Chinese Suzerainty over Tibet: an Expedient Invention

Topjor Tsultrim

12/8/20

"Despite Chinese emperors and Tibetan kings having carried out relations for countless centuries using their own systems of relationships, many of which foregrounded Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions, the current paradigm of the Western nation-state has totally supplanted such dynamics. This term suzerainty, that ultimately proved fatal to Tibet’s dream of nationhood, still retains the ambiguity it was imbued with over 100 years ago."

Today, whether living abroad or under the oppression of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter referred to as PRC), the Tibetan people are the survivors of a systemic onslaught against their very existence. Their current form of existence, whether in diaspora, within the Tibet Autonomous Region (hereafter referred to as the TAR), or in the historically culturally Tibetan regions of neighboring provinces, is far different than it was between the years 1913-1949. In the years since the People’s Liberation Army of the PRC marched into Lhasa, questions have been asked, by Tibetan children growing up in the diasporic settlements of Dharamshala, New York, Zurich, and Toronto, by Hollywood actors, and by scholars across the world, surrounding the same theme: how did Tibet become a part of China? To answer that question, we must first begin at unpacking its premises, as well as the relevant terms of sovereignty, autonomy, and—most critically—suzerainty. This term, while used in British documents in a Tibetan context as early as the 1880s, came into debate most critically during the tripartite Shimla Convention of 1913-14 between Tibet, the Republic of China (hereafter referred to as the ROC), and Britain. Tibet’s ostensible acceptance of the term ‘suzerainty’ in the early 20th century demonstrates the country’s fatal lack of familiarity with the Western political lexicon of statecraft—a lexicon that its neighbors China and, to a lesser degree, Mongolia had already begun to adopt. This asymmetric dynamic of legal fluency led to the intentionally ambiguous term ‘suzerainty’ to be used first by the British to settle the issue of the Tibet-India border, but then reanimated by the Chinese to both prevent foreign intervention in Tibet during the Republican Era and establish a historical record for its claims over modern Tibet. 

While suzerainty first was intentionally mobilized as a politically expedient legal vessel for Britain and China, the term’s translation into the Tibetan language showed how the Tibetan government perceived it as an inconsequential linguistic ambiguity of little political significance. While English language references to suzerainty in Tibet had already begun in the 1880s, the most pertinent place to locate the dissection of the Tibetan language lexicon of statecraft is the Shimla Convention of 1913-14. At this conference between Britain, the Republic of China, and the recently self-declared independent state of Tibet, all three parties arrived with specific aspirations they intended to secure for their respective governments. While we will explicate Britain and China’s coded intentions in due course, the Tibetan delegation clearly delineated their position from the very first meeting of the months-long conference, stating emphatically, “China and Tibet have never been ruled by each other… Tibet is an independent country.” This translation was provided by Kazi Dawa Samdup, the Tibetan translator for Sir Charles Bell, the British Political Officer for Tibet from 1908-1919, and served as a British representative during the Shimla Convention. The Tibetan term used here is “རྒྱལ་ཁབ་རང་བཙན” or gyal khab rang zen, which is consistent with phraseology enlisted in other assertions of Tibet’s independence, such as His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama’s declaration of Tibet’s independence. This unequivocal assertion of independence from Chinese influence is significant when taken with the context of the Tibetan delegation’s ostensible willingness to submit to the suzerainty of China. As Ryosuke Kobayashi highlights in his chapter within Okamoto Takashi’s A World History of Suzerainty, the Tibetan record of the Shimla Agreement’s Article 2, which was initialed by all three plenipotentiaries of the Conference, but later rejected by Chinese officials in Beijing, translates China’s assertion of “under the suzerainty of China” as “རྒྱ་ནག་གི་མངའ་ཁོངས་ཡིན་པའི་དབང་དུ་བརྩིས་ཀྱང་།” or gha nak kyi mnga khongs yin wang dhu tsi gyang.” The political implications of this phraseology are exceedingly weak, as its connotative implication only refers to how Tibet was ‘considered to be under the external influence of China.’ Indeed, the next sentence of Article 2 goes on to use the term rang zen, the same word used in Tibet’s declaration of independence, which demonstrates how the Tibetan delegation did not consider the discussion of suzerainty and its connotated ‘semi-sovereignty’ as having any bearing on Tibet’s independence. While the final English translation ultimately used the word autonomy in Article 2, it seems logical to conclude that the consistent use of rang zen in the translation of Article 2 and the Tibetan delegation’s initial assertion of independence demonstrates how they felt the discussion of suzerainty and autonomy were non-issues. The dueling semantic contradiction of suzerainty and autonomy, which is the source of the rhetorical ambiguity Britain and the PRC would later seek to mobilize, melts away in the Tibetan translation, revealing a single, consistent, narrative of weak Chinese external influence coupled with Tibet’s self-conception of independence. The conceptual treatment of these terms was reflected in the Tibetan delegation’s strategy to focus primarily on the issues of territory and border-defining. However, it is clear that the other two parties at the Convention, Britain and the ROC, approached the term with an opposite disposition and attached tremendous significance to suzerainty’s ambiguity. 

The British government intentionally deployed the term suzerainty to prevent the ROC from claiming sovereignty over territory that abutted the northern border of British India while ensuring Tibet was not free to develop closer relations with Russia, Britain’s rival in the Great Game of Central Asia. Britain was concerned by their contentious interactions with the ROC, deeming them “a bad neighbor during the 1905-1911 period of direct Chinese power in Tibet.”  Therefore, they preferred to “[create] a buffer state in Tibet.” They saw Tibet as a government more amenable to border and trade agreements that favored the British. Additionally, as a remnant affect from the geopolitical attitudes of the Great Game, the British empire believed “it was equally important that Tibet was not wholly independent and free to forge an alliance with Russia.” In order to accomplish both of these goals, Britain believed that could best control this situation by circumscribing Tibet’s international stature into the loosely defined status of being under the ROC’s suzerainty. By only acknowledging the ROC’s suzerainty over Tibet, and not its sovereignty, Britain believed that it had effectively preserved the functional autonomy of Tibet, insofar as trade and border issues were concerned, while distancing Tibet from Russian influence. When analyzing the British perspective as such, it becomes apparent that the key factors that precipitated the usage of the term suzerainty were considerations of political expediency in the pursuit of Britain’s imperial designs in India and Central Asia. Even though the question of historical record and functional independence, as presented to Sir Henry McMahon, the British plenipotentiary in the Shimla Convention of 1913-14, was met an “overwhelming… weight of documentary evidence” in Tibet’s favor, the British were more concerned with their political considerations than historical fidelity. Despite this focus on political expediency, the ROC, and later the PRC, was able to repurpose the means by which Britain pursued these ends.

The ROC, still reeling from the tumultuous transition from the Qing dynasty, was able to use the language of suzerainty to control Tibet’s international stature without maintaining actual political or military control over Tibet. With their limited capacity to administer the vast territory associated with the Qing empire, the Republic of China was unable to maintain direct control over the Tibetan government in Lhasa, leading His Holiness the 13th Dalai Lama to declare Tibet’s independence in 1913. It would have been a doubly big blow if Tibet was able to align itself with a Western superpower like the British empire. As such, the Shimla Convention of 1913-14 and Britain’s ostensible support for Tibet’s evidence-based historical claims of independence did not bode well for the ROC’s plans to reign sovereign over all territories formerly associated with the Qing empire. However, despite the Accords never being signed by Beijing, the popularization of the term suzerainty equipped the ROC with the language of legal ambiguity such that they would not have to meet the then-insurmountable standard of sovereign rule while still precluding Tibet’s recognition as an independent nation on the international stage. Indeed, to this end, “China was able to obtain… guarantees that [Britain] would not support the independence, as they might well have done, of either Tibet or Mongolia,” without exercising actual control over Tibet. While “Tibet enjoyed at least de facto independence” during China’s Republican period, the ambiguity within the term suzerainty, which was deliberately deployed by the British delegates at Shimla, led to this peculiar juxtaposition of Tibet’s legal relationship with the ROC. Ultimately, this ambiguity buried the Tibetan state just barely under the surface of sovereignty. Despite the weak ROC government’s inability to actually administer Tibet, the blanket of suzerainty precluded Tibet from being recognized as sovereign in the early 20th century. The failure to garner international recognition for their sovereignty directly led to the principal concerns of the modern discussion surrounding Tibetan statehood.

Since the People’s Liberation Army’s invasion of Tibet in 1949, the PRC has mobilized the historical legacy of suzerainty to create a national record that legitimates their territorial claims over Tibet. The PRC built upon the ROC’s “claim for sovereignty” over modern Tibet—a claim that only started to develop actual merit after the British withdrawal from India in 1947. Once the PRC assumed power shortly afterward in 1949, they began upon the project of staking the claims of nationhood—an endeavor that prioritized the establishment of sovereign borders. This project of defining their new nation with the language of Western statecraft led some to describe the PRC as the “vicar of the high church of Westphalia.” In pursuit of this goal, the PRC’s propaganda machine mass-produced this Western narrative of nationhood. One such example of this national project was when Radio Peking, a national radio station, broadcast the following message to the nation announcing Tibet’s ‘liberation’: “The Tibetan nationality is one of the nationalities with a long history within the boundaries of China, and like many other nationalities, it has done its glorious duty in the course of the creation and development of the great Motherland.” This preamble to the Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet is exemplary of how the PRC continuously attempts to cast Tibet and the Tibetan people as being historically distinct but constituent members of China’s territorial “Motherland.” This language of “Motherland” circumvents the question of political control and instead focuses on historical territorial claim—a claim bolstered by the historically accepted term of suzerainty. Modernity still has not shook off the cloud of ambiguity that surrounds that term. This is but just one example of the PRC’s commitment to the weaponization of the Western lexicon of statehood. The mythologized construction of an enduring 4,000 year Chinese state history intentionally caulks over the truncated, jagged history of the parties that ruled the territory now recognized as China. The legacy of the forced adoption of the Western lexicon continues to define the parameters of the Tibetan issue. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet’s government-in-exile, both support the “‘middle way’ of greater autonomy within China”  However, many have pointed out, such a solution “is rather reminiscent of some definitions of ‘suzerainty.’” Despite Chinese emperors and Tibetan kings having carried out relations for countless centuries using their own systems of relationships, many of which foregrounded Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions, the current paradigm of the Western nation-state has totally supplanted such dynamics. This term suzerainty, that ultimately proved fatal to Tibet’s dream of nationhood, still retains the ambiguity it was imbued with over 100 years ago.

The three parties at the Shimla Convention of 1913-14, Britain, China, and Tibet, each settled on the term suzerainty to describe the relationship between the ROC and the Tibetan state for their own set of motivations. For the Tibetans, the term mnga khongs, or suzerainty, had no bearing on their concept of rangzen, or independence, and thus its acceptance was a small price to pay for the preferential territorial claims they exacted in the Shimla Accords. For the British, a Tibetan state under the suzerainty of China helped them settle the disputed northern border of India while keeping the Russians further afield from British colonial holdings. For the Chinese, the claim of suzerainty allowed the relatively weak state of the ROC to maintain a nominal claim over Tibet until a stronger central government, the form of the PRC, could more fully incorporate it into the sovereign territory of China. Ultimately, the decision surrounding the usage of the term suzerainty to describe the China-Tibet relationship was made by Britain and China. At the time when these critical decisions were taking place, these two countries had a far better grasp of the connotations of the modern Western legal lexicon of statecraft than did Tibet. As a result, the decision to describe Tibet’s legal status as such was done not with respect to the actual historical record, but rather with respect to the short and long-term political interests of the two parties who understood the implications of such language on the global American-Eurocentric stage. The modern Tibetan struggle continues to embody a reincarnated model of the endeavor of Shatra Penjor Dorjee, the Tibetan plenipotentiary of the Shimla Conference: presenting the “overwhelming… weight of evidence” to the global community. It remains to be seen if the global community, given the chance, will again forsake truth and history for the allure of political expedience. 

Works Cited:

Amy Kellam, Manufactured Obscurity: The Postcolonial Erasure of Suzerainty and the Changing Legal Status of Tibet (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2015).

Okamoto Takashi, ed., A World History of Suzerainty: A Modern History of East and West Asia and Translated Concepts (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2019).

Yuan Yi Zhu, ‘Suzerainty, Semi-Sovereignty, and International Legal Hierarchies on China’s Borderlands’, Asian Journal of International Law, 2020.

"Britain's suzerain remedy," The Economist, Nov. 6, 2008.

Goldstein, Melvyn C., and Gelek Rimpoche. A History of Modern Tibet. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of Calif. Press, 2008.

Goldstein, Melvyn C. The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 2005.

Goldstein, Melvyn C., and Ngawang D. Narkyid. English-Tibetan Dictionary of Modern Tibetan. Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, 1986.

van Walt van Praag, Michael C. The Status of Tibet: History, Rights, and Prospects in International Law. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987.

Shakabpa, Tsepon W.D. Tibet: a Political History. New York, NY: Potala Press, 1984.

Shakabpa, Tsepon W.D. “Bod Kyi Srid Don Rgyal Rabs.” Unpublished manuscript, typescript.