Highly-intrusive mass surveillance programmes by China have stoked popular resentment in the Tibet Autonomous Region, leading to many clashes between locals and police. The situation is on the boil
Recently The New York Times carried an article, “Who’s Afraid of Chinese MoneyIJ” Jonathan Mirsky, the author, recounts the story of the British Prime Minister John Major in the autumn of 1991; he was the first Western leader to visit China after the Tiananmen events.
Major had told the Press that he would present a list of several hundred political prisoners prepared by Amnesty International, to the Chinese leadership. After meeting Premier li Peng, Major confirmed to the Press that he had passed on the list to his Chinese counterpart; everyone praised Major’s moral courage. later on, Mirsky discovered from one of the British officials who attended the meet, that Major had never shown the list to li Peng, nor had he spoken a word about human rights; he had plainly lied. Business was already business.
Don’t expect Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to ask the Chinese leaders what is happening in Tibet; so-called future economic business prospects are too important for India. It, however, remains true that the human rights situation in Tibet is grim. In fact, it has not been so bad since 2008.
The case of Nagqu is interesting: Despite several ‘inspection tours’ by high-level Communist Party dignitaries (including Mr Yu Zhengsheng, the No 4 in the party, in charge of Tibetan affairs), the Prefecture is on the boil; several Tibetans are said to have been killed by Chinese bullets. Nagqu is one of the seven Prefectures of the Tibet Autonomous Region; it is the largest with an area of 4,50,537 sqkm for a population of 4,00,000. As it is located on the Qinghai-Tibet railway line, Beijing plans to transform the Prefecture into one of the main economic hubs on the Tibetan plateau — without considering the local population.
In May, Mr Yu chaired a meeting of the Small Group on Tibet, a body which implements China’s Tibet policies, in Beijing. The meeting was attended by senior cadres from the Tibetan Autonomous Region as well as from Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces. Soon after the meeting, the Party Secretaries from these areas went back to their respective Provinces and preached to the ‘masses’ the importance of Mr Yu’s instructions. Mr Chen Quanguo, the TAR’s Party Secretary, went to the Nagqu Prefecture to carry Mr Yu’s message to “bring stability and harmony to Nagqu”.
Unfortunately for Secretary Chen, the day he was returning to lhasa, thousands of Tibetans gathered in Driru, one of Nagqu’s counties. They met at a sacred Tibetan mountain to protest against the Government’s planned mining projects in Driru County. The mountain, called lhachen Naglha Dzambha, is rich in mineral resources. On May 24, over 1,000 pick-up cars, with more than 5,000 Tibetans gathered near the sacred site to stop wild mining by Chinese firms. Apparently, the Tibetans managed to temporarily block the mining operation, though the situation remained tense.
Already in October 2012, two Tibetan cousins, Tsepo, 20 and Tenzin, 25, self-immolated in front of a school in Driru. The cousins shouted slogans calling for freedom in Tibet and the return of Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai lama, before setting themselves alight. They pleaded to all Tibetans to be “united like brothers”. The resentment is due to a host of highly-intrusive mass surveillance campaigns known as ‘Benefit the Masses, Solidify the Foundation’, ‘The Grid Management’ system, ‘New Socialist Villages’, which are being implemented in the area. Those who do not comply with these regulations are severely beaten and punished.
A year later, on September 28, a serious confrontation happened between the Chinese security forces and local Tibetans in Mowa village in Diru County. The Tibetans rebelled against a new campaign known as the ‘Nine Must Haves’ which says, amongst other things, that it is compulsory to fly the red national flag on private houses.
When local Tibetans refused, the People’s Armed Police immediately arrived on the spot. This led to an inevitable confrontation. The local authorities in Diru County announced that Tibetans who don’t comply with official rules would be punished; Tibetan protesters would have their children expelled from schools; their sick relatives would not receive medical care in hospitals; and they would not get licenses to harvest the famous Ophiocordyceps sinensis, a pricey caterpillar fungus used as an aphrodisiac in China.
A few weeks earlier, the Tibetan Autonomous Region authorities had sent some 18,000 Chinese cadres to Diru to intensify the Party’s ‘mass line’ policy; these cadres conducted ‘patriotic education’ campaigns among local Tibetans, demanding them to pledge their ‘love and gratitude’ to the Party and the nation.
On September 29, another protest took place with 4,000 students of Diru County’s primary and middle schools after they were informed about the threat to expel their classmates whose parents had participated in the earlier protests. The County middle school has been indefinitely closed.
A day after the National Day (October 2), local Tibetans in Diru County once again defied the security forces by putting up human blockades along major highways occupied by the security forces. They demonstrated against the annihilation of the Tibetan identity. Four Tibetans are said to have been killed by bullets in the demonstrations.
To give an idea of the scale of the ‘monitoring’ of Tibetan activities, Xinhua recently admitted that during the last two years, 60,000 cadres have been stationed in 5,459 villages and 1,877 monastic institutions in TAR. Mr Wu Yingjie, the TAR Executive Secretary is a Han Chinese with 39 years of work experience in Tibet; he has been camping in Nagqu for weeks. The fact that the central leadership has had to depute Mr Wu to Nagqu for a long period of time means the situation is seriously out of control.
But worse, China’s new security czar, Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun, had to fly from Beijing to lhasa to take stock of the latest happenings. During his visit (only announced after his return to Beijing on October 10), Mr Guo called “for efforts to ensure long-term stability of the Tibet Autonomous Region in order to guarantee the region’s leapfrog economic development.” According to Xinhua, Mr Guo “inspected police stations to check on the work of police patrols, how criminal and non-criminal reports were resolved, fire fighting and public service.”
How long can the situation continue to deteriorateIJ The time has perhaps come for the Communist authorities to think out of the box, and even use the services of the Dalai lama to pacify Tibet. This would be a great leap forward for the Communist regime. It is the only solution which makes sense.