“Bitter Winter” exclusive report on Tibetans enlisted in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. But first, we should understand the area’s geography and geopolitics.
by Marco Respinti
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The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is constantly at war with its citizens, its neighbors, and yes, the entire world. Ideological in nature, revolutionary in means and goals, aggressive always, its war is waged at many levels and employs different weapons. Some of them plays on the chords of the subconscious, the emotional, and the imaginative, shrewdly mixing intimidation, propaganda, and a strategic pression on the collective self of societies. In this respect, several of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) techniques can be compared to the functioning of the levers that have been famously described by French anthropologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) in his 1895 book “Psychologie des foules”‒published in English as “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”‒and the exploitation of the mechanisms addressed by American journalist and social commentator Vance Packard (1914–1996) in his 1957 book “The Hidden Persuaders.”
The CCP attempts to both impress and intimidate “ad intra” and “ad extra” alternates boasting shows of strength and arrogant assertions of “faits accompli.” In this peculiar art of war, geography plays a key role. University of Pisa’s Marco Tangheroni (1946–2004)—an Italian specialist of navigation and trade in the Mediterranean sea during the Middle Ages—taught that the dynamics of human civilizations become clearer when the study of history is organically connected to that of geography. This consideration is also reported—by way of a real life anecdote—in the introduction to a posthumous collection of essays by Tangheroni, penned by Italian social commentator Giovanni Cantoni (1938–2020), who himself underlined another important truth through a maxim: if your history is wrong, your politics will be wrong as well.
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Anti-communist as they were, Tangheroni and Cantoni would not be surprised to see the CCP among their most diligent pupils. In fact, communists do always do their homework, never stopping elaborating and manipulating. And while it should be a fatigue to daily reinvent the wheel of Chinese history, modern and ancient, the CCP gladly and constantly plays also with geography. Both fabricated history and geography are in fact used by the Chinese leadership and apparatchiks to tame facts, twisting them into a surrealistic new version of the world shaped by ideology, where cultures, religions, and ethnic identities are customized and orchestrated to build and maintain a political consensus that both produces and praises the final aim of Sinicization. Recently, “Bitter Winter” had the occasion to reflect upon the imposition of a fake semantization of that concept that the CCP uses to perform its totalitarian goal.
The CCP’s frequent re-designing of the PRC’s both national and regional borders on the world map is a case in point, normally justified by Beijing with supposedly strategic necessities, but mainly performed just to exhibit muscles. The latest‒and surely not the last‒unilateral redefinition of the national boundaries of the country came on August 28, 2023, with the publication of the 2023 edition of the “China Standard Map” by the PRC’s Ministry of Natural Resources. Of course, this provoked outraged reactions by India, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) for the arbitrary annexations of parts of or all their territories to Chinese sovereignty, but it is interesting to note that Moscow didn’t protest for the similar and illegitimate appropriation of territories belonging to the Russian Federation. We would probably not go astray if we imagine that this silence is probably due to the new alliance between the PRC and Russia, somewhat sealed also by Beijing’s simultaneous mute concession to some of Moscow’s territorial claims.
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A constant major center of local geopolitical controversy is the border between PRC and India that is called “Line of Actual Control” (LAC). It separates PRC’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in the north from India’s Ladakh union territory, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh states in the south, along the Himalayas. On that gigantic mountain range, the borders between PRC in the north, and Nepal and Bhutan in the south make the India-China boundary discontinuous. The LAC is roughly divided into three sectors, the western between India’s Ladakh and PRC’s XUAR and TAR being the most disputed of several contested bordering areas.
Totally informal, the LAC was designed as a de facto compromise following the cease-fire that froze the Sino-Indian War of 1962. In 1993, the two Asian countries agreed to respect it, yet there are neither official maps nor clear demarcations of lands; and so disputes continue.
Therefore, on occasions soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), or the PRC’s armed force, cross the LAC and ignite new open contentions. In 1963, the Publications Division of the Government of India in New Delhi published a pamphlet, entitled “China Aggression in Maps” (now available online at the web site of French journalist, sinologist and Tibetologist Claude Arpi), to document the problem, which of course continued well after that year.
The most recent and serious of those military altercations took place in 2020, starting on May 5 (and factually dragging as late as January-February 2021), along all the three sectors of the LAC, but with particular intensity in the west, in the valley of Galwan. This is a river that flows from Aksai Chin into Ladakh, the first being occupied by the PRC but claimed by India as part of the latter. There, the clash between the armed forces of Beijing and New Delhi peaked in a physical brawl that resulted in casualties on June 15‒16, 2020, bringing military buildup on both sides and more territorial disagreements, mainly the claimed, reported occupation by the PRC of about 2,000 square kms of Indian territory in eastern Ladakh that haven’t been returned yet.
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Some may wonder how it comes that two regional and world giants can shed blood for a handful of square kilometers in what “Bloomberg” media outlet efficaciously described as “a freezing high-altitude desert,” “a mostly uninhabited terrain” where, “during winter months,” “temperatures can drop to 40 degrees below zero.” The principal reason is that a substantial part of politics is made of liturgies, rites, and symbols, national sovereignty being one of the most importantly perceived. Another is the strategic role played by boundary areas: for example, the PRC has no intention to give easily up Aksai Chin, a desert area with no natural resources that nonetheless preciously connects the XUAR and the TAR. A third, very pragmatic, reason is that for the CCP all is a good occasion and tool to tighten control on its citizens and impose its power.
The Spring and Summer 2020 battle on the roof of the world‒a low intensity conflict, but highly rated by both sides‒caused widespread international reactions and a broad press coverage, but there is another aspect of its aftermath that goes little noticed. After the skirmishes, the Chinese regime initiated the military recruitment of Tibetans in the PLA to bolster its standing presence in the area, i.e. maintain the occupation of Indian territories as part of its strategic long-term deployment plans.
The post Tibetan Soldiers in the Chinese Army. 1. The Context first appeared on Bitter Winter.