Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting
of Tibet’s Geopolitical Identity
DIBYESH ANAND
The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet’s status within China
remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is
defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis
China. Tibet’s modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperi-
alism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the
emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant
aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twenti eth
century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This stra-
tegic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet’s status, culminated in
the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that
found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-
constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide
between the political and the cultur al, the imperial and the imaginative.
H
OW DOES A PLACE acquire geopolitical identity? The answer is not self-
evident. The status of a geopolitical entity is not simply reflective of a
pre-given reality. The relational and processual nature of identity, studied exten-
sively in the context of the individual and the collective, holds true for geopolitical
constructs, too. This paper is an analysis of one such entity—“Tibet.” The
Seventeen-Point Agreement signed by the Tibetan government and the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1951 concretized Chinese sovereignty
over Tibet in writing. Even though the Dalai Lama later renounced the treaty
after fleeing from Tibet in 1959 and there have been numerous protests
against Chinese rule by Tibetans (the March 2008 protests are a recent
example), no country in the world recognizes the Dalai Lama’s government in
exile as a legitimate government and no one denies Chinese sovereignty explicitly.
This paper focuses on the period before this authoritative scripting of sovereignty
as the defining term in Sino-Tibetan relations. Instead of adhering to the wide-
spread emphasis on Sino-Tibetan conflict, the paper will analyze the role of
British imperialism in fixing Tibet’s geopolitical identity.
The T ibet question (see Sautman and Dreyer 2006) is about the struggle over
what “Tibet” was, is, and should be, and the protests of 2008 once again brought the
Dibyesh Anand (D.Anand@wmin.ac.uk) is a Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations at the
Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster University, London.
The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 68, No. 1 (February) 2009: 227–252.
© 2009 The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. doi:10.1017/S0021911809000011
issue into the limelight. Was Tibet once an independent state, or was it always an
integral part of China? Is Tibet an occupied country, or is it a backward part of
China benefiting from civilizing modernization under the aegis of Chinese state?
Should Tibet be an entity based on the exercise of the right of self-determination
by Tibetans, or should Tibet always be China’s Tibet? A crucial, often neglected,
ingredient in the mix of the Tibet question is the West, both as a political actor
and as a source of ideas that have shaped the contemporary world. This paper ana-
lyses theBritishimperialscripting ofTibet in terms of sovereignty and thefacilitative
role played by Western representations of Tibet in it (for a wider discussion of the
subject, see Anand 2007, 2008). While some historians have studied the modern
history of Tibet in the context of British imperialism (McKay 1997; Mehra 1979;
Palace 2005), and others have charted the history of the Western imagination of
T i bet (Bishop 1989, 1993; Dodin and Räther 2001; Klieger 1997; Lopez 1998),
few have attempted to seriously link the imaginative and the imperial as mutually
reinforcing (for an exception, see Bishop 1989). The scripting of the geopolitical
identity of Tibet in terms of sovereignty, suzerainty, autonomy, and independence
can only be understood within the British imperial legacy.
I focus on this tale in order to challenge the divide between the political and
the cultural, to assert the salience of cultural imaginations as political practices, to
highlight the arbitrariness of contemporary international relations, and to argue
that sovereignty is not a settled fact but an ever changing, always open, contested
fiction. Conceptualizing sovereignty as a fiction opens up the realm of the politi-
cal to multiple possibilities and thus poses problems of international politics—
such as the Tibet question—not as intractable but as made so because of a
buying into of sovereignty talk as sacrosanct. It thus challenges Melvyn
C. Goldstein’s widely accepted argument that the “Tibet question—the political
status of Tibet vis-à-vis China—is an intractable nationalistic conflict” (1995, 3).
SOVEREIGNTY TALK
In a certain sense, the Tibet question is a nonstarter, for all of the nation-
states have agreed to the answer: China has sovereignty over Tibet. So Tibet
does not exist as an independent geopolitical entity but is an “integral part” of
a powerful member of the international community that is a club of nation-states
only. The sacrosanct principle that is marshaled by China and accepted by all
states in the world to designate Sino-Tibetan relations is sovereignty. Sovereignty
is thus accepted as an “essentially uncontested concept” (Walker 1990: 159; for
different perspectives on sovereignty, see Bartelson 1995; Biersteker and
Weber 1996; Hannum 1996; Hinsley 1986; Hoffman 1998; James 1986;
Krasner 1999; Weber 1995), even though its usage in the context of Sino-Tibetan
relations is recent (see Sperling 2004; see also Carlson 2005). And yet, the Tibet
question remains an unsolved one in the international arena. A visible group of
228 Dibyesh Anand
Tibetans and their supporters reject the status quo and argue that China does not
have sovereignty over Tibet, and hence the current control of Tibet by China is a
colonial, illegal occupation. This anti–Chinese sovereignty claim is multifaceted:
History, religion, democracy, morality, development, decolonization, self-
determination, international law, nationalism, transnationalism, human rights,
and several other resources are marshaled to assert a historically distinctive iden-
tity for Tibet and Tibetans, with the implication that such an identity makes Tibet
deserving of a distinct political identity, too.
Chinese control over Tibet can be understood through two different imperial
trajectories—one Chinese and one Western. While the PRC focuses primarily on
historical imperial ties to legitimize its control over Tibet, the fact that it uses the
modern concept of sovereignty—a product of European universalization through
imperialism and decolonization
1
—shows the significance of the Western imperi-
alist trajectory in the scripting of modern Tibet. Modern Chinese translation of
Tibet ’s religio-political relations with the Mongols and Manchus, termed mchod-
yon (patron-priest),
2
as a “domestic affair of China” was part of a wider develop-
ment at the start of the twentieth century when nationalism emerged strongly.
“China,” imagined as a modern nation,
3
maintained a schizophrenic attitude
toward its imperial past, especially toward the Qing/Manchus.
4
While the
Manchus and other “barbarians” were held responsible for the decline of the
“great” Han Chinese civilization and for failing to adjust and counter the rising
European (and Japanese) powers, the territorial legacy of the Qing empire was
seen as legitimate. The minoritization of Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Hui,
and several other “nationalities” went hand in hand with the construction of
“Han” identity as the leading force within multinational Chinese nationalism.
5
In this nationalizing China, the traditionally fuzzy religio-political relations that
1
The conflation of modern with European is not uncontested. This association is even more proble-
matic when teleology is read into the shift from medieval to early modern to modern, with Europe
as the natural leader of the engine of progress. For an interesting discussion of the different ways of
being “early modern,” see Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997). Laura Hostetler (2001) offers an insight
into the innovations going on in early modern China under the aegis of the Qing.
2
On mchod-yon, see David M. Farquhar (1978), James L. Hevia (1995, 37–49), P. Christiaan
Klieger (1992), and D. Seyfort Ruegg (1991). Despite the overarching frame of mchod-yon,
relations between the Manchus (and before them the Mongols) and the Tibetan lamas were
always in flux. See Mark C. Elliott (2001) and Peter C. Perdue (2005) for shifting attitudes in
the Qing court and nationalizing reforms during late Qing times.
3
For China’s imagination as a modern nation, see Prasenjit Duara (1995); see also Ann Anagnost
(1997). Interesting analyses of the relationship between nationalism, imperialism, and modernity
can be found in Timothy Brook and Gregory Blue (1999), Duara (2003), Partha Chatterjee
(1986) and Thongchai Winichakul (1994).
4
For different perspectives on late Qing imperial rule and its significance for modern China, see
Pamela Kyle Crossley (1999), Ping-ti Ho (1967, 1998), Elliott (2000), Magnus Fiskesjö (2006),
Perdue (2005), and Evelyn S. Rawski (1996).
5
For various arguments on national minorities in China, see Susan D. Blum (2002), Uradyn
E. Bulag (2002), Frank Dikötter (1992), June Teufel Dreyer (1976), Dru C. Gladney (1994,
2004); Edward Friedman (1995), Thomas Herberer (1989), and Colin Mackerras (2003).
The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet’s Geopolitical Identity 229
marked Tibet’s relations with the Qing court, and before that with the Mongols,
were seen as anomalous, and sovereignty talk along absolutist European lines
became dominant. This paper does not engage with the Chinese nationalist
appropriation of Tibet as part of the “motherland” in the name of imperial
legacy (see Anand n.d.); rather, it focuses on how Western ideas and practices,
through the agency of British imperialism, facilitated the delegitimization of tra-
ditional Sino-Tibetan relations and ensured that Tibet’s geopolitical identity
became China’s Tibet.
The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the
first half of the twentieth century with regard to Tibet was the formula of
“Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” Inspired by Stephen D. Krasner’s des-
ignation of sovereignty as “organised hypocrisy” (1999), I term this formulaic
interpretation of Sino-Tibetan relations strategic hypocrisy. As we will see in
this paper, China rejected the formula but adopted the European concept of
sovereignty and asserted it as the sole marker of Sino-Tibetan relations,
etching it indelibly through the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement. Tibet
entered the modern political imaginary thus. In the rest of the paper, I focus
on the role of the British imperial perspective in the creation of this contempor-
ary notion of “Tibet” as a geopolitical entity through hitherto unemphasized or
neglected British policy documents and expedition reports, read with the critical
eye of a multidisciplinary “anthropologist.” A reified notion of sovereignty is thus
challenged as ahistorical, opening up a space for imagining sovereignty differ-
ently and multiply.
BRITISH IMPERIALISM AND TIBET
The Western imperial scripting of Tibet occurred through the agency of
British imperialism. We can study this scripting in four different phases. The
first phase (1780–92) saw abortive efforts to establish relations with Tibet.
The second phase (1792–1899) was marked by a lack of official interaction
with Tibet, now imagined as the “ forbidden land.” In the third phase (1900–
1904), there was a radical attempt to force modern international/imperial
relations onto the hitherto “closed” Tibet, an attempt that was, in a sense, a
flash in the pan, while at the same time, the forces it set rolling were irrevers-
ible. As a consequence, the fourth phase (1904–50) was marked by contradic-
tions and saw the explicit use of European terminologies to define Tibet
using the terms of suzerainty and autonomy. This formulaic etching of Tibet
in the modern geopolitical imaginary, strategic hypocrisy, actively encouraged
ambiguity and vagueness in line with the British imperial interests. The
fourth phase ended with the complete Europeanization of the region as Sino-
Tibetan relations were defined clearly in writing in terms of C hinese sovereignty
in the 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement. The PRC completed the European
230 Dibyesh Anand
imperial scripting of Tibet by using a most effective weapon out of the
European terminological armory—sovereignty.
Phase I: Tibet as a Blank Space
The significance of the representation of Tibet as a blank space, however, did
not remain the same throughout pre-twentieth-century modern period. In the
late eighteenth century, as the British were still at the start of their colonial
phase in eastern India with a strong commercial ethos, the unknown quality of
Tibet did not cause anxieties. In fact, it is interesting to note that Tibet
aroused mere mild curiosity among a select few colonial officials, and even this
curiosity was secondary to the possibility of Tibet as a trading and commercial
partner. Two British officials were involved in this attempt to establish relation-
ship with Tibet: George Bogle (1774–75 and a proposed dispatch in 1779) and
Samuel Turner (1783). Tibet was seen as providing a possible backdoor entry
to the mammoth of the “vast Chinese market” that was closed to Westerners.
However, Tibet was also seen as valuable on its own for trade and commercial
purposes. When the missions failed in establishing diplomatic or commercial
links with Tibet, it was not seen as significant. Thomas Manning’s visit to Lhasa
in 1811 (on his abortive attempt to go to Peking) did not arouse any interest in
British India. Tibet as a blank space was not threatening. There was no
urgency to define Tibet’s political status or its relations with China. This does
not mean that visitors did not comment on this aspect. For instance, in a letter
dated September 30, 1775, Bogle clarifies Sino-Tibetan relations thus:
“The Emperor of China is acknowledged [as] the sovereign of the country …
but the internal government of the country is committed entirely to natives …
the people of Thibet except at Lahasa, hardly feel the weight of a foreign
yoke” (IOR 1768–84, 354, 397–98). In his account published in 1800, Turner
observes,
The Tibetans do not, it is true, bend under the immediate authority of
that Court, but its influence overawes them in all their proceedings,
and produces a timidity and caution in their conduct, more suited to
the character of subjects than allies. The jealousy with which they
regard this interference of the Chinese, and their uneasiness under the
yoke, though it rests so lightly upon them, was manifest, from the
distant reserve with which they treated those officers and troops who
came for no other purpose than to do honour to their High Priest.
(1971, 253; emphasis added)
What is absent in these accounts of Bogle and Turner is the urge to define in precise
terms. The use of the term “sovereignty” by Bogle did not reflect a recognition of
China’s absolute control over Tibet, for that clearly was absent. What comes out
from both of these accounts are the following images of Tibet—it is a vibrant,
The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet’s Geopolitical Identity 231