Nothing Will Come of Nothing

I’ve posted on the anti-government protests in Tibet and adjacent portions of China proper at Outside the Beltway.

BTW, the demonstrations and the Chinese reaction are the top story at The Economist. Their correspondent was perhaps the only Westerner to file a first hand report:

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.

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.

Follow the link to read the rest of this excellent report.

3 comments… add one
  • zyq Link

    talk nonsense!who give you the right to calumny a government and nation different from yours?we Chinese love peace and treasure the friendship with other countries,as well as with USA.but we never beg for friends,and we never fear any enemy .no one can conquer Chinese people.the history proves that anyone who tries to invade us must be defeated.we treat friends with good vine while we treat the beasts with gun!

  • zyq Link

    correction:
    we treat friends with good wine while we treat the beasts with gun!

  • zyq:

    There’s an expression in English “parading one’s ignorance” that you might want to get familiar with. There’s no “calumny” in my post and if you’d read it or understood it, you’d know that.

    As to rights, whatever you believe we believe that we have the right to say and write anything we care to and that right is secured by our laws. Consequently, my response to you is that Heaven has given me that right and my country ensures it.

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