(TibetanReview.net, Nov05’24) –China has an issue with the people on the two sides of the Tibet-Nepal border marrying each other and has banned it but not bothered to explain why, according to thediplomat.com Nov 4. The people on the two sides of this border share ethnic, Buddhist cultural heritage and linguistic ties; but cross-border marriage doesn’t exist anymore. The centuries-old borderlands marriage has been halted thanks to the Chinese side, the report said.
“Cross-border marriage was not an issue until 2008,” the report quoted a Nepali local in Olangchung Gola village in Nepal’s eastern Taplejung district, which borders Tibet and India, as saying. It was “halted from the Chinese side after 2012.”
As a result, cross-border marriages, once the norm in Olangchung Gola, are now a rarity, the report said.
While a Nepali from any part of Nepal can marry a Chinese in any part of mainland China, Beijing has forbidden cross-border marriages between people who live in the Tibet-Nepal borderlands, within walking distance of each other, and with strong linguistic and cultural ties. Beijing has provided no explanation for this policy, the report said.
Chumbe Sherpa, a former deputy chair of the erstwhile Olangchung Gola Village Development Committee (local government), has said that previously Tibetan women were drawn to Nepal as the latter was comparatively well-developed and the source of their food and other supplies. A marriage with a Nepali man was therefore an attractive option.
However, in recent decades, China has developed the Tibetan region, and the Tibetan border regions are more developed than the Nepali ones. Hence, the situation has reversed and commodities now flow into Nepal from Riu in Dinggye County of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Almost all daily essentials being used by residents of Olangchung Gola are now from TAR and sport Mandarin characters. Olanchung Gola is closer to Riu bazaar than Taplejung’s district headquarters of Phungling bazaar, the report noted.
The report also said that even meeting relatives on the Tibet side of the border had become tougher post-pandemic. “We can’t go to our relatives’ homes on the other side,” Chhilamo Lama, whose maternal house is on the Tibetan side, has said. She has “to stay at a quarantine-like home,” where her “relatives come to meet and greet” her. “This was not the case in the past,” she has said.
Trade and other relationships between the two sides on the borderland continued to be excellent, however, the report noted.
Local residents as well as security personnel view the Chinese positively. Madhab Khatri, the recently deployed Border Outpost chief of Nepal’s Armed Police Force has said, “Chinese counterparts often ask if we need anything from them.”
“We mostly go to Riu to sell our products and buy theirs. If we can’t sell all our products in the Riu bazaar, Chinese policemen purchase our unsold items,” Chhilamo Lama has told The Diplomat.
Also, Chheten Sherpa, a local leader of the Nepali Congress and a former local government member, has said that the Chinese are helpful and are eager to have better road connectivity with Nepal. Chinese-sent bulldozers and oil tankers with Chinese number plates are visible at Olangchung Gola bazaar.
And so, the big question is, when border trade and crossings have resumed, why are traditional borderland marriages being blocked? Why are marriages between people who have to fly long distances across the Himalayas permitted when those who live just within walking distance of each other are forbidden, the report asked.