Below The Beltway

The New York Times has an excellent article today exploring how China created the environment that has led to the unrest we are seeing in Tibet:

[T]o many Tibetans and their sympathizers, the weeklong uprising against Chinese rule in Lhasa reflects years of simmering resentment over Beijing’s interference in Buddhist religious rites, its tightened political control and the destruction of the environment across the Himalayan territory the Tibetans consider sacred. If there is a surprise, it may be that Beijing has managed to keep things stable for so long.

Since the last big anti-Chinese riots in Tibet two decades ago, Beijing has sought to smother Tibetan separatism by sparking economic development and by inserting itself into the metaphysics of Tibetan Buddhism. But an influx of Han Chinese to Tibet, and a growing sense among Tibetans that China is irreparably altering their way of life, produced a backlash when Communist Party leaders most needed stability there, analysts say.

“Why did the unrest take off?” asked Liu Junning, a liberal political scientist in Beijing. “I think it has something to do with the long-term policy failure of the central authorities. They failed to earn the respect of the people there.”

Primarily, they’ve done this by turning the Dalai Lama, and by extension all of Tibetan Buddhism, as an enemy and, ironically enough for an officially atheistic state, trying to gain control of the religion itself:

The Communist Party, atheistic by doctrine, has insisted that it has the sole authority to approve incarnations — the divine process by which a “living Buddha” is chosen in boyhood. Beijing had already selected a boy as its own Panchen Lama, the second ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, and reportedly jailed a boy chosen by the Dalai Lama.

(…)

Beijing has steadily been taking a tougher line on religious practices and cultural expressions of Tibetan pride. In November 2005, Zhang Qingli was appointed Communist Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Mr. Zhang came from the Communist Youth League organization, part of the political stronghold of Mr. Hu. Mr. Zhang has made no attempt to disguise his paternal attitude toward his charges.

“The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need,” Mr. Zhang said last year. He later added: “The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetan

The idea that the Tibetan monks, and the Tibetan people, might resent a paternalistic attitude that ignored, and even sought to destroy, centuries of Tibetan tradition and culture never seemed to occur to them.

In the short run at least, it looks like the Chinese are going to continue this self-defeating strategy:

BEIJING, March 18 — Premier Wen Jiabao said Tuesday that the recent unrest in Tibet was instigated by the exiled Dalai Lama and proved for all the world to see that his claims of seeking peaceful dialogue with China “are nothing but lies.”

Wen, in China’s first senior-level response to the rioting in Tibet and other Tibetan-inhabited areas of the country, said the violence Friday in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, was particularly “cruel” and caused great harm to the city and its inhabitants.

He dismissed charges by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, that China’s government is committing cultural genocide by submerging the region’s native population under a wave of Han Chinese immigration, and vowed to carry on with economic development in the isolated mountain territory.

“These claims that the Chinese government is engaged in cultural genocide are nothing but lies,” Wen declared at a news conference marking the end of China’s annual legislative sessions.

Wen spoke out after Chinese police conducted house-to-house searches in Lhasa Monday and rounded up hundreds of people suspected of participating in a deadly outburst of anti-Chinese violence, exile groups and residents reported.

If anything, China’s actions in cracking down on the Tibetans may have made the situation worse rather than better:

[E]ven if the protests are extinguished soon, China’s leaders will be left with a shattered Tibet. One foreigner who witnessed the violence in Lhasa said Tibetans were covering the streets in white toilet paper. Traditionally, Tibetans offer white silk scarves to welcome guests. But the toilet paper was intended to symbolize that the Chinese were no longer welcome — even though there was little possibility they would leave.

Hardly an image that China wants to project to the world.