Violence Escalates in Lhasa

[FIRST POSTED MARCH 14, 2008. ADDENDUM BELOW.]

After days of peaceful protests, where the only violence was from Chinese military forces, the Tibet protests have started to take a violent turn. We discuss the nature of that violence below.

From the New York Times:

Violent protests erupted Friday in a busy market area of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans clashed with Chinese security forces. Witnesses say the protesters burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus.

By Friday night, Chinese authorities had placed much of the central part of the city under a curfew[…]. Military police were blocking roads in some ethnic Tibetan neighborhoods, several Lhasa residents said.

[…] The [American] embassy said it had “received firsthand reports from American citizens in the city who report gunfire and other indications of violence.”

So let’s take a closer look at the “violence”. The gunfire is certainly related to violence carried out by the Chinese military. No confusion as to who’s being violent there, and dangerously so.

According to the Wall Street Journal, violence by Tibetan protesters is directed at the property of ethnic Chinese colonists. There is a lot of built-up resentment at how Chinese have come into Tibet, taken advantage of preferential policies, and pushed Tibetans into a second-class role in their own country (imagine if your country were taken over). The property destruction is regrettable, but is not directed against people and appears to be the release of pent-up anger at how Tibet has increasingly been taken over by Chinese:

Crowds of angry Tibetans surged through the streets of central Lhasa on Friday, attacking shops owned by ethnic Chinese and forcing a retreat by armed police and soldiers, according to multiple witnesses.

Of course, Tibetan protesters are also confronting Chinese military forces. When unarmed protesters face armed military who have killed Tibetans in the past, yes it is violence but it is also bravery.

No tourists appear to be harmed by Tibetans The burned tourist bus was empty, and owned by a Chinese company. Indeed one tourist was quoted as being afraid of the gun-toting Chinese military forces (probably with good reason):

“The Red Army is downtown. It’s not safe to walk around. All the major monasteries are closed,” said the tourist, who refused to give her name or her nationality. “Tourists don’t feel comfortable walking around because police are all over.”

———————ADDENDUM (MARCH 19, 2008)———————-

We are now seeing acts of violence in Tibet directed against civillian Chinese settlers.

First, do we condemn the violence?

Yes, we categorically condemn all violence. Against Tibetans, against Chinese.

More importantly, so does His Holiness the Dalai Lama (statement here), whose Nobel Peace Prize citation lauded his “consistent resistance to the use of violence in his people’s struggle to regain their liberty.”

Now, a bit of context:

1) The core issue is China’s occupation of Tibet: The core issue in Tibet is China’s violent, ongoing occupation of Tibet and the Tibetan people’s legitimate and unfulfilled desire for freedom and independence. Since Tibet was invaded by China in 1951, over 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of the occupation, and thousands of Tibetans have been imprisoned and tortured for their political or religious beliefs.

2) The protests started out entirely peacefully: What China’s state-run media fails to report is that for the first five days of the protests, thousands of monks, nuns, and laypeople inside Tibet peacefully assembled and marched, protesting China’s illegal occupation of their homeland. China’s violent crackdown on these peaceful demonstrations led to an explosion of tensions and desperation felt by Tibetans across Tibet. The BBC has obtained footage showing how a peaceful demonstration by unarmed monks was confronted by armed Chinese riot police, which may have been the spark that set off the violent protests. Rioting Tibetans were also likely reacting to the lockdown on all major monasteries, the detention of hundreds of monks, and the beating and shooting of peaceful protestors.

3) Many protests are still peaceful: Despite China’s provocations, there are still many entirely peaceful demonstrations that are happening across Tibet right now. China wants you to believe that “all” protesting Tibetans are violent rioters, but this is a pathetic attempt to discredit the very brave Tibetans who are showing true courage in calling for freedom in the face of armed Chinese forces.

4) Chinese forces are shooting unarmed Tibetans, and terrorizing the populace: We are getting reports from sources in Tibet of potentially over a thousand deaths. Click here for very graphic photos of Tibetans shot dead in Ngaba. Chinese soldiers have shot unarmed Tibetans as they flee for Nepal. Chinese forces are terrorizing the populace in Lhasa. And China’s attempts to expell all foreign tourists and reporters from Tibet is an ominous sign of an impending bloodbath.

5) Of the violence that Tibetans may be perpetrating, it is a reaction to the much more violent Chinese occupation and colonization of Tibet: Many times, the protesters’ main targets were symbols of state power and government-owned properties (police stations, a Bank of China branch, the Xinhua office, etc.). And it’s important to note that this is a very unusual situation, as we’ve seen Tibetans resisting China’s occupation of their homeland nonviolently so long and under extremely harsh conditions. But there has to be a breaking point, and it’s not surprising that, after five decades of brutal occupation, we are seeing Tibetans boiling over in their resentment against Chinese rule.

The Tibetans are an occupied people rebelling against their occupiers. Tibet is part of China by coercion – how could Tibetans be expected to embrace their occupiers? Chinese shop owners and settlers in Tibet are very unfortunately caught in the backlash, caused in part by their very decision to settle in Tibet, where they are seen by Tibetans as agents of the Chinese government’s plan to “Sinicize” Tibet. The Chinese government has been using economic and political incentives to encourage Chinese to colonize Tibet, and these Chinese settlers are pawns in their government’s policy of “Sinicizing” Tibet. Tibetans have grown increasingly resentful of becoming second-class citizens in their own country, and see the ever increasing Chinese colonists as one more way their country is being stolen from them. That is the simple reality.

And ultimately, the cause of all the violence we are seeing is squarely at the feet of the Chinese government, and specifically Comrade Hu Jintao.  The moral burden of violence vs. nonviolence is not on the occupied, but on the occupier. China dictates the terms of its occupation of Tibet, and it is China’s responsibility to bring the situation to a peaceful solution. If every time people try to state their views the occupier responds with soldiers and tanks, then yes people are going to end up throwing rocks.

6) The Chinese civillians are victims of their own government’s callous policies: The Chinese settlers in Tibet are, in effect, human pawns of their own government.  The Chinese government wants to settle its “Tibet problem” by swamping Tibet with ethnic Chinese colonists, so it creates the economic and political incentives to move hundreds of thousands of largely poor Chinese into Tibet.  These Chinese are, probably unwittingly, being used by Beijing as tools of colonization.  Beijing clearly cares more about its grip on Tibet than its own citizens’ safety. 

Imagine Serbia sending Serbs to colonize Pristina, Kosovo right before NATO wrested Kosovo away from Serbia’s genocidal hands.  Responsible and caring government?  Hardly.  China is basically telling its citizens: “Move to Tibet, there are all these great incentives for you to escape poverty at home.  Those Tibetans?  Don’t worry, sure they’re backward and a little feudal, but they love Chinese for ‘liberating’ them.  Nothing bad ever happens in Tibet, especially not in years like 1959, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1993.  So bring your families, there’s nothing to worry about!  Don’t you trust your own government?”

7) Despite China’s desperate attempt to discredit Tibetans, the protests are ultimately a legitimate cry for freedom: As Anne Applebaum wrote in Slate:

Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire.

Keep that in mind, over the next few days and months, as China tries once again to belittle Tibet, to explain away a nationalist uprising as a bit of vandalism. The last week’s riots began as a religious protest: Tibet’s monks were demonstrating against laws that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai lama. The monks’ marches then escalated into generalized, unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han Chinese shops and businesses, among them—as you can see on the cell-phone videos—the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.

However the official version evolves, in other words, make no mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese.