Why has China’s president, Xi Jinping, visited Tibet?

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THE OBVIOUS explanation for why Xi Jinping has this week chosen to visit Tibet for the first time as China’s president also applied to his previous visit there, as vice-president, ten years ago. Both years mark significant round-number anniversaries of what China sees as “the peaceful liberation of Tibet” in 1951. That was the year of “the 17-point agreement”. In this accord, a young Dalai Lama—at the time Tibet’s political as well as spiritual leader—ceded sovereignty over Tibet to China, in return for a promise of autonomy. But the agreement, never honoured by China, and negotiated with the Dalai Lama, whom China constantly vilifies, is not mentioned in most official Chinese accounts of Mr Xi’s visit to Tibet. Similarly, China does not make much of a fuss over a rather similar treaty, a joint declaration on the future of Hong Kong, that it signed with Britain in 1984.

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In China’s version of history, its invasion of Tibet in 1951 was welcomed by its residents as a liberation. In 2011 Mr Xi celebrated the way Chinese rule had led Tibet “from the dark toward the light”. In material terms he had an obvious point then and an even stronger one today. On this latest trip he travelled on a new railway, a 37bn-yuan ($5.7bn) track (“the project of the century”, as China sees it) that extends westward from the city of Nyingchi, where Mr Xi arrived in Tibet, to the region’s capital, Lhasa. The region’s first electrified railway, it is described by officials as a gift for the Communist Party’s 100th birthday, which was marked (with considerably more fanfare than the Tibetan anniversary) on July 1st. China likes to draw attention to the economic and infrastructural advances under its rule. It also likes to remind Tibetans and the Dalai Lama’s many admirers around the world that before 1951 Tibet was not some Shangri-La of tinkling temple bells, lowing conch shells and smiling people, but a highly stratified society built on mass monasticism and serfdom.

China understandably no longer draws attention to the 17-point agreement, in which China promised not to alter “the existing political system of Tibet”. In fact, the promises of autonomy and non-interference soon proved hollow, and in 1959 an abortive Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule led to even harsher repression, and the flight of the Dalai Lama and some 80,000 followers into India, where they set up an exiled government that enjoys no international recognition. At home in Tibet, occasional flare-ups of anti-Chinese sentiment have been harshly dealt with. Foreign access to the region is tightly curtailed, but there is little reason to suppose that the deep reverence and loyalty many Tibetans feel towards the Dalai Lama have dwindled. China continues to smear him as a figurehead for an independence movement, though in fact he has long asked for no more than autonomy for Tibet as part of China— ie, what he was promised in 1951.

Oddly, Mr Xi’s visit was unannounced, and reported in the official press only as it wound up. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Chinese Communist Party remains anxious about its legitimacy in the eyes of its Tibetan subjects, and indeed about political stability in the region, and that those anxieties explain its harking back to “liberation” in 1951. It is noticeable that the official Chinese accounts of the visit stress “a new chapter” in both “high-quality development” and “lasting stability”. The former does not guarantee the latter, and many of the repressive techniques deployed in the neighbouring region of Xinjiang—to greater international scrutiny in recent years— were hatched in Tibet. The result is that stability there does not seem under obvious threat. That gives rise to another question: why is China so worried about Tibet?