Bharat Rakshak

"According to what we understand, over the past few days the life and Buddhist activities of the monks at the Kirti monastery are all normal. Social order there is also normal. Material supplies in the temple are totally sufficient," The report quoted China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei as saying at a regular news briefing.

Hong had offered a dubious explanation for the lockdown China has imposed on the monastery. "The Kirti temple's administration and local police a long time ago set up a police-temple joint patrol team. The aim was to prevent people of uncertain identity from entering the temple. Relations between the police and the temple have always been harmonious," Reuters quoted him as saying.

Lobsang Sangay to be Tibetan Prime Minister
Lalit Mohan/TNS

Dharamsala, April 27
Lobsang Sangay, a research fellow at Harvard Law School and former activist of the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), will be the next Tibetan Prime Minister-in-exile (Kalon Tripa).

After Chief Election Commissioner Jamphel Chosang declared the results today, Lobsang will be the third directly elected Tibetan PM since the elections were held for the first time in 2001. He will succeed current incumbent to the post-Samdhong Rinpoche.

In a message on his campaign website, Lobsang, who won the elections by a margin of more than 8,600 votes ahead of the closest contender, wrote: “Your overwhelming support is humbling and I will do my utmost to live up to your expectations”.

“With profound humility, I accept the Tibetan people's support and the post of Kalon Tripa. I urge every Tibetan and friends of Tibet to join me in our common cause to alleviate the sufferings of Tibetans in occupied Tibet and ensure that the Dalai Lama gets his rightful place in the Potala Palace,” Lobsang said in his message.

Lobsang is currently in the US and is likely to reach Dharamsala in mid-May, sources here told The Tribune. He will join the office in June. The biggest challenge before him after joining the office will be to engage China in the bilateral dialogue process in the absence of the Dalai Lama. With China already dubbing him as a terrorist, it seems to be an uphill task. Out of the 83,399 voters around the world, 49,184 (approximately 59%) voted in the elections held on March 20, 2011.

Lobsang secured 27,051 (55%) votes out of the total votes cast, leading the next two contenders, Tethong Tenzin Namgyal and Tashi Wangdi, by 8,646 votes and 23,878 votes, respectively. Tethong got 18,405 (37.42%) and Wangdi got 3,173 (6.44%) votes. Lobsang Sangay won owing to the strong support from young Tibetans.

The CEC said Tibetans in Kathmandu could not take part in the elections as the Nepalese authorities barred them from polling. He, however, said votes from other parts of Nepal and Bhutan were able to reach the EC office.

The Election Commission also announced the results for the 15th Tibetan Parliament-in-exile. As many as 21 new candidates, including six women, have made a fresh entry to the next Parliament that will formally take over the House in June. The Tibetan Parliament comprises 44 seats, 10 each from the three traditional provinces, two each from five religious traditions, including Bon, and 2 each from North America and Europe.

However, only 42 candidates are declared elected by the commission as U-Tsang Province remained short of two members for want of the required minimum number of votes. To be elected as a member of the Tibetan Parliament, a candidate must at least secure 33 per cent of the votes.

Ten years in the making, this award-winning feature-length documentary was filmed during nine journeys throughout Tibet, India and Nepal. Cry of the Snow Lion brings audiences to the long-forbidden “rooftop of the world” with an unprecedented richness of imagery… from rarely-seen rituals in remote monasteries, to horse races with Khamba warriors; from brothels and slums in the holy city of Lhasa, to magnificent Himalayan peaks still traveled by nomadic yak caravans. The dark secrets of Tibet’s recent past are powerfully chronicled through personal stories and interviews, and a collection of undercover and archival images never before assembled in one film. A definitive exploration of a legendary subject, Cry of the Snow Lion is an epic story of courage and compassion. Tibetans have a tremendous body of spiritual knowledge, a spiritual technology if you will, that is an immense gift to human learning. They have preserved in their monastic universities a vast corpus of learning and understanding about the nature of consciousness, the structure of the human mind, that western science is just beginning to comprehend.

Tibetan monks remaining at a restive Buddhist monastery in China’s Sichuan province are being forced to undergo a “grueling” routine of political re-education by Chinese authorities after 300 of their number were forcibly removed by Chinese security forces, sources said.

Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China
by Tim Johnson
Nation Books, 333 pp., $26.99

On March 10 the Fourteenth Dalai Lama made front-page news throughout the world by saying,

"As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power. Now, we have clearly reached the time to put this into effect. During the forthcoming eleventh session of the fourteenth Tibetan Parliament in Exile, which begins on 14th March, I will formally propose that the necessary amendments be made to the Charter for Tibetans in Exile, reflecting my decision to devolve my formal authority to the elected leader."

It is well known that Beijing regularly dismisses the Dalai Lama as a criminal and a “splittist.” But will this announcement that he will relinquish his temporal leadership make it more likely that Tibet will become a truly autonomous part of China, as the Dalai Lama has for years proposed to Beijing? [1]

As the title of his new book suggests, Tim Johnson thinks that there is no chance of such an arrangement. On the final page he concludes:

"As the Dalai Lama’s life enters its final stretch…more and more Han [ethnic Chinese] migrants will arrive on the Tibetan plateau, and almost inevitably Tibet will head the way of Inner Mongolia and other regions of the mainland subsumed by the vast Han majority. The race is nearly over."

The Mongolian comparison is especially grim: in 1949, Mongols in their region outnumbered Hans by five to one. By the year 2000 there had been so much Han migration that there were 4.6 Hans for every Mongol in Inner Mongolia, and now only 17 percent of its population are Mongols, “confined largely to nomadic settlements and ethnic oases in a larger sea of Han.”

This is not what admirers of the Dalai Lama want to hear, and I feel uneasy endorsing it; but from my first visit to Tibet in 1982 I noticed how the Hans were swamping almost every aspect of Tibetan life. Johnson writes that during their annual negotiations in China, the Dalai Lama’s emissaries’ proposal of an autonomous Tibet within the People’s Republic, with its own religious, educational, and other cultural characteristics, has been dismissed by the regime; the Chinese side has insisted that only the “criminal, splittist Dalai” is discussable. In his book To a Mountain in Tibet, Colin Thubron writes tersely, but characteristically to the point, of the Dalai Lama:


"His apostleship of peace has brought his country a refracted holiness, but no Chinese concession. The West fetes and wonders at him. As for China, his distrust of material institutions, even of his own office, renders him all but incomprehensible". [2]

More than incomprehensible: Beijing calls the Dalai Lama “a wolf wrapped in robes, a monster with a human face and an animal’s heart.” I have heard young Chinese studying in British universities like Oxford and the LSE quote Rupert Murdoch, who called the Dalai Lama “a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.” Murdoch, ever keen to flatter the Chinese in order to get access to their markets, could be expected to make cheap remarks about the far more intelligent and brave Tibetan.

Tim Johnson spent six years in Beijing as a bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder and McClatchy newspapers, and he identifies China’s three greatest hates: “the three Ts and one F—meaning Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement;…the F refers to the Falun Gong meditation sect…harshly suppressed and declared an ‘evil cult.’” Of these, Tibet is the most “radioactive”; Johnson was briefly there in 2008, although it was off-limits to journalists, as it had been for at least thirty years. He buttresses, and occasionally pads out, his pessimistic case (which is basically an informed guess) by going to India, Tibet, areas of China sometimes called Greater Tibet in which many Tibetans live, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, home of the oppressed Muslim Uighurs.

Born in 1935, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama knows the looming succession is a serious matter. Two years ago he told me that his doctors had assured him he would live to 102, thus probably outlasting the Chinese Communists, [3] and, probably joking, he told Johnson that he doubted the Communist regime would last another ten years. From time to time he has said he would like to reappear as a “humble monk,” but he has said, too, that “if my death comes when we are still in a refugee status, then logically my reincarnation will come outside Tibet.” It is also ritually legitimate, as Johnson observes, for a living Dalai Lama to identify his next incarnation.

But Beijing has already rehearsed for what comes after this Dalai Lama. In 1989 the Tenth Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second-highest religious figure, died, and in 1995, the Dalai Lama designated as his incarnation a boy called Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. This child was almost immediately kidnapped with his family and replaced by a Communist-approved boy as the authentic Eleventh Panchen; most Tibetans reject him, Johnson notes, as a “faux Panchen Lama.”

In Beijing Johnson interviewed Yabshi Pan Rinzinwangmo, or Renji, the Tenth Panchen’s daughter by a Chinese woman. A carefully protected woman who is sometimes called “Princess,” Renji remembers her father; when she was six she and her mother flew to Tibet where the Panchen had mysteriously died. As I found when she visited me in London, she is cautious about committing herself on China’s role in Tibet or on the Eleventh incarnation. “With me,” Johnson writes,

"she kept her guard shrewdly, saying only that she has yet to gaze into his [the Eleventh Panchen’s] eyes [to recognize—or not—her father’s spirit]…. She understands her strategic value in the drama over the young man who now wears the yellow hat of the Panchen Lama: “He needs me more than I need him.”"

Discreet though she is, Renji must know that statement will panic the Chinese authorities. Even more alarming, in 2003 she said this to me: “What do you think is my relationship to the boy in Beijing? Shouldn’t he respect me because of my father?” [4]

During these disputes about incarnations, the Dalai Lama tends to put first on his list of preferred successors the Seventeenth Karmapa, the leader, now in his twenties, of another Buddhist lineage, who escaped from China in 1999 and now lives near Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s Indian sanctuary. In the minds of many Tibetans he has taken the place of the Panchen as their favored successor to the Dalai Lama. Energetically pursuing his story, Johnson traveled to see the Karmapa. He is unique in that both Beijing and the Dalai Lama look upon him favorably, at least, says Johnson, as “a temporary leader, or regent…a pan-Tibetan figure above sectarian disputes.”

Recently, the Karmapa has been embroiled in an Indian media farce that accused him of taking huge sums of money from various sources including China. This has largely blown over. [5] As discreet as the Panchen Lama’s daughter, he told Johnson:

"I’m already the Karmapa. That’s my role and it’s already one I feel quite weighed down by…. For anywhere between 800 and 900 years, the Karmapa has been a very apolitical figure, a person who has concentrated on spiritual leadership, not involved in any way with governmental leadership. So I think it would be very difficult to change that historical pattern overnight and turn the role of the Karmapa into something more than strictly a spiritual teacher."

The Karmapa is aware that “the situation of Tibet is dire…. So it’s actually quite a hot potato that we have here…. If we were to wait 50 years, we would be in danger of losing a great chunk of Tibetan culture that could not be recovered.”

Another of Johnson’s sources is Tsering Woeser, a prominent Tibetan dissident, poet, and blogger who lives in Beijing with her Chinese husband, Wang Lixiong, a famous novelist and supporter of the Tibetan cause. A bird in a gilded cage, Woeser is in exile from Tibet and forbidden to leave China. Although her mother, sister, and brother still live in Tibet, Woeser is less discreet than Renji or the Karmapa:

"I am pessimistic…. Tibet is totally controlled by the Chinese government. Under these circumstances, it’s impossible for Tibetans to change the destiny of Tibet. Tibet can only change along with China. However, the Chinese government is a rather despotic dictatorship so the possibility of change in Tibet is quite low…. The future of Tibet will not be promising…. The damage is accelerating."

This damage can take surprising forms. In Nepal, Johnson met a young Tibetan with frostbitten toes from his agonizing trek across the mountains. Why had he fled? He didn’t get along with his older brother. Truly amazingly, when asked if he longed, as most such refugees passionately insist, to meet the Dalai Lama in India, the young man said. “I’ve never heard of the Dalai Lama.” Some may suppose his village was extremely remote, but in my own travels through Tibet I never met a single Tibetan, no matter how far from the cities, who didn’t worship the Dalai Lama. That was twenty years ago. Chinese domination may be more pervasive than we suppose.

Johnson’s experiences in Tibet were brief but while there he kept his eyes and ears open. It is well known, for example, that up to 1.8 million herdsmen and nomads are being moved off the grasslands into semi-urban housing. Beijing, Johnson observes, claims that overgrazing was keeping the nomads poor, and that relocating them is necessary to restore the environment. Johnson saw “vast stretches of overgrazed grasslands…desert-like areas that barely sustain life.” He contends, however, that shifting the herders off their traditional terrain is ending a traditional way of life, “a pillar of Tibetan identity.” The bleak camps in which they are crammed “facilitate Chinese surveillance and control of the nomads, most of whom hold little allegiance to China.” Nor is it only the nomads whom Beijing squeezes. Monks and nuns, writes Johnson, who refuse to denounce the Dalai Lama are given sentences of five years; in late 2009, a US Congress–sponsored commission “tallied 445 monks and nuns in prison on political charges.”

Lhasa, Johnson found, “has lost some of its soul…. Tibetans were a minority. Han migrants drive nearly every taxi, and Han and ethnic Hui Muslims own most shops, a sign of the marginalization of Tibetans.” This is precisely what Colin Thubron noticed, far from Lhasa on the Chinese–Nepali border, in the first Tibetan town he entered. A US State Department study estimates—how was this counted?—that there are “ten thousand sex workers” in the two main Tibetan cities, Lhasa and Shigatse: “some of the prostitution occurred at sites owned by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], the government, and the military.”

And far from Tibet, as Johnson points out, Beijing threatens ill-defined consequences for any country that assents to official contact with the Dalai Lama. These threats work. In 2008 British Foreign Secretary David Milliband, after years of national silence on the subject, suddenly declared that Tibet was a part of China. Also in 2008, then–prime minister Gordon Brown greeted the Dalai Lama at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence, Lambeth Palace, rather than at 10 Downing Street, thus appearing to regard the Dalai Lama as a religious, not a political, leader; Tibetans regard him as both. Russia and South Korea refuse visits from the Dalai Lama, while successive American presidents since Clinton, all of whom professed to admire the Tibetan leader, avoided greeting him in the Oval Office—as has President Obama—and contrived to have him “drop by” in less formal quarters in the White House.

Johnson mentions Wal-Mart, “the world’s biggest retailer…[which] imports about 70 percent of its products from China,” and perceives what he calls the “Wal-Mart fissure” into which Tibet might fall. The concerns of huge employers like Wal-Mart, he contends, have far more influence on US China policy, and therefore on Tibet, than any number of pro-Tibet Hollywood stars and what he sees as the ineffectual Tibetan government in exile. “Dharamsala has none of the revolutionary zeal of Ramallah in the West Bank, nor does it simmer with the anti-Castro–type conspiracies that roil the Miami of Cuban-Americans.” The readiness to use violence on the West Bank or the roiling conspiracies in Miami seem to me less admirable than the patient Tibetan exile government and its capable representatives abroad.

But the Chinese never let up their pressure on Tibetan matters. In 2009, Johnson says, legislators in California sponsored a resolution to establish “Dalai Lama and Tibet Awareness Day”; before long Beijing’s lobbying, involving threats of economic sanctions, persuaded a majority in the legislature to slide the resolution into limbo. A year later Beijing bullied nineteen countries into boycotting the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in Oslo. American policymakers are transfixed by Beijing’s huge holdings of US Treasury bonds. Bullying gets ever more effective as Washington and its allies count on Beijing to help negotiate with North Korea, Iran, and perhaps Burma. Under such battering, Tibet fades into the background.

Johnson has asked himself why Beijing doesn’t offer Tibet the same deal that it concluded with Hong Kong: “One country, two systems.” But then, he admits, “I came to my senses. The Communist Party would cede no ground.” Johnson notes that whenever the Dalai Lama’s negotiators put forward proposals for a measure of Tibetan autonomy, Beijing’s reply is that such suggestions are “exactly the same as ‘semi-independence’ and ‘covert independence.’” Other ethnic nationalists, Beijing fears, would feel a spurt of hope. Tibet’s vital minerals and water resources could be lost. Missile bases might have to be withdrawn. Indeed, “most Chinese I knew,” Johnson says, “wanted to pull Tibet more tightly into Beijing’s embrace rather than let up on a bear hug many Tibetans see as suffocating.” He might have added, “How many battalions does the Dalai Lama have?” And what if Communist China collapsed? Other oppressive regimes have perished in recent memory, although in the case of the former Soviet Union the conflicts with some of the ethnic areas—dating back at least as far as Tolstoy—remain long-lasting and deadly.

The pressure on Beijing may well lessen after the Dalai Lama dies. When the Tibetan exile government discusses matters like a democratically elected government and a new prime minister, with the Dalai Lama deliberately absenting himself, it is apparent they are not much interested in a future without the Dalai Lama in charge. In India Johnson met Tenzin Tsundue, one of the leaders of an exile faction of young Tibetans demanding full independence for Tibet. In 2002, when then Chinese premier Zhu Rongji was visiting Bombay, Tsundue scaled a tall building to unfurl a banner saying “Free Tibet.” But even this daring activist admitted to Johnson that many Tibetans in the diaspora wait for indications from the Dalai Lama before they act. “The people worship His Holiness as the Buddha. He’s a Buddha in real life. People say [to him], ‘I will die if you say. You make the decision and I will follow.’” When the parliament in exile recently considered the constitutional change that would lead to a replacement for the Dalai Lama, eleven of the first fourteen members to speak opposed any move that would permit such a change.

Some Tibetans look farther into the future. It surprised Johnson to learn about the Special Frontier Force (SFF) of Tibetan mountain commandos created in India after the 1962 border war between China and India. In a new war, it was imagined, these commandos could fight in the Chinese rear. More interesting still is that this unit is under the command not of the army but of the Indian intelligence agency. It is not well known that several thousand young Tibetans have been trained this way, Johnson writes, who “see their service as keeping hopes for Tibetan independence alive.” Those in the Vikasregiment of the SFF sing:

We are the Vikasi
The Chinese snatched Tibet from us
And kicked us out from our home….
One day, surely one day
We will teach the Chinese a lesson….

The Dalai Lama “bristled” when Johnson mentioned armed resistance. “Our struggle is not military. It is not realistic. It’s suicidal. It’s a waste of human life.”

The illusions of Tibetans and their supporters abroad worry Johnson. He emphasizes that “no matter how worried party leaders may be about Tibet, their public posture reflects no indecision or internal debate.” The outrage of Hollywood stars like Richard Gere has not weakened the tightening Chinese grip on the region. Beijing is on a roll that is hard for anyone to resist including the great powers, much less a few million, usually nonviolent, Tibetans. Johnson warns that Tibetans hoping to outlast the present Beijing regime, gaining hope when they hear that the Dalai Lama has met President Obama or that international street actions and campaigns support Tibet, are doomed to disappointment. “I rarely had the heart to disrupt their delusional dreams.”

On the other hand Chinese leaders react with satisfaction when they hear men like David Milliband state that Tibet belongs to China. It makes no difference in Beijing if those who make such statements believe what they are saying. Words mean everything to the Communist Party, which equates them with acts; that is why they lock up dissidents like Liu Xiaobo—and Johnson knows him well—because of what they have said. And because words mean so much the Chinese “have ensured that he [the Dalai Lama] has almost no way of communicating with ordinary Chinese,” much less Tibetans. [6]

The Dalai Lama could not be more of a realist: “The crucial question is whether Tibet will become like Inner Mongolia, where Mongols have now become a minority. When that happens the significance of self-rule is lost.” Each year his death draws closer and the world may be faced with the spectacle of what Tim Johnson, in his energetically researched and comprehensive book, calls “dueling Dalai Lamas.” One, beyond Beijing’s grasp, might be a woman, His Holiness has suggested, or, in accordance with traditional ritual, he could identify a reincarnation before his death. The rival Dalai Lama would be like Beijing’s tame Eleventh Panchen, scorned in Tibet, and into whose eyes Renji, the young woman who the Communist Party claims is this faux incarnation’s spiritual daughter, has yet to gaze.

[1] According to Robert Barnett, an authority on Tibet at Columbia, "It is true that for China and for most of us, we will not see much difference in the short term if his plan goes ahead. The Dalai Lama has said that he will continue travelling around the world as a religious leader and will still speak on Tibetan issues, albeit in a personal capacity. So this is not a monastic vow of silence or an end to his role as the figurehead of the Tibetan people and as the most powerful voice through which their concerns will be expressed." See Barnett, "Viewpoint: Dalai Lama's Exile Challenge for Tibetans," bbc.co.uk, March 14, 2011. ↩

[2] Harper, 2011, p. 109; reviewed in these pages by Pico Iyer, April 7, 2011. ↩

[3] See my " How He Sees It Now ," The New York Review , July 17, 2008. ↩

[4] Johnson writes that there is some sort of special relationship between President Hu Jintao and Renji because he respected the Tenth Panchen when he was alive. But in 1989 when I met Hu in Tibet, where he was Party secretary, he told me he despised Tibetans. ↩

[5] For a sensible round-up of this story see Paul Mooney, "Many Accusations but Few Facts as Karmapa Accused of Spying," South China Morning Post , February 9, 2011. ↩

[6] An exception was the Internet conversation last year between the Dalai Lama and some Chinese, which Johnson describes in his book. See also Perry Link, " Talking About Tibet: An Open Dialogue Between Chinese Citizens and the Dalai Lama ," NYRblog, May 24, 2010. ↩

abhishek_sharma wrote:Will There Be a ‘Duel of Dalai Lamas’?: Jonathan Mirsky


Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with China
by Tim Johnson
Nation Books, 333 pp., $26.99

On March 10 the Fourteenth Dalai Lama made front-page news throughout the world by saying,

The desertions were said to be caused by fears of disappearance, torture and detention on the one hand and the impossibility of religious practice and study due to the compulsory patriotic education campaign being carried out by the Chinese authorities.

Regarding the state of the army and police blockade, a Kirti monk in exile still maintaining contacts with people back home was quoted as saying, "These days there are two big army tents pitched outside the north wall of the monastery, two each on either side of the east and west entrances to the complex, three more at the great stupa west of the monastery, and four at the main (south) entrance of the complex. The monastery's new 25 room meeting hall inside the complex is occupied by soldiers and police, and all vacant dormitory buildings in the rest of the compound are also being occupied by soldiers, police and officials."

Earlier, BBC New online on Jun 9 cited Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei as saying while responding to a foreign journalist's question in Beijing that there had been no "enforced disappearances" at Kirti monastery; that local authorities had simply taken some monks for "legal education."

Tibetan monks at a restive monastery in southwestern China’s Sichuan province refused to take part in a religious rite on Wednesday, claiming that Chinese authorities were staging the event for purposes of “propaganda,” Tibetan sources living in India said.
The ceremony, which is normally held twice a month at the Kirti monastery chapel dedicated to “protector deities,” had been postponed since March 16, when a Kirti monk set himself on fire in a protest against Chinese rule in Sichuan’s Tibetan-majority Ngaba (in Chinese Aba) prefecture.

Acharya wrote:I have talked to some US baptists and they seemed to show too much interest in Tibet.
What is their interest in Tibet.

The 17-Point Agreement, through which Lhasa bowed to Beijing’s sovereignty on May 23, 1951, was India’s capitulation more than Tibet’s. After the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched into Tibet in October 1950 and destroyed the Tibetan army, India’s army chief, General (later Field Marshall) K M Cariappa declared that India could spare no more than a battalion (800 men) to block the Chinese invasion alongside the Tibetans. Then New Delhi refused to back Lhasa’s request for the United Nations to adopt a resolution against the Communist invasion. With global attention focused on the Korean War, and with India hoping to mediate between China and the US-led coalition, India feared that sponsoring Tibet’s reference to the UN would damage its leverage with China. And with Washington and London allowing New Delhi to take the lead on this issue (India, after all, was most affected by events in Tibet) China was allowed to subjugate Tibet unopposed.

The hopelessness that has seeped through the Tibetan exile community in India manifests itself in a growing rejection of the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Path”, which involves a non-violent engagement with Beijing about Tibetan autonomy rather than independence. India’s many angry Tibetan youngsters are held back for now by their enormous respect for the 14th Dalai Lama, but his passing on will create a problem for China that will be far more potent than the legitimacy of the 11th Panchen Lama. If New Delhi looks ahead and calibrates its response inventively, it may go some way towards recreating the leverage in Tibet that it lost in the 1950s

A Tibetan Buddhist monk protesting Chinese policies immolated himself publicly in a Tibetan area of Sichuan Province in southwest China on Monday, an outside advocacy group reported. It was the second such act in the area in the past five months and appeared to reflect resistance to increased Chinese repression of loyalty to Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

The monk was heard calling, “We Tibetan people want freedom,” “Long live the Dalai Lama” and “Let the Dalai Lama return to Tibet,” after he drank gasoline, doused himself with it and set himself alight on a bridge in the center of Daofu, a town in Ganzi County in Sichuan, according to the advocacy group Free Tibet.
:
Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet, identified the monk who killed himself as Tsewang Norbu, 29. She said he was protesting what she described as the harsh treatment of Tibetans following the March 16 immolation by a monk from the Kirti monastery in Aba, or Ngaba in Tibetan, in the same region of Sichuan. She said the repression worsened further when Tibetans in Daofu and elsewhere defied a government ban on celebrating the Dalai Lama’s 76th birthday on July 6.

Chinese authorities say the man, Rigzin Phuntsog of the Kirti monastery, immolated himself on 16 March.
Tsering Tenzin and Tenchum will be jailed for 13 and 10 years respectively for "intentional homicide", Xinhua news agency said.
On Monday, the court jailed another monk for 11 years over the death.
Drongdru, Phuntsog's uncle, is accused of hiding him after he set himself on fire and depriving him of medical attention for 11 hours. The exact circumstances surrounding the monk's death remain unclear.

Robert Barnett, a Tibetan analyst at New York’s Columbia University, says these prosecutions are unusual, even in Tibetan areas, where a formal charge means an almost certain conviction.

"This looks like the situation that we are seeing that local officials or maybe central officials have decided to make these cases as an example to deter other Tibetans to protest," he said.

"The trial is a clear escalation in terms of reprisals for cases of self-immolation [and] the first time we have heard of such an action by the government,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.
In the past, most Tibetans involved in protests have been charged under state security laws. Tibet watchers say homicide charges mark a significant change in tactics by prosecutors that lead to longer prison sentences. Bequelin says this appears to be part of a broader effort by local officials to reign in the Kirti monastery.

The Communist Chinese Regime has appointed another Han boss in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).

During his six years of dictatorship power in the region, the region's outgoing highest-ranking Han-official, Zhang, made verbal attacks on the Nobel Peace Laureate, the spiritual leader of Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Nearly 300 Tibetans were killed across Tibet as military crackdown escalated. Many people were given harsh prison sentences for their slogans like; "Long Live the Dalai Lama," "We want Freedom in Tibet," "Return the Dalai Lama to Tibet," and "Ensure human rights in Tibet." Many of those who protested were executed.

observers say Chen is an economist who is unlikely to display Zhang's level of ideological zeal.

China will provide Nepal with economic aid and investments worth US$ 70 million.
:
In exchange, China wants Nepal to intensify its crackdown on Tibetan exiles and promote “a policy of harmony” among the countries of the region.
:
The first to pay the price of the policy are Nepal’s 22,000 Tibetan exiles. For 50 years, they had seen Nepal as a haven where they could flee from China’s grip.

For Nepal’s former ambassador to China Rajeshwor Acharya, Beijing wants to destroy the Free Tibet movement, which keeps the spotlight on China’s violations of human rights against the people of Tibet.
:
“The delegation came to Nepal in order to enhance the anti-Tibetan repression,” Foreign policy expert Nischal Nath Pandey said. In fact, Chinese authorities gave the green to investments promised in previous meetings only when Kathmandu agreed to crack down on Tibetan exiles.

Much of the talk about Vice President Joe Biden’s four-day visit to China last week centered on the man who hosted him: Xi Jinping, expected to become the country’s next president in 2012. Biden’s office has said that the principal purposes of his visit were “to build a relationship with Vice-President Xi” and “to get to know China’s future leadership.” But working out the thinking of China’s leaders has always been extremely difficult, and Xi is no exception.

Apart from an unusually rambunctious speech in 2009 when he lambasted foreigners and their “full bellies,” Xi’s political inclinations remain a black box. His public speeches have mostly consisted of boilerplate prose. In his most recent major speech, for example, delivered on July 19 in Lhasa, he began by saying that “the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet are chanting merrily to express their happiness and joy” and ended with a call to “fight against separatist activities by the Dalai clique.” The rest was mainly about China’s achievements in boosting the economy in Tibet—standard fare for Chinese leaders.

But the Lhasa speech was broadcast live on Chinese state television, an exceptional event and an indication of its national importance. Watching Xi deliver it gives a much more complex impression both of him and of China: the visual information largely conveys the opposite of Xi’s words.

The footage shows that Xi delivered his speech from a viewing platform erected in a vast new square in front of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s former residence in Lhasa. Banners above the stage show that the speech was part of the ceremonies marking what China calls “the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Tibet,” a reference to China’s assumption of sovereignty over Tibet in 1951 following its invasion a year earlier. There are frequent shots of the audience in the square, which included, according to the official Chinese media, “more than 20,000 Tibetans of all walks of life.”

But the footage does not support this claim. For one thing, only two monks are shown among the 20,000 people in the audience—one of them is shown repeatedly—suggesting that Tibetans from a “walk of life” that is integral to Tibetan society were not invited. As for women, there are many in the audience, but among the 200 or so senior Chinese and Tibetan officials who are shown seated on the viewing platform, all but five are men.


Audience members at the ceremony for 'the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Tibet,' Lhasa, July 19, 2011


Plastic stools arranged in front of the Potala Palace

Another detail stands out too: No one in the audience has a chair.

According to China Daily, Xi Jinping had brought with him 300,000 cold-proof stainless kettles, 710,000 stainless pressure cookers, 60,000 quilts, and 150 computers as gifts for the Tibetans. But, apparently, not chairs.

The audience is seated on little plastic stools, about nine inches off the ground, arranged in straight rows in the vast new square, without a single broken line in either direction. They are arranged in blocks according to their profession or ethnicity, and thus to the color of their uniform or costume. One block of six hundred or so is green, which means it is the soldiers; another block is white, which is the doctors in their lab coats; a third block is light blue, which is the primary school children in their uniforms. The black block is that of junior officials wearing suits, most of whom seem to be Chinese, and the red block is Tibetan women from some area or group who have been assigned to wear Tibetan robes of the same color.

I recall that when the stools were introduced for audiences at these mass rallies held to welcome state leaders in Tibet some ten years ago, they were seen as a sign of progress and a concession to the spectators, because presumably everyone had sat on the ground before. In the rural areas it remains like that, and official television news broadcasts in Tibet still show local leaders in county towns seated in chairs beneath lavish banners with slogans about development, lecturing Tibetans who are sitting silently in rows on the road.

The ceremony included speeches by three other Chinese leaders and one Tibetan, a local village chief, as well as a parade of marching students, militia and the military. It lasted for at least 147 minutes, according to the television footage, during which time everyone applauded on cue, at the end of each section of each speech. It must have been quite hot or tiring because some Tibetans in the square can be seen holding their heads in their hands and being comforted by other members of the audience. Occasionally one or two people get up and move, but for the most part, no one leaves his or her assigned spot. At the back of the crowd one can even see synchronized displays—words spelled out by rows of people holding up different characters that form huge slogans saying “We thank the Chinese People” and “Tibet’s Future Will be Better.” One could be forgiven at times for thinking that Lhasa had been taken over not by Beijing but by Pyongyang.

I was at the university in Lhasa in 2001, the last time an equally important Chinese official—Hu Jintao himself—spoke at such an event. He came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the “liberation” and gave the same speech, almost word for word. I had seen it then on television, and the ceremony looked identical as well. In 2005 I was at Tibet University again during yet another ceremony (it was my last, because the cooperation program for our students from Columbia and other US universities was ended without explanation one year later) which that time marked the anniversary not of liberation but of Tibetans being given autonomy. Most of the Tibetans who were selected to be at that event were only told the night before that they were required to attend the ceremony the next day because of supposed security concerns. We foreigners were instructed not to leave the university until the event was over, and once we did, “not to look at anything we should not look at,” though we were not told what that was.

Those who were selected had to be in the square by about 5 AM, four hours or so before the ceremony started. Some of the rules of attendance during these events are known from a unique documentary called 16 Barkor Street South, made by the brilliant independent Chinese filmmaker Duan Jinchuan when the same ceremony was held in 1995 (again, to celebrate autonomy). In his film, an official is shown ordering the Tibetans who have been selected to go to the square not to drink too much beforehand because they will not be able to go to the toilet during the event. They are also ordered to wear Tibetan clothes. And they are told that if they wear clothes that have patches, it will be a “political offense,” which usually means a crime. And, at least as shown in the film, only Tibetans were required to attend, not local Chinese residents.

This year, the Tibetans in the square would again have been selected from their work units or residential committees and ordered to attend, and no one else would have been allowed to enter the square. This is at the heart of the interpretative problem surrounding the event: the crowd in the square was dwarfed by giant slogans saying “We thank you, CPC Central Committee.” How to explain that choice of slogan given that most Tibetans in the audience had been forced to be there? Wouldn’t most of them expect Party leaders to provide development and roads, and know that they are paid quite well to do so?

And why would Xi insist that “ethnic unity in Tibet has steadily enhanced” when the number of political protests and arrests in Tibetan areas has risen sharply in the last three years, or that “the religious beliefs of the people are fully respected and protected,” when all Tibetan students and Tibetan government employees in Tibet, including those in the audience, are forbidden from any Buddhist practices at all?

Some aspects of these events cannot be seen from the television footage alone; one has to be there on the ground. After the ceremony in 2005, we were all allowed out on the streets once the formal events had ended, and so I went to the Post Office, near the exit of the square, and joined a vast crowd of curious Tibetans to watch the participants as they left. But what we saw coming out of the square had not been visible on the television screen: hundreds of armed troops followed by armored personnel carriers, riot control vehicles, water-cannon trucks, barbed-wire laying machines, vehicles with gun turrets and other forms of military hardware.

The military vehicles and the troops were not visible in the footage of the ceremony this year either, but they were surely there again. Perhaps there is an underlying view that all Tibetans are rebels thirsting for a war. If so, it would explain why the head of China’s army had been sent to sit next to Xi Jinping on the stage during the ceremony. It would also explain why there were no chairs: presumably they are seen as potential weapons in the hands of imagined Tibetan rioters, more threatening than plastic stools.

Everyone can understand why China is proud of improving Tibetan infrastructure and wants to maintain its rule over Tibet, but it is not clear why its leaders, or even ordinary Chinese, expect forcing Tibetans to stage rituals of mass gratitude to Xi Jinping and the Chinese government not to fuel resentment. In any event, resentment seems to be spreading among Tibetans: last week on August 15 another Tibetan burnt himself to death, others say they have been tortured after staging minor protests, at least three of the 13 Tibetan areas in China remain closed to foreigners, and the state’s officially selected Panchen Lama cannot visit a monastery without a major security operation to prevent unrest.

How does Xi Jinping rationalize the practice of mass displays of forced gratitude, or the decision not to allow his Tibetan audience to sit on real chairs? Scholars talk of these rituals as a throwback to imperial traditions, as the legacy of Leninism, or as China’s way of dealing with the non-Chinese nationalities on its borders. But no one knows how leaders justify these practices to themselves. Joe Biden and the other US officials tasked with fathoming the logic of governance in China will not find the answer in their current visit. But at least they will get chairs.