Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928–49.

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Paradoxically, Tibet’s isolation has never protected its sovereignty. That basic truth is explored in Lin Hsiao-ting’s fascinating survey of Republican China’s complicated relationship with Tibet between 1928 and 1949.

Sino-Tibetan relations stretched back to the Tang dynasty and always involved tensions between the powerful Chinese centralized state and theocratic Tibet. The apogee of Chinese imperial influence came with the Qing dynasty, whose policy toward Tibet involved active intervention in its internal affairs during the 18th century; however, as the Qing declined during the 19th century, Tibet edged away from its Chinese suzerains toward a limited independence. All this changed in the late 19th century when Russia and Great Britain competed in the “Great Game” for superiority in Central Asia; once more, remote Tibet landed in the middle of a geopolitical struggle between larger states. For Great Britain, Tibet mattered as a buffer state between India and rampant Russian expansion throughout Central Asia, so much so that the British invaded and seized Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, in 1904.

The rise of Chinese nationalism culminated in the ouster of the Qing court in 1911 and began the long road to creation of a nominally “central” Chinese government by the KMT in 1928. A key pillar of the KMT’s version of Chinese nationalism was the making good on its promises to regain “lost” territories that comprised a “five nationality” greater China that included Tibet.

In reality, Nationalist China, according to Lin, never went beyond its own rhetoric about extending its sovereignty over such historic Inner Asian frontier areas as Tibet and failed in its ethno-political schemes to control such areas. As the Nationalist government first struggled against the Japanese between 1937 and 1945, and later the Chinese Communists between 1945 and 1949, Tibet slipped clear of Chinese dominance by finally rising against the fading Nationalists in 1947.

Lin’s book is a valuable addition to a limited literature on Tibet’s relations with China before the creation of the People’s Republic. His well-documented, revisionist arguments make a strong case for believing that China’s pre-1949 “claim” to Tibet was insubstantial and amounted to no more than nationalistic hype.