiated settlement: the fear of Tibetan extinction. It makes sense, then, to preserve the strategic option of confronting China at a more opportune moment, such as a democratic or embattled China.
It would do well for the Tibetan leadership to remember Henry Kissinger’s insight that in diplomacy, goods already delivered are rarely paid for. Stated otherwise, diplomatic adversaries have bottomless appetites for concessions, until, of course, reciprocity starts to pinch.
On both sides, highly nationalistic discourses preclude the possibility of a co-existence between the Chinese state and Tibetan nation. While the Dalai Lama has been able to contain such exclusivist sentiments, which is evident from the overwhelming support for his Middle Way Approach, Beijing is a hostage of this beast; not the least, because it is Beijing’s own creature.
In sum, Beijing’s anachronistic insecurity is driving policies that foster that which it fears: future coalitions between angry Tibetans and hostile powers. After a settlement, Beijing’s position will be substantially bolstered with the Dalai Lama as a tool against Tibetan nationalists and foreign critics. The warped logic of ultra-nationalists notwithstanding, Tibetan identity and the Chinese state are not mutually exclusive; a fusion will actually serve China’s internal and external interests of unity, stability, harmony, image, security and peaceful rise. If Hu Jintao engages the Dalai Lama with sincerity and benevolence, he has a historic opportunity to secure China from future injuries.
Tibetan nationalists should eschew blind rejectionism. Tibet survives on borrowed time and every avenue must be explored, including band-wagoning with a rising power; the relative virtues of balancing and band-wagoning must be considered seriously.
The ideas and perceptions that inform calculations on both sides are the real barriers; they need to be reality-checked. There are stirrings in that direction. A dialogue process is in place. Beijing has indicated a willingness to consider a visit by the Dalai Lama to China if he abandons his pursuit of Tibetan independence. Beijing’s intransigence and ambivalence, however, persist.
If Hu Jintao fails to reciprocate the leadership and courage of the seventy-year old Dalai Lama, the opportunity that Tibet represents may no longer be China’s to use, but that of its enemies’ to exploit.
Tsering Topgyal
PhD Student, London School of Economics and Political Science
United Kingdom
t.topgyal@lse.ac.uk
