Hissing Dragon-Squirming Tiger:

Comparisons, Negotiations

and Attitudes continues...

In the Chinese White Paper on the ownership of Tibet, referred to earlier, the Chinese government states: ‘In the mid-thirteenth century Tibet was officially incorporated into the territory of China’s Yuan Dynasty’.

This ignores the fact that Kublai Khan, the Mongol Khan who started the Yuan Dynasty, believed himself to be a devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, and patron of Tibetan Buddhism, with a record of having given administrative control of Tibet to the Sakya lamas. It also ignores the fact that the Choe-yon Priest-Patron relationship between the Mongol rulers of China and the Buddhist head of Tibet, which we have examined in detail, was in fact broken by the Tibetans themselves.

From about 1350 to 1642, two years before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Tibetan kings ruled Tibet, displacing lamaistic rule. And the Mings, as the maps of the period show, did not control Tibet. In 1638, six years before the Manchus overthrew the Ming Dynasty, the ruling Qoshot Mongol Khan of Mongolia had begun a Choe-yon relationship with Tibet’s Gelukpa sect of lamas, giving their head lama the title of ‘Dalei Lama’ for the first time, and with it patronage, including military backup, for their administrative control of Tibet. But the Mongols themselves were neither ruling China nor part of China at the time. So it can be seen that China’s version of the history does not exactly fit the recorded facts.

Till Indian PM Atal Behari Vajpayee’s June 2003 visit to China, a great deal of the lack of progress on the negotiation was due to two major reasons:

(1) The Indian side was attempting to deal with the boundary in the contentious eastern sector as a ‘historical’ border, but relating history only to the British period of the 20th century, and

(2) The Chinese side had nothing to lose by waiting indefinitely for a

future settlement.

To be continued...