1 The encounter of China and India in this century will change the world. For thousands of years, the two civilisations were separated by the high mountains of Tibet. Except for a brief war in 1962, there were no major conflicts between them in their long histories. However, they knew of each other through traders and monks. Going around Tibet, the old silk routes were long and difficult, passing overland through Central Asia and by sea through the peninsulas and archipelagos of Southeast Asia. During the Great Game of the 19th century, both Britain and Russia saw it in their own interest to keep Tibet as part of Qing China, providing a buffer between them. When Chinese and Indians meet, they recognise each other as an ancient people. In his laconic way, India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh observed that each is too big to be contained by the other and that the world is big enough to accommodate both. Chinese leaders doff their hats in return.
2 Together, China and India make up more than a third of the world's population and will supply much of the talent for global development in this century. The concentration of Chinese and Indian talent in Silicon Valley foreshadows what is coming. How China and India relate to each other in the coming decades will affect everyone. If peaceful, this will be a golden age for Asia.
3 Tibet is changing from being a barrier to a region linking China and India together. Tibet was so inaccessible even in the recent past; neither Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai nor Deng Xiaoping ever visited it. Today, there are good roads connecting Tibet to Xinjiang, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan. Three years ago, an amazing thousand-kilometre railroad from Golmud in Qinghai to Lhasa in Tibet was opened. 80% of it is over 4000 metres in altitude; 50% on permafrost. Oxygen is pumped into the carriages to help passengers adjust to the thin air. This railroad is the fulfilment of a 100 year-old dream. When first proposed, many foreign engineers said that it could not be built. From Lhasa, the railroad will be extended to Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city, taking it very close to the Indian and Nepali borders.
4 Economically, there is much to be gained by improving road and rail links between Tibet and South Asia. The distance from Lhasa to Calcutta is less than a thousand kilometres. Indeed, the Chinese have suggested that they be linked by rail as well. The Indian Government is understandably apprehensive about moving too quickly. Scars of the 1962 War are still raw in India. When the Indian Army moved to liberate Bangladesh in December 1971, an important factor it considered was winter snow preventing the Chinese Army from interfering through the mountain passes. Thus, the reopening of the 4400 metre-high Nathu La Pass in July 2006 was politically significant. As part of it, China recognised India's ownership of Sikkim. Hundreds of kilometres of fibre optic cables have been laid in the past year from Yadong in Tibet to Siliguri in West Bengal with an initial capacity of 20 gigabytes per second.
5 Trade between China and India has grown rapidly in the last ten years. China has already become India's biggest trading partner. And this is only the beginning. Perhaps this should not be thought remarkable since Qing China was British India's biggest trading partner in the 19th century. Common economic interests are driving the two countries into closer political cooperation both bilaterally and internationally.
6 Culturally, there are growing areas of contact as well. The most important rivers of South Asia have their sources in the Tibetan highlands, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Mount Kailash is sacred for many religions. Hindus believe it to be the Abode of Shiva. A trickle of Indian pilgrims trek over the border to visit. Others fly to Kathmandu and travel overland. To serve this region of Tibet, a new airport will soon be opened with an extra long runway because of the high altitude. The trickle is becoming a flow.
7 Buddhism has long linked China to India. Ironically, there are many more Buddhists in China today than there are in India. As physical infrastructure improves in India, the flow of pilgrims from East Asia to the Buddhist holy land in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh will become a flood in the coming years. Riding this tide, the Indian Government is reviving Nalanda University as a secular, international university. Nalanda was a great university in the first millennium. At its peak, it had 10,000 students. Many came from East, Southeast and Central Asia, including the famous Tang monk Xuan Zang. Indeed, the most important accounts of Nalanda came from the Chinese records. Nalanda was sacked by Afghan invaders in the 12th century at about the time Oxford was founded. Two years ago, a committee of mentors headed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was formed by the Indian Government to spearhead the re-establishment of the university. It is a project which China fully supports.
8 As China and India move closer together, Tibet is both an opportunity and an issue. The economic opportunity is obvious, but rapid development has brought about great stress to the Tibetan way of life. This complicates bilateral relations between China and India.
9 Over long years, Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism evolved in response to the challenges of extreme physical conditions at high altitudes, developing in the process a deep spirituality. However, old Tibet should not be romanticized. It was not Shangri-La. The political economy was based on the feudal domination of monasteries over rural serfs. Like the endless turns of the prayer wheel, it was an internally consistent way of life which could have gone on and on for as long as Tibet stayed isolated from the outside world. In 1951, Mao Zedong's Government negotiated the 'peaceful liberation' of Tibet with the local Tibetan Government, guaranteeing that Beijing would not force changes to the feudal political economy of Tibet. But the Chinese revolution had its own internal dynamic. By the mid-1950s, land reforms had begun in Tibetan-inhabited areas outside Tibet in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. Monastic lands were seized and redistributed to peasants. Nomads were settled and their children sent to school. These contributed to the Tibetan rebellion of 1959. While the Dalai Lama fled to India where Tibetan exiles were settled in Dharamsala, the Panchen Lama remained in China and worked within the system, but not always effectively. In 1962, he sent a letter to Beijing expressing Tibetan grievances. During the Cultural Revolution, Tibetan youths, following Chinese youths in other parts of the country, engaged in an orgy of destruction. Since then, as in the rest of China, monasteries and temples have been restored or rebuilt, often to a state better than what they were before, although some precious artefacts were lost forever. Without land and serfs, these places can only be sustained with the patronage of the Chinese state.
10 The marriage of Tang Princess Wencheng to Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo in the 7th century began a complex relationship between Tibet and Imperial China which ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties. The links between Tibet and Mongolia reached high points during the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing Dynasties. Mongol princes during the late Ming and early Qing Dynasty intervened on behalf of the Yellow Hat Gelugpa (the order of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama), making it the dominant sect in Tibet. Because religious and political leadership was fused from the time of the 5th Dalai Lama, the appointment of high lamas often required the approval of the Emperor. This was certainly so during the Qing Dynasty. It was a practice carried into Republican and Communist China. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Government approved the appointment of the 14th (present) Dalai Lama in 1940 and the 10th Panchen Lama in 1949. At the Forbidden City in Beijing today, the old buildings still carry inscriptions in the four main languages of the Qing Dynasty - Han, Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan.
11 Unlike the encounter of Spanish conquistadores and the Andean Incas in the 16th century, which saw one side extinguishing the other in a short span of time, the encounter of these four nationalities with one another took place over many centuries. The Incas, like the Tibetans, had developed values and institutions adapted to high altitudes.
12 In the last 50 years, China devoted huge resources to the development of Tibet because of its strategic importance. Economic growth has been in the double digits in the last fifteen years. Social indicators like average life spans have shown remarkable improvement. But, relative to Han Chinese, Tibetans lag behind especially in economic performance. This should not be surprising because an entrenched way of life cannot change quickly within a few decades. As in Singapore, the tensions which naturally arise when different ethnic and religious groups living side by side respond at different speeds to globalisation cannot be wished away; they simply have to be recognised and managed. Affirmative action, however, creates its own problems.
13 Education is clearly the key to the future. Although it would make sense to set a minimum age for young boys wanting to become monks so that they could have a strong educational foundation first, this is still deemed too sensitive. At Tibet University which has a beautiful new campus, the faculty is two-thirds Tibetan. The need for affirmative action must limit the university's faculty size and expansion. Instead, Tibetan students are offered places in middle schools and universities elsewhere in China, which is probably what Beijing wants as well.
14 As part of the recent stimulus package, satellite dishes were given to farmers enabling them to receive dozens of Chinese TV channels. Pole-vaulting a medieval society to the 21st century is however never easy. At the Norbulinka Palace, the summer residence of the Dalai Lama, devotees still prostrate themselves before objects once used by him like his bed and sofa.
15 The 14th Dalai Lama is now 74 years old. In a recent TV interview, he said that he was born to accomplish certain tasks and as those tasks were not completed, it was 'logical’ that he would be reincarnated outside China. Many believe that 'outside China' means Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh where the 6th Dalai Lama came from, a Tibetan area controlled by India but claimed by China. This would greatly complicate the border demarcation between China and India. Beijing of course insists on the old rule that the appointment of high lamas must have its approval.
16 The 11th Panchen Lama is coming of age. When chosen as the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama, Beijing gave its approval but not the Dalai Lama. Six months ago, at the Second World Buddhist Forum in Wuxi, he surprised many people by giving his speech in English.
17 It may seem strange that the reincarnation of high lamas should be a subject of such intense interest today. That perhaps is a reflection of the past in the present and the importance of the China-India relationship. Looking ahead, however, Buddhism in Tibet will have to adjust to change as it has in other parts of Asia where it is enjoying a huge revival in many countries. Tibet is part of a much larger Asian drama that is changing the world.
George Yeo is the foreign minister of Singapore. He visited Tibet in August this year, the first foreign minister to do so after the March 14 riots last year.
An abridged version of this article was published on YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu).
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Posted by: nichypal | December 18, 2009 at 07:52 PM