Wang Xianchang (王憲棠) writes an interesting essay (in Chinese) on the Hong Kong Ming Pao Daily, relating two major news events: Tibet unrest and the Wenchuan earthquake. Roland Soong translated the essay on his EastSouthWestNorth blog:
After the Sichuan earthquake occurred, I wondered how affected were the Tibetans. After all, the heavily hit epicenter of Wenchuan was inside the Aba Autonomous Prefecture for the Tibetan and Xiang ethnic groups. Readers who are concerned about the Tibet issue will recall that there multiple large-scale protests that were suppressed in the Aba Prefecture after the Lhasa incident in March. So the two biggest news stories in China recently converged here. Although numerous reporters were out there, very few reports linked the two together. This was perplexing.
After waiting for a long time, I finally spotted a related news story in Ming Pao on June 1. The headline was striking, with each word about 3 centimeters big: “Armed Tibet Independence elements robbed disaster relief materiel.” This news story had originated from a mainland news and the Ming Pao reporter made an independent verification. But the report did not explain the basis by which the armed robbers were “Tibet independence elements.”
