This article was translated from the Chinese by Princeton University Prof. Perry Link.
WSJ: The Cry of
By WANG LIXIONG
March 31, 2008
The recent troubles in
A few angry young men then began throwing stones at the Barkor police station. More and more joined, and then they set fires, overturned cars and began shouting "
The fundamental cause of these recurrent events is a painful dilemma that lives inside the minds of Tibetan monks. When the Chinese government demands that they denounce their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, monks are forced to choose between obeying, which violates their deepest spiritual convictions, and resisting, which can lead to loss of government registry and physical expulsion from monasteries.
From time to time monks have used peaceful demonstrations to express their anguish. When they have done this, an insecure Chinese government, bent on "annihilating unstable elements" in the "emergent stage," has reacted with violent repression. This, in turn, triggers violence from Tibetans.
In recent decades, the Chinese government\’s policy for pacifying
The most efficient route to peace in
It should be no surprise that beatings of monks and closings of monasteries naturally stimulate civil unrest, or that civil unrest, spawned in this way, can turn violent.
Why aren\’t these simple truths more obvious? Phuntsog Wanggyal, a Tibetan now retired in
Their ready-made tag for everything that goes wrong is "hostile foreign forces" — an enemy that justifies any kind of harsh or unreasoning repression. When repeated endlessly, anti-splittism, although originally vacuous, does take on a kind of solidity. Careers are made in it, and challenging it becomes impossible.
I am a supporter of the Dalai Lama\’s "middle way," meaning autonomy for
It follows — even if this is a tall order — that the ultimate solution to the
It is time for the Chinese government to take stock of why its long-term strategy in
Mr. Wang, a Beijing-based writer, was the organizer of the recent 12-point statement on
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