Tibet gives the lie to the great change

Last Modified: 03 Apr 2008
By: Lindsey Hilsum

All promises about freedom of reporting and improving human rights in the run-up to the Olympics appear to have been abandoned.

Everyone says this is a period of profound historic change in China. I've said so myself, pointing to huge economic growth and the country's new diplomatic reach.

But the speed with which the leadership has reverted to Cultural Revolution language and to blaming old enemies for the trouble in Tibet makes me wonder if anything very much has changed at all. Zhang Yihe, whose writing is ban ned in China, wrote a book entitled The Past Is Not Like Smoke - you cannot blow it away.

Her father, Zhang Bojun, was condemned as a "rightist" in the Fifties, and she is censored partly because of official suspicion of what used to be called "bad family background". Not surprisingly, she feels the past half-century has failed to produce a real shift. "This is an insignificant transitional time in China," she writes.

The Olympics was supposed to mark China's full emergence from that transition into the modern world, but without political change it is hard to see how that can happen. Commercialism and nationalism may have replaced communism as the prevailing ideology, but when faced with a crisis, the authorities behave pretty much as they always did.

Take Tibet. Despite media censorship, we now understand more or less what happened. On 10 and 11 March, monks led peaceful demonstrations to commemorate the 1959 Tibetan uprising during which the Dalai Lama fled to India.

The police tried to beat them back and then besieged the monasteries. The following two days were mainly quiet, but on Friday 14 March a small demonstration outside the Rampoche Temple in central Lhasa sparked rioting by Tibetan youths, who attacked Han Chinese and Hui Muslims and their property.

President Hu Jintao did not smile as he announced that the torch relay had commenced. I suppose he must be preoccupied.

The police seem to have allowed the rioters to run rampant until evening. The chairman of the Tibet Autono mous Region, Qiangba Puncog, told diplomats in Lhasa: "The government failed in its duty to protect innocent citizens." He said he had apologised to the injured in hospital. Officially, 18 people were killed by rioters.

The crackdown started the next day, by which time demonstrations were springing up all over the Tibetan parts of China. Orders went out that these protests must be suppressed. No distinction appears to have been made between youths smashing windows and peaceful Tibetans, including monks and nuns, waving Free Tibet flags and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama.

In Aba County, Sichuan Province, at least four people are believed to have been shot dead by police. Tibet campaigners say 140 in total have been killed. Thousands are being rounded up; we may not know their fate for years.

This pattern, according to journalists who were here in 1989, is familiar. Faced with a sudden crisis, afraid of doing the wrong thing, with no standing orders, police referred decisions upwards. By the time they were told to act, momentum had already built, so huge armed force was deployed.

There are now tens of thousands of soldiers and armed police controlling Tibetan provinces. Tibetans are terrified to speak out; journalists have been banned. All promises about freedom of reporting and improving human rights in the run-up to the Olympics appear to have been abandoned.

An old-style propaganda campaign is in full swing. According to the People's Daily, "the Dalai clique . . . masterminded, carefully organised and planned the riot with bloodshed, and the rioters' evil deeds are closely related to ravings to secede the motherland [sic]".

In a throwback to the "Third World-ism" of the 1970s, no country is too obscure for inclusion in the list of those who agree with the Beijing leadership.

The China Daily solemnly printed that: "Tolofuaivalelei Falemoe Leiataua, speaker of the legislative assembly of Samoa, said the Tibet issue is China's internal affair, and foreign governments have no right to interfere, nor should its leaders meet the Dalai Lama." Under the headline "World leaders voice support for China's handling of riots", politicians from minute states and communist parties the world over are similarly cited.

Last Monday, I sat in Tiananmen Square watching the ceremony to mark the arrival of the Olympic torch. "This is a historic moment," intoned an official. It didn't feel like it. Fewer than 6,000 people sat in the square, which can hold a million.

The cheerleaders waved their golden pompons only when the camera-crane swept over - it was nothing like the excited celebration in 2001, when Beijing was awarded the games.

President Hu Jintao did not smile as he announced that the torch relay had commenced. I suppose he must be preoccupied, managing the same old problems in the same old way, the Olympics now threatening to highlight not how much China has changed, but how much it has stayed the same.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman