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Book Review: Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands – Sulmaan Wasif Khan

Ford, G. (2015). Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands by Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Asian Review of Books, 27 November.

Subtitled “China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands”, Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy focuses on the “long” decade between Communist Party troops entering Tibet in 1950 in the closing months of China’s civil war and the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

For Sulmaan Wasif Khan, a professor at Tufts’s Fletcher School, Tibet was no isolated state in the fastness of the Himalaya’s, rather it was neither isolated nor a state. It was not isolated, but rather a cosmopolitan bustling thriving borderland; nor was it a state, lacking as it did all the attributes required. There was a complete absence of central authority with no-one in control as nomadic tribes meandered across grasslands, the monasteries cast their shadows merely over their immediate neighborhoods and landlords and their serfs were thinly littered across a plateau where much of their needs were serviced by itinerant traders of solely Indian citizenship or hunxue’ers claiming both Chinese and Indian descent and the best of both worlds. Communications with Beijing were so bad that when food needed to be sent to Tibet in the 1950s it was shipped to Calcutta and then overland to Tibet.

China’s new Government’s arrival was met with an initially cautious welcome. It was, Khan claims, “Empire-lite”—a form of “Anti-Imperialist Empire”—where the center in Beijing played from a different and softer “deck” of policies from those operating in the rest of China. Land reform was consigned to the distant future, religion was tolerated and small-scale capitalism continued to practise and prosper.

The problem wasn’t Tibet, but Tibetans. The eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau known as Kham, sprawled across the Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Sichuan and Xikang. Here there was no Empire-lite, but the brutal imposition of Party diktats made that much worse by the Han chauvinism Mao had warned against. The result was pacific and active resistance that turned bloody.

This ongoing conflict proved contagious with ethnic dissatisfaction seeping west. As early as 1951, Washington was fanning the flames with covert assistance to Tibetan guerrilla fighters. By 1954, US planes were dropping weapons and equipment to rebels in Qinghai, the result was a harsh counter-insurgency particularly after the Tibetan Goloks in the province took up arms in 1958.

From that point on Khan tries to map the pattern of events leading up to the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile but can miss  the trees for the wood. Lhasa and Shigatse saw roadblocks and strikes, demonstrations and protests. By 9 March 1959, crowds assembled around the Dalai Lama’s summer palace, the Norbulingka, as rumors spread that the Dalai Lama was to be abducted. Tibetan “collaborators” with Beijing were stoned and one killed.

Although Mao and the Party had ordered that PLA troops should under no circumstances initiate hostilities a young PLA soldier panicked and fired two rounds. Here the story inexplicably loses a week as we jump from the 9th to the 17th. In this interregnum—although we’re not told here—fighting flared up around the country as 30,000 remained camped out in their palace vigil to prevent the Dalai Lama’s abduction.

It is then that the Dalai Lama again consulted his oracle as to whether he should stay or go. The oracle screamed, “Go, Go! Tonight!” and then helpfully mapped out a detailed route with pen and paper that—according to John and Elizabeth Roberts’s 2009 Freeing Tibet—is exactly that agreed earlier by the Tibetan resistance with the CIA. The Dalai Lama fled to India, where he remains to this day. It was this that signalled to Beijing that the honeymoon for Tibet was over. The province was to be fully brought within China’s curtilage, no more fuzzy borders for nomads, traders with dual nationalities and a Tibet better connected to Delhi than Beijing.

Previously India and China had been the partners in the Non-Aligned Movement as they jointly tried to unite the Afro-Asian World against imperialism. However the consequences of the crisis in Tibet had international as well as domestic ramifications. This unity was to collapse leaving Beijing reliant more on the contradictions between neighboring states than their resolution, be it Nepal and India, or India and Pakistan.

After the hunxue’ers were forced to choose between their two nationalities, the next step was demarcating the border. With a Tibetan Government in exile at best tolerated by India, and at worse aided and abetted by Delhi where China physically started and finished could not be left to custom and practice. Zhou Enlai offered a territorial exchange to Nehru, Indian sovereignty over the disputed eastern sector in exchange for Aksai Chin in the west necessary to providing the crucial road links between Tibet and Xinjiang.

Delhi spurned the offer and when they seemingly linked trade rights with the boundary dispute, all trade was embargoed. China, or rather Tibet, had more to lose than India. Thus the traditional barter of grain and salt for cashmere was ended. With Nepal itself suffering a food shortage, alternative sources of supply were scarce to non-existent.

Tibet went hungry and road to war was cleared. It is claimed more died from starvation than were killed in the war.

Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy is a well-written and sparse book that paints the big picture well. First China’s “one world” idealism was driven by events into the shadows of realpolitik whence it has never emerged. Empire-lite became simply Empire.

Yet just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they are not out to get you. It’s important to remember that the events in Tibet were less than a decade on from the UN Security Council retrospectively authorizing at the US’s behest military intervention in another civil war on the Korean Peninsula where China was forced to enter the conflict. Mao wanted to close down the problems in Tibet as quickly as possible before Washington’s clandestine assistance to the Tibetan insurgents threatened to evolve into a re-run of that 1950 decision in the UN Security Council.

Khan makes these two points well. The problem is that for those who don’t already know the backstory this relatively short 136-page book’s thinly-drawn chronology of events is rather like trying to build a jigsaw with half the pieces missing.