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Enter the Dragon: Chinese Invasion of Tibet continues....
This is narrated by a Chinese cadre who witnessed the whole thing. This was not during the difficult days in the 50s but as late as in March 1989.
The Canadian journalist and author Eric Margolis wrote of his visit to Lhasa in his 1999 book. ‘Lhasa looked normal, but to my eyes, trained to watchfulness in a score of nasty Communist or Third World dictatorships, the signs of repression were evident.
Large numbers of uniformed and plainsclothes Chinese police kept discreet watch on the Tibetan population. Police checkpoints guarded many important intersections. Hidden up back alleys, squads of riot police waited for trouble. My reconnaissance around the capital showed that three regular divisions of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army were based just outside Lhasa in a rough circle, ready to intervene on short notice.
Military checkpoints carefully monitored traffic in and out of the capital.
There is an underground resistance movement across Tibet, but it is badly fragmented, disorganized, and frequently penetrated by Chinese agents.
Lacking arms or foreign support,
Tibetan nationalists are compelled to adopt a policy of sullen, passive resistance until the day, however distant, that a miracle occurs, and China’s iron grip is somehow broken, or at least relaxed. It had happened before in Tibet’s long history, I was told, and, with patience, would happen again.’ Margolis talks about the validity of China’s concerns regarding Tibetan loyalty to the PRC:
China’s concern over the loyalty of its ‘new Tibetan brothers’ is well-founded. All photographs or paintings of the Dalai Lama were banned as ‘subversive’. Even possession of a photo can lead to beatings, prison, or even the Lao Gai, the vast gulag created by China in the wastes of Qinghai Province, where the average sentence for political deviation, real or imagined, was fifteen to twenty years’ hard labour on subsistence rations.
Yet it was plainly evident that Tibetans yearned passionately for the return of their spiritual leader, and sorely chafed under the harsh Chinese ‘liberation’. The author was witness to one eruption of popular dissatisfaction in Lhasa.
To be continued...