Tibet: The Lost Frontier

Tibet: The Lost Frontier PDF Author: Claude Arpi
Publisher: Lancer Publishers LLC
ISBN: 1935501496
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Delving deep into the history of the Roof of the World, this book introduces us to one of the greatest tragedies of modern times, its principal characters as well as the forces impelling them, consciously or unconsciously. The main ‘knot’ of our ‘drama’ was staged in 1950. During this ‘fateful’ year the dice of fate was thrown. There are turning points in history when it is possible for events to go one way or the other — when the tides of time seem poised between the flood and the ebb, when fate awaits our choice to strike its glorious or sombre note, and the destiny of an entire nation hangs in balance. The year 1950 was certainly one such crucial year in the destinies of India, Tibet and China. The three nations had the choice of moving towards peace and collaboration, or tension and confrontation. Decisions can be made with all good intentions — as in the case of Nehru who believed in an ‘eternal friendship’ with China, or with uncharitable motives of Mao. Decisions can be made out of weakness, greed, pragmatism, ignorance or fear; but once an option is excercised, consequences unfold for years and decades to follow. In strategic terms, Tibet is critical to South Asia and South-east Asia. Rather the Tibetan plateau holds the key to the peace, security and well being of Asia, and the world as such. This study of the history of Tibet, a nation sandwiched between two giant neighbours, will enable better understanding of the geopolitics influencing the tumultuous relations between India and China, particularly in the backdrop of border disputes and recent events in Tibet.

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier

The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier PDF Author: Benno Weiner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501749412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
In The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, Benno Weiner provides the first in-depth study of an ethnic minority region during the first decade of the People's Republic of China: the Amdo region in the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Employing previously inaccessible local archives as well as other rare primary sources, he demonstrates that the Communist Party's goal in 1950s Amdo was not just state-building but also nation-building. Such an objective required the construction of narratives and policies capable of convincing Tibetans of their membership in a wider political community. As Weiner shows, however, early efforts to gradually and organically transform a vast multiethnic empire into a singular nation-state lost out to a revolutionary impatience, demanding more immediate paths to national integration and socialist transformation. This led in 1958 to communization, then to large-scale rebellion and its brutal pacification. Rather than joining voluntarily, Amdo was integrated through the widespread, often indiscriminate use of violence, a violence that lingers in the living memory of Amdo Tibetans and others.

Frontier Tibet

Frontier Tibet PDF Author: Stephane Gros
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048544904
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
Frontier Tibet addresses a historical sequence that sealed the future of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It considers how starting in the late nineteenth century imperial formations and emerging nation-states developed competing schemes of integration and debated about where the border between China and Tibet should be. It also ponders the ways in which this border is internalised today, creating within the People's Republic of China a space that retains some characteristics of a historical frontier. The region of eastern Tibet called Kham, the focus of this volume, is a productive lens through which processes of place-making and frontier dynamics can be analysed. Using historical records and ethnography, the authors challenge purely externalist approaches to convey a sense of Kham's own centrality and the agency of the actors involved. They contribute to a history from below that is relevant to the history of China and Tibet, and of comparative value for borderland studies.

Tibet and the British Raj

Tibet and the British Raj PDF Author: Alex McKay
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780700706273
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This text explores the diplomatic representatives of the Raj in Tibet. Besides being scholars, spies and empire-builders, they also influenced events in Tibet but as well as shaping our modern understanding of that land.

The Dawn of Tibet

The Dawn of Tibet PDF Author: John Vincent Bellezza
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442234628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
This unique book reveals the existence of an advanced civilization where none was known before, presenting an entirely new perspective on the culture and history of Tibet. In his groundbreaking study of an epic period in Tibet few people even knew existed, John Vincent Bellezza details the discovery of an ancient people on the most desolate reaches of the Tibetan plateau, revolutionizing our ideas about who Tibetans really are. While many associate Tibet with Buddhism, it was also once a land of warriors and chariots, whose burials included megalithic arrays and golden masks. This first Tibetan civilization, known as Zhang Zhung, was a cosmopolitan one with links extending across Eurasia, bringing it in line with many of the major cultural innovations of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Based on decades of research, The Dawn of Tibet draws on a rich trove of archaeological, textual, and ethnographic materials collected and analyzed by the author. Bellezza describes the vast network of castles, temples, megaliths, necropolises, and rock art established on the highest and now depopulated part of the Tibetan plateau. He relates literary tales of priests and priestesses, horned deities, and the celestial afterlife to the actual archaeological evidence, providing a fascinating perspective on the origins and development of civilization. The story builds to the present by following the colorful culture of the herders of Upper Tibet, an ancient people whose way of life is endangered by modern development. Tracing Bellezza’s epic journeys across lands where few Westerners have ventured, this book provides a compelling window into the most inaccessible reaches of Tibet and a civilization that flourished long before Buddhism took root.

Greater Tibet

Greater Tibet PDF Author: P. Christiaan Klieger
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498506453
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The concept of Greater Tibet has surfaced in the political and academic worlds in recent years. It is based in the inadequacies of other definitions of what constitutes the historical and modern worlds in which Tibetan people, ideas, and culture occupy. This collection of papers is inspired by a panel on Greater Tibet held at the XIIIth meeting of the International Association of Tibet Studies in Ulaan Baatar in 2013. Participants included leading Tibet scholars, experts in international law, and Tibetan officials. Greater Tibet is inclusive of all peoples who generally speak languages from the Tibetan branch of the Tibeto-Burman family, have a concept of mutual origination, and share some common historical narratives. It includes a wide area, including peoples from the Central Asian Republics, Pakistan, India, Nepal Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, People’s Republic of China, Mongolia, Russia, and Tibetan people in diaspora abroad. It may even include practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism who are not of Tibetan origin, and Tibetan peoples who do not practice Buddhism. Most of this area corresponds to the broad expansion of Tibetan culture and political control in the 7th–9th centuries AD, and is thus many times larger than the current Tibet Autonomous Region in China—the Tibetan “culture area.” As a conceptual framework, Greater Tibet stands in contrast to Scott’s concept of Zomia for roughly the same region, a term which defines an area of highland Asia and Southeast Asia characterized by disdain for rule from distant centers, failed state formation, anarchist, and “libertarian” individual proclivities.

1962 and the McMahon Line Saga

1962 and the McMahon Line Saga PDF Author: Claude Arpi
Publisher: Lancer Publishers LLC
ISBN: 1935501577
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
Fifty years ago, India went through a tragic event which has remained a deep scar in the country’s psyche: a border war with China. During the author’s archival peregrinations on the Himalayan border, he goes into some relatively little known issues, such as the checkered history of Tawang; the British India policy towards Tibet and even the possibility for India to militarily defend the Roof of the World. The author also looks into why the Government still keeps the Henderson Brooks Report under wraps and what were Mao’s motivations for ‘teaching India a lesson’. Throughout this series of essays, the thread remains the Tibet-India frontier in the North-East and the Indo-Chinese conflict. The more one digs into this question, the more one discovers that the entire issue is intimately linked with the history of modern Tibet; particularly the status of the Roof of the World as a de facto independent nation. British India had a Tibet Policy, Independent India, did not. This led to the unfortunate events of 1962.

Kashmir's Death Trap

Kashmir's Death Trap PDF Author: Col Danvir Singh
Publisher: Lancer Publishers LLC
ISBN: 1940988136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book is an effort to recall the life in Kashmir, a state under perpetual conflict. It is a saga of courage, betrayal, passion and hatred seen from the eyes of a young soldier. In this nature’s paradise, is a human hell where the lives are lost daily in pursuit of Ideology. Armed by own set of Justifications India, Pakistan and the Kashmiris battle each other to no end in sight. Zealous young men continue to die for a cause diseased by treachery and celebrated by heroism. The territorial desire of Pakistan has cost dearly to the generations stifled in this conflict. This fight has devastated many a homes with ever widening chasm and deepening scars. Punctuated by blood curdling violence, Kashmiris are prisoners of a historic mistake. In the ongoing series of Pakistan’s grand design to wrest control of this state, a proxy war was unleashed by them in 1989. This war still continues as I write.

From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy

From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy PDF Author: Matthew Mosca
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804785384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.

Kashmir The Troubled Frontiers

Kashmir The Troubled Frontiers PDF Author: Maj Gen Afsir Karim
Publisher: Lancer Publishers LLC
ISBN: 1935501763
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This book traces the historical roots of the Kashmir problem and provides an overview of the entire state as it existed prior to the partition of the Subcontinent. Evaluates population composition, available human resources and the economy of the state, studies at micro level the various regions including PoK and discusses the prevailing geographic, ethnic and religious divisions existing within. The book presents the scope and intensity of the current turbulence, unbiased description of events and personalities, takes into account the Pakistani viewpoint and their quest for strategic depth. Further, assesses the military capabilities of China, Pakistan and India to alter the status quo and the value of Kashmir card for the USA. Kashmir: The Troubled Frontiers explains the geo-political profile with emphasis on the strategic importance of J&K to the region. The independent and comprehensive analysis is the result of research by the Indian Defence Review Team with suggestions of bold and radical options. No apologies are offered and none asked for. The idea of this book emanated from the Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Research Foundation and it gave a grant to facilitate the research.