Introduction: The emergence of communist china begins………

If you are planning for a year, sow rice;

if you are planning for a decade, plant trees;

if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people. (Chinese proverb)

The ‘Chinese sub-continent’, the modern ‘Han Empire’ of the present Communist Dynasty (from October 1st, 1949), is much larger than the Indian sub-continent.1 It is very nearly three times larger than India. This Chinese sub-continent is a political sub-continent, under the authoritarian one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party and is known since 1949 as the People’s Republic of China. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an epoch-making event for eastern and southern Asia, and it is what brought about the geo- political changes and tensions that affected both Tibet and India, which is what part of this book is about. The other parts of this book are about China’s and India’s relations with one another in the geo-strategic field, up to 19h2 and the border war, and the strategic military situation from today into the near future.

The Chinese sub-continent is politically a monolith, despite the regional cultural differences within it in such a large geographic region. Within this political monolith, the culturally different regions are Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, while Manchuria though not China proper is now greatly Sinicised. Both the two major non-Han regions, Tibet and Xinjiang, have borders with the Indian sub-continent, and both have borders with the largest country of the Indian sub-continent; modern political India. India has no other borders or adjoining frontier regions with the Chinese sub-continent. The overwhelmingly larger part of the ancient and traditional contacts of the Indian sub-continent with today’s Chinese sub-continent have been with these just these two regions. Contact with culturally Han China has been so scarce that it has actually been the subject of written historical records in China, and one of these, the visit to India of the Chinese Buddhist monk Hiuen Tsang2, is the subject of a popular folktale.3 These cultural contacts with Han China will be looked at in a separate chapter.

To be continued…………