As Chinese authorities reportedly beef up the military presence in Tibetan regions out west, efforts are being made to have Lhasa return to some semblance of normalcy. Nevertheless, sporadic reports of ongoing protests are still coming in, including a peaceful demonstration by Tibetan farmers and nomads in Luqu County, Gansu Province. Foreigners have been kicked out of Tibet and other Tibetan areas. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that Premier Wen Jiabao has assured him that Chinese officials are willing meet with the Dalai Lama, who Wen has blamed for the unrest.
The chasm in thinking between Dharamsala, India, the base for the Tibetan government-in-exile, and Beijing, is evident in statements made recently by both sides. On Open Democracy, Gabriel Lafitte, advisor to the government-in-exile, writes:
What do Tibetans find so objectionable about today’s China? Why is it that Tibetans and Chinese, neighbours for thousands of years, cannot get on?
Media coverage focuses on immediate causes, but there is a deeper story. The experience of working with Tibetans for thirty years, and of seeing Chinese development projects in Tibet for myself (as well as of having been briefly imprisoned for it), I can share what my Tibetan friends tell me. Contemporary Chinese capitalist modernity is as problematic for Tibetans as past state violence and repression. China today pours money – overwhelmingly state money – into Tibet: into railways, highways, tourist infrastructure and a top-heavy administrative elite. Glass towers, shopping-malls, enormous brothels masquerading as discos, towering offices, now dominate urban Tibetan skylines which only twenty years ago were a sacred landscape of prayer flags, temples and meditation.
On the face of it, that’s progress. If Lhasa now looks like any Chinese boomtown, that’s just the price of modernity – or so many outsiders say. But Tibetans find themselves excluded from the material benefits of modernity, watching powerlessly as gangs of non-Tibetan immigrants take over even the unskilled jobs on construction sites and in driving taxis. Tibetans remain poor, socially excluded, on the margins of a state-funded construction boom that reduces them to a minority meant to smile for the tourist cameras as they try to focus on their spiritual pilgrimage.
While Zhang Qingli, the Communist Party secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, was quoted in yesterday’s New York Times as saying:
“The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need,” Mr. Zhang said last year. He later added: “The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans.”
Other links about the situation in Tibet:
* The Tibetan exile site Phayul has collected numerous audio and video links of the unrest and interviews with eyewitnesses, as well as protests around the world.
* China’s Olympic Delusion by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom in The Nation
* Chinese Citizens, Get Your Tibet Protest Videos Here from Wired, which collects non-YouTube links to Tibet-related videos
* China’s Himalayan Reach by Simon Robinson in Time Magazine, about China’s influence on the government of Nepal.
* An Overlooked Pocket of Unrest by Adrienne Mong of NBC News, about her efforts to report on protests and reported deaths in Aba County, Gansu Province.
* China’s Patchy Tibet Blackout by Edward Cody of the Washington Post, about the Chinese media blackout on the unrest.
