Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China's Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands

New Cold War History

by Sulmaan Wasif Khan

In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa, leaving the People's Republic of China with a crisis on its Tibetan frontier. Sulmaan Wasif Khan tells the story of the PRC's response to that crisis and, in doing so, brings to life an extraordinary cast of Chinese diplomats appalled by sky burials, Guomindang spies working with Tibetans in Nepal, traders carrying salt across the Himalayas, and Tibetan Muslims rioting in Lhasa.
What Chinese policymakers confronted in Tibet, Khan argues, was not a "third world" but a "fourth world" Beijing was dealing with peoples whose ways were defined by statelessness. As it sought to tighten control over the restive borderlands, Mao's China moved from a lighter hand to a harder, heavier imperial structure. That change triggered long-lasting shifts in Chinese foreign policy. Moving from capital cities to far-flung mountain villages, from top diplomats to nomads crossing disputed boundaries in search of pasture, this book shows Cold War China as it has never been seen before and reveals the deep influence of the Tibetan crisis on the political fabric of present-day China.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China, Politics

207 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 10, 2015

About the author

Sulmaan Wasif Khan is Assistant Professor of International History and Chinese Foreign Relations at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He also directs the Water and Oceans program at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy (CIERP). He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2012. He has written for The Economist, The American Interest, Prospect, e360, and YaleGlobal on topics ranging from Burmese Muslims in China to dolphin migration through the Bosphorus.

Reviews

[Andrew]

A slim book that covers border tensions between India and China in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Khan traces what he calls the PRC's shift from "empire-lite to a harder, heavier form of empire." This phrase will be repeated over and over again throughout the book. He sees Tibet as a "forth world" zone that rests between two third world powers. At this point in time post-colonial countries were trying to hammer out a third world way modus vivendi that rested on the principles of peace and non-interference. The Tibetan border zone, as a forth world zone, makes this modus vivendi difficult. The title of the book alludes to the inscrutable identities of the people living in the Tibetan borderlands. They had professions that could work across Himalayan borders (such as the grain-for-salt trade) and backgrounds that reflected the diverse nature of the peoples in this zone (such as the Kaji - a mixture of Kashmiri Muslim and Tibetan cultural traits). These people were often suspect of spying. Khan argues that their actions put Beijing - which feared political dismemberment and spies - on edge, and helped accelerate the collapse of an Afro-Asian third world pact and the arrival of the "harder, heavier form of empire" in Tibet. This form of empire manifests itself through the creation of unitary identities and hardened boundaries.

The usage of empire in a loose sense if part of a recent historical and anthropological interest in re-defining empire in order to shed better light on the sleight of hand that converted empires into nations in the 20th century. How many imperial traits lingered on? Did the emperor simply changed clothes? Calling the PRC, India, and other states "empires" is tricky because it conceals as much as it reveals. New continuities surface, but in the search for similarities differences are confused. While the case can be made that the PRC in Tibetan is based on imperial land claims and colonial style rule, I am not convinced China is best understood as empire. The PRC committed so many resources to nation-building and ideological indoctrination, that I find it hard to think that "empire" best captures its historical project. I see the temptation to do so in the Tibetan case, but I think that the usage of the term "fourth world" also carries risks. In treating Tibet as a more or less stateless region in which empire-states coordinate political and economic interests, we are encouraged to forget plateau state formations. We also leave unchallenged our own conceptions of "state" and political power.