In this episode of our series on ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’, we discuss a little-known entity perhaps only peripherally related to education, but central to the shifting politics of identity in contemporary Taiwan: the ‘Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission’ (蒙藏委員會) (MTAC).
In her doctoral research, Alessandra Ferrer examined the changing role of the MTAC following the retreat of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan in 1949. During the period of Martial Law under the KMT, the Commission’s function was primarily propagandistic, its very existence serving to remind ROC citizens and the wider world of the claims of ‘Free China’ to sovereignty over the entirety of Chinese territory, with ‘China’ defined as encompassing both Tibet and the whole of Mongolian (including that of the independent Mongolian People’s Republic).
In this interview, we begin by reviewing the origins and purpose of the MTAC on the Chinese mainland, when the MTAC was tasked with both with asserting China’s claims to governance over Tibet and Mongolia and, as far as possible, extending and embedding actual Chinese influence in these regions. Alessandra also explains how the Commission’s origins can be traced to the Qing Dynasty agency for ‘managing barbarians’, the Li Fan Yuan (理藩院).
Following defeat in the Chinese Civil War of the late 1940s, the KMT retreated to Taiwan, but continued to assert its rightful authority over the Chinese mainland, including Tibet and Mongolia. This meant maintaining all the institutions of the Republican regime, including the MTAC.
In her article for the Comparative Education special issue, Alessandra analyses the treatment of Tibetans and their religion in MTAC literature, and characterises MTAC discourse as an instance of ‘internal orientalism’. In effect, she is drawing a comparison between ROC discourse on the ‘frontier’ regions of Tibet and Mongolia and Western colonial ‘civilising missions’. One key point that emerges from her work relates to the dominance of assumptions of Han cultural or civilisational superiority vis-à-vis Tibet during the Martial Law era. At the same time, ROC officials were keen to highlight instances of CCP brutality and insensitivity in its treatment of ‘minorities’ on the mainland, and to contrast this with the enlightened and beneficent policies proposed by the MTAC.
However, MTAC discourse on Tibet underwent some significant changes during the 1980s and 1990s, as Taiwan itself democratised and the KMT’s Chinese nationalism was increasingly challenged. On the one hand, Taiwanese nationalism drew upon a narrative of a ‘multicultural’ Taiwan that rejected the established emphasis on the island’s monolithic ‘Chineseness’. But at the same time, underlying ideas of what constitutes ‘a nation’, and assumptions of Han Chinese cultural superiority, have remained relatively strong.
Alessandra also comments on how the rapid democratisation of Taiwan from the late 1980s, and the growing challenge to Chinese nationalism, was viewed with apparent alarm by MTAC officials at the time. MTAC literature suggests that officials within the Commission increasingly found themselves more in sympathy with their counterparts on the Communist mainland than with ‘nativist’ opinion on Taiwan itself. This is reflected in a fractious relationship between the MTAC and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile during this period, with some MTAC publications during the 1990s blaming the Dalai Lama for irresponsibly stoking ‘anti-Han sentiment’ among Tibetans. When the Dalai Lama was scheduling a visit to Taiwan in the late 1990s, his aides insisted that the MTAC be excluded from any role in hosting him.
Unsurprisingly, independence-leaning Taiwanese politicians had little interest in maintaining the MTAC. However, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration of President Chen Shui-Bian (2000-2008) was unable to abolish the Commission, because it lacked a majority in the Legislative Yuan (or ROC parliament), which was still dominated by the KMT. It was only after the DPP’s comprehensive victory in the 2016 elections for the presidency and legislature that abolition became possible - and was duly in enacted in 2017.
Readings:
Alessandra Ferrer. 2023. ‘Internal Orientalism on Taiwan: The ROC’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission and its Portrayal of Tibetan Buddhism’, Comparative Education, 60 (1). DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2023.2296191
James Leibold. 2007. Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
