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Enter the Dragon: Chinese Invasion
of Tibet continues...
The point was amply demonstrated to me by a violent riot that erupted before my eyes in downtown Lhasa. Chinese police had tried to seize a picture of the Dalai Lama from a seller of hides.
He had resisted; a melee erupted, as passersby sought to prevent his arrest. In a few minutes, the streets of central Lhasa were filled with demonstrators hurling curses at their occupiers, and attacking Chinese-owned shops.
Truckloads of Chinese riot police and heavily-armed troops suddenly appeared, sealing the main intersections and cordoning off the downtown area. Tibetan demonstrators were beaten with rubber truncheons and tear-gassed. More troops took up positions on the outer roads ringing the capital. I was stopped by security police, searched, and forced to return to my hotel, for ‘my protection against bandits and troublemakers,’ I was helpfully informed. More riots had erupted. I later learned, in Shigatse, Tibet’s second city.
Chinese authorities would subsequently denounce the riots as the work of ‘splittists, feudal elements, and foreign agents.’ Clearly,
Tibet’s liberation was not progressing satisfactorily, in spite of four decades of socialist re-education and ideological purification, Chinese euphemisms for brute force, terror, intimidation, and ceaseless propaganda.
Chinese attitude to Tibetans, as also to the non-Han peoples of Sinkiang and of Inner Mongolia, have been noted by all recent visitors to be one of contempt. During the Tibetan protests in March-April 2008, when Chinese television showed the street violence in Lhasa all over the PRC, the universal reaction of all the Han Chinese was that of indignation that the police had not used more force to quell it.
To be continued..