Bordering Spaces, Practising Borders: Fences, Roads and Reorientations across a Nepal–China Borderland

ABSTRACT

Infrastructure developments across the trans-Himalaya have rapidly advanced Nepali and Chinese state presences across spaces where central governance has long been absent. This study examines how new border infrastructures of fences and roads shape commercial and cultural relationships between Mustang (Nepal) and Tibet and the ways in which these processes serve state-making purposes for both Nepal and China through the governance of highland–borderland landscapes. A Tibetan cultural region at Nepal's northern border, Mustang's human and physical geography supports trade corridors that link the Tibetan Plateau with the plains of India. Merchants, mendicants and militaries have traversed these trade routes for centuries, giving rise to a unique social landscape that largely transcends modern demarcations of a bordered world. Looking across the trans-Himalaya, this article argues that as Chinese and Nepali authorities introduce new material structures and institutional practices to regulate and solidify the border between Tibet and Mustang, local communities are alternatively oriented towards either Kathmandu or Beijing under shifting terms of economic and political power.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders
• China
• commerce
• Himalaya
• mountains
• Mustang
• Nepal
• roads
• Tibet

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Rune Bennike, the guest editor of this special section, as well as two anonymous South Asia reviewers for great feedback throughout the writing process. Research assistants in Nepal, Yangjin Bista, Tsering Dorje and Tsering Wangdue, were unfailingly informative and helpful. Any and all errors are mine alone.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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2. The vast majority of Mustang's robust remittance economy is sourced from New York City, where the largest community of Mustang's population outside of Nepal now resides. This New York-based population is so large that virtually every family in Mustang has a relative in Queens, NY, and when a visitor to Mustang now asks, ‘Where are all the 18–30-year-old men and women?’, a typical answer is, ‘They are in New York!’

3. Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and René Véron (eds), Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

4. Julie Cidell and Devon Lechtenberg, ‘Developing a Framework for the Spaces and Spatialities of Transportation and Mobilities’, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 257–65; and Byron Miller and Jason Ponto, ‘Mobility Among the Spatialities’, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 266–73.

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6. Ramesh Dhungel, The Kingdom of Lo (Mustang) (Kathmandu: Tashi Gephel Foundation, 2002).

7. Donald Messerschmidt, ‘The Thakali of Nepal: Historical Continuity and Socio-Cultural Change’, in Ethnohistory, Vol. 29, no. 4 (1982), pp. 265–80.

8. Thapa, Mustang Bhot in Fragments.

9. Carole McGranahan, Arrested Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

10. Tséring Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

11. By the late 1960s, Chushi Gangdruk had split into two major rival factions. See McGranahan, Arrested Histories.

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17. John W. Garver, Protracted Contest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

18. The 1960 agreement between the Government of the People's Republic of China and His Majesty's Government of Nepal stipulated that the armed forces of either country could not enter the sovereign territory of the other state without invitation. Nepali border officials and government ministers maintained that China's PLA had clearly violated the customary boundary between Nepal and China and Chinese officials eventually conceded this point. See ‘Agreement between the Government of the People's Republic of China and His Majesty's Government of Nepal’, 21 Mar. 1960.

19. Eric Hyer, The Pragmatic Dragon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015).

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23. Hyer, The Pragmatic Dragon.

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27. Rajendra Kumar Jain, China South Asian Relations, 1947–1980, Vol. 2 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981). The road runs between Kathmandu and Kodari.

28. Despite the Kora La's nomenclature as a ‘pass’, the terrain more closely resembles a high alpine plain common to the Tibetan Plateau rather than a V-shaped mountain saddle typical of many other Himalayan passes. Partly as a function of its gentle slopes, this border space was for centuries openly traversed by pastoralists, pilgrims and traders engaged in the trans-Himalayan salt trade as well as for more local business ventures, and for social relations between Mustang and townships across southern Tibet, including the region's semi-annual trade fairs, or tsongra.

29. It was in fact within close proximity to the Mar-Khog Chorten that the Mustang Incident occurred in Summer 1960, and the site remains within Nepali state territory today. More recently, in Summer 2015, it was also at the Mar-Khog Chorten that Chinese authorities dropped substantial caches of post-earthquake humanitarian aid to support reconstruction efforts across Mustang district following the major earthquake of 25 April 2015.

30. Belying the constraints posed by these new regulations, however, the following decade gradually allowed for a progressive resumption of customary, trans-border movement for farmers, herders and traders until the late 1960s. Jain, China South Asian Relations, Vol. 2.

31. Kenneth Bauer, Geoff Childs, Andrew Fischer and Sienna Craig, Development Transitions: Land, Labor and Social Policy in Tibet (Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2012).

32. Symbolising the intersections between geopolitics and cultural politics, Chinese fences exist along the China–Nepal border only in areas with significant Tibetan cultural traditions and/or Tibetan refugee populations.

33. Van Spengen, Tibetan Border Worlds.

34. All names have been changed.

35. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009).

36. Thapa, Mustang Bhot in Fragments.

37. Ministry of Transportation, Government of Nepal, 5-Year Plan for Transportation Infrastructure Development (Kathmandu: Government of Nepal, 10 May 2016).

38. Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox, Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), p. 39.

39. ‘Govt Begins Preparation to Set Up Army Barrack at Kora La Border Point’, The Kathmandu Post (7 July 2016) [http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2016-07-07/govt-begins-preparation-to-set-up-army-barrack-at-korala-border-point.html, accessed 31 Jan. 2017].

40. Galen Murton, ‘Making Mountain Places into State Spaces: Infrastructure, Consumption, and Territorial Practice in a Himalayan Borderland’, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers (20 Oct. 2016), pp. 1–10, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1232616.

41. ‘China Pledges Rs 3 Million of Food Donation to Districts in Northern Nepal’, AidData [http://china.aiddata.org/projects/34426, accessed 12 Jan. 2017].

Additional information

Funding

Social Science Research Council [International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF)]; US Department of Education [Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Grant # P022A1400]; University of Colorado Boulder [Graduate School and Department of Geography].