Below The Beltway

The violence in Tibet intensified yesterday and spread beyond the capital city:

BEIJING — Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.

Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100.

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital. Large numbers of military police and security officers fired tear gas while Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.

“Their slogans were, ‘The Dalai Lama must return to Tibet’ and ‘Tibetans need to have human rights in Tibet,’ ” said Jamyang, a Tibetan in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, who spoke to protesters. By Sunday morning, unconfirmed reports from pro-Tibet groups described new protests in other Tibetan areas of Gansu Province, and possibly elsewhere in Tibet.

The Dalai Lama, meanwhile, accused the Chinese of engaging in a systematic effort to destroy Tibetan culture:

(CNN) — The Dalai Lama on Sunday called for an international probe of China’s treatment of Tibet, which he said is causing “cultural genocide” of his people.

The exiled spiritual leader of Tibet spoke at a news conference Sunday in Dharmsala, India, two days after violent clashes between pro-autonomy demonstrators and Chinese security forces in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

A spokesman for the Tibetan exile government said it has confirmed at least 80 deaths in Friday’s violence and that protests were continuing outside the capital on Sunday, further undermining China’s hopes of a smooth run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Tibet Watch, a group based in Daramsala, India, told CNN that 34 people have died in the Nwaga County area of Sichuan province in western China.

The dead include women and children, the group said in an e-mail. They were killed by Chinese police attempting to stop the protests.

Another protest took place in Machu County in northwestern China, the group said. It was started by some Tibetan students distributing fliers.

With images and video of the violence now starting to make their way to the world, the Chinese have good reason to be concerned about the international reaction. They are, understandably, afraid that these protests will develop into another Tiananmen Square, causing damage to China’s intentional reputation on the eve of the Olympics. And, as at least one blogger has noted, maybe China shouldn’t be hosting the Olympics at all:

Beijing has been hanging its international reputation on the success of the Olympics for years now. But maybe it shouldn’t have been so eager to host the games in the first place. By emphasizing that the 2008 Olympics will symbolize China’s coming-out as a humane and responsible great power, Beijing has invited challenges to the legitimacy of its actions in Darfur, Burma, and now–in the wake of this week’s crackdown on protesting monks–Tibet as well.

The problem, of course, is that China’s government is fundamentally incapable of acquitting itself well against these challenges without radically restructuring its priorities, or undergoing fundamental political change. For example, unless China abandons its colonial project in Tibet (and its reliance on the use of force to keep order), no responsible Chinese leader can allow a Tibetan uprising to go unchecked. Similarly, unless China wants to readjust its attitude towards free speech, Beijing has to crack down on human rights to prevent domestic protests from marring the Olympics. And unless China wants to readjust its policy of nonintervention in other states’ internal affairs–as well as its strategy of currying favor with unsavory African regimes–it must continue to coddle Sudan.

To some extent, it’s clear that the Tibetans are using the approach of the Olympics to put pressure on the Chinese, who now find themselves between a rock and a hard place.