Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
October-November 1950 approached the Indian government about possible
cooperation to support Tibet against Chinese encroachment.
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New Delhi was
not interested in the US proposal. US leaders then concluded that without Indian
support and cooperation an operation supporting Tibetan resistance to China was
not feasible, and dropped the idea—at least for several years. A decade later,
circa 1960, when the Indian government finally began taking a benignly
permissive attitude toward US covert operations in support of Tibetan forces, the
PLA's position in Tibet was far stronger than it had been in 1950.
But let us suppose New Delhi had decided to take a different course in 1950, a
course of cooperating with the US and encouraging it to assist Tibetan resistance
to Chinese entry into Tibet. The PLA had then not yet entered Tibet. Chinese
forces were marshaling in eastern Tibet (then known as Xikang province) to do
so, but Tibetan forces (ardently anti-Chinese but primitively armed and
organized) still blocked their way. The PLA was also moving toward
intervention in the Korean War.
Suppose then that in cooperation with India, hefty US assistance had flowed to
the Tibetans. Suppose that US and Indian military advisors had undertaken a
crash re-training of Tibetan forces arrayed along the upper Yangtze River. The
PLA had not yet built the roads vital to supporting operations inside Tibet. Nor
had it yet developed with a decade of Soviet assistance into the potent motorized
force that would grind down Tibetan resistance in the 1960s. (PLA construction
of roads in Tibet combined with the motorization of PLA forces meant that once
a Tibetan guerrilla unit engaged Chinese forces, other PLA units could deploy
rapidly to adjacent areas keeping the horse or foot powered insurgents on the run
until they became exhausted.) The US and China would soon be engaged in a
bitter, intense war in Korea with the US searching for ways of diverting Chinese
forces from the Korean theater. Tibetan resistance to Chinese invasion could
easily have been roused.
Let us imagine that under these circumstances India's leaders had decided
circa 1950 to cooperate with the United States with the consequence that US
covert assistance flowed to the Tibetan forces in amounts roughly comparable to
those that in fact flowed to Nationalist Chinese remnants in northern Burma. Let
us also imagine that, under these circumstances, Tibetan forces had developed
adequate strength to thwart or contain the first several PLA thrusts into eastern
Tibet. Suppose that Beijing had then hesitated for a period of time, perhaps until
the war in Korea was over—just as it did with offensives to retake the off-shore
islands once the Korean War began.
Regardless of what happened next, a sequence of events along these imaginary
lines would have left China with far greater apprehension regarding India. Even
if Indian-US moves had been overwhelmed by superior Chinese force in the
mid- 1950s, China's subsequent threat perceptions
vis-à-vis
India would have far
