Gazing at the Tibetan Plateau: Sovereignty and Chinese state expansion in the early twentieth century

• Main Author: Relyea, Scott
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2010
• Subjects: Asian History; Asian Studies; History
• ISBN: 9781124377186; 1124377182

This dissertation explores continuities in the expanding Chinese state's endeavour to incorporate its southwest borderlands from the last years of the Qing dynasty into the first decade of the Republic of China, complementing recent scholarship which explores the transformation over the first half of the 20th century of the Qing Empire into a Chinese state. Geographically, the text focuses on the Kham region of cultural Tibet, a vast borderland of high mountains and narrow river valleys situated between and coveted in the early twentieth century by both central Tibet and Sichuan Province. By integrating first-hand accounts penned by officials, soldiers, gentry, missionaries, and adventurers, Chinese, Tibetan, and foreign, with an analysis of the policies implemented by diverse military, governmental, and economic actors into a narrative of events in Kham from roughly 1904 to the conclusion of the Nine Power Treaty in 1922, this work offers a detailed history of a crucial period in the emergence of the Chinese state while simultaneously presenting a comprehensive picture of the social and political circumstances of a region at the edge of Chinese and Tibetan space. This work further analyses the transformation during the early twentieth century of the Sino-Tibetan relationship prompted by the introduction of the globalising norms of sovereignty and territoriality, situating contemporary irredentism in these Tibetan borderlands, as manifest during demonstrations stretching from Lhasa to Kham in early 2008, in the incomplete implementation of these policies during the transition from imperial to state space in a process which I call infrontier imperialism. The military campaigns, bureaucratisation, and myriad 'civilising' reforms implemented most effectively by the Qing general Zhao Erfeng, known to Tibetans as the 'Butcher of Kham', and mirrored less successfully by successive Republican administrations of Sichuan and its borderlands, claimed a long imperial pedigree. Yet the essence and effects of these policies, which comprise the first two stages of infrontier imperialism, were transformed in the early 20th century in the burgeoning global climate of nation-states imbued with sovereignty, the concept which evoked the last stage of infrontier imperialism, the conversion of Kham into a province. Synthesising imperial and modern, these policies, which resonate even today, included the replacement of imperially-invested local chieftains with centrally-appointed bureaucratic officials, the exploitation of mineral resources through mining, the migration of farmers from Sichuan's Red Basin to agricultural colonies coupled with the formation of experimental farms on the plateau, the initiation of industrial production utilising local products, and the establishment of schools and the inculcation of new social norms to transform and acculturate the Khampas. Bolstered by initial military action and the continued presence on the plateau of Sichuanese soldiers, however tenuous, these myriad policies were at their core intended to weaken the local power of monasteries and thereby the spiritual and rival political influence of Lhasa in Kham. Geographical and political challenges exposed by diverse countervailing forces at the global, imperial or state, and local levels transected these efforts, frustrating the incorporation of Kham into the bureaucratic structure of the Chinese state at a time when the region was perceived by both Chengdu and Beijing as a stepping stone toward encompassing the whole of Tibet. A stark contrast existed between the late Qing and early Republican governments' real exercise of authority on the plateau at the local level and the largely performative aspects of that authority at the imperial or state level deployed to legitimate claims to sovereignty over Kham and Tibet to the global community. The emergence of nation-states and the accompanying tenets of sovereignty in the first decades of the 20th century had transformed long-standing policies of bureaucratisation and acculturation once invoked by expanding Chinese empires into tools for absorbing these same borderlands into the nascent Chinese state. Yet this dissertation argues that the persistent inability of the Qing and Republican governments to exert effective control over the diverse polities comprising Kham during these crucial decades of state formation, coupled with the incomplete implementation of the bureaucratic and transformative endeavours noted above, exacerbated an underlying tension between the political and the spiritual in the competition for authority in Kham among local leaders, Lhasa, Chengdu, and Beijing which persists even to this day.