China’s Tibet policy returns to US strategic radar – Defense News

By Monish Tourangbam

China’s Tibet policy is coming under closer scrutiny in the United States and the European Union. New draft legislation has been introduced and new proposals are being put forward to allow the US State Department and EU officials to more closely inspect Chinese practices in Tibet. A new bill recently passed the US House of Representatives, introduced by prominent Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and is expected to be signed soon by President Joe Biden. The ‘Resolve Tibet Act’ calls for strengthening US support for Tibet and “pressing for negotiations without preconditions between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama or his representatives or the democratically elected leaders of the Tibetan community.” The bill aims to empower “State Department officials to actively and directly combat disinformation about Tibet by the Chinese government.” Furthermore, it aims to help US officials coordinate with other like-minded governments and multilateral efforts and, most significantly, reject false claims that Tibet has been part of China since “ancient times.”

Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman, and Michael T. McCaul, a Republican congressman who was part of the team that promoted the bill, wrote a commentary for the diplomat ‘US policy on Tibet has lost its way. We want to change that,” arguing, “The United States should support the people of Tibet in pushing to have a say in how they are governed. And we should push back on distorting the CCP’s history rather than encouraging it. Our bill does just that.” Whether or not their bill ends up achieving what they claim, this legislative measure has certainly brought the issue of Tibet to the center of the debate on China ahead of the US presidential meeting. election this November. This also comes at a time when the two countries are dangerously locked in a new great power rivalry over “trade, technology and security.’

America’s role in Tibet is not a newfound attention, but has indeed seen ups and downs from the early days of the Cold War to the current era of countering China’s assertive rise. At the height of the Cold War, after China became communist and became the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and when the PRC occupied Tibet a year later, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ) became active, including training Tibetans. rebels in the US state of Colorado. These rebels were then parachuted into Tibet by CIA transport planes, taking off from a Pakistani air base. Bruce Riedel, former CIA analyst and advisor on South Asia to several American presidents, in his book JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War wrote that he was a US ambassador to IndiaLoy Henderson, who secretly urged a young Dalai Lama “to leave Tibet and seek asylum outside the country, thus keeping alive a Tibetan government in exile.”

Beyond the American Beltway, China’s Tibet policy has begun to raise alarm bells among America’s close allies – the E.U., New Zealand and Australia, where Tibetan civil society groups and representatives of the Tibetan government in exile have become more active in amplifying their concerns. In April, before the EU elections, the EU parliament launched a “Europe for Tibet” campaign and exceeded its target of garnering more than 100 pledges from candidates to support Tibet in the EU Parliament if elected. More specifically, 115 candidates representing 16 EU member countries supported the pledge to defend the fundamental right of the Tibetan people. Despite President Xi Jinping’s high-level outreach to European countries, trade tensions and human rights differences remain areas of concern in China’s engagement with the EU. In an interesting twist, in addition to the annual bilateral human rights dialogue with China, which will take place in Chongqing on June 16, EU officials have requested a field visit to Tibet and reportedly provided the names of some specific prisons they expected visit. According to the EU Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Chinese authorities will organize a parallel visit to Tibet “for a small group of staff from the European External Action Service who monitor human rights issues”.

Ahead of the Chinese Prime Minister During Li Qiang’s visit to New Zealand this week, the Auckland Tibetan Association sent a letter to New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon with a request not to remain silent on the Tibet issue despite the overriding factor of ties commercials. In a similar vein, in early March, the Tibet Office in Canberra urged Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong ahead of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to Australia to raise the critical situation of human rights in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese authorities.

In the new Cold War, Tibet, unlike Taiwan or the South China Sea, due to its distinct historical and contemporary paths, hardly appeared as a geopolitical hotspot in the growing US-China competition and contestation that began to show traces of confrontation, despite unequivocal economic interdependence. However, as the US-China great power dispute heats up and contentious issues like Tibet are unearthed from the cold storage of moral activism to the front lines of political discourse in Washington and other Western capitals, time will tell whether the bipartisan bill activism and EU MPs bring about any dramatic change on the Tibet issue.

The author is Director of the Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies (KIIPS).

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