are not principally what demonstrates Tibet’s capacity to enter into international relations. Rather, it is the participation of Tibet as an equal party which demonstrates that capacity. Because Tibet participated as an equal with China and Great Britain,25 Tibet and Great Britain could only have entered a treaty if Tibet were an autonomous state, albeit one with links to China.26 A binding treaty could have resulted from the Simla Conference, had the negotiations gone well, because the parties had the capacity to form such a treaty. As it happened, Britain and Tibet did conclude bilateral agreements regarding trade and the Indo-Tibetan border at the Simla Conference,27 and India later recognized the validity of
about 90,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory as a reward for their support of the ‘independence of Tibet.’ The conference was a secret deal made by Britain to incite the ‘independence of Tibet.’ The Chinese government firmly refused the Simla Treaty and the illegal McMahon Line.” (Cheng Ran, The Origin and Truth of the ‘Independence of Tibet’, About Tibet (2) (Beijing 1991) at 4.) “It is well known that the British government threatened not to recognize the government of the Republic of China unless Yuan Shikai, head of the Chinese government, agreed with the participation of Tibetan delegates in the Simla conference. Immediately after the conference began, at the instigation of the British colonialists, the Tibetan delegates submitted a request for the independence of Tibet. This met with the opposition of the Chinese government, which insisted that Tibet was an inseparable part of Chinese territory and that China enjoyed sovereignty over Tibet. When the British delegate Henry McMahon worked behind the Chinese delegates’ back to compel the Tibetan delegates to cede a large tract of the Chinese territory (according to a line which later came to be known as the so-called McMahon Line), the Chinese delegates flatly refused to sign the treaty.” (N. Cering, The Relations Between the Local Tibetan Government and the Central Government During the Period of the Republic of China, in Jing Wei, ed., China: Issues and Ideas 1: Is Tibet an “Independent Country”? -- On van Praag’s “The Status of Tibet” (Beijing 1991) at 34.) 25
International Commission of Jurists, Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic, supra note 1, at 149.
26
Permanent Tribunal of Peoples, supra note 2, at 21.
27
van Walt van Praag, The Status of Tibet, supra note 5, at 138 (footnote omitted): “The outcome of the Simla Conference was significant in that the three agreements concluded between Great Britain and Tibet comprehensively regulated their mutual relations. By these agreements the previous treaties concluded between Britain and the Qing Empire were superseded, and henceforth Anglo-Tibetan relations were regulated solely by the 1904 Lhasa Convention and the 1914 agreements, which modified it in some respects.” The texts of the three agreement appear as Appendices 18-20 to id. See also International Commission of Jurists, The Question of Tibet and the Rule of Law (Geneva 1959) (“as the Chinese representative of the Chinese government declined to sign and ratify the [Simla] Convention it was signed on July 3rd, 1914 by representatives of Great Britain and Tibet”); International Commission of Jurists, Tibet and the Chinese People’s Republic, supra note 1, at 150 (“Great Britain at no stage after 1914 dealt with Tibet through the intermediary of China and entered into two separate treaties with Tibet alone in 1914”).
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