ONE CHINA POLICY IN PUBLIC ATTENTION FOCUS IN INDIA

By a Correspondent

China’s ‘One China Policy’ is in the focus of public attention these days in India for an interesting reason.Tenzin Tsundue (pictured above) , a 48 year old Tibetan refugee and one of the most popular faces of Tibetan freedom struggle across the world, is walking 500 km from Dharamshala to New Delhi these days. His month long walk through dozens of north Indian cities and hundreds of towns and villages is part of his unique campaign of interacting with individual citizens and public gatherings.

Tsundue has been in international limelight on many occasions in the past. The most talked about event was in 2002 in Mumbai when despite high levels of security ring around visiting Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, Tsundue managed to climb a tower of Zhu’s hotel and unfurled the Tibetan national flag and a banner which boldly read “Free Tibet : China, Get Out”. Running his freedom struggle for Tibet strictly on non-violent principles, he has been in and out of Indian prisons for 16 times. No surprise that he has emerged as the face of a non-violent Tibetan freedom struggle on same lines as followed by Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther  King Jr.

The main thrust of Tsundue’s public interaction is to remind Indian masses that China has become a permanent source of irritation and danger to Indian national security and sovereignty along the Himalayas. And that it could happen only because China occupied Tibet and thereby changed traditional ‘India-Tibet’ border into ‘India-China’ border. His appeal to Indian masses is to put pressure on the India government to abandon its ‘One China Policy’ and help Tibetan people to win back their independence from China. Tsundue insists that “India can ensure peace and security on her Himalayan borders only if China goes back from Tibet and Tibet again becomes a peaceful buffer as a free country between India and China.” In contrast, all Indian governments since past seven decades have refrained from standing up for human rights of Tibetan people lest it hurts China’s ‘One China Policy’.

CHINA’S VULNERABILITY

By focusing his 500 km long arduous walk through northern India on ‘One China Policy’, Tsundue has put into focus one of the most important aspects of China’s ongoing belligerence across the globe. In China’s relations with other countries, one issue on which the Chinese leaders lose their cool is this very issue of ‘One China Policy’. There is no doubt that the extraordinary annoyance and arrogance of Chinese leaders on this issue has helped China, most of the times, in getting its way through with most of the governments. But it has also helped its foes to understand the vulnerability of the present day Chinese communist regime on the idea of ‘One China’. Initially China’s insistence on ‘One China Policy’ started with Taiwan. But over past many decades Beijing has gradually expanded the definition of its ‘One China Policy’ to it’s those colonies like Tibet, Xinjiang and ‘Inner’ Mongolia too which Chinese rulers had forcibly occupied at times of recent history which are still fresh in world’s memory.  

THE IMPACT OF WUHAN VIRUS

In the case of many countries who abide by China’s insistence on its ‘One China Policy’ it has been more a quid pro quo for business and cheap products from China than their love for China or belief in the sanctity of this idea. There are other countries who have succumbed to the ever increasing financial and military muscle of Beijing. But thanks to the catastrophic impact of China’s Wuhan virus and its threatening behavior to many countries in the South China Sea and the Himalayas which have shaken the world from its slumber. These countries have now started looking for ways to stand up to China and put a check on its ever growing belligerence.  

In this context China’s colonial occupation of countries like Tibet, Xinjiang (original name ‘East Turkistan’), South Mongolia and Manchuria and its bully behavior on Hong Kong and Taiwan are fast attracting attention of countries and other interest groups who have their own reasons to cut China to its size.  The history of geographic growth of present day China is bound to come handy to all such forces.

BIRTH OF A NEW CHINA

Even elementary study of modern day China would show that China has grown from its original size of a walled country to a mammoth of present size only through forcible occupations. The first signs of China as a modern nation appeared only in 1912 when three century old Qing Dynasty of the Manchu rule over Han Chinese was overthrown in the ‘Xinhai Revolution’ and the great Han leader Sun Yat-sen established the ‘Republic of China’. 

FROM WALLED CHINA TO TODAY’S CHINA

Even before the Manchu rule, this region of Asia was ruled and dominated by the Mongols. A unique historic feature which defined China’s geographic identity in deeper past was the 21,196 km long ‘Great Wall of China’ which the kings had built in nearly   2300 years (7^th Century BC to 1644 AD). Although China today takes pride in presenting this wall as one of the ‘Seven Wonders’ on earth but the other face of this wonder coin is that it also represents the timid and defeatist personality of the Chinese society who build such a mammoth structure out of fear of invasions from a host of surrounding people.  These invaders included the Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hui, Tatars, Kazakhs and many others whose homelands are today under Chinese occupation. This also explains why all these races are referred to as ‘barbarian’ even today to reflect the Hans’ hurt ego.

History shows that just before Sun Yat-sen established ‘Republic of China’, it was surrounded by Mongolia, Tibet, East Turkistan, Japanese Manchuria and many parts of China itself which were run by Britain, Germany, France, Japan and Portugal. It was only when ‘Republic of China’ was established in 1912 that China could claim that it had borders with Manchuria, Burma (now ‘Myanmar’), Vietnam, Laos and Korea.

OCCUPATION OF ‘INNNER’ MONGOLIA

But soon after establishing the ‘Republic of China’ and recovering from internal problems and violent unrests thereafter, the southern parts of Mongolia, claimed by China as ‘Inner Mongolia’, was occupied and assimilated in China in 1919. This was first time when Russia became another bordering neighbor to China besides a truncated Mongolia.

MANCHURIA’S OCCUPATION

It was in 1921 that Kuomintang (KMT), the nationalist party of Sun Yat-sen, came out of upheavals of infightings and short term revival of the Qing Dynasty to establish a national government with the support of Communist Party of China. Finally in 1928 General Chiang Kai-shek of KMT took charge of China after quelling rebellions and a big massacre of communists in Shanghai. This marked the beginning of a new civil war which finally ended in 1949 with the communist leader Mao pulling down the KMT rule of Chiang Kai-shek in China and establishment of ‘People’s Republic of China’. Chiang escaped to the southern island of Taiwan and announced his fresh ‘Republic of China’ as the ‘real’ China.

OCCUPATION OF MANCHURIA

During the KMT rule after 1928 China occupied Manchuria in 1939. It was the Han answer to the Manchurian dominance of the past and centuries of humiliation at the hands of Manchus. Internationally this occupation of Manchuria lead to adding Korea and Japan as China’s new next door neighbours in addition to coming face to face with extreme eastern parts of Russia in its new avatar as ‘Soviet Union’. Almost all visual and practical dimensions of the Manchurian culture were practically destroyed during the decade of Cultural-Revolution. The remaining sign too have been nearly wiped out due to overwhelming Han settlers and marriages with the new Han neighbours over past eight decades. Manchu, which used to be the official language of entire China for centuries, is spoken today by less than a thousand people in a country of over 1.4 billion.

OCCUPATION OF EAST TURKISTAN

The next number to be assimilated was of East Turkistan in the year 1949 where Qing Dynasty used to have only some partial and broken presence in the past. China renamed it as ‘Xinjiang’ which means ‘New Frontier’ in Chinese. This not only added a huge new land mass into China but it also brought China face to face with five new countries. These were Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan and Tajikstan republics of Soviet Union besides Afghanistan and the Ladakh region of India. Since Pakistan had occupied Gilgit, Baltistan and some other areas of Jammu & Kashmir of India this region worked as geographic link between Pakistan and China. It is through this region that China has found its access to the Arabian Sea through ‘China Pakistan Economic Corridor’.

An interesting episode related to China’s occupation of East Turkistan was that when China found strong armed resistance from tribal leaders of East Turkistan Mao used his magic smile and persuaded almost all major clan leaders to come to Beijing for ‘friendly talks’ in order to find an ‘amicable solution’. With the help of Soviet communist leader Stalin, Mao organized a special plane flight for these Uyghur leaders and found his ‘amicable solution’ when the plane exploded on the way and an entire generation of East Turkistan leadership was wiped out. This made Mao’s job much easier in fully grabbing the Uyghur country.

TIBET TOO IS GOBBLED UP

This expansion spree of China concluded with Mao’s final and master stroke in 1950 when Mao’s People’s Liberation Army invaded and occupied eastern parts of Tibet. He used PLA’s presence in Tibet as a lever and forced the 15 year old Dalai Lama’s government to sign on dotted lines on a “Seventeen-Point Agreement” to assimilate Tibet into the PRC. An independent country called Tibet, which has been living free of any foreign interference at least 39 years since 1912 and had been signatory to international treaties suddenly disappeared from the world map as an ‘Autonomous Region’ of China.

Today the total land mass of these four colonies account for over two thirds and natural resources for over three fourths in what the communist bosses of Beijing claim to be ‘One China’. But on the population front the demographic colonialism of the Hans has reduce the original populations of these four colonies to almost meaningless minorities in their own homelands. The Tibetans, Manchus, Uyghurs and Mongols along with all other 51 ‘minority nationalities’ of today’s China account for less than two percent as compared to +82 percent of Hans. On the one hand the water and rich minerals of these countries have been perpetually fattening China’s kitty to give it a strong financial arm to arm twist the rest of world. On the other hand, its military power on the borders of its 14 new neighbours across the continents has added to its arrogance and belligerence. That explains why Beijing’s communist masters are so sensitive on ‘One China Policy’ and why the world looks confident about hitting China where it is most vulnerable.