In August 1945, shortly after recognising the independence of Mongolia, Chiang Kai-shek announced that China was willing to accord the Tibetans “a very high degree of autonomy” (gaodu zizhi) and that “if in the future they fulfill economic requirements of independence, the Nationalist government will … help them to attain that status” (p. 171). Hsiao-Ting Lin's carefully researched history of the Kuomintang's relations with Tibet and its other “non-Han” territories provides a richly textured context for this remarkable offer.
Lin deliberately leaves unresolved the question as to whether that offer was ever intended as any more than a lure to get the Tibetans to send delegates to the 1946 National Assembly in Nanking. He also does no more than hint at the possibility that it might have been the basis of Mao's 1951 agreement with the Tibetans and of the Dalai Lama's current negotiating position with Beijing. But he does make it clear that the success of this offer – it did indeed lead the Tibetans to send a delegation to the National Assembly – was mainly a result of deception: China's representative in Lhasa never told the Tibetans that the meeting to which they were being invited was a National Assembly (p. 172). This is just one of the many intrigues referred to in the well-chosen subtitle of this book, a description of a struggling Chinese state that in its relations with the non-Chinese nationalities “played ethnopolitical games, utilizing the Tibet issue as a means to elevate its prestige” (p. 14).
In Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier, intrigues emerge as the form taken by early-stage state building in the context of ethnic challenge. In areas where the state could not use force or claim cultural identity, we see how even a single individual, such as Norlha hutuktu or the Ninth Panchen Lama, had bizarrely disproportionate political impact when sent by the Chinese or the Japanese on what the author calls “‘Commissioner’ Politics” in order to win over the local population or dupe the local militia (pp. 86–104). The more conventional forms of state building in frontier zones are also described, such as the construction of railways, roads and schools, along with the academic studies, surveys and censuses that preceded them (pp. 122–36). But in general we are shown how a weak administration, beset by civil wars and invasion, becomes embroiled in a politics of mutual suspicion in its unresolved attempts at “the formulation of a definite and clear modern Chinese territoriality” (p. 138).
The author notes that his work has suffered, like all research in this field, from the continuing restrictions on access to the Tibetan archives, but he presents a wealth of material from other sources, particularly newly released documents from the Kuomintang archives. From these Lin reaches surprising conclusions about the three main phases in Nationalist China's Inner Asian politics. Of the period from 1928 to 1939, when China's authority in the outer domains was “imaginary,” he concludes that, despite their public rhetoric, “fundamentally…China's leaders at the highest level were not especially concerned about whether the Tibet issue was resolved,” because their priority was to build up their standing in neighbouring provinces (p. 84).
In the Second World War period, the British unexpectedly pressurised the Tibetans into accepting some Chinese presence in their country, and the Kuomintang was finally able to establish a representative office and an effective spy network in Lhasa. But it got no closer to transforming its “previously imagined sovereignty over Tibet into a more substantiated administrative control” (p. 155). Despite his rhetoric, Chiang was willing to accept Tibet as a buffer zone, in effect tolerating the Tibetans’ decision to establish their own Foreign Affairs Bureau in 1945. As Lin puts it, “the maintenance of an ambiguous and undefined national boundary in fact served the interest of the war-besieged Nationalist government” (pp. 14, 203).
In the post-war “nimbus” period, the Chinese leadership regained control over much of Inner Asia, but not Tibet. In 1947, it failed to respond to the pleas of the former regent Retring Rinpoche for military support during his brief attempt to overthrow the Lhasa government (pp. 182–98). “Perhaps it may be said,” Lin concludes, “that the KMT Nationalists had already lost Tibet” two years before they lost China. This, he notes, left the Communists with little resources to deploy in their reincorporation of Tibet except the use of force.
The author's style, based on diplomatic analysis, is more restrained and cautious than Goldstein's narrative-based renderings of Tibetan history in the same period, and might have profited from a similar oral history approach. But his method leaves readers very well positioned to reach their own conclusions from the data presented, and to situate them within major debates in historical studies. By contrast, the chapters on Commissioner Politics (chapter five), espionage in Lhasa (chapter eight) and the failure of the Radreng (Retring) coup (chapter ten) are particularly vivid, and will be invaluable for undergraduates as well as for established scholars.
But perhaps the most invigorating aspect of the book is its deft handling of the dispute over Tibet's legal status, which has dragged down the work of so many writers. Rather than promote or avoid any particular position, the author presents simply and clearly the shifting perceptions and actualities held on all sides at the time, using value-free terms of his own choosing. We end up with a graphic study of the constant contraction and expansion in the zones of effectiveness between overlapping nations or states. “As late as the mid-twentieth century,” we are reminded, “the very definition of ‘China’ remained an unresolved issue” in the minds of Chinese officials (p. 203), just one of the pointers toward the wider importance of this valuable study of China's frontier politics.
