China stays the course on its Tibet policy

Willy Lam has a piece in the new Jamestown Foundation China Brief breaking down Beijing’s most recent signaling on its Tibet strategy. New policies for the restive region, announced by Xinhua following a January 8 Politburo session devoted to the question of how to pursue “breakthrough-style economic development and long-term stability” in Tibet, essentially amount to doubling down on its existing program of economic modernization and political repression.

The Xinhua brief highlights that the new measures are primarily concerned with the “complete construction of a middle class society, national security, the fundamental interests of the Chinese people and long-term development.” The new plan will feature boosted investment in tourism, manufacturing, mining and infrastructure, along with greater technology transfer and the dispatching of experts. This is a continuation of Beijing’s ongoing modernization program for Tibet, which has raised living standards and improved the economy but has come under fire for inordinately benefiting Han interests while marginalizing Tibetan religion and culture.

The Politburo session also resulted in a leadership reshuffle elevating hardliners with military and Tibet experience to a number of important posts, signaling the lockdown on Tibetan society in place since the March 2008 Lhasa riots will continue or even tighten. Lam also reports that Beijing remains stubborn in its refusal to engage emissaries of the Dalai Lama, and has silenced moderate Han and Tibetan intellectuals calling for racial reconciliation.

In other words, all the evidence further confirms that Hu, a Tibet veteran within the party and reportedly still in charge of policy for the region, has settled in with his preferred strategy for navigating the way forward on regional policy. As Columbia University Tibetologist Robert Barnett puts it in the Lam piece, “China now seems locked into conflict with Tibetans.” Nevertheless, interesting questions remain with respect to the thought process of the leadership. Barnett again:

Either Beijing’s leaders lack the political capital to admit that existing policies might have failed or…they believe that Tibetans will be won over by the current mix of repression and enforced, culturally corrosive modernization that stimulates migration.

I think Barnett’s framing of the question loses sight of Beijing’s perspective on the issue. In his reading, the issue is whether China’s leaders realize their ethnic policies are the root of the difficulties in Tibet; if they do, he implies they “lack the political capital” to change course. This is debatable.

Considering the interesting admission in late July by Wang Yang, the party chief for Guangdong province, that China needs to “rethink” its ethnic policy, it seems probable that China’s leadership has devoted plenty of careful thinking to the issue. Considering the content of the recently announced plans for Tibet, they have almost certainly decided that staying the course is still in their best interest, the problems caused by its ethnic policies notwithstanding.

It seems to me Beijing’s leaders might believe their “existing policies…have failed” only to the extent they have inflamed Tibetan resentment. I suspect in Beijing such simmering discontent is seen as a thorny but manageable problem. The Chinese government has proven adept at isolating Tibetan nationalism by increasing the costs for foreign actors who publicly raise the issue. Moreover, they have largely succeeded in the much more important geopolitical project of speeding up the sinicization of the Tibetan plateau. Considering the degree of Han investment and  latent desire for autonomy in the region, the alternative of scaling down central control would be unthinkably risky and impractical for the foreseeable future.

The counter-argument, as Lam alludes to, is that such a policy will continuously feed Tibetans’ desire for some degree of self-determination, undermining the “comradeship among different nationalities on which lasting stability and prosperity are predicated.” While this danger is real, it is also arguably nebulous and a long way off, at least from a Chinese policymaker’s perspective. Considering the PRC’s increasing international clout and sophistication in exercising political control, along with the prospect of internal disorder among the ranks of Tibetan exile following the Dalai Lama’s passing away, China’s leaders are probably betting that the problem can be kicked down the road for at least another few years, if not longer.