The military operation by which the People's Republic of China incorporated Tibet was conducted in two phases — the Chamdo operation of October 1950, which destroyed the Tibetan eastern frontier army and produced the surrender of the local Tibetan authorities; and the political follow-on of November 1950 to May 1951, which produced the 17-Point Agreement signed under duress at Beijing by a Tibetan delegation that had no plenipotentiary authority. The combined effect was the formal incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China and the substantive end of the Ganden Phodrang as a state, a status that the Fourteenth Dalai Lama would publicly repudiate only after his March 1959 flight to India.
The Communist context
The military reunification of China by the People's Liberation Army between 1948 and 1950 had brought all of the principal Chinese-republican territories under Communist control by the formal proclamation of the People's Republic of China at Beijing on the 1st of October 1949. The remaining peripheral territories — Hainan, Taiwan, Tibet — were left for subsequent operations. Mao Zedong's directive to the Southwest Bureau of the Central Committee in November 1949 stated that the "liberation" of Tibet should be undertaken by force only if peaceful negotiations failed, but that the operation should be prepared during the winter and spring of 1950 for execution in the autumn if necessary. The military commander assigned was Liu Bocheng of the Second Field Army, with Deng Xiaoping as political commissar; the substantive command of the field operation was vested in the 18th Army Corps under Zhang Guohua.
The Tibetan government's response to the November 1949 announcement was the dispatch of a six-member trade mission, led by Tsepon Shakabpa, to the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Nepal, to seek international support and to negotiate, if possible, with the new Chinese government. The mission was received politely in Delhi, more or less politely in Washington and London, and produced nothing of substance. By the spring of 1950 it was clear in Lhasa that no major foreign power was prepared to extend recognition, to provide military assistance, or to take any substantive action.
The Chamdo operation
The Tibetan eastern frontier in 1950 was held by a single border command at Chamdo, the principal Khampa town on the upper Mekong, with approximately 8,500 Tibetan troops (most of them Khampa militiamen of variable quality, with two regular regiments of the Lhasa army) under the command of Ngabo Ngawang Jigme, the recently-appointed military governor (doring) of Chamdo. The Chinese order of battle for the operation comprised approximately 40,000 troops in five divisions of the 18th Army Corps, deployed along a five-prong axis advancing from southern Sichuan and Yunnan across the upper Yangtze. The Chinese plan was the encirclement of the Chamdo command, the elimination of its principal regular units, and the occupation of Chamdo as the political endpoint of the military operation.
The operation commenced on the 6th of October 1950. Within four days the Tibetan northern flank (around Riwoche) and the southern flank (south of Markham) had been turned. By the 11th of October the Tibetan central position at Chamdo was substantially encircled. Ngabo, who had attempted on the 7th to wire Lhasa for instructions and had received an inadequate response from a Lhasa government that was on its New Year (Tibetan calendar) holiday, ordered the destruction of the principal Chamdo arms dumps and a withdrawal westward on the 12th. The withdrawal was caught by a Chinese armoured column at Lamdo on the 17th; Ngabo surrendered with approximately 2,700 of his command on the 19th of October 1950. The remaining Tibetan forces in the area surrendered or dispersed over the following two weeks. The Chinese forces entered Chamdo on the 19th of October without further resistance.
The Chinese casualties in the entire operation were approximately 100 killed. The Tibetan casualties were approximately 180 killed in the principal engagements, with a further indeterminate number of Khampa militia dispersed or surrendered. The Chinese had captured approximately 5,700 Tibetan soldiers, who were progressively released in the months after the surrender on the substantive condition of accepting Chinese political indoctrination — a practice that the Tibetan government and the subsequent diaspora literature have described as the first iteration of the broader "patriotic re-education" approach.
The political response
No major foreign power was prepared to extend recognition, to provide military assistance, or to take any substantive action.
The news of the Chamdo surrender reached Lhasa on the 25th of October. The Tibetan government's emergency response — delayed by the New Year ceremonies and by the unwillingness of the Taktra regency to act decisively in the final weeks before the planned investiture of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama — comprised three principal decisions taken at an emergency National Assembly in early November:
- The Fourteenth Dalai Lama would be invested immediately — at fifteen, rather than waiting for the customary majority at eighteen. The investiture took place at the Potala on 17 November 1950.
- The seat of government would move to Yatung on the Sikkim frontier — a precaution permitting an exile crossing if Lhasa itself were threatened.
- A delegation would be sent to Beijing to negotiate, without plenipotentiary authority and under instructions to refer all substantive matters back to Yatung.
The Yatung relocation took place in December 1950 and January 1951. The Dalai Lama and approximately 1,000 members of his immediate household, the Kashag and the senior government remained at Yatung from the early winter of 1950–51 to the summer of 1951. The country was governed during this period through a substitute administration in Lhasa under the senior Kashag minister Lobsang Tashi.
The Beijing negotiations
The Tibetan delegation to Beijing, dispatched from Yatung in April 1951, comprised Ngabo Ngawang Jigme (released from Chinese custody and now acting as the chief negotiator), Khemey Sonam Wangdu, Lhautara Thupten Tenthar, Sambo Tenzin Thondup and Dzasak Khenchung Thuptan Lekmon. The delegation had no plenipotentiary authority — its instructions from Yatung were to negotiate, to refer all substantive matters back to the Dalai Lama and the Kashag, and to sign nothing without authorisation. The delegation reached Beijing in late April; the negotiations opened on the 29th of April with the Chinese side led by Li Weihan, head of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese negotiating position was that Tibet had been an integral part of China since the Qing dynasty, that the People's Republic of China had inherited the Qing sovereignty, and that the only legitimate matter for discussion was the constitutional arrangements for the new autonomous-region administration. The Tibetan delegation's attempts to raise the substantive question of Tibetan independence were rejected as inadmissible. The Chinese side offered a draft seventeen-point agreement that conceded the maintenance of the existing political and social system, the continuation of the religious institutions and the property of the lamas, the formal authority of the Dalai Lama, the protection of religious freedom, and the gradualism of the planned reforms; in exchange the Tibetan side accepted the formal incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic, the stationing of People's Liberation Army units on Tibetan territory, and the conduct of Tibetan foreign affairs through Beijing.
The Tibetan delegation's resistance to signature was, given its lack of plenipotentiary authority and the absence of any external support, substantively impossible to sustain. The Chinese side prepared seals in the names of the Tibetan delegates — including, controversially, a duplicate seal for the Dalai Lama's authority that the delegation had not been authorised to use — and the agreement was signed at the Hall of the People in Beijing on the 23rd of May 1951. The text, in eighteen articles (the seventeen substantive points plus the formal preamble), constituted the first treaty of Tibet's incorporation into a Chinese state since the 1793 Qing ordinance.
The ratification at Lhasa
The Dalai Lama at Yatung received news of the signature on the 27th of May. The Kashag's deliberations through June produced the substantive decision — taken under the substantial influence of the senior incarnate teacher Trijang Rinpoche and on the assessment that no external support was available — to ratify the agreement and to return to Lhasa. The Dalai Lama's party arrived at Lhasa on the 17th of August 1951; the first units of the People's Liberation Army reached Lhasa on the 9th of September; the formal ratification by the Dalai Lama through a public declaration was issued on the 24th of October. The Ganden Phodrang's formal independence ended on that date.
The Dalai Lama's subsequent public repudiation of the 17-Point Agreement, issued from Tezpur in Assam on the 18th of June 1959 — eighteen days after his flight to India — gave the constitutional ground for the position that the Central Tibetan Administration has maintained ever since: that the agreement was signed under duress and was therefore void, that the Tibetan signatories had lacked plenipotentiary authority, and that the seals affixed to the document were forgeries in the case of the Dalai Lama's own seal. The Chinese position has been correspondingly that the agreement was valid, that the Dalai Lama's 1951 ratification was free, and that the 1959 repudiation has no constitutional effect.
The substantive outcome — whatever the merits of the constitutional dispute — was that from October 1951 the territory of central Tibet was administered jointly by the existing Tibetan government and the People's Liberation Army's military district, and was substantively integrated into the political and economic system of the People's Republic of China over the subsequent eight years. The 1959 crisis and the longer aftermath are the subject of the final chapter.
End of Chapter VII