There is no such thing as international law. You can search on the “legal status of Tibet” and find a lot of stuff. Such as the International Commission of Jurists here: http://www.historywiz.com/legalstatus.htm
I don’t have time for a more in-depth search, but here is a map of the Republic of China claimed territory. The areas that are not light blue are the PRC, and the non light blue are areas claimed as part of China by the ROC. http://mapsof.net/china/static-maps/png/zhonghua-minguo-quhua-fanti
You make 2 great points. Tibet has been under Chinese scrutiny for a long time. Which doesn’t mean much.
Second, China has always claimed the right to approve the Tibetan rulers. However this does not necessarily equate with actual practice, no?
And the Chinese have written the history that is generally accepted. You could check out Sir Charles Bell’s Tibet Past and Present history of Tibet ebook here: http://e-asia.uoregon.edu/easia/nufound.cfm . Sir Charles was the British envoy to Lhasa in 1920-21 and a Tibetan Scholar.
Hello fellow Wikipedia browser. The International Commission of Jurists is a group organized and funded by the CIA during the Cold War to issue official-sounding anti-Soviet proclamations. An opinion from them issued in 1960 is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone, seeing as how the CIA was also actively training and arming a Tibetan insurgency at the very same time.
For me, the argument that it was a buffer zone between China and India doesn’t hold water. It was a buffer zone, when it was Tibet. Now India and China share a border, no buffer zone. There is a sign on the road in Dharamsala which reads, “China in Tibet is a threat to India”, which I’ve never forgotten.
As for them, ‘considering it traditionally’, part of China, let’s not forget that they still consider Taiwan to be part of China. Still. They want Tibetan’, and the world, to let it go, but they will never let Taiwan go, even all these years later? That strikes me as hugely disingenuous.
They are brutally repressive of a culture that values peace, respect for life, and non consumerism, above most everything else. Go to Ladahk and see, with your own eyes, that such repression is not required to modernize Tibetan’s.
As for what they want it for, they are currently filling the beautiful Himalayan valleys of Tibet, with their nuclear waste. But I’m sure we can trust, they are doing so in a safely prescribed fashion, it’s not like they have no standards. Oh, wait, poisoned pet food, lead painted children’s toys, substandard building regulation enforcement causing schools to collapse on children during natural disasters…
You also want to launch your rockets so that they ascend over water, not over land, if possible. If you don’t have that option (as the Russians didn’t), then you at least want to avoid launching toward a highly populated area. That’s because not all rocket launches are successful, and a crash in a densely populated area will do more damage than one in water or tundra. You generally want to launch in an eastward direction, because doing that gives you extra velocity from the Earth’s rotation.
Another disadvantage of using Tibet for space launches is that space launches require big rockets. Those things are harder to transport in mountainous areas than they are in flat areas. Even if you assembled them on-site, you have to get large quantities of raw materials there, and that’s harder in mountainous terrain than it is somewhere flat.
The advantage you get in a shorter distance to the moon is trivial, too. Suppose you built your launch facility on top of Mt. Everest. The Moon, on average, is 238,000 miles from Earth. That’s a difference of one part in 10[sup]5[/sup] in distance. If you scaled the distance to the Moon down to 1000 miles, that would be a distance of a little over 50 feet.
Thanks for the responses to my irrelevant post. . . which apparently left a Saturn V sized WHOOOSH as the little coda at the end of my post went unnoticed.
Being a formal part of a country doesn’t preclude it from being a buffer zone. Xinjiang is pretty clearly a buffer zone- it takes a lot of work to control such a remote and hostile region, and they aren’t putting in that work for nothing. It’s pretty much the only real route hostile forces could use to get into the heart of China.
There may be cultural/historic reasons why China prefers buffer zones that they directly control over the classic dependent state scenario (though North Korea could be an example of the latter.) It could simply be that China wanted to avoid a Mongolia situation, where what they consider a traditional buffer area allies with Russia.
I really recommend China: Fragile Superpower for a better understand of Chinese nationalism and why Taiwan is so important. The book posits China perpetuates the idea that they suffered a “century of humiliation” where they fell from their position as one of the richest, most advanced and most respected nations on Earth because of hostile forces. There is a strong idea that China needs to regain their rightful place in the world and become a respected power, and regaining Taiwan has been positioned as the final key to putting that period behind them.
A few decades ago, when Taiwan took it’s claim as the rightful rulers of China more seriously, this was a more sensible thing to rally around. But the idea has such force in popular culture that it’s kind of taken on a life of it’s own. Now it’s so strongly ingrained that any politician hoping to be successful has to use strong words about Taiwan, and the perceived ability to regain Taiwan has become essential to the public’s support of the government- indeed, it’s to the point where a government who did not seem capable of regaining Taiwan would probably lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public and would risk falling out of power.
As with everything in China, it’s complicated and can’t easily be boiled down into “good” and “bad.”
We tend to focus on southeastern Tibet, the Himalaya and Lhasa, the parts of the country of most ‘tourist’ interest. But much of it is Altiplano, high plains suitable for ranch-style animal husbandry – which takes a lot of arable space, at a premium in much of China. Evan back around 1300 there was trade between northern Tibet and west central China, lowland foodstuffs including tea being shipped up and horses, in demand for cavalry and pack trains, back down to C China.
Interesting link. I never knew that before. Although, it was *initial *funding. IIRC, The ICJ have issued a lot more “rulings” over Tibet than in simply 1960. But you’re right, a 1960 ruling during the CIA funded covert operations would be pretty suspect
For large parts of the 19th and 20th Century, the Chinese could not determine duties or appoint revenue agents for trade into China, the British and Americans did, and large Chinese armies fought against other large Chinese armies almost without interruption. The answers to your questions are unlikely to impress anyone on either side of the argument.
yes. repeatedly. Most notably off the top of my head -
during the Tang Dyansty, when as a result Princess Wen Chuan was married off to the Tibetan King. He also had a Nepali wife and IIRC 6 Tibetan wives. (Chinese v ersion was that the Emperor sent his daughter off out of the goodness of his heart to help international relations and spread buddhism. YMMV)
Second was when the Tibetan army was massacred by British/Indian troops led by Younghusband in the early 1900’s. This is chronicled in ‘Bayonets to Lhasa.’
Also notable was Tibets refusal to allow the Allies to ship good across Tibet in WW2. The ‘hump’ was used as an alternative.
I have never heard this before and it makes no sense. The “Hump” was between Assam and Kunming, which are much closer to each other, linked by railway to the rest of India and China respectively, and both far to the east of Tibet. How would crossing Tibet have helped? Even supposing there was some land route over the Himalayas into Tibet, Tibet in 1940 had no railways and very few paved roads even internally, never mind with China.
This came out of pre-internet research when I wrote the guidebook to SWChina. My co-author’s grandfather was a Hump pilot.
I believe this Tibet trans-shipment is cited in “The Legal Status of Tibet” by Michael C. van Walt published in the late 1980’s as a proof point of sovereignity.
I quick internet search did not turn up anything specific on this. Then again, I’m searching from China and a lot of tibet related links are “unavailable”.
