China In Focus - Number 16

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China In Focus - Number 16
TIBET: “LIFE OR DEATH STRUGGLE” FOR AN AUTOCRATIC EMIPRE

March 24, 2008 | Editor Al Santoli

Editor: The struggle for survival of the Tibetan people under Chinese occupation has been largely depicted as a human rights tragedy. There is, however, a significant strategic dimension to China's behavior. Beijing's control of Tibet's vast landscape, its water resources, mineral and natural wealth, as well as its strategic location on "the roof of the world," is a major component of China's plans for expanded political, military and economic influence on a global scale.

Map of Tibetan Region

Little Known Facts about China's Occupation of Tibet:

Tibet is the largest region of China, encompassing one-eighth of the empirical land mass. This does not include the historical and resource-rich Tibetan provinces of Kham and Amdo, which are larger than the Chinese official Tibet Autonomous Region, and were annexed by China after the 1950 invasion.
Deposits of uranium in the hills around Lhasa are considered the largest in the world. Tibet is also rich in gold, copper, zinc, lithium and other scarce minerals.
There are at least three major nuclear weapons bases in Tibet. The "Ninth Academy," China's primary nuclear weapons research and design facility is located in Haibei on the Tibetan plateau.
Deforestation by Chinese loggers is rampant. At least 50 percent of Tibet's ancient forests have been destroyed, causing severe environmental damage, flooding and ecological devastation.
Tibetans are now a minority population in the capitol Lhasa and the Tibet Autonomous Region, and are vastly outnumbered in the annexed territories. In the Amdo region, now the Chinese Qinghai province, in 1953 there were only 100,000 Han Chinese. According to the official Chinese Statistical Yearbook, in 1985 there were 2.5 million Chinese compared to only 750,000 thousand Tibetans.
The ethnic ratio has gotten much more out of balance since 1992, when Deng Xiaoping began advocating the settlement of Han Chinese from other regions to Tibet and the Muslim Xinjiang region. Han settlers were given economic subsidies and other incentives and had houses and shops built for them by the government.
The UN and the West have enabled and funded this cultural genocide by investing in the railroad into Tibet, which was opened in 2006. Under "economic development," as well as the relocation of thousands at least 130,000 Han settlers into the fertile Lhasa Valley.

Beijing's Quest for Regional Dominance:

On March 11, Tibetan monks were in the second day of peaceful protests in Lhasa commemorating the anniversary of the 1950 invasion by Chinese troops and ongoing ethnocide and absorption of Tibet. On that same day in Washington, U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Thomas Keating described in testimony to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee a comment that a senior Chinese military officer made during the admiral's first visit to Beijing as PACOM commander.

Keating recalled the Chinese officer saying, "As we develop our aircraft carriers, why don't we reach an agreement, you and I?" He paused, then made a proposal: "You take Hawaii east. We'll take Hawaii west. We'll share information, and we'll save you all the trouble of deploying your naval forces west of Hawaii."

Within a few days of Keating's testimony, Lhasa and other areas of Chinese-occupied Tibet exploded in violence. It was a sobering response to the U.S. State Department taking China off its list of the world most severe human rights violators. More than 100 people have been killed and hundreds have been arrested, not only in Lhasa but in large areas of natural resource rich eastern Tibet that since 1960 have been made parts of ethnic Han dominated Chinese provinces such as Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu and Yunnan. Of the three historic Tibet provinces, Kham and Ambdo province no longer exist, as their forested land masses have been absorbed into the expanding Chinese empire.

Writing in the Washington Post on August 23, author Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, labeled China as "an authoritarian dictatorship, albeit of a modern variety." Kagan challenged earlier assurances of Western business executives and policy makers that a liberalized economy would leave China no choice but to evolve into a liberalized political system and a leader of a greater East Asian political and economic union. "Can a determined autocratic government join a liberal international order?" he asked. "Now it looks like the richer a country becomes, whether Russia or China, the easier for autocrats to hold on to power... More money pays for its armed forces that can be pointed inward at Tibet and outward at Taiwan. And the lure of more money keeps a commerce-minded [Western] world from protesting too loudly when things get rough."

Media manipulation and international cyber warfare:

On March 21, after evicting all foreign journalists from Tibet, Chinese officials ordered the national media to "incite patriotism and hatred of the Dalai clique" among the Chinese people. At the same time, on March 17 the United Press International reported that Chinese hackers and/or government agents are sending waves of internet viruses to disrupt or destroy the internet capabilities of organizations advocating for Tibetan freedom. The cyber attacks are similar to the tactics used by the Chinese government against the Save Darfur Coalition and the international supporters of the banned Falun Gong meditation group. Similar tactics have been used against Taiwan and Western governments agencies that are viewed as opposed to Chinese government policies.

In what Chinese officials publicly call a "life and death struggle," thousands of Chinese troops are pouring into the Himalayan region, drawing mixed international concern. The March 23 Associated Press reports that Chinese state-run news media have issued an orchestrated call to "resolutely crush" Tibetan demonstrators. Jasper Becker, publisher of Asia Weekly magazine observes, "We are still seeing a Cultural Revolution pattern of propaganda similar to the techniques used by the Nazis. China is always painted as the innocent victim rather than what they are: a colonialist power in Tibet."

The riots as a last gasp for cultural survival:

Chinese officials contemptuously call the protests a "conspiracy by separatists loyal to the Dalai clique." However, historians and informed observers doubt it is the Dalai Lama or the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism that is behind the street riots. To the contrary, the Dalai Lama departed Tibet in 1959 and has little direct contact with the people of Tibet. Most monasteries and the Buddhist traditions have been suppressed or severely harassed, with thousands of monks and nuns having been murdered or held in brutal political prisons and reeducation camps. Thousands more are living outside the country as refugees in foreign lands. Today, throughout Tibet, monks are subjected to communist political indoctrination.

The age of the Tibetan non-clergy demonstrators would indicate that they were raised and educated under the grip of Chinese communism and not steeped in Buddhist tradition. Violent resistance experts state, is a reaction to decades of brutal Chinese suppression and the frustration of young Tibetans educated to be Chinese citizens that they are denied any hope of adequate livelihood. The Chinese government, however, has seized upon the rage of some of the demonstrators. While ignoring the brutal violence of Chinese police and soldiers against peaceful demonstrators, they have exploited the images and the violent deaths of some Chinese colonial shopkeepers in Lhasa to "incite hatred and patriotism" among Han Chinese toward Tibetans.

In the March 21 Washington Times, "Religion Meets reality in Tibet" Ann Geracimos observes the demonstrators grew up during an era of stepped-up Chinese suppression of Buddhism." Mr. Buchong Tsering, Vice-President of the International Campaign for Tibet states that all qualified Buddhist masters in Tibet were educated before 1959, and that generation is passing away." Tibetan advocate Maura Moynihan observes, "Tibetans are people, too, and people can only be pushed so far... before they fight back."

In a March 23 Outlook Section article in the Washington Post, "What They're Really Fighting For in Tibet," Abrahm Lustgarten states: "It is certainly true that human rights abuses continue in Tibet, including imprisonment and torture, the banishment of Tibetans from their farmland, and draconian restrictions on activities and thought within the monasteries. And it is these restrictions that may have sparked this latest resistance. But the mayhem in Lhasa was most notable for its focus on the symptoms of the economic shift. What began as a protest by a few hundred monks from Lhasa's monasteries turned into a riot that brought shopkeepers, traders and farmers into the streets.

"The targets of destruction and violence were not random. The cars toppled and burning in the heart of Lhasa's old city, and on the nearby Beijing East Road were expensive Toyota Land Cruisers and slick Hondas and Audis. They represent the upper class of Tibet's bureaucratic society and the ruling Han immigrants from China.

"Six years ago, on my first visit, Lhasa could still be described as a quaint city brimming with Chinese influence but largely characterized by its ancient Tibetan architecture, Tibetan goods and, of course, Tibetan people. I was dumbfounded, on four subsequent visits, to see how much had changed. The population exploded -- from 250,000 to 500,000 -- and despite official figures that insisted otherwise, few of the newcomers were Tibetan.The Chinese had taken sledgehammers to large swaths of Lhasa's historic streets. They replaced entire neighborhoods with hastily built office buildings and dreary shops with all the hospitality of self-storage units. Chinese dominated all sectors of the economy; they sold all the fruit, drove most of the taxis and mined all the minerals. And finally, in July 2006, the acclaimed Qinghai-Tibet railway opened for service, a transformation that released the floodgates... All the expansion and wealth that has streamed into Tibet has benefited Tibetans very little."

"In October 2006, several hundred young China-educated and otherwise "modern" Tibetans gathered in front of the local government administrative offices in Lhasa in what may come to be viewed as the precursor to the widespread unrest of March 14, 2008. The protesters didn't take aim at religious persecution or human rights complaints but at the unfair rules of their new economic world. The Beijing Olympics in August afford Tibetans -- and many other downtrodden Chinese -- what may be their last great opportunity to draw the world's attention to the inequity of China's economic miracle. For the Tibetans, it may be their final chance to hold onto an ethnically, religiously and economically unique homeland before it is lost forever."