Sino-Indian Conflict and the Sino-Soviet Alliance } 151
polemic warned the “tiny number of people trying to continue fanning the
flames”:
So long as you do not end your anti-Chinese slander campaign, we will
not cease hitting back. We are prepared to spend as much time on this
as you want to. We are prepared, too, if you should incite other coun-
tries to raise a hue and cry against us.
The day the Renmin ribao polemic appeared, Zhou Enlai met with repre-
sentatives of socialist countries to explain the situation and ask for solidarity.
Nehru’s “class nature” was counterrevolutionary, Zhou explained. Nehru op-
posed reform in Tibet because he wanted that region to remain backward so
that it could serve as a “buffer” between India and China. This was the central
aspect of the situation and of the Sino-Indian conflict, Zhou said. A section
of the Indian ruling class wanted Tibetan independence so that Tibet could
become an Indian protectorate.^7
Beijing’s estimates of Nehru’s policy were wildly inaccurate. Nehru imag-
ined that he was pursuing a policy of friendship toward China, including rec-
ognizing and even supporting China’s control of Tibet. At the UN in 1950,
Nehru declined invitations from the United States, Britain, and Central
American states (who had their own reasons for opposing big-country dom-
ination of weak countries) to join in opposition to Chinese moves toward
Tibet. In 1951, Nehru lobbied the Dalai Lama to return to Beijing and cut the
best deal he could with the CCP, an approach that led to the seventeen-point
agreement of May 1951 between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, an agreement
that constituted the legal basis for China’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet. In
1954, Nehru recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet—without insisting on
a quid pro quo on the border. Before China’s new roads into Tibet opened,
supplies for the growing numbers of Chinese stationed in Tibet came largely
from India via the Chumbi Valley. When the CIA began operations with
Tibetan rebels in 1957, Nehru may well have known about those operations,
but there is no evidence he or India supported them.^8 Nehru probably saw
CIA activities as a factor likely to prompt Beijing to seek Indian cooperation
on Tibet. Nehru was in fact trying to persuade Beijing not to militarize the
Tibet-India border region and to grant Tibet a degree of autonomy out of
deference to Indian sensitivities, but to accomplish all these things on the
basis of Indian acceptance of Chinese rule over Tibet. As a progressive and
secular man of the left, Nehru even had a good deal of sympathy with the
efforts of socialist China to reform “feudal” Tibet. Indian-Chinese solidar-
ity was at the core of Nehru’s romantic vision of the future world order, and
he did not intend to have that partnership founder on Tibet. And yet Mao
quickly concluded that Nehru was fanning the Tibet uprising in an effort
to “grab Tibet.” The vicious, direct, and open Chinese polemical attack on