Tibet: the jealousy, rage and bitterness of a new generation that fuelled deadly riots
Young Tibetans may not remember earlier uprisings but the ethnic tension between the ruled and their rulers is just as acute today
From The TimesMarch 22, 2008
Jane Macartney in Beijing
It was March 1988. Tibetan monks howled and shouted, battered at the door, gouged out the mud-baked roof and bayed for the blood of a top ethnic Tibetan official of the Chinese Government.
Captive in a room within the Jokhang Temple, Tibet's most holy Raidi cowered under a table, sobbed with fear and begged ethnic Han Chinese officials trapped with him for protection. He knew Tibetan retribution would be fiercest against one seen as a turncoat.
Today, nearly two decades later, the ethnic bitterness between ruling Han Chinese and deeply Buddhist Tibetans is no less acute.
Zhang Weihong , a Han Chinese, owned a trendy little bar frequented by Chinese, Tibetan students and foreign backpackers in Lhasa's Old City - until last week that is. Gutted by fire, it is one of hundreds of small Han-run businesses destroyed in the anti-Chinese riot that ripped apart Lhasa and killed 13.
Tibetans in communities across the Himalayan plateau and in surrounding provinces who have risen up this week against Chinese rule appear mainly to be young men and women in their teens or twenties. They are from a generation too young to remember either a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule in which tens of thousands were killed or the destruction wreaked by Red Guards - both Chinese and Tibetan - during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
Their anger has been directed as much against the traditional symbols of Chinese power as against ordinary Chinese, hinting at a deepening resentment, even a hatred, that follows ethnic lines.
Ben Hillman, of the Crawford School of Economics and Government of the Australian National University, sees a mix of economic and ethnic factors behind the unrest. “I think there has been a pace of change so fast that Tibetans have failed to keep up. Other groups, such as the Han, have moved in and taken opportunities, and that's caused a great deal of tension - particularly among young Tibetans.”
Beijing has poured billions of dollars into the region over the past three decades to try to develop one of its most backward - and strategically important - corners. The economy has grown at more than 12 per cent for seven years and hit 14 per cent last year - higher even than the national rate. Incomes too have risen: up 13 per cent in 2007 for Tibet's many nomads and farmers and a stunning 24.5 per cent for urban residents.
But there are those who feel left out. Young Tibetans who speak poor Mandarin - the official language of China and crucial to finding a job. Others are accustomed to a more rural way of life and their education, like others in China's vast countryside, leaves them ill-equipped for the rough and tumble of a market economy.
As Mr Hillman said: “These issues are incredibly complex. They are not just economic. It's an oversimplification to say it's the haves against the have-nots.”
Many Tibetans chafe under the restrictions imposed two years ago by the regional party boss that ban Tibetan Government servants from religious activities. Others are keenly aware that scarcely a single Chinese official in the regional government can speak Tibetan. That ethnocentric Han approach only intensifies the ethnic divide and cultural misunderstandings. No ethnic Tibetan has ever held the job of Communist Party boss - a potent signal of Beijing's lack of trust in this deeply Buddhist people who still revere the Dalai Lama.
Mr Hillman said: “It is a real source of resentment among people who feel very proud of their cultural heritage, which is an extremely well-developed one.”
The latest unrest has shown that Beijing needs to do more than restrict religion, vilify the Dalai Lama and throw money at the problem. Mr Hillman said: “Chinese investment has been overwhelmingly in hardware, in infrastructure and not in people, in education, in software.”
Across China, popular fury is being vented in internet chat rooms against the ingratitude of Tibetans. A documentary on the unrest, broadcast repeatedly nationwide since Thursday on state television, has provoked fury among Han Chinese as a sobbing Chinese trader describes the death of his 18-year-old sister in a fire in her shop.
Chinese in Qinghai province, which borders Tibet, voiced their rage openly yesterday on a bus and said that the rioters should be executed at once to teach Tibetans a lesson. Intended to show that only a few Tibetans, manipulated by the Dalai Lama, were involved, the video is already stirring new ethnic hatred.
Chinese have poured into Tibet on the new train to Lhasa that began running over the frozen plateau 18 months ago, visiting as tourists drawn by the mystique of its Buddhist faith and ancient traditions or as traders lured by business opportunities. They may well now recoil after the frenzy of violence. For Tibetans the breakdown of trust is reciprocated. Frightened and embittered, they face a prolonged security crackdown at the hands of Chinese who they may see more than ever as oppressors.
Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, said: “Ethnic hatred sometimes appears to be about lack of money and about jealousy - but it always has deeper foundations in long histories of usually bad policy and over-management by the state.”
Already all civil servants, university students and schoolchildren are being required to stand up in public and denounce their exiled god-king in a tested Communist Party tactic that demoralises and humiliates. As for Raidi, the survivor of the 1988 violence, he is now an adviser to Beijing and is leading a campaign in Lhasa to demonise what China routinely brands as the Dalai Lama clique masterminding unrest to try to sabotage the Beijing Olympics. Twenty years on, the ethnic hatred still burns deep.
留学生发起“宣传西藏真相 ”集会示威