Cross-Border Interference or Garbled Messaging: China, Nepal, and the Cancellation of the World’s Largest Tibetan Studies Conference
Cross-border Interference or Garbled Messaging: China, Nepal, and the Cancellation of the World’s Largest Tibetan Studies Conference
WRITTEN BY ROBERT BARNETT
8 September 2026
The horror of the catastrophic flooding on the Tibet-Nepal border has dominated world headlines, overshadowing a much smaller but nonetheless significant development in China’s cross-border diplomacy across the Himalayas: the cancellation of a major international conference in Nepal. On 8 August, following three years of detailed planning and consultation, the Nepalese government abruptly ordered Kathmandu University to abort its plan to host the 17th seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies although some 700 of the world’s top scholars on Tibetan and Himalayan studies were to attend.
Media reports and online chatter assumed China to be the culprit, since two weeks earlier China’s ambassador to Nepal had complained to the Nepalese government that “some individuals” at the event might “speak against China and in support of Tibet”. The long arm of authoritarian intolerance seemed to have reached across the Himalayas, with startling effect, raising questions about the commitment of the Nepali government, in power only since March this year, to non-aligned, democratic standards. What remains unclear, however, is whether China had aimed at the total shut-down of the conference or whether Nepal misread the signals from Beijing and went further than required.
A reality check
The conference had very little to do with the politics of China’s claims to Tibet. The 146 sessions, roundtables, book launches and events planned for the conference were almost entirely about recondite topics drawn mainly from the fields of Buddhism and philosophy (29 per cent), geography, development and Himalayan anthropology (22 per cent), or art and archaeology (13 per cent). Many of the sessions were not focused on Tibet at all, but on culture, history or society in other Himalayan regions, such as Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh, or Nepal itself. Only three of the sessions were scheduled to touch on issues that might be deemed overly political, and those were analytical not activist, since the International Association of Tibetan Studies only accepts presentations detailing primary research and screens out any advocacy papers in the review process.
To underline the uncontentious nature of the conference, over 100 of the papers were to be presented by scholars from China, delegated in most cases by their official work units. And this is not surprising: all scholars and their offices in China are now required, as their main priority, to actively assert China’s “discourse power” in the international arena, just as in propaganda work the main task is “to tell China’s story well”. Dominating particular areas of international discourse is, not unreasonably, China’s strategic priority in the academic realm, particularly when it comes to Tibetan issues. Ultimately, the conference took place online rather than in person, but this made it all but impossible for Chinese scholars to meet with foreign counterparts and disseminate Beijing’s views and perspectives.
China has said nothing publicly about the cancellation, but there are doubts as to whether Beijing intended or asked for the event to be cancelled. Nothing as drastic as this has happened before in Nepal or in Tibetan studies outside China, and the cancellation will damage Beijing’s efforts to cultivate soft power, to display the achievements of its scholars, and to track the work of foreign Tibetologists, which is a primary task for China’s main institution for Tibetan studies. In fact, media reports about the Ambassador’s intervention specified at the time that he was not asking for cancellation: he reportedly requested Nepal only to police any dissident voices that might be “lurking” within the conference — in effect, the silencing or intimidation of supposed “Dalai clique separatists”, which typically refers to Tibetan exiles. If so, that aim had already been largely thwarted by the exile Tibetan administration’s pre-emptive decision to withdraw its associated researchers from the conference well before anyone had asked.
Tibetan exile protest. Image credit: Chris Beckett/Flickr.
What seems more likely is that China’s aim, besides signalling its usual discontent regarding any criticism, was to push Nepal to continue to make life difficult for Tibetan exiles, a project that Nepal has enabled systematically if half-heartedly for much of the last 30 years, banning Tibetan exiles from holding most public activities and preventing many from obtaining official registration. If so, it seems any such signal was misread. Within days, damage limitation was under way: the office of Nepal’s Prime Minister backtracked radically, denying that his office had anything to do with a ban or that it had been notified of any security concerns. That effort came too late, however: China is now seen as a cross-border aggressor interfering in a neighbour’s affairs and Nepal glossed as some kind of helpless Chinese pawn. But which of these two governments first decided on the cancellation remains unclear.
An alternative explanation
If China did in fact demand a total ban on the conference, then we are facing a serious increase in the degree and scope of Chinese cross-border interference. It is, however, also possible that the episode represents an instance of what scholars call costly signalling. China, in criticising the conference for inflated reasons, may have been conveying not a demand for cancellation but its usual aggressive stance on Tibet and Tibetan exiles, while aiming indirectly to boost the anti-Tibetan, ultra-nationalist faction that has resurfaced in Nepal since the riots of last September. Such sentiments — some observers associate them with Royalists and others with Nepali communist parties — manifest as outrage at any moves that might damage Nepal’s relations with Beijing, with one opposition party describing the government as “a puppet of…Indo-Western interests” because it had allowed exiles to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s birthday at a reception in a private school in Kathmandu. Such views are fuelled by painful Cold War-era memories of a time 60 years ago when exile Tibetan fighters, with CIA support, secretly used Nepali territory for their guerrilla operations against the PLA. They are also animated by what some describe as majoritarian prejudices against Nepalese hill peoples, which include about 2 million people whose cultures and heritage are related to those of Tibetans.
Accordingly, one theory is that proponents of that faction persuaded figures in the current government that China would be pleased by a cancellation of the conference, while another suggests that the Nepali leadership thought cancellation would improve conditions for a planned visit to Beijing, since postponed, by the head of the ruling Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) — despite the fact that pre-emptive concessions of that kind have a chequered history in terms of any substantive benefit for the conceding country, especially if given without a quid pro quo.
A signal of displeasure, arguably misread, appears to have been enough to shut down the field’s largest international gathering, and in a democratic state, with a reputational cost to that state as well as to China.
China’s initial interference thus created an opening which domestic factions or parties could then exploit. This suggests a failure of internal checks within the new Nepalese government designed to neutralise such pressures and to reach the compromise outcome that China had probably anticipated. Indeed, the decision to cancel was taken by Nepal’s Chief Secretary and its Foreign Secretary without cabinet discussion; hence the later statement by the Prime Minister’s office claiming to have had no part in from the decision. In fact, the government could have worked out a solution that would have shown goodwill to China without upsetting some 700 delegates, including the 100 Chinese scholars, or damaging the interests of the many hotels and other businesses that stood to profit from them. But it did not do so: that opportunity was lost.
The failure of internal mechanisms to modify contentious signals from a government or ruling body occurred at lower levels, too. The order to close down the conference was given verbally to Kathmandu University, the official host of the conference, by Nepal’s Chief Secretary, but the University leadership — which had just been replaced — did not insist on a written statement from the government to authorise that move and clarify its terms or rationale. The university thus failed to explore whether the government intended the conference to be banned in any form, as the media assumed, or whether it meant only that Kathmandu University, as a government entity, could not host it, a very different proposition.
If China was in fact aiming just at intimidating discussion and harassing exiles, its signalling seems not to have been moderated by the usual mechanisms that bureaucracies design to inhibit precipitant misreadings: consultation with overseeing bodies did not take place, written statements were not obtained, factional or party interests were not balanced out by their opponents, and a less self-damaging response to China’s signals was not arrived at. If so, the episode is a reminder that provocative signalling can backfire in contexts where a faction, or just overanxious bureaucrats, might misunderstand it or use it for their own purposes.
The more sobering lesson, however, is not that China directly or indirectly stepped up its demands on a neighbouring government, but that it did not have to. A signal of displeasure, arguably misread, appears to have been enough to shut down the field’s largest international gathering, and in a democratic state, with a reputational cost to that state as well as to China. It is a measure of how much weight Beijing’s disapproval now carries across borders even when its requests are muted or inferred, and a reminder of the importance of cautious and conservative interpretations of China’s diplomatic signalling.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Robert Barnett works on nationality issues in China, focusing on modern Tibetan history, politics, and culture. He is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and an Affiliate Lecturer at the Lau China Institute, Kings College, London. From 1999 to 2018 he taught at Columbia University in New York, where he founded and directed the Modern Tibetan Studies Program. He has also taught at Princeton (NJ), INALCO (Paris), Tibet University (Lhasa) and IACER (Kathmandu) and is a frequent commentator for the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, South China Morning Post, and other media. His most recent book is The Quiet State: Micro-Surveillance and Normalisation in Tibet (Palgrave Macmillan 2026). Image credit: Jan van der Wolf/Pexels.