When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed.
Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records.
For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase repeated in textbooks, press releases and UN statements with such numbing frequency that many accept it as fact. However, it is not true legally, politically, historically or conceptually.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) speaks of “China” as if it were a fixed, eternal nation with a continuous identity stretching back thousands of years.
That is modern political fiction. What is known as “China” today — a centralized, multi-ethnic nation ruled from Beijing — did not exist before 1912, and the PRC itself has only existed since 1949. Everything that came before were empires: Dynasties rising and falling, ruling over shifting frontiers with varying degrees of control.
During those imperial centuries, “China” was often a cultural and geographic idea, not a precise set of borders. It referred primarily to the Han cultural heartland — the Yellow River basin and its surrounding regions. Regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Manchuria were not seen as integral parts of “China,” but as frontier zones — often tributary, sometimes allied, other times independent and frequently treated as distinct entities by the imperial court itself.
In the 20th century, the PRC reframed all this under a single nationalist umbrella: If any Chinese dynasty had ever exerted influence over a region — even loosely or just briefly — that region is an “inseparable part of China since ancient times.”
It is a political fabrication, not a historical fact. A map of past imperial reach has become a license for present-day control.
By that standard, Vietnam and Korea, both of which were under Chinese imperial rule longer than Tibet ever was, should also be “inseparable parts of China.” Yet no one makes that claim — because Beijing cannot get away with it. In Tibet, it could.
Tibet was a fully sovereign empire from the seventh to ninth centuries, with a powerful military and its own script, laws and rulers. In 763, Tibetan forces even briefly occupied the Chinese capital of Chang’an (the ancient name for what is today Xi’an) during a period of instability in the Tang Dynasty — a fact recorded in Chinese sources. For centuries after, Tibet maintained varying degrees of contact with Mongol and Manchu Qing rulers, often in religious-political arrangements that granted Beijing symbolic authority in exchange for spiritual legitimacy.
However, none of this amounted to full annexation. Even under Qing rule, Tibet maintained its own government, borders, army and diplomatic relations.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, Tibet expelled Chinese officials and was a de facto independent state for nearly 40 years. It was not until 1950 — after the founding of the PRC — that the PLA invaded. The so-called “peaceful liberation” that Xi commemorates was a military occupation followed by the coerced signing of the 17-Point Agreement, which the Dalai Lama has since renounced.
The same flawed logic is used to justify Beijing’s control of Xinjiang, where millions of Uighurs live under a regime of forced assimilation, surveillance and cultural erasure. It is also used to lay claim to Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the PRC, not even for a single day.
Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin says that Ukraine is not a “real” country — because it was once ruled from Moscow — China asserts that a centuries-old imperial relationship with Tibet justifies permanent control today. Both regimes stretch ancient history to erase modern identity. Both conflate imperial reach with national legitimacy and paint indigenous resistance as a threat to national security.
Xi’s appearance in Lhasa — the first by a top Chinese leader at such an anniversary — is no mere ceremony. It is a stage-managed claim of total ownership, timed ahead of the inevitable clash over the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation.
The spiritual leader has made clear that his successor would be found outside Chinese control. Beijing, for its part, insists it has the exclusive right to name him — an odd position for an officially atheist regime.
While the world might be unable to undo Beijing’s rewritten history, it must stand firm in calling out historical distortions and refuse to let myths be wielded as weapons to erase peoples, identities and rights.
Tibet was not always part of China. Neither was Xinjiang and Taiwan.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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