Talk:Sino-Tibetan War of 1930–1932

Spinning ?
"The Sino-Tibetan War occurred in 1930–1932 when the Tibetan army under the 13th Dalai Lama invaded Xikang and Yushu in Qinghai..."

Ouch, and both of this provinces seems to be Tibetan. So, can you "invade" yourself? Would American trop movements in Alaska be described as an American "invation of Alaska"? Greswik (talk) 06:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)


 * > Implying they had control. --  李博杰   | —Talk contribs email 07:59, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't mean to be rude, but if you had spent the time you spent here on making your answer a complete sentence, instead of making it shine in a fancy color, I think it would have been better. Greswik (talk) 12:49, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I was merely criticising your comment of comparing apples and oranges. And I by no means have any obligation to answer your question, because WP:NOTFORUM. --  李博杰   | —Talk contribs email 15:28, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * A: I certainly know this is not a forum. However, death by spinning / POV-pushing is one of the possible deaths Wikipedia may suffer. This makes it, unfortunelaty, sometimes necessary to bring up subjects who may look like discussions, even like political discussions. I must be allowed to ask if this is a POV, or not.
 * B: When you start to talk - in riddles, in green letters- you should be prepared to be asked to explain what you actually try to say. To say there is no obligation for you to answer my question, is your right- but then you should stop with the non-answer, or it will look a bit strange, at least to me.
 * C: My example was easy, I admit it. Easy examples have the advantage of being fast to produce, and the downside of being easy to attack. Lets take a better example: from 1814 to 1905 Norway was a Swedish colony, but with extensive home rule, and a military of it's own. (This should resemble the situation between Tibet - China of the era.) Would a Norwegian trop movement to another Norwegian county be an "invasion" of this county? Why would a Norwegian troop movement be seen as an "invasion", would this imply something just had happened to deteriorate the relationship? My principle claim is something must be wrong here, and this was the reason why I asked if this was spinning. To return to Tibet- you say something halfways about "control". You have refused to clearify, but the article may be right to use the word "invasion" if it is true the part this invasion took place into, was strongly in Chinese grip in this period -and had been for a while. This is exactly of the things the facts seem to differ, which is bad, cause facts shouldn't differ. If we have differing "facts" about how intens Chinese control of Tibet was in the era, we would hardly manage to write in the same article. And it is my impression Chinese often has a differing view on Chinas pre-cultural-revolution control in Tibet, from what is given in Europe. But at least we would have needed a ref for a claim of total control. And that would be after someone actually claimed it in words, implicitly are so vague. Anyhow, there are other words for "invade" - I'm not so good with English, but "march into", just for starters. "Invade" is an assesment.
 * D, and summary: I have never heard of this war, but I got a feeling the article was loopsided. Then it is necessary to try to find out if this article is OK, or if it is a big black lie. And to clear it is not a big, black lie, we may - how horrible it is- be forced to discuss. By being arrogant, while defending it, people certainly will not give me the feeling it is OK - this is instead the way to make my spider sense tingle. Or spinning sense. People who truly are in control of the events don't need to be arrogant or snappy- they explain things without seeming to lecturing. And I apologize in advance for not holding this high level myself. Anyhow, to clear it up, I think the best would be third party sources (and, if possible, not Chinese, and not Tibetan) about how much in control China was in the disputed terroritories, in a longer period of time leading up to the "invasion". I don't necessarily even think this exists. Greswik (talk) 21:00, 31 October 2010 (UTC)


 * This is an interesting parallel to the discussions about the title of Invasion of Tibet (1950). Some people argument that it was not an invasion because a) you can't invade yourself, and b) Tibet was already Chinese territory. However, the consensus view in that case is that "invasion" should be used in a non-political sense: an invasion is any time you send troops to take over an area that is not currently under your political control. So, under that definition, it would be irrelevant whether or not Tibet was rightfully part of China prior to 1950&mdash;it's still an invasion. And it would be irrelevant whether or not Jyekundo and eastern Kham were rightfully part of Tibet before 1930, if it was not under de facto Tibetan control at the time.


 * My personal opinion is that the word "invasion" can be used in a politically neutral sense, but this is tricky because it often carries a strong implication of illegitimacy. Therefore, we can use "invasion" in some situations where there is no better alternative, but generally we should avoid it in these sorts of cases.


 * As for the facts of the situation, I'm not sure how robust the analogy with Norway is. Tibet in 1930 was not just a colony with extensive home rule. The government in Lhasa controlled the western half of the Tibetan region and made explicit claims to independence. The eastern half of the Tibetan region was ruled by Chinese warlords, who in some cases allowed a lot of autonomy to traditional local chieftains (the relationship between the warlords and the chieftains was very complicated and unstable). Those eastern areas had not been firmly under Lhasa's control for hundreds of years at this point. The boundary between the Lhasa government's territory and the eastern parts moved around a lot, particularly in the late 1910s and the 1930s. After the fighting in 1918, the de facto boundary was fixed at the Yangtze (Drichu) River. The territories that were invaded in 1930 were on the other side of that boundary.&mdash;Greg Pandatshang (talk) 02:32, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * @Greswik: Alright, let's have a look at your original line, shall we? Referring to "...invaded Xikang and Yushu in Qinghai", you write "Ouch, and both of this provinces seems to be Tibetan. So, can you "invade" yourself?" So, did the Tibetans actually control these regions? They did not have control over these regions, and were seeking to control these regions, which was the whole point of the invasion. These regions were under not only the de jure administration, but also the de facto control of the Republic of China, and not the Tibetan political entity led by the Dalai Lama. As for your line "Would American trop movements in Alaska be described as an American "invation of Alaska"?", my reference to "apples and oranges" meant that two two are unrelated since Alaska is undisputably part of the United States, with both de facto and de jure control, however in this case, Tibet has neither. Same goes for the Norway/Sweden example. --  李博杰   | —Talk contribs email 03:55, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't have been so quick to assume malice from Greswik. He could be confused, like a lot of people, because Tibetan exile leaders have repeatedly and disingenuously made the claim that the Dalai Lama's state controlled Xikang and Yushu. It fits with their present-day political goal of a unified administrative entity encompassing a Greater Tibet: to paraphrase the Dalai Lama, "the border between China and Tibet was set in the 8th century". To reduce this confusion on Wikipedia, we should not indulge in the exiles' historical revisionism by calling Qinghai "Amdo" and Sichuan "Kham" (I have seen both in many articles) where historical political divisions are given. Quigley (talk) 04:27, 1 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Can you cite any examples where Tibetan exiles claim that the Dalai Lama's state cnotrolled Xikang and Yushu? I don't recall seeing that.&mdash;Greg Pandatshang (talk) 12:32, 1 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Phintso Thonden of the Office of Tibet in New York is cited in Goldstein, 1994 as saying
 * "Since China’s invasion of and occupation of Tibet, the Chinese have incorporated the whole of Amdo and parts of Kham into the neighbouring Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Szechuan, Kansu and Yunnan – leaving only U-tsang and other parts of Kham as the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region [TAR]. This was done with the view that should Beijing be forced to give up its spoils in Tibet, it would give up only the TAR and hold on to the more economically valuable regions of Kham and Amdo….(Thonden, p. 12; emphasis added.)"
 * This meme—that China is employing some kind of "divide and conquer" tactic by making a separate TAR and TAPs (ironically, China did what the Dalai Lama couldn't by actually unifying these areas under one state; the PRC) is par for the course in Free Tibet literature. For example, The Central Tibetan Administration says that Tibet was "invaded by China 1949–1950" (1949? that's when the Communist Party took Qinghai from the Republic of China) and captions in its extravagant map of Tibet no distinction between the territory ruled by the government in Lhasa and the other territories of the plateau. Quigley (talk) 18:43, 1 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Qinghai was under the control of Generals Ma Qi and Ma Bufang, Ma Qi successfully prevented Tibetan and Mongol separatism, and announced that Qinghai was part of the Republic of China. The Mongol author Uradyn Erden Bulag wrote about thisДунгане (talk) 21:37, 1 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Quigley, I see what you mean. Clearly, the exile sources you're citing are interested in contemporary politics much moreso than history, and this means they project their current context onto the past with results that are sometimes misleading. I don't think they ever explicitly dispute that much of the territory in question was ruled by China before 1949. It is also a historical fact that it was all claimed by the Lhasa government (when the 13th Dalai Lama was informed of the terms of the Simla Convention, his response was "But you've given away half of Tibet!"), and the exile sources are arguing that that claim was valid. From a historical perspective, the fact that PRC policies are simply continuing the divided rule of the Tibetan area is important, but the point that Phintso Thonden is making is that, in his opinion, divided rule was unjust all along, so it is unjust for the PRC to continue it, and it doesn't make very much difference which Chinese regime first implemented it.


 * For a Tibetan nationalist, the statement "Invaded by China in 1949-50, the independent country of Tibet was forced to face the direct loss of life that comes from battles ..." is awkwardly worded, but not false. On the other hand, the statement that "As recently as 1914, a peace convention was signed by Britain, China and Tibet that again formally recognised Tibet as a fully independent country," is just plain false. Also, the statement that "Tibetans have demonstrated repeatedly for independence from China" is uncertain, since the same words can mean "independence" or "autonomy" in Tibetan.


 * By the way, Amdo is not coterminous with Qinghai. Parts of Ngawa Prefecture are in Amdo, and the region around Jyekundo (Gyêgu) is part of Kham but is in Qinghai.&mdash;Greg Pandatshang (talk) 00:10, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose that Qinghai – Tibet War be merged into Sino-Tibetan War. I think that the content in the "Qinghai – Tibet War" article can easily be explained in the context of "Sino-Tibetan War". Slb nsk (talk) 07:53, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Reluctantly oppose: The Sino-Tibetan War and Qinghai-Tibetan War started under different pretexts, occurred on separate fronts, and although one war is a subset of the other, it would be similar to separating Pacific War from the rest of World War II. Both conflicts encompassed more than what is written, and there's always room for future expansion of both articles. --  李博杰   | —Talk contribs email 07:59, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

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