148 { China’s Quest
was then understood to be the crest line of the eastern Himalayan Mountains
east of Bhutan, known as the McMahon line after the British diplomat who
drew it at a 1914 conference. The sudden revelation of the Aksai Chin road
and the long period of previously unknown Chinese road-building activity
in that region jarred India. A small map included in one of the 1958 articles
showed the area south of the McMahon line—an area of about 90,000 square
kilometers—as part of China. The Indian realization that from Beijing’s per-
spective India’s entire border with Tibet was undefined, with large tracts of
territory claimed by China, prompted Indian efforts to actively assert control
over what it felt was Indian territory. Nehru ordered Indian forces to more
actively assert Indian control by patrolling and setting up outposts in territory
India believed was its own.
In the midst of this escalating (but still not lethal) border conflict, an up-
rising against Chinese rule broke out in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, on March 10,- Here a bit of background is necessary. Tibet is a vast, extremely rugged,
thinly populated, and strategically located region. Since the thirteenth cen-
tury, China’s emperors had had a unique relation with the Buddhist monas-
teries that ruled Tibet. The Yuan and Qing dynasties that ruled from 1279 to
1368 and 1644 to 1911 respectively chose Tibetan “Lamaist,” or more properly
Vajrayana, Buddhism as their dynastic religion in order to hinder the as-
similation of their native peoples by the far more numerous Chinese. In line
with this, select monasteries in Tibet were invited to send priests to Beijing to
instruct the imperial court and that court’s non-Chinese ethnic base in reli-
gious matters and conduct religious ceremonies. Thus, for some 280 years,
China’s emperor and the centers of ruling monastic power in Tibet had a
very close relationship—much closer, in fact, that that between the emperor
and tributary rulers of kingdoms surrounding China. Imperial-Tibetan re-
lations were both closer and more equal than China’s run-of-the-mill tribu-
tary relations.
In terms of ways of life, however, Tibetans and Chinese were different in
many important ways: language, diet, marriage, burial, religion, and mode of
governance. With the emergence of Chinese nationalism in the early twenti-
eth century, the Chinese reconceptualized what it meant to be Chinese, and
concluded that Tibetans were part of the family of peoples that made up the
new, multinational, multiethnic China. The fact that Tibet was not, and in
fact had never been, under effective Chinese administration was attributed,
by the Chinese nationalist narrative, to imperialist interference. This became
the common Chinese nationalist narrative, but not a common Tibetan one.
As CCP power swept across China in 1949, that party’s leaders were deter-
mined that Tibet would be integrated into the national revolutionary process.
The PLA occupied Tibet in 1951 and immediately began building a network of
roads that could support a more robust military presence in the region. The
Aksai Chin road was one of those roads.