Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Border Minorities in China’s Foreign Relations with South Asia

ABSTRACT

This article takes a closer look at how China’s government deals with border minorities in the foreign relations with its neighboring South Asian states. To secure its periphery, China has been known to push its neighbors to support border security, including repressive measures against refugee populations which could potentially threaten China’s domestic peace by inciting or supporting secessionist movements. This study highlights the roles of the Tibetan and Uighur minorities in the relations of China with adjacent states in South Asia. For the Tibetan minority, the article will analyze Sino-Nepalese as well as Sino-Indian relations; concerning the Uighur minority, Sino-Pakistani relations will be highlighted. These case studies promise to be interesting also because of the range of relationships between China and these countries, Pakistan being a relatively close ally, Nepal a buffer state in which China and India compete for power, and India being at least a competitor state, if not arch-enemy—given still existing border disputes. India and Nepal house the first and second largest Tibetan refugee populations worldwide, respectively, while only a small Uighur population lives in Pakistan. Expected results should show the relative importance of border minorities and therefore, Chinese domestic politics in foreign relations with the selected cases.

Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the 59th annual conference of the American Association for Chinese Studies (AACS) with support from the AACS Junior Travel Grant. We would also like to thank Daniel Palm, Joel Fetzer, and Linda Chiang, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Bibek Chand http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6899-6639

Lukas K. Danner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5914-9585

Notes

1 For clarification, this article analyzes the influence on matters related to the Uighur minority in Sino-Pakistani relations, since the XAR, where Uighurs are in the majority, is bordering Pakistan. Conversely, the analysis focuses on influence on matters related to Tibetans in Sino-Nepali and Sino-Indian relations, since the TAR, where Tibetans are in the majority, is bordering Nepal and India. These three cases relate to the border security and the survival as a nation-state of the PRC. So, on the one hand, the geographic fact of Nepal and India bordering the TAR would preclude that it would not make sense for the analysis to also focus on Uighurs in Nepal or India. On the other hand, the geographic fact of Pakistan bordering the XAR would preclude that it would not make sense for the analysis to also focus on Tibetans in Pakistan. Similarly, this paper focuses on the influence of ethnic border minorities of Chinese autonomous regions with its South Asian neighbors. It, therefore, does not take into account economic, geostrategic, ideational, or other factors but the authors do acknowledge that ethnicity is not the only factor that constitutes the bilateral relationship between China and its South Asian neighbors.

2 The Republic of China, led by Sun Yat-sen, had first established this, which the Communists took over in 1949, basically without change.

3 Though, de facto, Taiwan enjoys independence from the mainland.

4 See Waltz (1979) for an exemplary work on neo-realism, and Keohane and Nye (1977) for neo-liberalism.

5 This is compared to a ca. 41% local Han-Chinese population with experienced great influx into the region in the past few decades under a government-directed “sinicization” strategy. Though, as far as the Muslim religion goes, Haider suggests that “Islamic ideology does not significantly serve to rally the Uighurs to the side of the Pakistanis or in opposition to the Han Chinese” (2005).

6 Many attacks have taken place before the recent ones mentioned:

The 1990s were a particularly violent period in Xinjiang. The Chinese Government claims that between 1990 and 2001 Uighur separatists carried out approximately 200 attacks that killed 162 people. The episodes included bombings, assassinations, attacks on government buildings, and more. While these statistics may be somewhat exaggerated, they are roughly consistent with data collected independently by scholar Gardiner Bovingdon, suggesting that the 1990s was a decade of growing ethnic unrest in Xinjiang (Scobell, Ratner, and Beckley 2014, 63).In July 2009, ethnic violence broke out in Urumqi (…). The Chinese government blamed the violence primarily on Uighur exiles, but Pakistani radical influence was also cited as contributing to the violence. More recent attacks in Xinjiang in late July 2011 (…) prompted Chinese criticisms of Pakistan for failing to crack down on the training of Uighur separatists in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. (…) Local Chinese authorities in Xinjiang charged that the person who conducted the July attacks in Kashgar had received training in Pakistan. The accusations were repeated in the China Daily newspaper. Pakistani political leader Mushahid Hussain acknowledged (…) that another attack similar to the one in Kashgar would have serious implications for China-Pakistan ties (Pamidi 2012, 83f.).

7 The PRC administration continues to argue that the Dalai Lama is a separatist.

8 Present day Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.

9 Present day Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai provinces of the People’s Republic of China.