In Gansu province -- as photographs taken by two Canadian television reporters show -- demonstrators on horseback stormed down from the mountains and congregated in front of the Bora Monastery near the city of Hezuo. Together with monks and demonstrators on mopeds, the Tibetans surrounded a government building, took down the Chinese flag, and hoisted the Tibetan flag in its place before police and soldiers regained control over the area after hours of street skirmishes.
A few blocks away, monks from the Bora Monastery even broke into and ransacked Chinese shops. They deliberately spared the shopkeepers but didn't end their attacks until a lama interceded. Meanwhile, Communist Party leaders used government-controlled television to announce that they had the situation "everywhere completely under control."
The region, a popular tourist destination, is now deserted. Instead of the usual backpackers, hotels now house government security forces. Residents seeking to leave the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the direction of Chengdu must pass through road checkpoints, where Chinese soldiers wielding machine guns search cars and trunks with metal detectors. Meanwhile, military trucks filled with young soldiers -- reinforcements -- arrive from the opposite direction.
Even in Beijing, roughly 50 young academics from the Central University for Nationalities dared to challenge the authorities by staging a sit-in -- and risking their freedom, or at the very least jeopardizing their careers. According to the state news agency Xinhua, professors convinced the protesters to return to their dormitories.
But the Chinese public was kept almost completely in the dark about most of the protests, as if a news blackout -- including blockage of the domestic feeds for CNN and the BBC, a ban on international reporting, and the expulsion of Hong Kong journalists -- could make the events go away.
And yet the news quickly circled the globe, mainly thanks to media-savvy young Tibetan politicians in exile. They spread their message throughout a worldwide network and triggered a massive outcry against Beijing. From Athens to Amsterdam, from Washington to Wellington, and from The Hague to Tokyo, demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity for the repressed Tibetan minority. In Berlin, hundreds demonstrated in front of the embassy of the People's Republic of China. The protests were especially strident in neighboring Nepal and India, where more than 80,000 Tibetan exiles live.
In Taiwan, where elections will be held on Sunday, events on the roof of the world have suddenly taken center stage. Beijing considers the island nation a renegade province and hopes that the Kuomintang Party (KMT), which is the Taiwanese party most closely aligned with the mainland Communist Party, will win the election -- which would bring Taiwan closer to "reunification." But now the widely favored presidential candidate, KMT's Ma Ying-jeou, finds himself on the defensive. He has condemned what he calls "repression in Tibet," and he's considering a boycott of the Olympics, echoing the sentiments of some European politicians.
The events in Tibet and elsewhere have turned into a major public-relations disaster for China's leaders. Suddenly the ugly face of Chinese communism is omnipresent again, as images of past injustices are conjured up. The 1989 massacre on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, when the party's tanks mowed down peaceful demonstrators and up to 3,000 people were killed, has been on people's minds; so has the violence in Lhasa in 1959, when more than 80,000 Tibetans died in the wake of a failed uprising that led to the Dalai Lama's forced exile. It's all happening as Beijing hoped to bask in the glow of the Olympics. This preeminent celebration of sports is more than just a prestigious event for China's leadership. Beijing associates the Olympics with its return to the stage as a world power.
The countdown to this new era has been running for seven years. The 1.3 billion citizens of the most populous nation on earth have been well primed. Beijing wants to suggest it has joined the United States as a superpower -- backed up by certain economic facts. China already has the largest foreign currency reserves of any nation, and it will likely be the world's leading exporter in 2008. The West looks up to us again, Beijing implies to its own people, with its imposing new towers and new Olympic sports facilities.
Last Tuesday, at his annual press conference to conclude the Beijing meeting of the National People's Congress, Premier Wen -- already playing jovial host -- insisted that the "smiles of 1.3 billion Chinese " will be returned by the smiles of all of the peoples of the world. But his performance also revealed that this time Beijing can no longer ignore global outrage over its repressive policies in Tibet. Speaking on live TV, the premier seemed genuinely anxious to respond to reporters' questions.
But then Wen proceeded to rattle off the party's hackneyed phrases, insisting that the Dalai Lama's claims that he seeks a peaceful dialogue, not independence for Tibet, are nothing but lies. On the other hand, he was also forced to address a French reporter's request to allow the foreign press to travel to Tibet, promising that Beijing would "look into" the matter.
But why is China jeopardizing its reputation in the world in such a dramatic way? What is it about Tibet and the Dalai Lama that has triggered the Communist Party leadership's extreme reaction? And how much of the escalation can be attributed to young, radical Tibetans who no longer support the Dalai Lama's peaceful "middle way," instead seeking confrontation with their Chinese occupiers?
Even more important, what exactly happened in Lhasa? And what is happening there now, while the global public is kept in the dark?
Beijing sees the unrest in Tibet as an attack on the country's territorial integrity and sovereignty, and a large majority of Chinese share its views. Ninety-two percent of Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group, and from their perspective Beijing is merely defending China's best interests in its dealings with Tibet.
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