Regularizing Nyarong: Nationalist Integration through Imperial Bureaucracy

Among the late Qing cases of administrative replacement of local chieftaincy with centrally-appointed bureaucrats, Nyarong in eastern Tibet was unusual.  Not the customary native hereditary chiefs, but regular Lhasa officials appointed by the Dalai Lama’s government, were the target of the so-termed administrative regularization (gaitu guiliu) in the 1900s, by a Sichuan and Yunnan frontier commission.  Nor was the Commission’s tactic administrative in nature but strikingly militaristic, diplomatic and rhetorical, and it was executed in a shroud of deception with little resemblance to a routine regularizaiton.  Aiming at compelling the Lhasa officials to withdraw without troop action within Nyarong’s borders, Commissioner Zhao Erfeng feigned a military campaign by marching troop columns toward Nyarong in slow movement and with wide publicity, severing supply and transportation to Nyarong from neighboring chieftains, and issuing stern warnings to Nyarong officials of punishment for failure to meet the withdraw deadline.  Behind this facade of intimidation, Sichuan officials and Qing resident representatives in Lhasa pressured central Tibetan authorities to withdraw the Nyarong officers on grounds of misrule, circumscribing the relevant due-process issues of succession legitimacy, chieftaincy request, and Lhasa entitlement.  The rhetoric of regularization was, therefore, used in a vague and conflated sense for the benefit of its familiarity to officials.  Notably, the gap between Sichuan’s need to absorb Nyarong for territory and security gains and Lhasa’s privileged position in Nyarong, which was sanctioned in earlier imperial agreements, was bridged not through central state bureaucracy but through the bold actions of the frontier Commission supported by Sichuan province.  Qing imperial traditions and bureaucratic procedures were invoked, and distorted, in order to mask the uneasiness of nationalistic territorial expansion for the Qing empire in a time when its traditional relationship with Tibet was challenged by British colonialism without and Chinese nationalism within.