UNV Desk:
China’s expansionism along Tibet’s southern border with India thus has a much more limited aim than the acquisition of territory of the conquest of India. It is intended to widen the buffer zone that surrounds Tibet.
by Salvatore Babones
If a stone rolls down a mountain and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? That’s the question that lies behind repeated China-India clashes in the high Himalayas, culminating in this spring’s deadly skirmishes in Ladakh. The area is so remote that in the early twentieth century, the British occupiers of India and the semi-independent kingdom of Tibet never bothered to demarcate their exact border, and the war-torn Republic of China was unable to assert control over Tibet, never mind establish its borders.
After the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong’s first priority was the subjugation of Tibet. The following year, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “liberated” the country, forcing its leaders to sign a Seventeen-Point Agreement by which Tibet “returned to the motherland” of China. A rebellion in 1959 brought the inevitable crackdown, during which the 23-year-old Dalai Lama fled to India. The Tibetan government in exile, known in English as the Central Tibetan Administration, remains there to this day.
It is hard for us today to imagine the incredible remoteness of 1950s Tibet. Even now, there are few roads connecting Tibet’s capital city Lhasa to lowland China, and virtually none over the high Himalayas to South Asia. A treacherous mountain road connects Tibet and Nepal via the Sino-Nepal Friendship Bridge north of Kathmandu, and 800 miles to the west an only slightly less treacherous mountain road connects the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to Pakistan via the Khunjerab Pass. In between, nothing.
The lack of roads keeps everyone safe, because no roads mean no armies, and no armies mean no wars. When China and India did go to war in 1962, it was over a road. China began construction of National Highway G219, the Sky Road connecting southwestern Xinjiang to the western extremity of Tibet, in 1951. It actually passed through the Aksai Chin region of Ladakh, historically part of India, for more than 100 miles. No one in India even knew about the road until it appeared on Chinese maps, sparking a diplomatic furor.
Despite the heightened tensions, India didn’t prepare for war. China did, using the Sky Road as a logistics route for a surprise attack in 1962. In the brief war that ensued, China consolidated its possession of almost the entire territory of Aksai Chin. So it’s no surprise that 55 years later, when China started building road infrastructure on the Doklam Plateau bordering southeastern Tibet, India took notice. The non-lethal 2017 Doklam standoff lasted more than two months before being resolved by a mutual withdrawal to the status quo ante.
Why does China so crave these remote mountain territories that it is willing to repeatedly risk war with and make a permanent enemy of one of the world’s most powerful countries? The twentieth century is over and China is not preparing for an armored blitzkrieg into the Ganges Plain. It has no ambitions to conquer north India or annex Uttar Pradesh. Its real goals are much more modest, but no less moral. China’s border incursions in the remote mountains of northern India are all about its repression of Tibet.
