Enter the Dragon: Chinese Invasion
of Tibet continues...

That the Chinese take-over of Tibet is not liked by the local populace is quite clear. There were many other flare-ups against them.

In 1959 there had been the spontaneous revolt in Lhasa when the Dalai Lama was forced to flee Tibet. In 1987 serious riots broke out again.

The excesses and atrocities of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were devastating both for the Buddhist institutions of Tibet and for the Tibetan public. Many thousands were executed.

The uprising in 1987 was crushed, following which the Dalai Lama attempted to calm the situation with his 5-Point Plan and his Strasbourg Proposal. But the situation was often tense, as has been noted by many observers. An actual observation of 1989 is given below.

A young Tibetan threw two stones at an armed guard. A vice platoon leader asked: ‘Shall we beat him?’ As the stone hit a vice battalion commander in his leg, he ordered: ‘Beat him!’

Then he led three armed policemen to chase the Tibetan who had thrown the stones. The Tibetan ran into the house of an ordinary Tibetan family. The armed policemen crashed upon the door and raked the residents with gunfire. All six members of the family were killed, among whom the youngest boy was only eleven years old.

But the Tibetan who threw the stones climbed a wall and ran away. The armed policemen followed him and shot him in the leg. One armed police then rushed forward and hit the Tibetan’s head with his rifle. The rifle went off accidentally, and an armed policeman behind him was struck in the neck and died instantly. When the vice-platoon leader saw his fellow die, he angrily hit the Tibetan with his rifle and smashed the brains out of the Tibetan’s head.

When the policemen hit this young Tibetan with their guns, six Tibetans from another family stood in their doorway not far away and cried: ‘Murderers! Murderers!’ The vice-platoon leader then picked up his machine gun and raked them with gunfire. All six Tibetans died

To be continued...