Chinese Peril

China’s touchiness over the Dalai Lama is in line with its aim of usurping Tibetan Buddhism
By Sanjay Kapoor

When the Tibetan Buddhist leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, visited Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, the Chinese media saw red. 

It promptly announced that India would be punished for allowing the Dalai Lama to visit a disputed region, claimed by China. 

The promised reprisal is unveiling slowly. 

If the government is not wise to the Chinese threat, then India could face serious aggravation on its border.
The question that many would ask is why is the Chinese government under Xi Jinping so prickly about the Dalai Lama and the importance accorded to him in India and elsewhere? 

There are no simple answers, but China’s muscular response to the Dalai Lama and India suggests an intense power struggle in Beijing before the Standing Committee to the Politburo is reconstituted later this year. 

What is also visible is that the Chinese government wants to control the Tibetan Buddhist leadership succession after this Dalai Lama.

Thorny issue
One key step to this was already accomplished long ago, when the Chinese installed a pro-China Panchen Lama in Lhasa. 

Obedient to the party and loyal to the Chinese State, the Panchen Lama is being pushed forward as an alternative to the Dalai Lama, a man widely loved by Tibetans as their supreme religious leader.
Xi, whose power and influence are no less than those of the late Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping, would not like to be seen as a weak leader unable to defend the territorial integrity of China by not making an example of the Dalai Lama, who wants greater autonomy for the Tibet region, and his supporters. 

China’s response has understandably progressed from being perfunctory to threatening.
Countries that do business with China have learnt to their discomfort how badly it reacts to any nation extending hospitality to the Dalai Lama. 

They made an example of Mongolia that tried to assert its independence from China’s arc of influence when it agreed to a visit by the Dalai Lama. 

Mongolia initially believed in the fiction that India could compensate for China’s expected estrangement, but it did not turn out that way. 

Cash-strapped Mongolia that had needed China’s munificence all these years sought a grant from India for sorting its economic troubles, but New Delhi, despite promising a credit line, could not cough up the money when Ulaanbaatar needed it the most. 

Mongolia had to bend low in front of China for a bailout and also commit that it would not host the Dalai Lama ever again.
Indian government officials have been expressing helplessness over how the events connected with the Dalai Lama have panned out. 

“We do not really have much to do,” they say. 

“If the Dalai Lama decides to travel to Mongolia or meet the President of India as part of a delegation of Nobel Prize winners then what does the Indian government have to do?”
China’s foreign policy hawks remain unimpressed by these explanations and there are plenty of reactions emanating from their publications that claim that India has hosted a Kalachakra event in Bodhgaya where Buddhist scholars had come from different parts of the world. 

The Chinese did not allow visas for Tibetan Buddhists to travel to India. 

There are other issues that rankle the Chinese – for instance, the remark of the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister that his state borders Tibet and not China.

Tibetan Buddhism in turmoil
The Chinese want to teach India and the Dalai Lama a lesson. 

With this explicit purpose, they have been working towards deepening the cleavages that exist in the Tibetan school of Buddhism. 

Ever since the Dalai Lama excommunicated a tantric spirit, Dorje Shugden, which was also presented as a protector of his Gelug School, Tibetan Buddhism is in turmoil. 

The controversy has attracted attention in the West following demonstrations by Dorje Shugden practitioners, especially Kelsang Gyatso’s Britain-based New Kadampa Tradition which broke away from the Gelug school in 1991. 

Other factions supporting Dorje Shugden are Serpom Monastic University and Shar Ganden monastery, both of which separated from the Gelug mainstream in 2008.
The Dalai Lama had called Dorje Shugden a “dark force” that undermines the practices of the Gelugpas. 

As the Dalai Lama wants to foster a harmonious community, he shunned a force whose practices were considered aggressively divisive.
The shunning of the 17th-century spirit has seen a backlash from many members of this faith who have been protesting all over the world. 

They claim that the Dalai Lama is dictatorial and does not allow the freedom of religious practices within the faith. 

On the other hand, the Dalai Lama and his millions of followers see the hand of the Chinese in the spread of resistance by the followers of Dorje Shugden. 

Their endeavour is to hurt the credibility of the Dalai Lama and show him up as a divisive leader who cannot be trusted to lead the Tibetan Buddhist community within Tibet and outside.

China hand
On February 4, 1997, the bizarre murder took place of the principal teacher of Buddhist dialectics, Lobsang Gyatso, and his two students in Dharamsala. 

The police investigation linked the murder to Dorje Shugden followers in the community of exiles. 

A further probe revealed that the perpetrators of the crime escaped to China. 

Later, there was reportedly an attempt to kill a close associate of the Dalai Lama and blame it on the Tibetan exile establishment in India. 

The conspiracy was discovered in time and nipped in the bud.
News agency Reuters conducted an investigation into the Chinese involvement in building the Dorje Shugden resistance to the Dalai Lama. 

The report showed that the Chinese communist party and some of its frontal organisations were involved in promoting Shugden followers as opposed to those of the Dalai Lama. 

The probe revealed that the Shugden followers were financed to rebuild monasteries and placed in important positions. 

To reiterate, the purpose was to diminish the authority of the Dalai Lama and then ensure that his word does not really carry much weight when he prophesies his successor.
Indian government sources claim that China has worked hard to control the narrative on Tibetan Buddhism, especially when it comes to undermining the authority of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan exile establishment and the sway it has in religious matters.
China has ensured that the number of Tibetans in the community of exiles who provided leadership is falling dramatically. 

The Karmapa Lama has brought out this fact in an exclusive interview to Hardnews. 

He said that the growing influence of China has resulted in many Tibetans leaving India. 

Some have returned to China and many others have left for a destination in Europe or the US due to the problems they face relating to identity papers and travel documents provided by India. 

The Karmapa said that 4,000-5,000 Tibetans are leaving India every year without being replaced by fresh refugees from Tibet. 

Many, who went a few years ago from India to Tibet, find it difficult to return.
This reporter met some of these Hindi-speaking Tibetans in Lhasa. 

They had crossed over from India at a time when border surveillance was lackadaisical. Subsequently, they found it difficult to return to India – a country they missed due to the freedom of expression, prevalence of English, and its multi-culturalism.
Ever since the Chinese tightened the squeeze on the movement of Tibetan monks who earlier routinely walked through the forbidding heights of the Himalaya to reach Dharamsala, the desperation in the Tibetan exile establishment has been growing. 

They also worry over the increasing influence of China globally and how other countries are kowtowing to it. 

As stated earlier, many countries just do not want to entertain the Dalai Lama anymore, lest it antagonise Beijing. 

Countries that are recipient of Chinese investments are particularly cautious.

Succession question
In these circumstances, the Chinese are growing more confident that they will be able to question the authority of the Dalai Lama. 

Their advantage is that they control the second most important leader, the Panchen Lama, and several other senior Lamas who populate the many monasteries in Tibet. 

Rather cleverly, they are funding many of the Tibetan monks from the East Tibetan region, where the Dalai Lama does not have much sway, and bringing them to the area around Lhasa. 

These monks are followers of the Dorje Shugden school of thought and driven by the desire to retrieve Tibetan Buddhism from the control of the Dalai Lama.
Bolstering Chinese hold over the Tibetan Buddhist narrative is that it will not recognise any of the reincarnations until Rule 5, as laid down by the Chinese government, is followed. 

Though the Chinese government would say it is “secular” and would not like to interfere in the process of selection of the Dalai Lama’s successor, it is actually preparing the ground for it to be decider on who will really lead the Tibetan Buddhists. 

Insiders say Beijing is in a position to reject the Dalai Lama’s nominee.
His detractors even claim that he is not keen on announcing his successor as he wants to destroy his own sect. 

It is a vicious no-holds-barred campaign with the Chinese government displaying a tenacity to not just control the region but its religion too. 

Its phenomenal economic rise in the past 20 years has given the Chinese government an opportunity to neuter the only threat it has to its integrity.

India’s concerns
India, which has provided refuge to lakhs of Tibetan Buddhist refugees, is a bit diffident about its Tibet strategy. 

While it is monitoring what kind of punishment it will be dealt for allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Arunachal Pradesh, it is not actually setting out to provoke Beijing. 

It is China that interprets Indian actions harshly.
There is a view that Xi could use the threat to punish India as an opportunity to firmly establish the balance of power in Beijing’s favour. 

The manner in which China has colonised Pakistan through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the way it has made Russia do its bidding in the region leaves little space for India to manoeuvre.
What compounds New Delhi’s worries is that its Tibet policy and the fact that it has agreed to host so many refugees since the 1960s was largely supported by the United States. 

Now the US, under Donald Trump, has a different view of the world. 

Unexpectedly, he sent a delegation to the Belt and Road forum hosted by China. 

India did not attend, hoping to find takers for its opposition to Beijing’s policy to “colonise” countries in Africa and Asia by masking its real intentions under the garb of this communication initiative.
This is a setback for India. 

It is, in many ways, left with a policy that has few takers in a transformed world. 

Now, the question is: how will India deal with Tibetan Buddhists in the future? 

Leverage their presence to put the Chinese on the defensive or get real with the fact that the numbers of the refugees will diminish further unless they are given Indian citizenship? 

This would also involve realignment of the way Tibet is perceived by Indian strategists.

Chinese Paranoia

Dalai Lama's Tawang visit: Unhinged rage against India betrays China's deep strategic insecurity

By Sreemoy Talukdar

China's overreaction on Dalai Lama's Tawang visit is indicative of a strategic insecurity it still suffers from despite projecting itself as the great economic, continental and maritime hegemony on the cusp of replacing America as the next global superpower. 

The seeds of this insecurity lie in the fact that while as the world's second-largest economy it seeks to adopt the mantle of global leadership and fashions itself as the new champion of free trade, China has been unable to shake off its image as a hostile, outlier nation whose foreign policy is rooted in the dualism of bullying or patronage and economic policy is guided by blatant mercantilism.

Consider the two issues China grapples with due to this problem of perception. 

One, its repeated refusal to respect the World Trade Organisation architecture and frequent flouting of market rules that govern the global trading system has given rise to huge trade imbalance and resentment among its trading partners. 

US President Donald Trump made China's flouting of norms his core election plank and evidently profited from it. 

Trade imbalance corners a huge degree of attention as Trump and Xi Jinping sit across the table in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
Second, and this has direct relevance to the recent fracas between India and China over Dalai Lama's visit, Beijing has shown a marked inability to develop friendly relationship with nations even as it seeks to rapidly translate its considerable economic prowess into hard military and political power.
China has never lent itself to international alliances, coalitions or treaty-based relationships, preferring instead to plough a lonely furrow guided by an ambition to restore its 'Middle Kingdom' glory. 

While seeking to do so, under Xi Jinping, it has emerged as a revisionist power seeking to rewrite global order by blatant imperialism. 

Its propagation of a so-called Nine Dash Line in defiance of The Hague Tribunal ruling and aggressive reclamation programme over South China Sea littoral, for instance, point to the scant regard it has for international rules-based system.
There is obviously a commercial and strategic angle to China's misadventures in the South China Sea. Its neighbours such as Philippines fear that China will restrict navigation and secure for itself exclusive rights for oil exploration and fishing. 

The US feels that China is altering the topography because it seeks to shore up its naval, air and missile systems. 

However, these are incidental to a larger Chinese design of establishing its supremacy over south-east Asia.
As Malcolm Davis writes in The Strategist, "This dispute (over the South China Sea) is one aspect of a broader Chinese ambition towards rejuvenation under a China Dream and restoration to ‘middle kingdom’ status that would see its neighbours in Southeast Asia relegated to tributary powers. That new Chinese hegemony would challenge US strategic primacy in Asia. The crisis feeds into a Chinese narrative of a ‘Century of Humiliation’ promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to sustain its political legitimacy."

It is inevitable that China will exert its geopolitical influence over South Asia as it climbs up the ranks of global power. 

But the problem lies in the fact that its rise has been abrasive and impatient, not peaceful. 

Its penchant for flouting international laws have driven its neighbours into deep anxiety. 

For instance, it brashly dismissed the jurisdiction of the Hague Tribunal when the ruling over the South China Sea went against it and opened up maritime disputes against a host of nations including Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Indonesia, all of whom claim parts of the South China Sea.
Not only has it rejected the global rules-based order, it has been placing more faith in coercive and/or debt-trap diplomacy while negotiating with neighbours instead of taking a persuasive approach by highlighting and mitigating areas of mutual benefits and concerns. 

These strategies have predictably triggered a pushback from neighbours — including India. 

Based on individual threat perceptions, the nations have responded by promoting greater mutual economic ties and have struck (or attempted to strike) military-strategic rebalanced to counter Chinese adventurism.
Barack Obama's Asia Pivot may have been a non-starter but many of these nations, threatened by the scale and rapidity of China's ambition, have quietly been synergizing their areas of mutual interests. 

India, Japan and Australia, for instance, have seen the benefit of a greater strategic cooperation that will certainly be aimed at (but not limited to) counterbalancing China.
As Council for Foreign Relations fellow Alyssa Ayres recently noted on this subject, "As Japan and India look to further harmonise their respective strategic visions—witness the coming together last November of Modi’s “Act East” policy and Abe’s “Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy”—Australia-India cooperation has also been expanding. Following the elevation of the relationship to a “strategic partnership” in 2009, bilateral maritime dialogues and exercises have followed, and a civil nuclear cooperation agreement has now entered into force. The two countries have also agreed to hold a “2+2” meeting with their defense and foreign secretaries."
This is where lies the germination of Chinese insecurity as it notes with increasing concern the coming together of nations against its imperialist designs. 

Its state-controlled media, which China uses to deliver messages it prefers not to through official channels, stopped just short of declaring war against India. 

"If New Delhi ruins the Sino-India ties and the two countries turn into open rivals, can India afford the consequence? With a GDP several times higher than that of India, military capabilities that can reach the Indian Ocean and having good relations with India's peripheral nations, coupled with the fact that India's turbulent northern state borders China, if China engages in a geopolitical game with India, will Beijing lose to New Delhi?"
No matter the level of real or perceived provocation, it doesn't behove a 'great power' to appear as unhinged in rage as China has been over an octogenarian spiritual leader's visit to meet his followers. China must grow up and show a greater degree of maturity that suits its status as the global superpower-in-waiting.

Dalai Lama says Tibetan people should decide on his succession

By Sunil Kataria

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama arrives to deliver teachings at Yiga Choezin, in Tawang, in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, India, April 8, 2017

TAWANG, India -- Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said on Saturday the Tibetan people should decide if they wanted to continue with his institution, adding that he wanted to convene a meeting of senior monks this year to start discussing his succession.
China, which brands the Nobel Peace laureate a dangerous separatist, says the tradition must continue and its officially atheist Communist leaders have the right to approve the Dalai Lama's successor, as a legacy inherited from China's emperors.
"Whether this very institution of Dalai Lama should continue or not is up to Tibetan people," the Dalai Lama told a news conference in the remote hill town of Tawang near the Chinese border in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
"So, consult people, if people feel now this institution (is) no longer relevant then this institution (will) automatically cease," the 82-year-old said, adding he wanted to start this year "some sort of preliminary discussion" on his succession.
A final decision on the fate of the institution would be taken when he reaches late 80s or 90, the Dalai Lama said.
Tibetan Buddhism holds that the soul of a senior lama, or Buddhist monk, is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death.
The Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, denies espousing violence and says he only wants genuine autonomy for Tibet.
His week-long trip to Arunachal Pradesh, an eastern Himalayan region administered by New Delhi, but claimed by China as "southern Tibet", has raised hackles in Beijing.
The Dalai Lama also said he disagreed with U.S. President Donald Trump's "America First" policy and the recent curbs on immigration saying that he admired America as a leader of the free world and expected the country to lead by that example.
The Dalai Lama now resides in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala, where his supporters also run a small government in exile. 

He has renounced any political role in leading the Tibetan diaspora.

Chinese Paranoia

China’s outrageous offer to India for settling the border dispute: Give us all the territory
By Mohan Guruswamy

Dai Bingguo is a Chinese politician and diplomat. 

Many in India will be familiar with him as a long-time interlocutor with a string of Indian National Security Advisors in the Sino-Indian border discussions. 

He has served as a State Councillor and as the director of the General Offices of Foreign Affairs and the National Security Group of the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee. 

A senior Chinese official once described him to me as China’s Kissinger. 

He retired in 2013 but his voice is still heard in the higher echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, and his voice is also often their voice. 

Hence it is as important to have him hear you, as it is to hear him.

Dai returned to headlines in India on March 2 when he told the Beijing-based magazine China-India Dialogue that: “The disputed territory in the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, including Tawang, is inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction. The major reason the boundary question persists is that China’s reasonable requests [in the east] have not been met. If the Indian side takes care of China’s concerns in the eastern sector of their border, the Chinese side will respond accordingly and address India’s concerns elsewhere.”
Dai was clearly alluding to a new package deal on the border issues between India and China, quite different from an old package deal offered several times in the past. 

That package deal entailed India recognising the Aksai Chin plateau in the North as Chinese territory in lieu of China recognising Arunachal Pradesh as Indian. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai first offered this package deal in 1960. 

But this was not acceptable to New Delhi and India and China went on to fight the 1962 war over the border issue. 

We have been eyeball-to-eyeball since.
In the interview, Dai said that the deal was offered to Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1979. 

The last time it was reportedly offered was during Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s meeting with Deng Xiaoping in 1988.
At an interaction with Indian journalists in Beijing in 2015, Yang Wencheng, President of the Chinese People’s Institute for Foreign Affairs said: “As a diplomat in the late 1980s, I was witness to a chance to solve the problem with Prime Minister Rajiv and Deng. Deng said, ‘We do some compromise on the West wing, you do some on the East wing, then we can have a new border.'”
Yang added: “We offered but Prime Minister Gandhi didn’t have a response. After that I felt very sad we lost the chance.”

What China wants
The goalposts have since changed. 

The Chinese now clearly want the populated Tawang tract in Arunachal Pradesh and want to go beyond the old Macartney-MacDonald line in Ladakh. 

This proposal requires India to cede territory it holds at present.
Though the Simla Conference of 1913 between British India and an independent Tibet agreed upon the McMahon Line as the effective boundary between India and China in the North East, the border was only notified by Delhi in 1935 at the insistence of Sir Olaf Caroe, then deputy secretary in the Foreign Department. 

China disputes the legal status of this line.
In 1944, civil servant JP Mills established British Indian administration in the North East Frontier Agency up till the McMahon Line, but excluded the Tawang tract, which continued to be administered by the Lhasa-appointed head lama. 

In 1947, the present Dalai Lama wrote to newly-independent India laying claim to these parts.
On October 7, 1950, the Chinese attacked the Tibetans in Qamdo and asserted control over all of Tibet within a year. 

In anticipation, on February 16, 1951, Major Relangnao ‘Bob’ Khating of the Indian Frontier Administration Service, at the head of a column of Indian forces, raised the India tricolour in Tawang and took over the administration of the tract. 

Clearly India’s claim over Arunachal Pradesh does not rest on any long historical tradition or cultural affinity. 

But then the Chinese have no basis whatsoever to stake a claim on the area either besides a few dreamy cartographic enlargements of the notion of China among some of the hangers-on in the Qing emperor’s court. 

The important thing now is that the McMahon Line is over 100 years old and India has been directly administering the territory for almost eight decades. 

China was never there, either in 1913 or before or after.

A tribal girl looks on during the second day of the three-day Tawang festival in Tawang, near the Indo-China border in north eastern Arunachal Pradesh state on October 22, 2016.

The case of Aksai Chin
India’s claims on Aksai Chin in the North rest on the “advanced boundary line” formulated in 1865 by WH Johnson, a civil sub-assistant in the Survey of India. 

Johnson proposed this line after claiming to have surveyed the territory. 

The authorities in Delhi and London waited three decades before rejecting this alignment, now called the Ardagh-Johnson line.
Viceroy Lord Lansdowne wrote on September 28, 1889: “The country between the Karakoram and Kuen Lun ranges is, I understand, of no value, very inaccessible and not likely to be coveted by Russia. We might, I should think, encourage the Chinese to take it, if they showed any inclination to do so. This would be better than leaving a no-man’s land between our frontier and that of China.”
Lord Curzon, who was Secretary of State for India in London, wrote: “We are inclined to think that the wisest course would be to leave them in possession as it is evidently to our advantage that the tract of territory between the Karakoram and Kuen Lun mountains be held by a friendly power like China.”
In 1893, Hung Ta-chen, a senior Chinese official at Kashgar in China’s western-most province of Xinjiang, handed a map of the boundary proposed by China to George Macartney, the British consul-general there. 

This boundary placed the Lingzithang plains, which are South of the Laktsang range, in India, and Aksai Chin proper, which is North of the Laktsang range, in China. 

Macartney recommended and forwarded this to the British Indian government. 

There were good reasons for the British to support this border along the Karakorum mountains. 

The Karakorums formed a natural boundary, which would set the British borders up to the Indus river watershed while leaving the Tarim river watershed in Chinese control.
The British presented this line, known as the Macartney-MacDonald Line, to the Chinese in 1899 in a note by Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister to the Qing dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty. 

China believed that this then was the accepted boundary. 

But post-1962, the Chinese are ahead of this too.
In 1941 after military intelligence in Delhi got reports of Soviet troops garrisoning in Xinjiang, it was decided to push the existing boundary outwards to the old Ardagh-Johnson line. 

Thus, Aksai Chin once more became part of India. 

This late incorporation appeared in few maps only. 

The India map of the original Constitution of India adopted in 1950 leaves the boundary between India and China at Aksai Chin as an airbrushed blank without indicating any line.

Chinese claims exaggerated
There are doubts in China too about its border claims. 

Professor Ge Jianxiong, director of the Institute of Chinese Historical Geography at Fudan University in Shanghai wrote in China Review that prior to 1912 when the Republic of China was established, the idea of China was not clearly conceptualised. 

Even during the late Qing period the term China would on occasion refer to the Qing state including all the territory that fell within the claimed boundaries of the Qing Empire. 

At other times it would be taken to refer to only the 18 interior provinces excluding Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Tibet and Sinkiang (now Xianjiang).
Professor Ge added that the notions of Greater China were based entirely on the “one-sided views of Qing court records that were written for the court’s self-aggrandisement.” 

Ge criticised those who felt that the more they exaggerated the territory of historical China the more patriotic they were deemed to be.
Both, India and China are now experiencing new levels of nationalism. 

Territory is at the core of this nationalism, making the exchange of territories unpalatable to public opinion in both countries. 

If the package entails the withdrawal of the two territorial claims, it might win a modicum of support in both countries. 

But this is clearly not so. 

What Dai Bingguo is now suggesting is that India gives up its claim on Aksai Chin, and also cede the strategically vital Tawang tract.
What is feasible is for India and China to find acceptable lines of actual control based on sound strategic principles. 

Claims and counter-claims on territories is clearly not the way to go about it.