Stubborn Tibetans Refuse to Be Cowed

Now, when we were savage, fierce and wild (Whack fol the diddle o dee die do day)
She came as a mother to her child (Whack fol the diddle o the dee do day)

She gently raised us from the slime
And kept our hands from hellish crime
And she sent us to heaven in our own good time (Whack fol the diddle o dee die do day) [“Whack Fol the Diddle,” an Irish protest song]

The Tibetan uprising is on again in Lhasa, and worst of all for the Chinese, it broke out just as it brought in a group of foreign diplomats to show them that China’s idea of order had been restored:

Witnesses in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, say fresh protests erupted there Saturday afternoon despite a massive Chinese police and paramilitary presence.

Witnesses told RFA’s Tibetan service that several hundred Tibetans rallied around 2 p.m. on March 29, beginning in the area near Center Beijing Road. Shops near the central post office on Lhasa Youth Road were closed, as security forces surrounded the Tibetan residential areas in Barkhor, Kama Kunsang, Ramoche, and the Jokhang temple. “People were running in every direction,” one witness said. “It was a huge protest, and people were shouting.” [Radio Free Asia]

The only violence reported this time were “fistfights,” reported by an unidentified source, and which could well have involved Tibetans resisting arrests by security forces. The incident follows a similar embarrassment for China just the day before:

Earlier this week, the government took select foreign media to Lhasa to highlight the wreckage and give the impression that the city was returning to normal, but the plan backfired when about 30 monks at Jokhang stormed an official news briefing.

The monks complained about a lack of religious freedom and voiced support for the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism who lives in exile and who China accuses of masterminding the unrest. [Reuters, Lindsay Beck and John Ruwitch]

The Washington Post describes the highly scripted, scheduled, and controlled visits and the protest that broke out just as the diplomats were being escorted out of Lhasa. Chinese residents apparently panicked and began closing their shops and began trying, in vain to catch taxis and buses home. The authorities cut off cell phone service, which amplified the sense of panic.

China has tried to characterize all Tibetan protest as violent, and to that end, we’ve seen nonviolent protests crushed with ruthlessness and without video, but in the case of the violent protests, we saw a sequence unprecedented in the history of the Peoples’ Republic of China — the China Central Television arrived before the armored personnel carriers.

I’m certainly not suggesting that all these events were staged; these events have been a PR disaster for China and shattered its fake image of order and harmony. The Tibetans’ violence against ordinary Han Chinese and their shops seems to have been a very real (and very wrong) part of their challenge to Chinese rule, but because of China’s news blackout over protests that it hasn’t been replaying for a global audience, it’s reasonable to draw some inferences about what China won’t let us see. The majority of reports I’ve read speak either of nonviolent protest or of justified violence — violence against buildings and personnel of a foreign occupation that Tibetans have never been allowed to reject democratically or nonviolently.

And as brutal as China’s response may have been thus far, I’m sure it’s nothing next to what will happen after the Olympics are over. By rejecting any calls for dialogue or even limited autonomy, China has blocked every nonviolent means of opposition. It’s also self-evident that appeals to world sympathy mean little in practice. Just read the silence from the U.N. and the International Olympic Committee, or the muted responses from President Bush and the European Union. As a commenter pointed out recently, the Dalai Lama doesn’t command any divisions, either. If Tibetans are going to have any degree of independence or force China to negotiate in good faith, they’ll have to take up arms.