NEW DELHI—Indian and Chinese soldiers have engaged in a minor altercation at Tawang in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, just weeks after a previous incident in which 100 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers intruded on Indian territory.
The Chinese regime says sovereignty over the area is disputed and has included it in its political maps as part of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Tawang, on the border with Bhutan and China, isn’t new to Chinese intrusion. A sinologist told The Epoch Times that Chinese interest in the Himalayan regions of India is linked to its wider sinicization campaign targeting Tibetan Buddhism and specifically to its “reincarnation politics” aimed at controlling the institutions of Tibetan Buddhism on the border, in locations that could be the birthplace of the next Dalai Lama.
Talks held between corps commanders on both sides on Oct. 10 also failed because the PLA refused to de-escalate overall and specifically refused military disengagement from the regions of Hot Springs, Depsang Plains, and Demchok in India’s Ladakh territory, near China’s northwestern border.
Why Tawang Is Important
Tawang is home to a 340-year-old Tawang monastery and the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso (1680–1706). Frank Lehberger, a senior fellow with the India-based think tank Usanas Foundation, said that Tibetans today believe that if it remains free of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference, this place could again be the birthplace of a future Dalai Lama. Therefore, the Chinese regime wants to control and even eradicate the monastery.“A possible Chinese goal in such a possible ‘reincarnation war’ could be to destroy or capture this important monastery in Tawang, in order to prevent that a future Dalai Lama would be identified or educated in this holy place,” Lehberger wrote in a paper published on the Usanas website on July 15.
“The so-called geopolitics of reincarnation is indeed the main reason why the PRC has since 2008 gradually intensified its controversial claim to the town and the ancient monastery of Tawang.”
Tibet’s unique tradition that institutionalizes the reincarnation system of eminent spiritual masters or religious authorities is called tulku.
“Tulkus are mostly recognized at infant age and then educated and groomed in a monastic environment, in order to later play the role of religious custodians who are entrusted with upholding the uninterrupted lineages of specific Buddhist teachings,” Lehberger wrote.
Wherever the atheist Communist Party takes power, it targets cultural traditions and religions, aiming to destroy and supplant them with communist ideology.
Lehberger wrote, “It is no surprise that Stalin and his local allies in the Mongolian Communist Party were the first to prosecute, imprison, and kill many Mongolian Tulkus during the anti-Buddhist pogroms of the 1930s in the newly founded Mongolian People’s Republic.”
Geopolitics Behind Sinicization
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road) is linked with leader Xi Jinping’s dream of the People’s Republic of China becoming the most powerful nation in the world by the middle of this century, when it will mark 100 years of communist rule. The initiative, which is a “geopolitical tool,” according to Lehberger, aims at linking China’s western hinterland—a region that’s home to a predominantly non-Han Chinese population—with Pakistan and other central Asian nations.“Tibetans and other large non-Han ethnic groups have lived for centuries on the natural resource-rich mountains and deserts that overlook and flank the ancient trade routes now intertwined with the modern [BRI], linking China to Central Asia and the Indian Ocean,” Lehberger said.
Since 2015, Xi has begun looking at these ethnic groups as a kind of geopolitical security risk, he said.
Xi wants to resolve this risk by assimilating the various ethnic groups into the dominant Han-Chinese social and cultural mainstream, Lehberger said. Anybody who objects will face elimination or eviction by military force.
