May 18, 2008
Fed Up With Peace
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
XIAHE, China
A Tibetan monk, recently out of jail and still in pain from beatings by the police, said he reveres the Dalai Lama but also regards him as a political failure.
“We think the Dalai Lama has been too peaceful,” he said. “There is a big discussion now about whether we should turn to violence.”
Another monk at Labrang Monastery here in Xiahe on the Tibetan plateau put it this way: “For 50 years, the Dalai Lama said to use peaceful means to solve the problems, and that achieved nothing. China just criticizes him.”
“After he’s gone,” the monk added, “there definitely will be violent resistance.”
This impatience seems widespread among young Tibetans, and the rioting and protests across ethnic Tibetan areas of China in the last couple of months may be a turning point. Unless the Tibet question is resolved, we may see a Tibetan equivalent of the Irish Republican Army or Hamas.
A harsh crackdown is under way in greater Tibet, as I found when I slipped into these Tibetan areas in the back of a car with local license plates. China’s heavy hand is adding to the antagonisms: the authorities are beating monks, confiscating pictures of the Dalai Lama, and forcing monks to attend “patriotic study” classes — up to two hours a day, six days a week — full of propaganda praising the Communist Party and denouncing the Dalai Lama.
“That just turns us against China more than ever,” one monk said.
The gulf between Tibetans and the Han Chinese ethnic majority has never been greater. The television images of Tibetans in Lhasa attacking Chinese civilians — devoid of any context of decades of repression — left many Chinese more hard-line than the Communist Party.
“Most of us think that the policy toward Tibetans has been too soft,” said a Han Chinese man in Qinghai Province who often travels in Tibetan areas. “They get all kinds of special preferences, but they’re just not as hard-working, and they drink too much. And then after we help them so much, they riot against us. So most of us think the policy toward Tibetans should be stricter.”
The recent uprising by Tibetans underscores the utter failure of Beijing’s policies in Tibet. But it also reflects the failure of the Dalai Lama and of America.
The Dalai Lama has played a waiting game, but as China gains global power — and as more Han Chinese flood into Tibet — that has been a losing strategy. The Dalai Lama has won acclaim internationally, but that acclaim triggers the deep Chinese sensitivity to foreign bullying and thus has antagonized the audience that may count the most: China.
The Dalai Lama missed opportunities by neglecting outreach by General Secretary Hu Yaobang in 1981, by spurning an invitation to China in 1989 and by announcing the choice of the Panchen Lama in a way that Beijing felt insulting. When the Dalai Lama and those around him refer to “genocide” or claim roughly one-quarter of China as Tibet, they undercut Chinese moderates.
As for the United States, it may have made things worse. Melvyn Goldstein of Case Western Reserve University, whose book “The Snow Lion and the Dragon” remains the best introduction to Tibet, writes that the United States has hurt the interests of Tibetans: its symbolic gestures have encouraged unrealistic Tibetan dreams of independence, and Washington has neglected the serious diplomatic work — both with China and with the Dalai Lama — that might actually improve the lives of Tibetans.
Both China and the Dalai Lama exaggerate, and the historical evidence about Tibet is contradictory. One can make a good case that Tibet has been a part of China at least since 1720. One can also make a good case that Tibet became independent around 1911. The evidence is simply mixed.
A deal to resolve the Tibet question is still attainable. The Dalai Lama would have to put aside claims to vast areas outside the present “Tibet Autonomous Region,” and he would have to accept much less political autonomy than he wants. China would have to ease religious controls and allow the Dalai Lama to return as a spiritual leader. Most important, Beijing would have to end Han Chinese migration to all Tibetan areas, to preserve their Tibetan character.
The upshot would be a Tibet that would be under China’s thumb, but with greater religious freedom — and with real hope of remaining authentically Tibetan through this century. And China would improve its international image and avoid the risk of Tibetan terrorism.
President Bush would do far more for the Tibetan people if, instead of just being photographed with the Dalai Lama, he assigned a top-notch diplomat like Christopher Hill to explore such a compromise.
Time is running out, however, for at this rate, Shangri-La may become a breeding ground for terrorists.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at
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April 08, 2008
Torch Protests Anger Chinese; Chaos In Paris
2008/04/08/
The relay carrying the Olympic torch to Beijing for this summer's Olympic Games has quickly turned into a gantlet of criticism that is angering ordinary Chinese who feel their country is being treated unfairly.
As thousands of French police struggled to keep the Olympic torch moving -- and lit -- through throngs of anti-China protesters in Paris before canceling the last stretch on Monday, people on the streets of Shanghai and Beijing were voicing increasing anger and rising nationalism.
'Chinese people should all be indignant,' said Du Chunhua, who works for a trading company in the Chinese capital. 'I think it's really bad that they are trying to ruin such a peaceful event.'
It is becoming clear that the Olympics, envisioned by the Chinese government as a kind of international coming-out party to celebrate China's rapid economic growth and its growing role on the world stage, is instead posing a major challenge to the nation's image.
And an event that many had hoped would help Westerners to better understand China and give China a better understanding of the West, is instead laying bare the sharply divergent views of each side.
The trouble in Paris came a day after the torch made a difficult journey through a snowy London, where a protester managed to break through security and momentarily grip the torch. On Wednesday, it arrives in San Francisco, where activists have spent months planning protests.
The scene in Paris on Monday was chaotic. At one point, the torch appeared unlit while being carried by a woman in a wheelchair. Moments later organizers placed the torch inside a bus transporting Chinese officials, and police on in-line skates surrounded the vehicle as it continued along the route.
A police spokeswoman said the torch was extinguished at least once during the relay. The actual flame, which was lit in Olympia, Greece, in late March, remained burning inside a lantern in the bus as a backup.
The torch protests in London and Paris have been fueled by events in Tibet, where peaceful demonstrations that began in early March turned into violence that met with a forceful Chinese government response.
But those speaking and acting out against the torch relay and China's hosting of the Olympics also criticize China's overall human-rights record, as well as its ties to repressive regimes such as Sudan and Myanmar.
Jean Pierre Bonville, a 59-year-old lawyer from Belgium, traveled to Paris with his 12-year-old son to protest. 'This is not just about Tibet; it's about the right to freedom in general,' he said.
Many, if not most, Chinese, however, see their country as freer -- and more prosperous -- than at any time in their lifetimes. For them, the Games are seen as a celebration of their economic, political and social progress.
At least some of the demonstrations have been blocked from broadcasts in China of the torch relay, particularly interruptions in the lighting of the torch in Athens. But as the protests have gone on, they are being reported in the Chinese press, though often not very promptly and generally blamed only on Tibetan separatists.
The protesters 'should come here and see for themselves,' said Han Hailing, 26, an urban planner in Beijing. 'They don't understand what's going on here. But you can't blame them either. They're getting wrong information from the media.'
Ms. Han said that 'every government has its problems,' but added: 'I have to say the Chinese government is right' on the way it is handling Tibet. 'The government has already invested a lot' in Tibet and other ethnic-minority areas, she said.
Such sentiments have drawn ethnic Chinese to the defense of China and the torch. In Paris, Tibetan protesters faced off in a shouting match with China supporters waving the country's red-and-gold national flag and chanting 'Bravo, Beijing.'
Shen Shuang, a 27-year-old woman from China, said she traveled to Paris from Marseille to show her support for the Beijing Olympics. With her face painted with Chinese flags, she ran alongside the convoy dodging protesters who blew whistles at her. 'I can keep this up all day,' she said.
As the torch traveled from the Eiffel Tower along the Seine River, hundreds of activists draped in Tibet flags poured into the street chanting 'Free Tibet,' trying to block the route.
Large vans and trucks helped clear a path for the torch through the crowds as police clad in heavy shoulder and arm pads locked arms with shouting protesters and forced some to the ground. A group of Chinese guards in tracksuits ran alongside the flame, forming a protective bubble.
Despite the tightly coordinated security effort, authorities were forced to take further precautions as several protesters broke through the police wall to get within steps of the embattled torch.
Part of what made the protests so difficult to contain was their scale -- both large and small. Members of the Paris-based rights group Reporters Without Borders managed to climb a section of the Eiffel Tower and unfurl a giant banner that depicted the Olympic rings as interlocking handcuffs.
Yolaine De La Bigne, a torchbearer, wore an armband depicting the Tibetan flag as she received the torch. Chinese guards who were running alongside her ripped the band off her arm as soon she tried to display it, she says.
Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympics on Monday criticized protesters who tried to disrupt the relay in London. 'A few Tibetan separatists attempted to sabotage the torch relay in London, and we strongly denounce their disgusting behavior,' Mr. Sun said.
For many Chinese, who read about the protests and see images online, the troubles with the torch relay seem very far from the reality of China as they perceive it. China this year is marking the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's decision to turn away from central planning and toward markets and to reopen China to the rest of the world. These ever-accelerating changes have transformed China from a Communist backwater to the world's fourth-largest economy.
Cheng Hongyu, a 25-year-old French-language student, says the protesters 'don't live here. From their perspective they are seeing problems, but they don't see the whole picture.' She continued: 'I think in general, the direction the government is taking is good. The government only wants improvements for Tibet and the Tibetan people.'
Online commentary has tended to be nationalistic and to argue that the coming Olympics are being used to bolster the cause of an independent Tibet. 'These destructive activities by the foreign forces of Tibet independence are really outrageous,' wrote one person in a popular Chinese chat room for political and social issues. 'Making ordinary Chinese angry is more dangerous than p- off the government.'
Some Chinese have taken matters into their own hands, launching campaigns of harassing phone calls and email against Tibetan human-rights campaigners and China-based foreign correspondents covering the recent unrest in Tibetan areas.
Many Chinese don't understand why the outside world fails to see the incredible progress that their country has made over the course of their lives.
'First of all, it's still a small group of people trying to screw up the event. And obviously there are political motives behind it,' says Han Hongyi, 36, who works at a human-resources-consulting company, and said he read about the protests online. 'It's unfair to most of the Chinese people. We have been looking forward to the Olympics for a long time.'
Gordon Fairclough / Stacy Meichtry / Max Colchester / Loretta Chao
http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/20080408/bch133833.asp?source=email
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April 02, 2008
Just like America, China is building a multi-ethnic empire in the west
Tibet and Xinjiang have the misfortune of having resources the Asian giant wants, and being on the path to resources it needs
Parag Khanna The Guardian, Tuesday March 25 2008 Article historyAbout
this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday March 25 2008 on p29 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:02 on March 25 2008.
It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively support the idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas or California? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control of central Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something that cannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.
Boundary agreements in 1895 and 1907 gave Russia the Pamir mountains and established the Wakhan Corridor - the slender eastern tongue of Afghanistan that borders China - as a buffer to Britain. But rather than cede East Turkestan (Uighurstan) to the Russians, the British financed China's recapture of the territory, which it organised into Xinjiang (which means "New Dominions"). While West Turkestan was splintered into the hermetic Soviet Stans, China reasserted its traditional dominance over Xinjiang and Tibet, today its largest - and least stable - provinces. (Beijing has now accused the Dalai Lama of colluding with Muslim Uighur separatists in Xinjiang.) But without them, the country would be like America without all territory west of the Rockies: denied its continental majesty and status.
Every backpacker who has visited Tibet and Xinjiang in the past decade knows that the Chinese empire is painfully real: the western region's going concern is undoubtedly Chinese Manifest Destiny. With the end of the civil war in 1949, China endeavoured immediately to overcome the "tyranny of terrain" and tame the interminable mountain and desert landscapes with the aim of exploiting vast natural assets, establishing penal colonies and military bases, and expand the Lebensraum for its exploding population.
Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the misfortune of possessing resources China wants and of being situated on the path to resources China needs: Tibet has vast amounts of timber, uranium and gold, and the two territories constitute China's geographic gateway for trade flow outward - and energy flow inward - with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Decades of labour by the army and swarms of workers have paved the way for unchallenged Chinese dominance. The high-altitude train linking Shanghai and Lhasa that began service in 2006 represents not the beginning of Chinese hegemony, but its culmination.
Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the birth of a multi-ethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much as America's frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago. Chinese think about their mission civilatrice much as American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity. Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans and Turkic, Muslim Uighurs are being lifted out of the third world - whether they like it or not.
They are getting roads, telephone lines, hospitals and jobs. School fees are being reduced or abolished to promote basic education and Chineseness. Unlike those Europeans who seek to define the EU as a Christian club, there are no Chinese inhibitions about incorporating Muslim territories. The new mythology of Chinese nationalism is based not on expunging minorities but granting them a common status in the paternalistic state: Uighurs and Tibetans, though not Han, are told they are Chinese.
"The Soviet Union collapsed because they experimented with glasnost prematurely, before the achieved unity among the peoples," explains a Chinese intellectual in Shanghai who studies central Asia. Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeks illustrate, China is determined not to waver.
In even the remotest corners of Tibet, small bases house platoons of the People's Liberation Army, with soldiers menacingly practising martial arts twice daily in public squares, often right next to ancient Buddhist stupas. Inaccessible jungle areas designated environmentally protected zones are often actually military encampments. Signs trumpeting "Tibet power" refer strictly to the Chinese electricity company.
China has pumped in billions of development dollars, hoping to generate goodwill among the scarcely 3 million Tibetans. In Lhasa, crumbling stone quarters have been replaced with sturdy homes built along thoroughfares connecting the city to the new railway station. The consequence of Chinese modernity, however, is that a city that once symbolised cultural authenticity has become merely a gateway to the remote plateaus where wild yak still outnumber people.
An even greater prize than Tibet is the far larger and more populous Xinjiang, with its oil deposits, deserts and mountains. Its demographic dilution has been dubbed "apartheid with Chinese characteristics". Xinjiang's Muslims have always been unruly, even briefly securing an independent East Turkestan at the end of the civil war. But massive Han resettlement began with the "Develop the west" campaign of the 1950s, and in the cultural revolution Xinjiang was sealed off for a massive pogrom of mosque destruction and Qur'an burning. Violent clashes in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, in 1996 proved that no peaceful Islamic culture would prevail in a Chinese-dominated environment. China suspended all mosque reconstruction and launched a "Strike Hard" campaign, imprisoning and executing hundreds of suspected separatists. Today one can see the results of a programme Mao and Deng began, but never completed: a railway and highway transporting coal, migrants and goods across the Taklamakan desert, facilitating the Hanification of a province where Uighurs now make up only half the population.
The annihilation of local people, history and architecture, and their replacement with shiny skyscrapers paying tribute to modern Chinese capitalism, make Urumqi the Shanghai of the northern Silk Road. A six-lane freeway runs through the city, and the Han majority fill up spiffy Japanese cars at the large Sinopec and PetroChina petrol stations. Urumqui buzzes with traders from Russia to Pakistan and all Stans in between, who buy cheap Chinese goods to be sold back home at a profit. Uighurs are now a marginalised minority in the city. Chinese tourists crowd the few accessible natural attractions, making the emerald-coloured Heavenly Lake no longer very heavenly.
Ironically, China's near absolute sense of security over both provinces is the greatest hope for a Chinese glasnost: China no longer faces any meaningful resistance to its rule and so some day may lighten up. Spiritual Tibetans have long looked south to Nepal and India for their cultural underpinnings, and in the 18th century Tibet was allowed a functional autonomy from China, a model the current Dalai Lama has proposed. Once he passes the scene, China might be less anxious about cultural exchange between Buddhists, further restoring Tibet's role as the Silk Road passage it was when Dunhuang's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas were carved, more than a millennium ago.
Tibetans and Uighurs will gradually become more prosperous than their neighbouring Mongols, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Nepalis - and this may provide a basis for Chinese claims of a benevolent hegemony elsewhere in Asia. But China will achieve that dominance before it talks about it.
· This is an edited extract from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires and Influences in the New Global Order, which will be published next week
paragkhanna.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/25/china.tibet/print
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The West plays with Tibetan lives
from David Seaton's News Links
Thursday, March 27, 2008
It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Richard Gere is a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
When westerners think of Tibet they think of the Tibetan spiritual superstar, the Dalai Lama and they naturally sympathize with the Tibetan’s desire for independence.
The Chinese, imagining an independent Tibet in NATO, with Mount Everest covered with American radar and CIA listening equipment, don’t.
Unfortunately for Tibetans, Tibet, besides its art treasures, the marvels of its Himalayan landscapes and the spiritual wealth of its unique form of Buddhism, has vast amounts of timber, uranium and gold that resource hungry China covets and a unique strategic position overlooking the world’s other rising giant, India. To expect the Chinese to trade any of this for a brilliant Olympic opening ceremony is disingenuous to the point of cynicism.
Sadly for Tibet, Washington, bogged down in two wars, with its economy troubled and its currency debauched, views China as a major threat, not just in Asia, but in Africa and Latin America as well. Richard M Bennett, an intelligence and security consultant writing in Asia Times observed that, “it would be rather surprising if the CIA was not taking more than just a passing interest in Tibet. For Washington this may seem a heaven-sent opportunity to create a significant lever against Beijing, with little risk to American interests. The Chinese would receive worldwide condemnation for violating human rights and it will be young Tibetans dying on the streets of Lhasa rather than yet more uniformed American kids.”
So, as HDS Greenway wrote in the Boston Globe, “If Tibetans are encouraged to further resist, it will be as with the Hungarian uprising, or the call for Iraqis to rise up during the first Gulf War - a hollow gesture that will lead to more repression in which the United States has no intention to intervene.” Writing in the
Guardian, Parag Khanna quoted a Chinese intellectual, "The Soviet Union collapsed because they experimented with glasnost before they achieved unity among the peoples." Khanna observes that, “Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeks illustrate, China is determined not to waver.”
Western globalization's discourse today is so filled with self-referring, self serving ideological constructions, that contemporary China's radical pragmatism seems mysterious. The authoritarian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of China has taken China on a path that has little to do with Marx but quite a bit to do with Lenin. Lenin himself defined “Communism” simply as “state power plus the electrification of the whole country.” If we change the word “electrification” for “development”, we have a very workmanlike description of today’s China. DS
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March 30, 2008
A week in Tibet
Mar 19th 2008 | LHASA
From The Economist print edition
Our Beijing correspondent happened to be in Lhasa as the riots broke out. Here is what he saw
ETHNIC-Chinese shopkeepers in Lhasa's old Tibetan quarter knew better than the security forces that the city had become a tinder-box. As word spread rapidly through the narrow alleyways on March 14th that a crowd was throwing stones at Chinese businesses, they shuttered up their shops and fled. The authorities, caught by surprise, held back as the city was engulfed by its biggest anti-Chinese protests in decades.
What began, or may have begun (Lhasa feeds on rumour), as the beating of a couple of Buddhist monks by police has turned into a huge political test for the Chinese government. Tibet has cast a pall over preparations to hold the Olympic games in Beijing in August. Protests in Lhasa have triggered copycat demonstrations in several monasteries across a vast swathe of territory in the “Tibet Autonomous Region” of China and in areas around it (see map). Not since the uprising of 1959, during which the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, fled to India, has there been such widespread unrest across this oxygen-starved expanse of mountains and plateaus.
Years of rapid economic growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have achieved the opposite. Efforts to integrate the region more closely with the rest of China, by building the world's highest railway connecting Beijing with Lhasa, have only fuelled ethnic tensions in the Tibetan capital. The night before the riots erupted, a Tibetan government official confided to your correspondent that Lhasa was now stable after protests by hundreds of monks at monasteries near the city earlier in the week. He could not have been more wrong.
It was, perhaps, a sign of the authorities' misreading of Lhasa's anger that a foreign correspondent was in the city at all. Foreign journalists are seldom given permission to visit. In January 2007, in preparation for the Olympics, the central government issued new regulations that supposedly make it much easier for them to travel around the country. Travel to Tibet, however, still requires a permit. The Economist's visit was approved before the monks protested on March 10th and 11th, but the authorities apparently felt sufficiently in control to allow the trip to go ahead as planned from March 12th. As it turned out, several of the venues on the pre-arranged itinerary became scenes of unrest.
It was, perhaps, a sign of the authorities' misreading of Lhasa's anger that a foreign correspondent was in the city at all. Foreign journalists are seldom given permission to visit. In January 2007, in preparation for the Olympics, the central government issued new regulations that supposedly make it much easier for them to travel around the country. Travel to Tibet, however, still requires a permit. The Economist's visit was approved before the monks protested on March 10th and 11th, but the authorities apparently felt sufficiently in control to allow the trip to go ahead as planned from March 12th. As it turned out, several of the venues on the pre-arranged itinerary became scenes of unrest.
Rioting began to spread on the main thoroughfare through Lhasa, Beijing Road (a name that suggests colonial domination to many a Tibetan ear), in the early afternoon of March 14th. It had started a short while earlier outside the Ramoche Temple, in a side street close by, after two monks had been beaten by security officials. (Or so Tibetan residents believe; the official version says it began with monks stoning police.) A crowd of several dozen people rampaged along the road, some of them whooping as they threw stones at shops owned by ethnic Han Chinese—a group to which more than 90% of China's population belongs—and at passing taxis, most of which in Lhasa are driven by Hans.
The rioting quickly fanned through the winding alleyways of the city's old Tibetan area south of Beijing Road. Many of these streets are lined with small shops, mostly owned by Hans or Huis, a Muslim ethnic group that controls much of Lhasa's meat trade. Crowds formed, seemingly spontaneously, in numerous parts of the district. They smashed into non-Tibetan shops, pulled merchandise onto the streets, piled it up and set fire to it. Everything from sides of yak meat to items of laundry was thrown onto the pyres. Rioters delighted in tossing in cooking-gas canisters and running for cover as they exploded. A few yelled “Long live the Dalai Lama!” and “Free Tibet!”
For hours the security forces did little. But the many Hans who live above their shops in the Tibetan quarter were quick to flee. Had they not, there might have been more casualties. (The government, plausibly, says 13 people were killed by rioters, mostly in fires.) Some of those who remained, in flats above their shops, kept the lights off to avoid detection and spoke in hushed tones lest their Mandarin dialect be heard on the streets by Tibetans. One Han teenager ran into a monastery for refuge, prostrating himself before a red-robed Tibetan abbot who agreed to give him shelter.
The destruction was systematic. Shops owned by Tibetans were marked as such with traditional white scarves tied through their shutter-handles. They were spared destruction. Almost every other one was wrecked. It soon became difficult to navigate the alleys because of the scattered merchandise. Chilli peppers, sausages, toys (child looters descended on those), flour, cooking oil and even at one spot scores of small-denomination bank notes were ground underfoot by triumphant Tibetan residents into a slippery carpet of filth.
During the night the authorities sent in fire engines, backed by a couple of armoured personnel-carriers laden with riot police, to put out the biggest blazes. By dawn they had also sealed off the Tibetan quarter with a ring of baton-carrying troops and stationed officers with helmets and shields in the square in front of the Jokhang temple, Tibet's most sacred shrine, in the heart of the old district. But they did not move into the alleys, where rioting continued for a second day. Residents within the security cordon attacked the few Han businesses left unscathed and set new fires among the piles of debris.
The risks of crackdown
Han Chinese in Lhasa were baffled and enraged by the slow reaction of the security forces. Thousands of people probably lost most, if not all, of their livelihoods (the majority of Lhasa's small businesses have no insurance, let alone against rioting). But the authorities were clearly hamstrung by the political risks involved. Going in with guns blazing—the tactic used to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the last serious outbreak of anti-Chinese unrest in Lhasa earlier that year—would risk inciting international calls for a boycott of the Olympic games. Instead they chose to let the rioters vent their anger, then gradually tighten the noose.
On March 15th occasional rounds of tear-gas fired at stone-throwing protesters eventually gave way to a more concerted effort to clear the streets. Paramilitary police began moving into the alleys, firing occasional bullets: not bursts of gunfire, but single deliberate shots, probably more in warning than with intent to kill. They also moved from rooftop to rooftop to deter residents from gathering on terraces overlooking the alleys. Rumours abounded of Tibetans killed by security forces in isolated incidents during the earlier rioting, but not during the final push to reassert control over the city. By Chinese standards (not high when it comes to riot control), that effort appeared relatively measured.
By late on March 15th the alleys were quiet. Patrols firing the odd bullet kept most of them deserted the next day, too. A Western student said she saw six Tibetan boys hauled out of their homes by troops, pushed to the ground, kicked and beaten with batons. The boys were then bundled into a bus and driven away. Troops covered up the bloodstains on the road with a white substance, she said. The Tibetan quarter is now gripped by fears of widespread and indiscriminate arrests as the authorities attempt to find “ringleaders”. China's official news agency says 105 rioters have surrendered to the police.
When residents began venturing out more normally on March 17th, the extent of the rioting became clear. Numerous Han Chinese-owned premises well beyond the Tibetan quarter had been attacked. Several buildings had been gutted by fire. The gate of the city's main mosque was charred, and the windows of the guard-house of the Tibet Daily, the region's Communist Party mouthpiece, had been smashed.
The city was under martial law in all but name. The government said that only police were involved in the security operation, but there were many military-looking vehicles on the streets with their tell-tale licence-plates covered up or removed. Some troops refused to say what force they belonged to. Two armoured personnel-carriers were parked in front of the Potala Palace, Lhasa's most famous tourist attraction on the side of the hill overlooking the city, which is now closed. Troops with bayonets were deployed along roads leading to the city's main monasteries, which have been sealed off by police. The rioting on March 14th and 15th involved mainly ordinary citizens, but monks are often at the forefront of separatist unrest in Tibet.
The approaching flame
The government's decision not to declare martial law, or any emergency restrictions, reflected its concern about the Olympics. In March 1989 the authorities imposed martial law in Lhasa to quell separatist unrest. Its measures were barely distinguishable from those now in force in the city. The old Tibetan area has been sealed off by gun-carrying troops, but officials prefer to refer euphemistically to “special traffic-control measures”. This time foreign tourists in Lhasa have been “advised” rather than ordered to leave. On March 18th police and troops began moving the 100 or so remaining tourists to hotels far from the site of the riots. In 1989 foreign journalists were expelled from Lhasa. This time your correspondent was allowed to stay, but only until his permit expired on March 19th. No others were allowed in.
For all the government's attempts to appear unruffled, the recent unrest in Tibet exceeds the challenge it faced in 1989. Since March 10th protests have been reported not only in Lhasa's main monasteries (Drepung, Sera and Ganden), but also at Samye Monastery about 60km east of Lhasa, Labrang Monastery in Gansu province, Kirti Monastery in Sichuan province and Rongwo Monastery in Qinghai province. Tibet's traditional boundaries stretch into these provinces. Outside Labrang Monastery Tibetans attacked Han Chinese shops on March 15th. TibetInfoNet, a news service based in Britain, reported several protests in various parts of Gansu on March 16th. Unlike in the ethnic violence in Lhasa, it said, the protesters' main targets were symbols of state power and government-owned properties.
The challenge is partly a security one. The martial-law regulations imposed in Lhasa in March 1989 were not lifted until May the following year. This time China will need to move faster to restore a semblance of normality. On June 20th the Olympic flame, having been carried up the Tibetan side of Mount Everest the previous month, is due to arrive in Lhasa, where a big ceremony is planned. Barring journalists and flooding Lhasa's streets with troops would be embarrassing. More so would be cancelling the event.
But easing the clampdown would be risky. Many Tibetans see the Olympics as a golden opportunity to bring the world's attention to their problems under Chinese rule. Tibetans living outside China, particularly in India, have been taking advantage of the Olympics to step up their publicity efforts. This is an annoyance to India, which does not want to disrupt relations with China by appearing to condone efforts to disrupt the games. Indian police have blocked efforts, launched on March 10th by hundreds of dissident Tibetans, to stage a march across the mountains into their homeland.
China worries too about the possibility that other ethnic minorities in China, particularly Muslim Uighurs in the far western region of Xinjiang, may be emboldened by Tibetan activism if it is left unchecked. The Chinese authorities have played up reports about recent alleged terrorist activities in Xinjiang (as an excuse to suppress peaceful dissent, say sceptics), including what officials say was an attempt by a Uighur woman to start a fire on board a flight bound for Beijing on March 7th.
Richer, but not happier
The longer-term challenge for China is to rethink its Tibet policy. One reason why Chinese officials appeared so surprised by the unrest is that Tibet has not behaved like the rest of China, where rapid economic growth appears to have staved off a repeat of Tiananmen-style protests. A surge of government spending on infrastructure in recent years and strong growth in Tibet's tourism industry (made easier by the new infrastructure, especially the rail link, which was opened in 2006) have helped the region's GDP growth rate stay above 12% for the past seven years. In 2007 it was 14%, more than two points higher than the national rate.
Incomes have been rising fast too. Officials predict a 13% increase this year for rural residents, a sixth straight year of double-digit growth. Urban residents enjoyed a 24.5% increase in disposable income last year. Robbie Barnett of America's Columbia University says a new middle class has emerged in Lhasa in recent years. But, he says, this has made very little difference to what Tibetans think about politics.
AFP
A man not easily angered
In the old Tibetan quarter, many see the Han Chinese as the biggest beneficiaries of economic growth. Hans not only run most of the shops, but are moving into the Tibetan part of the city. Some Tibetans believe Han Chinese now make up around half of the city's population, with the railway bringing in ever more. (An official, however, points out that it is now also easier for Tibetans to reach Lhasa from distant parts of the plateau.)
The economic statistics may be misleading. Incomes may have been growing fast on average, but in the countryside averages have been skewed by soaring demand in the rest of China for a type of traditional medicine known as caterpillar fungus. Tibetans in rural areas where this fungus grows have seen their incomes rocket (and fights have broken out among them over the division of fungus-producing land). In the cities, many complain about fast-rising prices of goods imported from other parts of China. Inflation is a big worry elsewhere in China too, but Tibetan bystanders watching the riots said that Chinese officials had promised the rail link would help bring prices down. The near-empty expanse of the Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Area suggests that officials are having trouble replicating in Tibet the manufacturing boom seen elsewhere in China.
Tibetans also resent the hardline policies of Tibet's party chief, Zhang Qingli. Mr Zhang, who is a Han (China apparently does not yet trust Tibetans to hold this crucial post), was appointed in 2005 after a spell spent crushing separatism in Xinjiang. When he took charge, neglected rules banning students and the families of civil servants from taking part in religious activities began once more to be rigorously enforced. Mr Zhang also stepped up official invective against the Dalai Lama, who is widely revered. (Many Tibetans in Lhasa defiantly hang portraits of him in their homes, or did until the troops moved in.) Mr Zhang urged more “patriotic education” in monasteries, part of which involves denouncing the Dalai Lama. He banned the display of portraits of the Karmapa Lama, who fled to India in 1999 and enjoys a devoted following in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama's role
Chinese officials have been divided over whether greater contact with the Dalai Lama would help to pacify Tibet. Between 2002 and July last year Chinese officials held six rounds of talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives. Laurence Brahm, an American author who has tried to mediate, says the discussions reached a high point in 2005 when the Chinese appeared to recognise that the Dalai Lama was crucial to resolving Tibet's tensions. At one stage the Chinese even considered allowing the Dalai Lama to visit Wutai Mountain in Shanxi province as a confidence-building measure, but they got cold feet. Talks eventually foundered over China's refusal to accept the Dalai Lama's statements that all he wants is Tibet's autonomy within China.
With troops on the streets, dialogue looks unlikely in the near future. China has accused the “Dalai Lama clique” of organising the riots. The Dalai Lama has denied involvement and has accused the Chinese of carrying out “cultural genocide” in his homeland. But he also needs to worry about the future of Han Chinese in Tibet. Many Han business people in Lhasa say they are planning to leave. Tourism from the interior, crucial to Lhasa's economy, is likely to be hard hit too. In the end, China may have a point with its obsession about economics. The recent boom has not won the loyalty or affection of Tibetans, but a slump would make them all the more angry.
http://www.economist.com/world/asia/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10875823
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March 29, 2008
Tour Of Lhasa Shows Wide Scope Of Unrest
2008/03/28/09:10 by Shai Oster from Wall Street Journal
A government-led tour of Lhasa nearly two weeks after antigovernment riots by Tibetans sparked a continuing wave of unrest showed that authorities were ill-prepared for the violence and that it spread far beyond the religious core of the ancient city.
Even as officials insisted calm had returned to the ancient city, Lhasa's three main Tibetan Buddhist monasteries remain locked down, surrounded by armed police. Monks aren't allowed out and journalists aren't allowed in while police continued their investigations into the March 14 incident.
Pelma Trilek, executive deputy chairman of the regional government said 414 people, mostly Tibetan and including monks, had been detained, with 314 still held pending police investigations. Other groups allege many more have been detained. Mr. Pelma said that they are being supplied food, water and electricity. 'We have exercised great restraint. The situation is getting stable. Law and order are basically restored,' he said.
He repeated government claims that the unrest, which broke out four days after monks in Lhasa marked the March 10 anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule, was planned and premeditated by the Dalai Lama ahead of the Beijing Olympics. But he declined to offer any proof. 'We have ample evidence which are still collecting and will release in due time,' he told a group of foreign journalists who are the first allowed back into Lhasa since the violence.
Yet even as the government insisted the violence had been instigated by a small group of monks, it was apparent from interviews that a vast number of people had joined in and that other factors were at play. One government official said that many of the people joining in the looting were unemployed youth. An injured Chinese policeman who has lived in Lhasa for 20 years said that the unrest had spread far beyond the several blocks of the city's core and that many police were injured because they tried to show restraint when responding to the unrest. He said said police were unarmed and didn't carry batons or shields when he was attacked.
Government officials took the journalists on a tour of Lhasa, in which they tried to underscore the brutality of the violence during the incident, in which, they said, Tibetans rioted for a day and half, burning and looting mostly businesses owned by ethnic Han Chinese, and Muslim Hui, but also symbols of authority in an outburst of anger against the government.
The veneer of calm and sense of return to normalcy were briefly shattered during the tour when a group of about 30 monks surrounded reporters visiting the Jokang, the center of Tibetan spirituality, and said they were being held without being allowed to leave.
They said worshipers in the temple and the square -- which lies at the heart of narrow stone alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter and which had been hardest hit by the violence -- were government sympathizers brought in for journalists to view. Officials denied that the government had vetted that day's worshippers. They also said the monks who had spoken out wouldn't be punished. The previous evening, the square and the temple had been sealed off by police, who closed them down again soon after the incident. Mr. Pelma said the 117 monks inside the temple wouldn't be allowed out until after police wrap up their inquiry.
The journalists also visited damaged buildings -- hospitals, the offices of the official Xinhua News agency, a government-run welfare hotel and a middle school. They were also shown injured medical personnel and police and displaced merchants who lost their livelihoods when their shops were burned.
At the Yishion clothing shop where five women had been burned to death, fresh flowers and a banner graced a shrine with their photos. The incident was given broad coverage in state-controlled media to underscore the violence. Tang Qinyan, the brother of the shop's owner, had emigrated six years ago from neighboring Sichuan province, as have thousands of others in recent years, to seek his fortune in Lhasa, contributing to Tibetans fears that they are losing out on economic growth. But he said he won't leave Lhasa. 'We are all unified; there is no ethnic strife,' he said.
The manager of a burned-out Bank of China building said the bank had been targeted because of its affiliation with the Beijing Olympics. 'They did this because they want to protest the games,' said Yang Zhen.
Ma Chuanming, a Hui immigrant from neighboring Gansu province had his whitegoods store destroyed during the violence. He was waiting for a train ticket back to his hometown at a refugee center where about a hundred others were seeking refuge after their homes and business had been destroyed. The crowd were mostly Hui, reflecting their recent influx into the city. 'Back home I was just a farmer, but here I'm a shopkeeper. Of course I'll come back once I rebuild,' Mr. Ma said.
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Han Chinese Say They Are Victims
2008/03/25 11:07 by Gordon Fairclough from Wall Street Journal
Peng Jianwei moved from his hometown in central China to Tibet as a teenager seven years ago, hoping to strike it rich on the country's Western frontier. Now, his dreams are in ashes. His girlfriend was killed, her parents badly injured and the shop where he worked burned to the ground during riots in Lhasa 10 days ago.
In the early afternoon of March 14, the day that the capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region erupted in violence, a crowd of Tibetans, including some crimson-robed Buddhist monks, broke into the clothing store owned by Mr. Peng's girlfriend's family, doused stacks of shirts and jackets with gasoline and set the piles on fire, says Mr. Peng. The details of his story couldn't be independently corroborated.
Mr. Peng's girlfriend, Liu Juan, and her parents, Liu Guobing and Wang Xinping, were hiding upstairs. As the fire spread, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang jumped from a second-story window. Ms. Liu, who was 20 years old and the mother of their 9-month-old son, apparently was overcome by the smoke. Her body was found inside the burned-out shop the next day, says Mr. Peng, who wasn't in Lhasa at the time of the attack.
Mr. Peng, 24, says he related events as described to him by Mr. Liu. Mr. Peng spoke in a telephone interview Monday from Mr. Liu's bedside in the First People's Hospital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in Lhasa. Mr. Liu, who is being treated for spinal injuries, was unable to speak on the phone.
'We lost everything in the blink of an eye,' says Mr. Peng, who is now facing raising their son as a single parent.
Cases such as the Liu family's are fueling ethnic Han Chinese anger with Tibetans, as well as with foreign media, which they feel are ignoring their suffering and instead focusing on Tibetans' grievances with the Chinese government. For most of China's Han majority, the anti-Han violence is the central story of the past 10 days of unrest in China.
China's government has been highlighting the ethnic violence, in part to justify using force to restore order. Demonstrations began in Lhasa on March 10, the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule. After marchers were arrested, more protests ensued and demonstrations turned violent on March 14.
Witnesses said Tibetans -- many of whom are angry with government restrictions on civil rights and religious freedoms and feel economically disadvantaged -- set fire to large numbers of Han-owned businesses as well as a mosque. Chinese authorities have denied journalists access to the restive regions, and almost every day there are conflicting accounts of deaths and injuries by the Chinese government and the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Tales of the suffering of Han Chinese and Muslims at the hands of Tibetans have become a staple of China's government-controlled press. But first-hand accounts of their stories have been relatively rare in Western news reports, in part because of the difficulty of reaching people by phone in Lhasa.
'Numerous Western newspapers, broadcasts and Web sites were full of reporting on the Chinese government's 'crackdown' and 'tyranny' against the Tibetan people,' while largely ignoring the damage caused by rioters, Xinhua news agency said in a commentary published Monday.
Many of the stories of Han Chinese targeted in the violence are harrowing. And many echo with the disillusionment of people who feel that their pioneering spirit and desire to help develop China's West have been betrayed.
Fan Yunhua, 35, left his hometown in Sichuan province and moved to Tibet last November. He opened a small store selling cigarettes, alcohol and drinks using nearly $30,000 he had scraped together from friends and relatives. The shop was on East Beijing Road, not far from Jokhang Temple at the center of Lhasa's old quarter, and served tourists and local Tibetans.
'Folks at home all said it's easy to do business in Tibet,' says Mr. Fan. 'I also heard a lot from the media that the government is opening up Tibet.'
On March 14, Mr. Fan and his wife locked themselves inside their shop as crowds gathered on the streets around them. At around noon, a group of Tibetans broke the door open, Mr. Fan says. Some began knocking bottles from the shelves. Mr. Fan says he and his wife were dragged outside. The details of his story couldn't be independently corroborated.
Seven or eight people began to beat his wife, and as he tried to make his way to help her, he was hit in the head with 'a cellphone-sized rock,' he says. A Tibetan woman rescued his wife and dragged her to shelter by a fire truck. His wife and some other Han shopkeepers hid for two days before being escorted from the neighborhood by paramilitary police, Mr. Fan says.
Mr. Fan says he fled and made his way to a hospital where the wound in his scalp was closed with 20 stitches. The couple is now staying in a government-run shelter for victims of the violence. 'I still want to do business here. I still like the city. But it depends on whether the government will be able to guarantee our safety,' he says.
China's government is acting to reassure the Han population, deploying large numbers of police in Lhasa and elsewhere. Heavily armed police even patrolled the southwestern city of Chengdu over the weekend. Chengdu, more than 1,600 kilometers east of Lhasa, has a sizable Tibetan enclave. The authorities also are highlighting their efforts to bring rioters to justice.
At a news conference in Beijing on Monday, the Public Security Ministry said it had detained five Tibetan men and women in their early twenties on Sunday and Monday. The authorities said the five had confessed to two separate crimes of setting fire to a boutique and a car-repair shop in Lhasa, killing at least seven people -- both Han Chinese and Tibetans -- including an 8-month-old boy.
When Mr. Liu hit the ground after jumping from his burning store, he couldn't move, and was slapped in the face by a Tibetan man, Mr. Peng says. His girlfriend's mother broke an arm in the fall. The two were pulled from the scene by other Han Chinese civilians and policemen and taken to a hospital, Mr. Peng says.
Mr. Peng says he and the Lius could understand some of the Tibetan language but couldn't speak it and had 'very good relations' with their Tibetan customers. But, he says, he had witnessed previous altercations between Tibetans and Hans that had turned into ethnic standoffs. He says he believes the riots were masterminded by the Dalai Lama and were aimed at disrupting the Beijing Olympics in August -- an assertion repeatedly made by the Beijing government and denied by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, who is in exile in India. Since the unrest started, the Dalai Lama has said violence isn't the way to advance the Tibetan cause.
Now, Mr. Peng says, he hopes the government will offer compensation for his and the Lius' losses. Mr. Peng says he and Mr. Liu are still too shaken to discuss their plans for the future. 'This is a sad place. We don't want to stay here. But we may have no choice, Mr. Peng says. 'We don't know if we can start it over.' The main concern now, he says: how to care for his son, who is now staying with relatives in his hometown in Hunan.
http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/20080325/chw112805.asp?source=email
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Interview of James Miles of The Economist
BEIJING, China (CNN) -- James Miles, of The Economist, has just returned from Lhasa, Tibet. The following is a transcript of an interview he gave to CNN.
Q. How easy was it for you to see what you wanted to see?
A. Well remarkably so, given that the authorities are normally extremely sensitive about the presence of foreign journalists when this kind of incident occurs. I was expecting all along that they were going to call me up and tell me to leave Lhasa immediately. I think what restrained them from doing that, one very important factor in this, was the thoughts of the Olympic Games that are going to be staged in Beijing in August. And they have been going out of their way to convince the rest of the world that China is opening up in advance of this. I think they probably didn't want me there but they knew that I was there with official permission, and one thing they've been trying to get across over the last few months is that journalists based in Beijing can now get around the country more freely than they could before. Of course Tibet is a special example. I've been a journalist in China now for 15 years altogether. This is the first time that I've ever got official approval to go to Tibet. And it's remarkable I think that they decided to let me stay there and probably they felt that it was a bit of a gamble. But as the protests went on I think they also probably felt that having me there would help to get across the scale of the ethnically-targeted violence that the Chinese themselves have also been trying to highlight.
Q. What you say you saw corroborates the official version. What exactly did you see?
A. What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves. Those businesses were left intact. Almost every single other across a wide swathe of the city, not only in the old Tibetan quarter, but also beyond it in areas dominated by the ethnic Han Chinese. Almost every other business was either burned, looted, destroyed, smashed into, the property therein hauled out into the streets, piled up, burned. It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence of a most unpleasant nature to watch, which surprised some Tibetans watching it. So they themselves were taken aback at the extent of what they saw. And it was not just targeted against property either. Of course many ethnic Han Chinese and Huis fled as soon as this broke out. But those who were caught in the early stages of it were themselves targeted. Stones thrown at them. At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop. It was a remarkable explosion of simmering ethnic grievances in the city.
Q. Did you see other weapons?
A. I saw them carrying traditional Tibetan swords, I didn't actually see them getting them out and intimidating people with them. But clearly the purpose of carrying them was to scare people. And speaking later to ethnic Han Chinese, that was one point that they frequently drew attention to. That these people were armed and very intimidating.
Q. There was an official response to this. In some reporting, info coming from Tibetan exiles, there was keenness to report it as Tiananmen.
A. Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. Because you would expect at the first sings of any unrest in Lhasa, which is a city on a knife-edge at the best of times. That the response would be immediate and decisive. That they would cordon off whatever section of the city involved, that they would grab the people involved in the unrest. In fact what we saw, and I was watching it at the earliest stages, was complete inaction on the part of the authorities. It seemed as if they were paralyzed by indecision over how to handle this. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, this main central thoroughfare of Lhasa, into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. But I didn't see any attempt in those early hours by the authorities to intervene. And I suspect again the Olympics were a factor there. That they were very worried that if they did move in decisively at that early stage of the unrest that bloodshed would ensue in their efforts to control it. And what they did instead was let the rioting run its course and it didn't really finish as far as I saw until the middle of the day on the following day on the Saturday, March the 15th. So in effect what they did was sacrifice the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger. And then being able to move in gradually with troops with rifles that they occasionally let off with single shots, apparently warning shots, in order to scare everybody back into their homes and put an end to this.
Q. Would be false to suggest there was heavy-handed security approach?
A. Well this was covering a vast area of the city and I was the only foreign journalist, at least accredited, to ... who was there to witness this. It was impossible to get a total picture. I did hear persistent rumors while I was there during this rioting of isolated clashes between the security forces and rioters. And rumors of occasional bloodshed involved in that. But I can do no more really on the basis of what I saw then say there was a probability that some ethnic Chinese were killed in this violence, and also a probability that some Tibetans, Tibetan rioters themselves were killed by members of the security forces. But it's impossible to get the kind of numbers or real first hand evidences necessary to back that up.
Q. Form any sense of where it would go from here?
A. Well I think they now have a huge problem on their hands. When I left Lhasa yesterday the city was still in a state of effectively Martial Law. They've been bending over backwards this time not to declare martial law as they did in 1989 after the last major outbreak of anti-Chinese unrest in Lhasa. This time they have not used that term and yet the conditions now in Lhasa are pretty much the same as they were in 1989 under martial law. Officials say there are no soldiers, no members of the People's Liberation Army involved in this security operation. And yet I saw numerous, many military vehicles, military looking vehicles with telltale license plates covered up or removed. And also many troops there whose uniforms were distinctly lacking in the usual insignia of either the police or the riot police. So my very, very strong suspicion is that the army is out there and is in control in Lhasa. And removing that security given the way Tibetans are now focusing on the Olympics as a window of opportunity, removing that security now I think would be something they would be very, very cautious about. And yet there are enormous pressures on them to do so. Coming up to the Olympic torch carrying ceremony in Lhasa in June. That is one obvious event they will want the world to see and they will want the world to see that Lhasa is normal. But I think getting to that stage will be enormously tricky given the depth of feeling in Lhasa itself among Tibetans.
Q. Did you actually see clashes between security forces and Tibetan protesters?
A. Well what I saw and at this stage, the situation around my hotel which was right in the middle of the old Tibetan quarter, was very tense indeed and quite dangerous so it was difficult for me to freely walk around the streets. But what I saw was small groups of Tibetans, and this was on the second day of the protests, throwing stones towards what I assumed to be, and they were slightly out of vision, members of the security forces. I would hear and indeed smell occasional volleys of Tear gas fired back. There clearly was a small scale clash going on between Tibetans and the security forces. But on the second day things had calmed down generally compared with the huge rioting that was going on...on the Friday. And the authorities were responding to these occasional clashes with Tibetans not by moving forward rapidly with either riot police and truncheons and shields, or indeed troops with rifles. But for a long time, just with occasional, with the very occasional round of tear gas, which would send and I could see this, people scattering back into these very, very, narrow and winding alleyways. What I did not hear was repeated bursts of machine gun fire, I didn't have that same sense of an all out onslaught of massive firepower that I sensed here in Beijing when I was covering the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in June, 1989. This was a very different kind of operation, a more calculated one, and I think the effort of the authorities this time was to let people let off steam before establishing a very strong presence with troops, with guns, every few yards, all across the Tibetan quarter. It was only when they felt safe I think that there would not be massive bloodshed, that they actually moved in with that decisive force.
Q. At time you left, were Han Chinese moving freely back?
A. There were some on the Saturday morning. On the second day we came back to the shops and I saw them picking through the wreckage, tears in their eyes. They were astonished, as I was, at the lack of any security presence on the previous day. It was only during the night at the end of the first day that this cordon was established around the old Tibetan quarter. But even within it, for several hours afterwards, people were still free to continue looting and setting fires, and the authorities were still standing back. And it was only as things fizzled out towards the middle of the second day that as I say they moved in in great numbers. Ethnic Chinese in Lhasa are now very worried people. Some who had been there for many, many years expressed to me their utter astonishment that this had happened. They had no sense of great ethnic tension being a part of life in Lhasa. Now numerous Hans that I spoke to say that they are so afraid they may leave the city, which may have very damaging consequences for Lhasa's economy, Tibet's economy. Of course one would expect that ethnic Chinese would think twice now about coming into Lhasa for tourism, and that's been a huge part of their economic growth recently. And leaving Lhasa, I was sitting on a plane next to some Chinese businessmen, they say that they would normally come in and out of Lhasa by train. But their fear now is that Tibetans will blow up the railway line. That it is now actually safer to fly out of Tibet than to go by railway. We have no evidence of Terrorist activity by Tibetans, no accusation of that nature so far. But that is a fear that's haunting some ethnic Han Chinese now.
Q. When you were told to leave, what were you told?
A. Well I had an 8-day permit to be in Lhasa. That permit began two days before the rioting, on March 12, and was due to run out on March 19. My official schedule was basically abandoned after a couple days of this. Many of the places on my official itinerary turned out to be hotspots in the middle of this unrest. They left me to my own devices. I was stopped by the police at one point, taken to a police station. They made a few phone calls and then let me go back out on the streets full of troops and police carrying out the security crackdown. They insisted however that when my permit did expire on the 19th that I had to leave. I asked for an extension and they said decisively no.
Q. So you weren't expelled? It just ran out?
A. Well we're in a gray area here. Because in theory China has been opened up to foreign journalists since January 2007, which means no longer, which was the case before, do we have to apply for provincial level government approval every time we leave Beijing for reporting. The official regulations don't mention Tibet. But orally, officials have made it clear that Tibet is an exception to these new Olympic rules and journalists who have made their own way there, unofficially, both before this unrest and during it have been caught or ... and expelled. Or those who have succeeded in making it out without being detected have been criticized by the authorities for doing so. So one could argue that yes I was expelled, if one looks at the regulations they've announced which one could interpret as meaning we have the freedom to be where we like. But in their interpretation, Tibet is an exception and in their view they were being rather liberal towards me by letting run to the end of my official permit.
Q. Is Dalai behind this?
A. Well we didn't see any evidence of any organized activity, at least there was nothing in what I sensed and saw during those couple of days of unrest in Lhasa, there was anything organized behind it. And I've seen organized unrest in China. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 involved numerous organizations spontaneously formed by people in Beijing to oppose, or to call for more reform and demand democracy. We didn't see that in Lhasa. There were no organizations there that ... certainly none that labeled themselves as such. These accusations against what they call the Dalai Lama clique, are ritual parts of the political rhetoric in Tibet. There is a constant background rhetoric directed at the Dalai Lama and his supporters in India. So it is not at all surprising that they would repeat that particular accusation in this case. But they haven't come across, haven't produced any evidence of this whatsoever. And I think it's more likely that what we saw was yes inspired by a general desire of Tibetans both inside Tibet and among the Dalai Lama's followers, to take advantage of this Olympic year. But also inspired simply by all these festering grievances on the ground in Lhasa
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