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China Finds Tibetans Guilty of Inciting Self-Immolations

The Wall Street Journal (January 31, 2013, 10:34 a.m. ET)

BY JOSH CHIN AND SAURABH CHATURVEDI

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BEIJING—Eight Tibetans were found guilty of inciting others to set fire to themselves to protest Chinese rule by two separate courts Thursday, state media said.

The sentences come as Chinese authorities pursue a hard-line approach to quell unrest in the country’s Tibetan regions.

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said a court in Aba, a heavily Tibetan prefecture in western Sichuan province, sentenced 40-year-old Lorang Konchok to death with a two-year reprieve—a sentence commonly commuted to life imprisonment—saying he used his status to seek to convince eight people, including monks, to light themselves on fire.

His nephew, 31-year-old Lorang Tsering, was … Read more on Source

Lonelier, in exile

The Economist (Jan 31st 2013, 13:00)

By A.R. | DELHI

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LOBSANG SANGAY, the elected political leader of Tibet’s exiled administration, is an optimist. On January 30th he addressed some 4,000 Tibetans, including MPs, who had gathered in a sports hall in Delhi as a part of four days’ of protest, prayers and debate. Mr Sangay dared to predict that the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans’ spiritual leader, would yet return to his homeland—once his countrymen had won greater freedom.

His assertion is threefold. First, he believes that “the human spirit will rise up” and overcome the repression and assimilation imposed by the Chinese authorities in Tibet. In that context he claims to understand, and even sympathise with, the 99 young Tibetans who have set themselves on fire in recent years. Many of them have died, and on January 31st China convicted a monk and his nephew of “intentional homicide” for having “incited and coerced eight people to self-immolate”.

Mr Sangay is also saying that, though the political change for which many Tibetans have long yearned may seem impossible today, given a mountain of latent anger and a spark, it can erupt unexpectedly fast. The Arab Spring or the fall of the Berlin Wall might be inspiration. Who is to say that Tibet won’t be next?

Last, most interesting, Mr Sangay is arguing that Tibetans could prove to be a “catalyst of moderation” for the rest of China. He estimates that there are 300m to 500m Chinese Buddhists (more than there are members of the Communist Party), many of whom yearn for greater cultural freedom in their country and could, under the right circumstances, sympathise with the Tibetan people and their spiritual leader. Ordinary Chinese, he believes, would also be attracted to the tolerance and openness of the Tibetan leaders.

They might like, too, the model of competitive and fair elections that Tibetans in exile (particularly the 100,000 or so in India) now use to pick their political leaders. Thanks to better communication—social-networking, the use of mobile phones inside China, greater travel abroad by Chinese civilians—a better understanding of Tibet and its politics might yet spread.

Mr Sangay’s appeal, and the march by Tibetans in Delhi on January 31st, is designed to counter a broader sense that the Tibetans’ political cause is flagging. Indian heavyweights are not shy of supporting the Tibetans in exile. At the gathering in Delhi, L.K. Advani, a former deputy prime minister and a senior figure in the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), gave a brief but rousing speech. He praised the Dalai Lama as “saintly”, lauding Tibetans’ for their appreciation of India and wishing them success. Congress, India’s ruling party, also sent along more junior political figures to cheer the marching Tibetans from the dais.

Yet India is beginning to look like an exception. Tibet’s exiled political leaders talk of the massive influx of Han Chinese to the towns and cities of the Tibetan Autonomous Region and other Tibetan areas of China; battling repressive security forces; schools that refuse to teach in the Tibetan language; and the arbitrary arrest and disappearances of monks and nuns. Nepal seems to be growing less hospitable to its exiled Tibetans by the year. And yet another battle exists: stirring interest farther abroad is growing harder by the year, in the face of China’s ever greater international and economic heft.

Speakers in Delhi grumbled that some democracies—such as South Africa—are quick to block visits by the Dalai Lama to avoid giving offence to China. For all the talk by Western leaders of promoting human rights, few would now dream of lecturing China in how to settle the dispute in Tibet. (Similarly, it is increasingly rare for any outsider to tell India how to resolve the long-running dispute in Kashmir.) At the same time, outsiders are preoccupied by the prospect of maritime disputes with China in the East China Sea, over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, or in the South China Sea. With so many pressing international problems, why should any outsider stir up difficulties over Tibet now?

The New York Times Op-Ed: Tibet Is Burning

New York Times Op-Ed Contributor (December 12, 2012)

By XU ZHIYONG

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Beijing

AROUND noon on Feb. 19, an 18-year-old named Nangdrol set himself on fire near the Zamthang Monastery in the northeast Tibetan town of Barma. In a note left behind, he wrote, “I am going to set myself on fire for the benefit of all Tibetans.” Referring to China’s ethnic Han majority as “devils,” he added, “It is impossible to live under their evil law, impossible to bear this torture that leaves no scars.”

Over the last three years, close to 100 Tibetan monks and laypeople have set themselves on fire; 30 people did so between Nov. 4 and Dec. 3. The Chinese government is seeking to halt this wave of self-immolations by detaining Tibetans it accuses of being instigators. Meanwhile, the scarless torture continues.

I first visited China’s far west 21 years ago with college friends. Back then it at least looked peaceful, but now, sad news arrives daily. When I returned in October, a young monk invited me to visit his monastery. Passing a checkpoint where a red banner read, “Stability Maintenance Calls for Fast Response to Emergencies,” he told me how he hated the sight of armed soldiers.

Because a road was closed for construction, I had to wait until evening to hitch a ride to Barma, where Nangdrol had lived, about 30 miles away. I was the third passenger in the car; the other two were young Tibetans.

“Are you Buddhist followers?” I asked them. One of them showed me a pendant portrait of the Dalai Lama that he pulled out from his chest. “He is our true Holiness,” he said.

“Have you heard about the self-immolations? Like, burning oneself?” I asked tentatively, finally broaching the topic. They knew about it.

“Pardon me, but do you hate the Hans?” I asked them because Nangdrol had used the term “Han devils” in his suicide note. They’d heard about Nangdrol. When I told them I was there to visit Nangdrol’s parents to express my sadness, they told me more.

They said they’d been to the site, as hundreds of Tibetans had. People had set up white tents at the intersection where he died. “He is our hero,” one said.

It was dark when we arrived in Barma. At a lamppost, one of my fellow passengers asked a man for directions but was waved off. At a crossroads, he asked two men on motorcycles and an argument broke out. A monk came to the window to examine me.

“Sorry,” my fellow passenger said, “they scolded me for taking you here.” A minivan approached. Two men jumped out of it and upbraided him indignantly. Fear and hostility shrouded the place like night.

“We are Tibetans,” he said all of a sudden as we left Barma in silence to spend the night in a nearby town. “We are Buddhists, but we can’t go to Lhasa without a permit.” Years ago, you could see many Tibetans on their pilgrimage to Lhasa, but not anymore.

The next day, I returned to Barma. I asked a young monk, on his way to fetch water, about Nangdrol. He took me to a hall where a middle-aged monk sat cross-legged in a corner. Since I didn’t have Nangdrol’s photo with me, he said he couldn’t help me.

A teenage monk asked several of his peers but got no answers. Passers-by shook their heads. At a construction site, no one had heard about him either. In the town’s elementary school I asked an armed soldier guarding the gate. I’d read that Nangdrol was a student. The soldier suggested that I check out the nearby compound where a Chinese flag flew, but people told me the town had no secondary school.

The road back from Barma was open only from noon to 1 p.m. I had to leave. Along a creek, a row of poplars basked in the golden sun, and a group of young monks in crimson robes were holding a class. Reluctantly, I climbed into a cab. I had been to many places over the years but never felt so lost.

I stopped the driver a mile or so down the road when we passed by a village on a slope. After my repeated pleadings, the roadside shop owner gave me directions to Nangdrol’s home. Up on the slope, an old couple pointed to the house.

It was a small mud-plastered house enclosed in mud-brick walls, and five tall sutra streamers flew on one side of the property. The iron gate was locked.

A middle-aged woman with a boy, passing by, said she had known Nangdrol. His parents now live on a faraway cattle farm, she said. The day of his death, she told me, he wore new clothes, and he was freshly bathed, with a fresh haircut. He asked people whether he was handsome.

I didn’t know how else to express my sorrow. I asked the woman to give 500 yuan (about $80) to Nangdrol’s parents, letting them know that a Han Chinese man had come to pay his respects.

I am sorry we Han Chinese have been silent as Nangdrol and his fellow Tibetans are dying for freedom. We are victims ourselves, living in estrangement, infighting, hatred and destruction. We share this land. It’s our shared home, our shared responsibility, our shared dream — and it will be our shared deliverance.

Xu Zhiyong, a lawyer and human rights advocate, is a founder of Gongmeng, the Open Constitution Initiative. This essay was translated from the Chinese by Yaxue Cao.

National Geographic News: Man on Fire

National Geographic News (November 30, 2012)

by Jeffrey Bartholet

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One man’s story of protest.

In the past two years, more than 80 Tibetans have self-immolated in protest against Chinese policies in their homeland. One of them was a 27-year-old man named Jamphel Yeshi, who set himself aflame on March 26. This is his story.

At the time he decided to set fire to himself, Jamphel Yeshi was living in the Tibetan refugee colony of Majnu ka Tilla, on the northern outskirts of Delhi. The colony was first settled in 1963, four years after the Dalai Lama escaped to India from advancing Chinese forces. The early residents built thatched huts and made a living brewing and selling chang, a traditional Tibetan barley-and-wheat alcohol. As refugees from the roof of the world, they were unaccustomed to the heat and humidity of the low-lying plain. They had no idea how long they’d be staying but imagined they’d return home soon.

Today, about 4,000 people live in the colony, which has been overtaken by the city: A busy thoroughfare runs alongside it, and Indian neighborhoods have grown up nearby. New construction in the colony is illegal, yet ragged workers continue to dig foundations, carrying rubble and dirt in handwoven baskets balanced on their heads and dumping their contents on the nearby banks of the Yamuna River. They navigate a warren of multistory buildings, a shambolic jumble of several hundred homes with colored prayer flags fluttering from the rooftops. The alleyways, many just wide enough for two pedestrians to pass, are populated by crimson-robed monks and nuns, mangy dogs and barefoot kids, activists and drifters, petty merchants, and beggars with missing or mangled limbs who offer a broad smile and warm thanks for receiving the equivalent of 20 cents. A Tibetan far from home can enjoy familiar scents and tastes here: salty butter tea, steamed dumplings, Tibetan bread and biscuits.

Jamphel Yeshi—Jashi to his friends—lived with four other Tibetan men in a one-room, windowless apartment they rented for the equivalent of $90 a month. The entrance to the room is through a tiny kitchen area, which is separated from the sleeping quarters by a threadbare curtain in a Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck motif. Jashi’s mattress still lies on the floor in a corner, below posters of the Dalai Lama and other senior lamas. His mattress and four others form a U-shape around the perimeter of the room, which is illuminated by three fluorescent tubes. A thin cabinet still holds many of Jashi’s books, including several well-thumbed collections on Buddhism, Tibetan politics, and history. During the day, the men would store their personal belongings in two tiny alcoves. Jashi’s small nylon suitcase remains where it was when he was alive, holding most of what he owned, including three ID cards, two plastic pens, two rosaries, four cotton sweaters, four pairs of pants, a vest, a scarf, a green and a red string, and a small Tibetan flag.

On the night before he set himself on fire, Jashi was in a cheerful mood. Two friends were visiting from the town of Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama and seat of the Tibetan government in exile, about 300 miles from Majnu ka Tilla. It was Lobsang Jinpa’s turn to cook that evening, but he had become distracted at a cybercafé. Jashi called Jinpa on his mobile phone and ribbed him: “Have you forgotten that you have to make dinner? You’ve become very popular in Dharamsala; maybe you’re too big too cook for us now!” Jinpa rushed back; by the time he arrived Jashi had already washed and cut the vegetables.

Jinpa cooked thenthuk, a traditional Tibetan dish of noodles, vegetables, and mutton. “No one said it was tasty, but everyone ate it,” recalls Jinpa, a former political prisoner who escaped Tibet in 2011. “Jashi ate very well.” The seven young men who gathered that evening talked about the upcoming visit by Chinese premier Hu Jintao and about a protest that was to take place the following day in downtown Delhi against Chinese rule. At one point, Jashi took off his shirt and flexed his muscles, showing off the dragon tattoos on his arms and joking about his physique.

As he often did, Jashi woke early the next morning, before any of his roommates. He first went to the Buddhist temple in Majnu ka Tilla to help serve tea to people attending prayers. Then he returned to the room, where he picked up a small backpack and a large Tibetan flag. He neatly folded his blanket and propped a book by the Dalai Lama and another on Tibetan history on top, so the arrangement resembled an altar. He roused his cousin, Tsering Lobgyal, to tell him he was leaving his mobile phone at home to recharge. If anyone called, Lobgyal should answer it. Then he went to board one of five buses taking protestors to the rally.

As Jashi passed again through the temple square, a friend asked why he was dressed in long sleeves and carrying a pack—it was too hot for that. Another joked about the large flag billowing off his back. “Superman!” the friend yelled as Jashi trotted past. Boarding the bus, Jashi met yet another friend and neighbor, Kelsang Dolma, who was going to the rally with her two-year-old son. Everyone had been talking about an unprecedented series of self-immolations in Tibet since March 2011 and wondering if Tibetans might set fire to themselves at the Delhi protest. Dolma patted the pack on Jashi’s back and joked, “Is this your petrol? Don’t set it on fire!”

Jashi smiled.

Looking back, Jashi’s friends see signs of what was to come. In 2008, he had vowed to set himself on fire and had even purchased a bottle of fuel. His cousins and friends persuaded him to cancel his plan, insisting that he could do much more for the Tibetan cause if he continued to live.

Dolma now recalls signs from the day Jashi self-immolated. On the crowded bus, he was holding a nearly empty bottle of cola and gave it to Dolma’s son to finish off. Then Dolma tried to fling the plastic bottle out the window—common practice in India—but Jashi stopped her. She thought he was being conscientious. That’s the way he was: earnest, devoted to doing the right thing, always volunteering and counseling others on what should or shouldn’t be done. In retrospect, she wonders if he needed the bottle to fill with gasoline. Jashi also realized on the bus that he didn’t have his wallet and asked to borrow 200 rupees from Dolma, whom he affectionately called “sister.” She didn’t have change, so gave him 500 rupees, which he reluctantly accepted.

Did he use the money to buy gasoline to fill the bottle? At the time, Dolma had no suspicions: Jashi was upbeat, smiling, and playing with her young son. “At another point during the ride, I opened a bus window to get some air,” Dolma recalls. “He said, ‘Wow,’ and he smiled and opened his arms to the coolness of the air … I think now that he knew he was feeling that for the last time. But at that moment, I only thought it was a bit strange.”

The bus stopped a couple of miles from the demonstration site so the protestors could draw attention to the Tibetan cause by marching through the city. Organizers handed out bottles of water to the marchers, many of whom wore yellow pinnies and badges with a bloody hand superimposed next to the face of Hu Jintao. Jashi told Dolma he needed to buy something for a friend, and they parted company. Video taken a little later contains a brief glimpse of Jashi, alone near the back of the procession, smiling and chanting slogans.

By the time the parade reached Jantar Mantar—a street where Indian protests take place daily—as many as 3,000 Tibetans had massed together. They were led by three horsemen dressed in traditional outfits from the three regions of Tibet. Indian demonstrations were taking place to the right and left-a clamor of noise and sweat, flapping flags, and waving banners. The heat was intense, over 90ºF. Dolma and others sought bits of shade under nearby neem trees.

Jashi slipped away through a gate and down a short driveway to an old sandstone building housing the All India Freedom Fighters’ Organization and other offices. Under a sign reading “Mehta and Padamsey Surveyors Private Limited, International Loss Adjusters,” he poured the gasoline over himself. It ran down his shoulders, over his clothes, and into his shoes. Then he put a flame to it.

Jashi ran about 20 strides, stumbled and fell under a giant Banyan tree. He was still inside the gated compound and wanted to get to the crowd of protestors outside. He pulled himself up and ran again, this time for 50 to 60 strides, through the gate and into the mass of people, who made way for the human fireball. He was baring his teeth in what could have been a broad smile—or an expression of excruciating pain.

Jinpa was among the many friends who were there that day. He saw the flaming man and then recognized Jashi’s face. He yelled out his name.

Pandemonium: Wails, screams, people frantically shaking water from their plastic bottles onto the flames. An elderly policeman tried to beat out the fire with his hat. A friend of Jashi’s, Sonam Tseten, began whipping at the fire with his backpack. But then Tseten realized that his mobile phone was in the pack and that the weight of it might be hurting his friend. So he tossed the pack aside and pulled off his shirt. “When I hit the upper side of his body with my shirt, the lower side burned more,” Tseten recalls. “When I hit the lower side, the upper side burned more.”

Above all of the cries and shouts, several witnesses later recalled most distinctly the roar of the fire: foh-foh-foh.

The first Tibetan to self-immolate in the modern era did so in the same location during a 1998 hunger strike. Just as Jashi would, Thupten Ngodup initially survived the inferno. The Dalai Lama paid him a visit at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital a day later. Ngodup tried to sit up to receive His Holiness but was gently encouraged not to. The Dalai Lama whispered through the gauze wrapped around Ngodup’s head. According to an account the former gave to Columbia University scholar Robert Thurman, he said, “Do not pass over with hatred for the Chinese in your heart. You are brave and you made your statement, but let not your motive be hatred.” The patient indicated that he understood.

“This is violence, even if it is self-inflicted,” the Dalai Lama told Thurman. “The same energy that can cause someone to do this to himself is very close to the energy that enables someone to kill others in fury and outrage.”

Ngodup’s fiery protest was an isolated incident. More than a decade later, in February 2009, another Tibetan self-immolated, then another followed two years later in March 2011. Since then, the numbers have soared: More than 80 Tibetans have torched themselves, one of the biggest waves of self-immolation in modern history. The overwhelming majority of self-immolations, carried out by monks, nuns, and increasingly by lay people, have occurred inside Tibet.

During this wave of immolations, the Dalai Lama has remained mostly silent, except to say that he must remain “neutral” on the protests. “If I say something negative, then the family members of those people feel very sad,” he told a reporter for The Hindu newspaper in July. “They sacrificed their own life. It is not easy. So I do not want to create some kind of impression that this is wrong.”

The Dalai Lama is widely revered by Tibetans, who regard him as the reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion. But his “middle-way approach” to China—calling for autonomy for Tibet, not independence, and often opposing even the most benign protest actions against Chinese rule—hasn’t produced results. China now refuses even to meet with Tibetan envoys. Two longtime Tibetan negotiators have quit in frustration, and the situation only seems to worsen. Han Chinese continue to migrate into traditional Tibetan areas, and repression of Tibetan religious institutions deepens. Security cameras are installed in monasteries. Portraits of the Dalai Lama are gouged out. Nomads are forcibly settled, and the Tibetan language is marginalized.

“Every other leader looks after his own country properly even if it means going to war,” fumes a Tibetan scholar in Dharamsala who did not want to be quoted by name. “Here we talk about world peace, about taking care of the whole world. What about taking care of our own country? Our leaders are more concerned about how to present themselves to the rest of the world—peace-loving and kind. If you care about your own country, you have to do everything for it: kill, cheat, lie, steal.”

That is a very extreme view among Tibetans. But it gives voice to a much wider frustration. Young Tibetans, in particular, want to act. Among the majority who still cherish non-violence but lack the otherworldly patience of His Holiness, options are limited. So a nun, standing stock still on a road in Tibet last November, becomes a human torch, flames leaping from her head toward the sky. “We need freedom,” yells a passerby, recorded in an amateur video that also captures a woman gently tossing a khata—a silk white scarf, offered in blessing—toward the flames. In another herky-jerky video secreted out of Tibet, a monk named Tsewang Norbu burns in front of a shop on a busy road. Some people gather around the charred and smoking body even as frightened Chinese hurry by without stopping; bicycles and cars pass, honking to move on quickly, as if worried they might get caught up in a security scandal.

Both the nun and the monk were from Jashi’s home area, Tawu. He himself had escaped Tibet in 2006. He had taped a photo of the monk on the door of his little bookshelf. He had seen the videos. He had watched them most recently a few days before his own self-immolation. They were shown on a screen in the temple square of Majnu ka Tilla—to inspire local residents to attend the upcoming protest. Jashi’s friend Sangye Dorji, the caretaker of a small monastery that overlooks the cramped square, was with him. “I was very emotional and depressed,” Dorji recalls. “Jamphel Yashi said only that they were very patriotic people.” He also had some advice for his friend: “If any Tibetan self-immolates, we should just let him burn,” Jashi said. “That person has made a decision to die.'”

Dorji never made it to the protest, but other friends did. Each acted instinctively. Jinpa, the former political prisoner who served 26 months for filming and distributing video of anti-regime protests in China, tried to push the crowd back. Jinpa recalls that at one point, as everyone was throwing water at the burning man, Jashi yelled out “Agh!”—as if to complain about the effort to douse the flames. “Let the journalists take photos!” Jinpa shouted.

“I was not at all hoping he would be alive with the amount of fire that was engulfing him,” Jinpa told me a few months later. “The police just wanted to take the body away quickly. Two police grabbed my waist to pull me back. I resisted and pulled back toward the burning body.”

Other friends thought Jashi might survive. The smell of burning was intense—like roasted meat, one friend recalled—but Jashi’s face was still recognizable. By the time the flames were out, however, his clothes had burned away, except for the shirt collar around his neck and the elastic bands of his pants and underwear. His skin was hard and crinkly, “like touching a basketball, but very hot,” says Tseten. “There was no softness at all.” Strangely, Jashi’s dragon tattoos appeared more vibrant than ever.

Tseten and several other friends eventually lifted Jashi into the back of a white police jeep. They placed him on one bench, and four of the men sat in a row on the bench opposite, holding him in place so he wouldn’t fall off as they sped around corners with the siren blaring. One of the men had painted his face in Tibetan colors, and now sweat, tears, and splashed water that had been thrown frantically toward the flames were all causing the paint to run down his cheeks.

Jashi arrived at Ram Manohar Lohia hospital at 12:45 p.m. and was officially admitted at 1:19. As his friends delivered him through the doorway, Jashi spoke the last sentence any of them would hear from him: “Why did you bring me to the hospital?”

Speaking those few words must have taken enormous effort. Doctors would soon discover that his insides were scorched, probably because he had inhaled toxic fumes and flames. Burns covered over 98 percent of his outer body. He was given antibiotics, painkillers, and oxygen, and doctors eventually performed a tracheotomy. At one point, the sister of one of Tibet’s highest reincarnate lamas—the Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism—arrived to deliver a “precious pill,” blessed by the high lama himself, to provide spiritual comfort and even healing for a man’s soul. A monk whispered a prayer into Jashi’s ear.

Jinpa wasn’t thinking about spiritual matters. He had shed tears like everyone else, but he wasn’t particularly sentimental. He knew that his friend had set himself on fire to make a statement—to awaken the world to Tibet’s plight. He didn’t want the sacrifice to be wasted.

He was also functioning on almost no sleep. While his friend had been preparing for his final act, Jinpa—who sports a gold earring and a goatee—had been at a party until dawn. Now his mind was racing. “Who has a key to the room?” he asked Lobgyal, Jashi’s cousin. “Don’t give the key to anyone. He might have left something.” Then Jinpa’s phone rang: Indian detectives were poking around the neighborhood, a friend told him, and wanted to get into the room. Minutes later, Jinpa got a call from an officer in the criminal investigation department who wanted to know who had a key to the room. Jinpa professed ignorance and switched off his phone.

As the sun was going down, Jinpa and others made their way back to the apartment from the hospital. The detectives had left. Two men served as lookouts in the alley while Jinpa and Lobgyal rifled through Jashi’s meager belongings. Inside a red cloth sack that also held his IDs and other documents, they found a handwritten letter in Tibetan. It began with a call for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet then spoke about the need for loyalty, “the life-soul of a people,” and about freedom: “Without freedom, six million Tibetans are like a butter lamp in the wind, without direction.”

“At a time when we are making our final move toward our goal—if you have money, it is the time to spend it; if you are educated it is the time to produce results; if you have control over your life, I think the time has come to sacrifice your life.”

The letter ended with a demand for the “people of the world” to “stand up for Tibet.” Jashi had written two copies, both on lined white school paper.

When one of Jashi’s former teachers in Dharamsala first read the letter—which by then had been typed and printed for wider distribution—he was skeptical that Jashi had written it. Jashi had arrived from Tibet as a young man with little education, and his written Tibetan was mediocre. His parents were rural middle class, and Jashi himself was classified as a “farmer/nomad” in the database of the exiled Tibetan government. He had lived in eastern Tibet, in a large house in the traditional Tibetan style, with a satellite dish on the roof and prayer flags flying from the chimney. Cows, yaks, and sheep were housed on the first floor, and the family occupied the upper level. They tended apple orchards and planted potatoes, barley, wheat, and other crops.

Jashi got his education informally, studying an hour or two a day with monks in a nearby monastery. They taught him how to read religious texts but not much more. He worked for an elderly monk in the village, etching Buddhist mantras on stones to be placed on hilltops. He was a good swimmer, and in the winter, he and his friends fashioned small ice sleds out of wood boards and metal rods. They would curl the rods around the wood so they would serve as blades, and then they’d push themselves across icy ponds until their knuckles turned raw.

As he became a young adult, Jashi became politically aware. He told friends that at least once he had ridden his bicycle late at night into the town of Tawu, roughly six miles away, to post political flyers on walls in the predawn darkness. In 2003, he was caught trying to escape Tibet, and later he apparently made some connections or got some tips about how to tap into the Tibetan underground while he served several months in multiple Chinese prisons.

In 2006, Jashi escaped successfully, taking a young neighbor along with him. They made their way first to a safe house in Lhasa, then hooked up with a guide who escorted them on the start of a monthlong trek. One guide handed off to another and then to another, through winds and snow, across plains and mountains, along the skirt of Mount Everest and into Nepal. They hid by day and hiked by night, surviving on a diet of dried yak meat and tsampa, a dough of roasted barley flour mixed with water. A few in the 15-person party suffered snow blindness, others horrific headaches; sometimes they had to pause for a day to allow someone to recover. Jashi had blisters that oozed puss. But they made it to Nepal and eventually to Dharamsala, where every newcomer gets an audience with the Dalai Lama, and everyone gets free schooling. Jashi cried when the Dalai Lama blessed him, touching his head. He couldn’t get a word out.

He entered a special school in Dharamsala for Tibetan newcomers aged 18 to 34. Former teachers and staff describe him as responsible and caring—the kind of young man who stayed late in the cafeteria to help the cook clean up. He loved to read and was obsessed with Tibetan history and culture, but he was an unimaginative student. In his essays and even his diary entries, he would often echo boilerplate talking points he had read elsewhere. “I scolded him: You’re not the Dalai Lama, full of wisdom and advice,” recalls Chogo Dorjee, who taught Jashi the Tibetan language. He was also a poor speller.

That is why another teacher, who goes by the single name Dhondup, suspected that Jashi didn’t write his last letter: The spelling in the typed version was correct. Later, however, Dhondup saw the original handwritten copy. It had six spelling mistakes and a missing word in the first four sentences. “I was reassured it was Jashi who wrote it.”

Jashi also left behind—unpublicized until now—two other very short pieces of prose. One is a sentimental paean to his mother. He expresses his unwavering affection for her: “Even in my dreams, I see her often … No one can separate our love.”

The second piece is entitled, “A Boy Without Direction.”

“The moment I was born from my beloved mother’s womb, I was without basic human rights, freedom to think, and was born under foreign domination. Because of this, I had to part ways with my country and come into exile in India. The place that I live now is a small room in Delhi, where I spend my days and nights. When I get up in the morning and look towards the east, tears roll down, uncontrollable … These are not empty words like water vapor.”

Jashi died in Ram Manotar Lohia Hospital, 43 hours after he had been admitted. No one ever survives with 98 percent burns. Even his friends, who had been hopeful early on because his face was familiar, lost hope when his head swelled beyond all recognition.

In the months since his death—and a massive outpouring of support and grief at his memorial service in Dharamsala—a monk who had recently escaped from Jashi’s home area relayed information on how the death was received there. The Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had broadcasted the news of Jashi’s demise, he says, so it was known right away. That night, many neighbors paid their respects to Jashi’s family. The monks of the monastery were forbidden to do so but conducted their own private prayer service the following evening. When Chinese authorities heard about the service, they called the abbot in for questioning.

A neighbor later told the monk that he was with Jashi’s mother a few days after her son’s immolation. She was cooking on a traditional stove, stoked with firewood, and accidentally touched the hot surface, burning her finger. She sobbed and through her tears muttered, “Imagine how much pain my son felt.”

In the neighborhood of Majnu ka Tilla, there’s still hope that Jashi’s sacrifice will mean something and also dread that it won’t. A fruit seller in Tunisia self-immolated in 2010, and that one event set off a cascade of change throughout the Middle East. Nothing like that has happened in Tibet. The world hardly notices when another young man or woman goes up in flames. Some young activists are talking darkly of another possible phase, of how thin the line is between killing yourself and killing your enemies. “The older generation is 90 percent religious and 10 percent nationalistic; they want to spread happiness and make the world a better place,” says Tenzin Wangchuk, the 38-year-old president of the Delhi chapter of the Tibetan Youth Congress. “But the younger generation is not a bunch of Buddhas. We are Buddhists but not Buddhas. If you kill evil, we don’t think that’s bad. We need actions … One day, who knows? We may raise our issue by bombing ourselves, and if you are going to die, maybe it’s better to take some enemies along with you.”

That is the fear of older Tibetans who have worked for decades to find a negotiated solution. “The only reason the Tibetans are so committed to nonviolence is purely because of the influence of the Dalai Lama,” says Lodi Gyari, who served as chief negotiator with China until his resignation early this year because there was no hope for a return to talks anytime soon. “I have also told the Chinese this. It’s a very thin line. One day, somebody may say, ‘I’ve had enough, it’s meaningless for me, but I’m not going to go alone … I’m going to take a couple of Chinese guys with me.’ That can happen any day.”

Jashi’s roommates in Majnu ka Tilla live much as they did before. Two small posters of their deceased friend, “the hero Jamphel Yeshi,” are pasted to the white walls. But the adrenaline rush is over. The men try to pick up odd jobs when they can, but as Tibetan refugees they’re not eligible for salaried employment. In the midday heat, several crash on their mattresses, waiting for the sun to go down.

On one occasion when Jinpa visited from Dharamsala, in the months after Jashi’s passing, he made the same grim joke as he had in the past when his friend was still alive: “Here I am again with these guys who don’t get any girls, don’t have jobs—useless men just waiting around to die!” This time, one of his friends perked up. “Are you coming to encourage another one of us to self-immolate?” he said. “Now it’s my turn … But don’t worry, I’ll prepare everything properly before I go!” It was supposed to be funny but had a different effect. Among Tibetans, nobody really knows who might be the next to burn.

TIME Magazine- World: As Tibetans Burn Themselves to Protest Chinese Rule, Communists in Beijing Stress Happiness in Tibet

TIME Magazine-World (November 10, 2012)

By Hannah Beech

Source

On Nov. 9, thousands of Tibetans students gathered in the historic monastery town of Rebkong to protest Chinese rule over the restive Tibetan plateau, where nearly 70 Tibetans have lighted themselves on fire since March 2011 in gruesome displays of desperation. Two days before, five Tibetans had self-immolated in three different parts of the high plateau, among them three teenaged monks and one young mother from Rebkong (known as Tongren in Chinese). Two other Tibetans burned themselves in Rebkong this week, according to overseas Tibetan groups.

Separately, in Xining, the provincial capital of China‘s western Qinghai province, where many Tibetans live, hundreds of Tibetan students joined together on the evening of Nov. 9 for a candlelight vigil to honor the protesters who, as flames engulfed their bodies, invariably shouted for an end to Chinese repression and the return of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader who fled into exile in India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule more than five decades ago.

The same day, on the edge of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Communist Party delegates gathered to discuss the situation in Tibet. The afternoon meeting was part of the 18th Party Congress, a once-in-five-years Communist leadership confab that began on Nov. 8, a day after the record five self-immolations took place. (A sixth fiery protest occurred on the Thursday the Party Congress first convened.) The site of the Tibetan delegation meeting was a room in the Great Hall of the People, adorned with brightly hued murals of Tibetans happily harvesting barley, frolicking in green fields under a rainbow and even sitting astride a horse while wearing a People’s Liberation Army uniform. The room was signposted in misspelled English as the “Tiebet Room.”

In filed a line of men in dark suits, some of Tibetan ethnicity but many others from China’s Han ethnic majority. (A Tibetan has never filled the top Communist Party leadership post in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.) A handful of women in traditional Tibetan dress, resplendent with coral and turquoise jewelry and geometrically patterned long skirts, sat down and proceeded to utter not a single word for the entire 90-minute session. Instead, they occupied their time taking pictures of each other, slowly writing notes while the senior cadres droned on or, in the case of one elderly female delegate, nodding off when the flood of socialist verbiage became too soporific to resist. Two broad-shouldered Tibetans wore the cowboy hats associated with the Khampas, the eastern Tibetans who most fiercely resisted the People’s Liberation Army troops when the Chinese marched in and declared Tibetan regions part of the new People’s Republic. Chinese television crews crowded around them, and sure enough the Tibetan delegates showed up on state television that evening as examples of the ethnically harmonious spirit of the Communist brotherhood.

The meeting began with an extensive paean to the keynote work report that China’s outgoing leader Hu Jintao had given the day before at the 18th Party Congress, a 100-minute treatise in which he outlined the accomplishments of his decade in power. We were regaled with just how perfectly Hu’s concept of “scientific development” suited the needs of Tibet. (Scientific development appears to be a theory in which a scientific and pragmatic approach to governance will lead to a sustainable and harmonious society, hardly the most groundbreaking of political ideologies.) Delegates at the Tibet meeting referred to each other as “comrade.” Not a word of Tibetan was spoken, only Mandarin, the Chinese dialect that is referred to in mainland China as “the common language.”

Those of us in the foreign press corps, who were watching the proceedings from a roped-off area, received our history lesson. “The last 10 years was the period when the people in Tibet have gained the most benefits,” we were told by Padma Choling, the chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The accomplishments of the Communist government in Tibet were examined in voluminous detail. Airports have been built, schooling made free. Complimentary medical checks are being offered for monks and nuns, who can now watch the state-run news on televisions powered by new power lines. Kilometers upon kilometers of new roads have unfurled across the Tibetan moonscape.

The government has built greenhouses, shower facilities and garbage dumps for thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries or nunneries with more than 20 clerics. Government health officials have given crucial information to nuns about how women’s bodies work. All Tibetan farmers and herders will be gifted “safe new houses” by 2013, according to Padma Choling. The urban unemployment rate is only 2.69% in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, reported a Han official in charge of the local Organization Department.

Tibetan capital Lhasa, we were instructed, has been voted the happiest city in China four times in a five-year period. “Happiness is dynamic, happiness need to be experienced,” enthused Che Dalha, the Communist Party secretary for Lhasa. “Today’s Lhasa is just like what they sing in the song: The sky in Lhasa is the most blue; the clouds in Lhasa are the most white; the water in Lhasa is the clearest; the air in Lhasa is the freshest; the sunshine in Lhasa is the brightest; and the people in Lhasa are the happiest.”

The word “happy” was a mantra during the meeting, perhaps only rivaled in usage by Hu’s concept of scientific development. (Conveniently, scientific development is what helps make Tibetans feel particularly happy.) Nowhere was it mentioned that many Tibetans feel as though they have not profited equally from the region’s economic expansion, as an influx of Han migrants flood the region and snap up some of the best jobs. No cadre at the Great Hall of the People admitted that many of the new roads are designed to truck out Tibet’s bountiful and largely untapped natural resources.

Even as the new greenhouses and showers in monasteries were hailed, no one talked about the culture of fear that exists in Tibetan Buddhist institutions, where spies ferret out anti-Chinese sentiment or catch people illegally worshipping the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese government considers an enemy of the state. Tibetan education in local schools has declined dramatically over the past five years, and monks are being forced to imbibe socialist propaganda because they are also, as Losang Gyaltsen, the vice chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, noted, “grassroots citizens” who are part of “Tibetan Buddhism adapted to socialist society.”

The assembled journalists were told by Padma Choling that we were “warmly welcomed to go visit Tibet, to feel the development and changes in Tibet.” Barely stifled giggles erupted in the press gallery. Practically no foreign journalists have been given official permission to visit Tibet since the months following a 2008 eruption of chaos when some Han and even more Tibetans were killed in internecine riots and the violently suppressed Tibetan protests that followed.

It wasn’t until the question-and-answer period—in which delegates gamely took a few questions from the foreign media, as well as softball queries from members of the Chinese state press—that the self-immolations even came up. Losang Gyaltsen, the vice chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, read his answer from a sheaf of paper, a signal that he was expecting the issue to come up, even if it didn’t merit any mention during the working group’s official meeting.

“We think the reasons for the self-immolation incidents are varied. Some of the cases were caused by personal reasons. But we also see that some of the self-immolation cases were incited and planned by separatist groups abroad. The overseas Tibetan separatist forces hype all these incidents. They call these heroic acts and they consider the people who set themselves on fire heroes. They extremely beautify and incite such extreme behavior. As we all know, in the laws of a lot of countries, instigating and inducing others to commit suicide is a crime itself. In the laws of China, this is criminal behavior…But the overseas Tibetan separatist forces and the Dalai clique sacrifice other people’s lives to reach their ulterior political motives.”

Che Dalha, the Communist Party secretary for Lhasa, added his take:

“Lhasa is a city of happiness. We won’t allow anybody to make trouble in it, to set themselves on fire. But indeed, supported by overseas forces and for other reasons, we are facing people who came from other areas and have tried to set themselves on fire in Lhasa. As of last year, everybody who enters Tibet needs to bring their IDs. We moved our checkpoints outside of Lhasa city to prevent people from going to the city to self-immolate… I read in the papers that in the West, in the U.S. and Japan, there are a lot of people who set themselves on fire or commit suicide. There are a lot of people who have fatally shot themselves with a gun, jumped in a river, self-immolated or hanged themselves. Only a few cases have happened in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. So some of the media have ulterior motives. It’s not necessary to spread propaganda.”

The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, based in the Indian hill station of Dharamsala, have said repeatedly that they are not orchestrating the self-immolations, 56 of which have occurred this year. It is true that the bulk of these burning protests have not occurred in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, which is a far smaller entity than the cultural sphere of Tibetan influence across western China. Significant populations of Tibetans live in Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces. The self-immolations have occurred mostly in Sichuan’s Kham foothills but are now increasingly flaring in the high plains of Gansu and Qinghai. Only eight self-immolations have occurred in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Although earlier protests were carried out by monks, nuns and former clerics, recent burnings have proliferated among laypeople—a disturbing sign of radicalization among Tibetans.

Such distinctions and trends, however, weren’t analyzed in the Great Hall of the People’s Tiebet Room. Instead, the language was both stern and hopeful, as in Padma Choling’s words:

“Over the last 10 years, we have always persisted in ‘stability overrides all thought.’ We have put stability as our first task, as the first responsibility of the government. The key point of stability is to improve people’s lives, so we have implemented a series of measures and policies for the people. We can say that currently Tibet is implementing stabilization and is on the way to long-term stability. We are determined, and we have confidence to build Tibet into a better place. In a word, right now the social system in Tibet has achieved a historical leap; economic development has achieved a historical result; social undertakings have achieved historical progress; people’s lives have achieved a historical improvement and all [ethnic] nationalities in Tibet have achieved historical unity.”

After 90 minutes, the media was ushered out of the Tibet delegation meeting room. Outside, on Tiananmen Square, firefighters in bright orange-red uniforms stood like stern-faced pillars. Each was armed with a fire-extinguisher. Near them, a loop of propaganda played on a giant screen, showcasing happy citizens of various ethnicities glorifying the People’s Republic of China.

—with reporting by Chengcheng Jiang/Beijing

 

New York Times: Many Chinese Intellectuals Are Silent Amid a Wave of Tibetan Self-Immolations

New York Times (November 9, 2012)

By Andrew Jacobs

Source

BEIJING — In a gruesome act of resistance that has played out dozens of times in recent months, six young Tibetans set fire to themselves this week, shouting demands for freedom as they were consumed by flames. On Friday, for the second day in a row, thousands of Tibetan students took to the streets in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai denouncing “cultural genocide” and demanding an end to heavy-handed police tactics, exile groups said.

Here in the nation’s capital, where Communist Party power brokers are presenting a new generation of leaders, the outgoing president, Hu Jintao, made no mention on Thursday of the anger consuming China’s discontented borderlands during his sprawling address to the nation.

Asked by foreign reporters about the escalating crisis, delegates to the 18th Party Congress blamed the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader, or inelegantly dodged the question altogether. “Can I not answer that?” one asked nervously.

But while Tibetan rights advocates have long been inured to impassive officials, they are increasingly troubled by the deafening silence among Chinese intellectuals and the liberal online commentariat, a group usually eager to call out injustice despite the perils of bucking China’s authoritarian strictures.

On Twitter, where China’s most voluble critics find refuge from government censors, the topic is often buried by posts about persecuted dissidents, corrupt officials, illegal land grabs or other scandals of the day. Since the self-immolations began in earnest last year, few Chinese scholars have attempted to grapple with the subject.

“The apathy is appalling,” said Zhang Boshu, a political philosopher who lost his job at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences three years ago for criticizing the government’s human rights record.

With a mounting toll of 69 self-immolations, at least 56 of them fatal, many Tibetans are asking themselves why their Han Chinese brethren seem unmoved by the suffering — or are at least uninterested in exploring why so many people have embraced such a horrifying means of protest.

The silence, some say, is exposing an uncomfortable gulf between Tibetans and China’s Han majority, despite decades of propaganda that seeks to portray the nation as a harmonious family comprising 56 contented minorities.

“It’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about,” said Wang Lixiong, a prominent Tibetologist and social theorist whose writings have drawn the unwelcome attention of public security personnel, including a contingent of police officers who kept him sequestered inside his Beijing apartment this week as the party congress got under way.

Mr. Wang and others say a subtle undercurrent of antipathy toward Tibetans suffuses the worldview of educated Chinese. That sentiment, they say, has been nurtured by official propaganda that paints Tibetans as rebellious, uncultured and unappreciative of government efforts to raise their standard of living.

One prominent filmmaker, speaking more candidly than usual, but only under the condition of anonymity, noted that many Chinese are alternately fascinated and repulsed by Tibetans. “We Han love their exotic singing and dancing, but we also see them as barbarians seeking to split the nation apart,” he said.

Whether it be antipathy or apathy, many Chinese have been unconsciously swayed by government propaganda that describes the self-immolators as “terrorists” even as unrelenting censorship blocks any public airing of their grievances, which include complaints about restrictions on Tibetan Buddhism and educational policies that, in some areas, favor Mandarin over Tibetan.

“I think the authorities have deliberately created a barrier between the two cultures,” said Hu Yong, a professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication.

Mr. Hu said such attitudes were reinforced by China’s army of Tibet specialists, nearly all of whom are employed by government-affiliated institutions and who faithfully parrot the party’s official narrative on Tibetan history and politics.

Rigorous censorship has ensured that news about the protests rarely makes it onto the Internet, let alone into the mainstream news media. The Chinese media has reported only a handful of the self-immolations, and people who transmit news from Tibetan areas face harsh punishment.

The fear can be paralyzing for many Chinese intellectuals. “No one wants to be accused of being a separatist,” said Mr. Zhang, the former academy member.

But neither fear nor censorship fully explain the silence of Chinese liberals, most of whom are adept at skirting the great firewall and many of whom regularly step across imaginary red lines to lob verbal critiques of the Communist Party. Tsering Woeser, a blogger of mixed Tibetan and Han ancestry, said many Chinese see Tibetans as the “other”; she said even friends have been known to cite a well-known Chinese proverb to explain their indifference to Tibetan grievances: “If you are not of my ethnicity, you cannot share my heart.”

Ms. Woeser said that even her most open-minded friends are confounded by Tibetans, with their fierce religious devotion, their demands for greater autonomy and their aching for the return of the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing regularly dismisses as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Chinese intellectuals, she added, see Tibet as a forbidding, restive land, but also inseparable from China. “The Han are obsessed with issues of sovereignty,” said Ms. Woeser, who is married to Mr. Wang, the critic barred from leaving his home. “They want to claim Tibet as part of China, but they are not terribly concerned with the Tibetan people or their culture.”

Even if the self-immolations are confined to a region thousands of miles away, Beijing officials were taking no chances this week as party elders gathered for the once-a-decade change in leadership. During the opening day of the party congress on Thursday, several security guards inside the Great Hall of the People held fire extinguishers between their knees as they sat in the back row of the auditorium.

Outside on Tiananmen Square, firefighters stood at attention with fire extinguishers at their feet, even if the vast granite-clad plaza was devoid of anything flammable. A New York Times photographer who snapped pictures of the firefighters was confronted by the police, who forced her to delete the images.

At a session held on Friday by delegates from the Tibet Autonomous Region, Liang Tiangeng, a top party official, dismissed a foreign reporter’s question about whether the government had plans to address the self-immolations. After extolling the happiness of the Tibetan people, he noted that even developed and democratic nations were plagued by suicides.

“People kill themselves, they set fire to themselves, they shoot themselves every day,” he said. “I think some media organizations are trying to sensationalize the very few cases of self-immolation that have happened in Tibetan area because they have ulterior motives.”

THE TELEGRAPH: China using massive surveillance grid to stop Tibetan self-immolation

THE TELEGRAPH- UK (November 9, 2012)

By Malcolm Moore, and Tom Phillips in Beijing

Source

China has revealed it is using a massive surveillance camera network to cover restive areas of Tibet and bring to an end a grisly wave of self-immolations.

Officials at the 18th party Congress claimed yesterday that the ‘Skynet’ network has divided the region into a closely monitored grid and that teams of security personnel can be mobilised within two minutes to put an end to the suicide attempts.

Six Tibetans have doused themselves with petrol and set themselves alight since the eve of China’s once-in-a-decade leadership change on Wednesday bringing to 69 the number who are reported to have died in the past year.

Yesterday (FRI), thousands of students marched in protest in Rebkhong county, Qinghai province, according to Free Tibet, an activist group, and armed police stepped up their presence.

Speaking at the Congress in Beijing Losang Gyaltsen, the vice chairman of the local government in Tibet, said: “We do not want to see such incidents,” he said. “We do not want anyone to spoil Tibet as a happy region. For locals, we are checking IDs and for visitors we have checkpoints and security checks on travel.

“We also have a grid management system, so if any immolation happens in a certain block, we can launch an emergency rescue within two minutes,” he added.

Skynet is a highly secretive network and it is not known how many people work for it or how far is its reach. It has hardly been mentioned in official state media communications and is supposed to have a camera on every road in Tibet and in the Tibetan areas of Gansu and Sichuan.

Beijing has been steadily expanding its use and in June, in a rare mention, it was praised as a way of combating crime in the region.

Lately there has also been a heavy security presence in Tibet’s temples. “There has been no immolation in the past year at any of the 1,700 temples and among the 46,000 monks in Tibet,” said Mr Gyaltsen.

He blamed the self-immolations on activists and “some monks outside the country”.

“Some overseas Tibetans are trying to achieve their ugly targets at the cost of others’ lives. It is immoral,” he said. So far, the Dalai Lama has yet to instruct his followers not to self-immolate.

Despite the tensions between Tibetans and Han Chinese, the party secretary of Lhasa, Che Dalha, said the city had been voted one of China’s happiest cities for five years in a row.

“For four of those years, it was number one,” he said. “It needs to be felt and experienced, so only the Tibetans can tell how happy they are. Lhasa has the bluest sky, the whitest clouds, cleanest water and air and happiest people,” he added.

Elsewhere at the Congress, corruption continued to preoccupy Communist party officials.

Wang Jingqing, the vice minister of China’s powerful and mysterious Organisation Department, which is responsible for internal HR, vowed senior leaders would battle corruption to preserve the “pure nature of the Chinese Communist Party”.

“Detachment from the people is the biggest danger to the Party’s governance,” he said, claiming that 668,000 party members had been punished for corruption in the last five years.

Without “strict party discipline” the Communist Party would “only be a pool of loose sand and will not achieve anything,” Mr Wang added.

But asked if he would support a policy under which leaders would have to publish their assets, he simply ignored the question.

Wang Ying, the head of the prosperous southern province of Guangdong, and a man who is often described as one of the Party’s reformers, also demurred over whether officials should make their wealth public.

Before the Congress opened, the New York Times revealed that the family of Wen Jiabao, the outgoing premier, had at least £1.67 billion of assets. The family of Xi Jinping, the incoming president, is worth some £235 million, according to a Bloomberg investigation.

“The Party central has clearly specified rules on the property ownership of government officials,” he said. “Guangdong has been exploring ways of publishing assets and will keep exploring in this direction. We will gradually do this according to policy from Beijing,”

Additional reporting by Valentina Luo

South China Morning Post: China steps up security in Tibet after self-immolations

South China Morning Post (November 9, 2012)

Agence France-Presse in Beijing

Source

China is boosting security in Tibetan areas after a spate of self-immolation protests just as Beijing holds a key political gathering, local residents and overseas rights groups said on Friday.

Armed police in paramilitary vehicles stepped up patrols in Tongren, in the northwestern province of Qinghai, after “thousands of protesters” gathered on the streets on Thursday, London-based Free Tibet said in a statement.

The protests came after six Tibetans set themselves on fire on Wednesday and Thursday, the rights group said.

Local residents in Tongren who were contacted said they witnessed no demonstrations but reported a stepped-up security presence.

“There are lots of police on the streets. They have increased their patrols and they stay out for 24 hours a day,” a shopowner in the town centre who refused to give her name said by phone.

Another shopowner said: “The police patrols have definitely increased… and there are very few people on the streets.”

Police in Tongren refused to comment when contacted said.

In Beijing on Thursday, China’s Communist Party opened a week-long congress that is expected to be punctuated by official calls for national unity under the party and end with the party leadership handed to Vice President Xi Jinping.

China has maintained tight security across ethnic Tibetan areas of the country since March 2008, when riots against Chinese rule erupted in the Tibet Autonomous Region’s capital Lhasa and adjacent areas.

The protests left 20 people dead, according to the government, while exiled Tibetans put the figure at 203.

Tibetan areas has simmered since then, however, and a total of 69 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in recent years, of whom 54 have died, according to the government in exile.

The exiled government has been based in India since Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese control.

China blames the Dalai Lama – who remains a revered figure among Tibetans in Chian – for fomenting unrest in Tibet and orchestrating the self-immolations.

He denies the accusations.

An 18-year-old man burnt himself to death on Thursday outside a monastery in Huangnan prefecture in Qinghai province, where a 23-year-old woman also died after setting herself alight on Wednesday, the India-based exile government announced.

A trio of young monks also set themselves alight on Wednesday in Aba County in Sichuan province, with one dying of his injuries, while another burning was confirmed in the Tibetan Autonomous Region on the same day.

Rights groups also said a huge military buildup had been launched in Aba to prevent further protests. The claim could not be verified by AFP.

StarTribune: Self-immolations accelerate as Tibet demands its freedom

Star Tribune (October 30, 2012)

By Simon Denyer, Washington Post

Source

NEW DELHI, INDIA – As China’s Communist Party prepares for its leadership transition, a wave of self-immolations has spread and accelerated across Tibet in the most sustained protests against Beijing’s rule there in five decades.

Most of those who have set themselves afire are in their late teens or early 20s, activists said. Exiled Tibetan political leaders and scholars described the actions as an emphatic rejection of the economic development and material gains that China is offering the Tibetan people and an anguished call for independence and the return of the region’s religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

“Almost all of them were born after the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the Cultural Revolution,” Lobsang Sangay, the political leader of the refugee community’s India-based government-in-exile said of the dead protesters. “They have grown up in the Chinese system, received Chinese education. They are the primary beneficiaries of whatever the Chinese government gave them. They are saying, ‘This is not what we want.’ ”

Last week alone, seven people doused themselves in gasoline and set fire to themselves in eastern Tibet. At least 62 people have set themselves on fire inside Tibet since February 2009.

It is not certain if the latest acceleration of the protests is timed to send a signal to the Chinese Communist Party congress, which meets from Nov. 8 to install a new leadership in Beijing.

Nevertheless, the protests appear to have embarrassed the Chinese leadership, which has responded by intensifying its crackdown, activists and scholars say.

China says it rescued the Tibetan people from medieval serfdom under the Dalai Lama’s theocratic rule when it took over in 1950. In recent years, it has poured money into the region to build roads, a high-speed railway and projects such as rural electrification.

It blames the self-immolations on the old regime’s attempts to split the country. “This is shameful and should be condemned,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman told a news conference last week.

But many Tibetans view the protesters as heroes, sometimes trying to prevent Chinese police from removing their bodies, laying ceremonial scarves at the protest sites or paying tribute to their families.

In the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Tibet was engulfed in protests and riots that saw hundreds killed and thousands arrested. Since then, China has tightened its grip on the high plateau in what many Tibetans have described as an attack on their language, religion and culture.

 

 

Newsweek Magazine: Will Beijing’s New Leaders Solve the Tibet Crisis?

(October 15, 2012)

Source

Can Beijing’s incoming leaders resolve Tibet’s crisis and stop the spate of fiery suicides?

Students of Buddhist history and literature know well the ancient fables about Buddha’s early incarnations, known as the Jataka Tales. In one, he is a prince who encounters a desperate, starving tigress with seven newborn cubs. It’s clear to the prince and his party that the mother will devour her own brood, and perhaps kill other prey, to survive. While his companions ride off to seek food for the beast, the prince slits his own throat and flays his body to feed the tigress and to prevent her from consuming her offspring. After this sacrifice, he’s reincarnated as Buddha—and in another twist of karma, the seven tiger cubs eventually are reincarnated as his disciples.

Frescoes illustrating this famous tale still captivate visitors at 1,400-year-old Buddhist sites along the fabled Silk Road. But the story is playing out in much grimmer metaphorical fashion in Tibetan communities. In January, a Tibetan Buddhist lama named Sobha learned that Chinese authorities had denied him a passport to travel to India to participate in a religious observance led by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Sobha recorded a nine-minute message and hid it in his maroon robes. Then he doused himself with kerosene and set himself on fire outside his monastery in Qinghai province. His suicide note declared he was sacrificing his body “to chase away the darkness … with firm conviction and a pure heart just as the Buddha bravely gave his body to a hungry tigress.”

Suicide is a desperate act in any community, but even more so among Tibetan Buddhists, who believe that the taking of any life (even one’s own) can make a person ineligible for reincarnation. Yet for those who resort to the taboo act, the allegory of the Buddha and the tigress offers a ray of hope that those who kill themselves “with a pure heart” may yet be reborn.

The current wave of immolations began three years ago in the Qinghai town of Tongren. In 2008, after antigovernment riots rocked the Tibetan capital of Lhasa—during which, Beijing says, 19 people died, mostly ethnic Chinese—officials implemented martial law in many Tibetan communities. They also accelerated efforts to compel the Buddhist clergy to denounce the Dalai Lama and promote a stifling program of pro-Beijing “patriotic education.” The clampdown exacerbated Tibetan resentment. At Tongren’s Rongpo monastery, a number of monks were detained by authorities in the months after the unrest. One of them, a 43-year-old, committed suicide in February 2009, reportedly after being tortured in detention. Since then, a steady stream of self-immolations have taken place, often intensifying around politically significant dates, such as the anniversary of the March 2008 bloodshed or of the abortive 1959 Tibetan uprising that triggered the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile.

The levels of despair evident in the suicides is matched only by the resounding failure of China’s Tibetan policies during the decade-long tenure of President Hu Jintao. The tensions between Beijing and the Tibetan Buddhist community reached a low point during the 2008 violence, which Beijing blamed on the Dalai Lama. Tibet’s hard-line Communist Party secretary at the time, Zhang Qingli, called him “a jackal in monk’s robes,” while the official Xinhua News agency accused him of being a “tricky liar” who advocated policies “similar to the Holocaust” to expel ethnic Han Chinese from traditionally Tibetan parts of China. For his part, the exiled spiritual leader—and winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize—said he was powerless to stop the protests, but vowed to resign as head of state if the violence continued. Later, in an interview after the unrest, he confessed to Newsweek that he had openly wept when he saw cellphone pictures of mangled Tibetan corpses.

So far, Beijing’s strategy has been to wait for the eventual death of the Dalai Lama, who is now 77, to help solve its Tibet headaches. After his passing, Chinese authorities apparently plan to anoint a malleable young Tibetan as the lama’s next incarnation and to nurture him while undermining or detaining other claimants. (Beijing adopted this strategy when the 10th Panchen Lama, the second most important Tibetan spiritual leader, died in China in 1989.) Beijing seems to be hoping that the Dalai Lama’s death—and the inevitable succession struggle—will weaken younger Tibetans’ desire for independence and shore up Beijing’s claim that Tibet has always been Chinese territory.

In fact, the Dalai Lama’s passing will likely have the opposite effect: radicalizing Tibetan youth, prodding protesters toward greater violence, and fragmenting the current consensus in support of the Dalai Lama’s moderate “middle way,” which advocates cultural and religious autonomy within China, but not outright independence.

Meanwhile, some analysts hope that Beijing’s Tibet policy could soften after the once-in-a-decade leadership transition that begins after next month’s 18th Communist Party Congress, when a new generation of Chinese leaders will assume top-level party posts. The head of this new crew will almost certainly be Vice President Xi Jinping, who is slated to succeed Hu as president and party head. More than three fifths of the party’s top 370 seats will also change hands, and the promise of new faces has prompted some Tibetans to hope for better days ahead. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” prominent Tibetan blogger and activist Woeser told Newsweek. “However, China’s political system is there, and many government units operate that system, so I don’t know how much Xi Jinping can do.”

That’s precisely the question many Tibetologists are asking as they parse Xi’s family background. Xi is a princeling, meaning his parents had sterling revolutionary credentials. His late father, Xi Zhongxun, was a former vice premier known for being relatively liberal in both his economic and political views. The elder Xi spearheaded China’s quasi-capitalistic and reform-minded “special economic zones,” which launched the country’s post-Mao modernization drive. And he had a soft spot for senior Tibetan spiritual leaders, including the current Dalai Lama, who recalls meeting the senior Xi in 1954, when the Tibetan leader traveled to Beijing for several months to be tutored in Mandarin and Marxism. The Dalai Lama presented the elder Xi with an expensive watch purchased in India and, as he recalled in a recent interview with Reuters, found the Chinese statesman to be “very friendly, comparatively more open-minded, very nice.”

Indeed, the Dalai Lama seems tantalized—though not entirely persuaded—by the possibility of a more liberal attitude in Beijing. He told Reuters that he hoped the incoming leadership team would have a “realistic” approach to Tibetan issues, and that he felt “encouraged” by recent meetings with emissaries claiming to be close to senior Chinese officials. However, in an interview with Newsweek last year, he said he was reluctant to raise the exile community’s expectations too much. Recalling his high hopes for Hu a decade ago, he said, “When Hu Jintao came to power, some foreign experts expected positive change. But 10 years have passed and nothing has happened. Xi Jinping … openly said China needs political reform … But we also know the Communists are masters of the art of hypocrisy.”

Many insiders, both Chinese and Tibetan, hesitate to speculate about Xi’s political leanings—or his ability to bring about policy shifts even if he wanted to, particularly given the Communist Party’s obsession with leadership consensus. “His father had taken a liberal stand on the Tibetan issue and had handled it quite well [but] I don’t know anything about Xi Jinping in this regard,” says Bao Tong, a former senior aide to the late party head Zhao Ziyang, who was purged from the party after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and lived under house arrest until his death in 2005. (Bao himself spent seven years in prison for sympathizing with the pro-democracy demonstrators.) Likewise, Tenzin Taklha—a nephew of the Dalai Lama and a secretary in the exiled spiritual leader’s office—told Newsweek, “It’s difficult for any one leader to change the mindset of an institutionalized bias against the Tibetan people.

“However, we Tibetans remain hopeful that the new upcoming Chinese leadership lead by Xi Jinping will be realistic,” he said, and that they will understand that a “policy of repression has failed to win the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people.”

What is clear is that Tibet has emerged as a bargaining chip—and possibly even a trump card—as China’s up-and-coming cadres jockey for power. “The past year has shown again that we outsiders know little of what’s going on within the black box of elite politics in China,” says Robert Barnett, a Tibet specialist at Columbia University. “Tibet has become an important element in intraelite bargaining, more than we’ve seen before. And so it could at any time be seen as a card to play.”

Barnett and others point to incremental shifts in Tibet policy at the local level, possibly in response to public opinion or as conflict-avoidance measures. In Lhasa, at detention centers where many Tibetans were confined for months after returning from Buddhist religious services in India, “authorities gave up trying to get people to denounce the Dalai Lama or admit they’d been to see him,” Barnett says, “after some older people said they’d throw themselves from the windows.” Authorities also backtracked after Chinese liberal intellectuals criticized them for forcing Tibetan Buddhist monasteries to prominently display portraits of Mao and other Communist leaders. Now, the practice is said to be “voluntary,” according to Barnett, who added that the announcement might be merely cosmetic with “no relaxation in practice.”

Despite these “microadjustments,” as Barnett put it, the self-immolations continue. The suicides have been so disturbing, they’ve paradoxically offered Beijing and Tibetan government-in-exile some common ground. Both sides have called for an end to the self-harming protests. In late September, more than 400 Tibetan exile leaders gathered for a special meeting in Dharamsala, India, to discuss the self-immolations and how to discourage Tibetans from carrying them out. “The fact that Tibetans, after 50-plus years, are still protesting—and in the drastic form of self-immolation—clearly indicates they are protesting against the occupation of Tibet and the repressive policies of the Chinese government,” said Lobsang Sangay, who took over from the Dalai Lama as political head of the exiled government last year. A spokesperson for the government called on Beijing and the international community to help “find a lasting solution to the crisis” and appealed to Tibetans to refrain from killing themselves.

Beijing authorities want to see an end to the self-immolations, too. Officials have imprisoned Tibetans for disseminating news about the suicides, barred foreign media and diplomats from traveling in many Tibetan areas, and ramped up security—including riot police with fire extinguishers—in Tibetan communities. And while China’s senior leaders still accuse the “Dalai clique” of encouraging the suicides, they no longer seem to blame him for planning or initiating them. During a press conference after a parliamentary session in March, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao struck a more tolerant tone. The suicide victims “are innocent,” he said, “and we feel deeply distressed by their behaviors.” Whether that distress will translate into policy changes remains to be seen.

 

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