Lhasa Rioters, March 14, 2008 (Photo by Kadfly)
On March 10, 2008, the 49th anniversary of the abortive rebellion of the Tibetans against the Chinese Communist government followed by the flight of their leader the Dalai Lama into exile in India, Tibetan monks and laypeople mounted demonstrations in Lhasa. Continued unrest climaxed on March 14, when Tibetan protesters threw stones at the paramilitary People's Armed Police who fled the scene. The Tibetan mob first assaulted Chinese bystanders, then set fire to many Chinese and Hui Muslim shops before the police finally returned to central Lhasa to restore order. However, Tibetan protests and demonstrations broke out in other areas with heavy Tibetan populations for several days thereafter. Chinese official sources later claimed that 18 innocent people of Han, Hui and Tibetan ethnicity and 1 police officer were killed by the Tibetan mob on March 14, while the Tibetan government-in-exile asserted that the Chinese police and military killed over 140 Tibetans during the demonstrations.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sees a linkage between Kosovo and Tibet, a view shared by the Chinese government and many people in China. Lavrov stated on March 17: " ... the situation in Kosovo is the most striking example of ethnic separatism ... Disturbances have also begun in other regions of the world. To encourage separatist tendencies, I believe, is immoral. You see what is happening in China's autonomous region of Tibet, the way the separatists are acting there." In this domino effects scenario, Western recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign nation has emboldened separatist movements elsewhere.
The outbreak of unrest in Tibet most definitely energized the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the eve of the March 22 presidential election in Taiwan. President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁)'s confrontational policy towards China, the stagnation of the Taiwan economy under 8 years of Chen's DPP administration, and corruption cases involving Chen himself, his wife, his son-in-law and other DPP officials have soured the Taiwan electorate on the DPP. The opposition Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist Party had won a landslide in the legislative elections on January 12, 2008, winning with its allies in the Pan-Blue Coalition 86 of 113 seats in Taiwan's Legislative Yuan, leaving the DPP with only 27 seats. KMT's presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who campaigned on the platform of improving Taiwan's economy and its cross-strait relations with China, held a commanding lead in the polls over DPP's presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷). News of the Tibet unrest presented Frank Hsieh with an opening: he immediately declared that "Taiwan could become the next Tibet," playing on the fears of the Taiwanese about China. Ma countered by condemning China's suppression of the protests and even suggested that Taiwan might boycott the Beijing Olympics over the Tibet issue. Ma, however, denied any linkage between Tibet and Taiwan, on the ground that Taiwan, unlike Tibet, has never been under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. Still, many observers believed that the Tibetan unrest, coupled with some missteps by the KMT, closed the gap between the KMT and the DPP.
Much to the relief of China, however, Ma Ying-jeou won in a landslide with 58% of the vote on March 22. The economy and prospects for improved relations with China evidently loomed larger in the minds of the Taiwanese voters than the Tibet issue. A further encouraging sign for the future of cross-strait relations was the historic meeting at the Boao Forum for Asia (博鳌亚洲论坛) between Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) and Taiwanese Vice President-elect Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) on April 12, "the highest level meeting between officials of the two sides since 1949," when the Chinese Communist Party defeated the KMT in the Chinese Civil War.
Hu Jintao & Vincent Siew at 2008 Boao Forum
If Taiwan's relations with China are on the mend despite the Tibetan unrest, China's hopes for the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a triumphant celebration of China's coming-out party as a peacefully rising power are now in shambles. The March riots followed by the Chinese government's crackdown have focused world attention on Tibet, and emboldened activists who have long planned demonstrations to publicize the Tibetan cause. Western media have broadcast and published reports on Tibet that are largely unflattering to the Chinese government. "Free Tibet" activists have plagued the international Olympic torch relay by disrupting it at almost every stop, even attempting to grab and extinguish the torch on many occasions.
Long before the March 2008 riots, political activists have been taking advantage of the approach of the Olympics to call "unfavorable attention to China’s human-rights abuses at home and its unseemly collusion with other human-rights abusers in the world like Sudan." Actress Mia Farrow and her son Ronan Farrow have labeled the Beijing Games the "Genocide Olympics" in a March 28, 2007 editorial for The Wall Street Journal, accusing China of "bankrolling Darfur's genocide" by its investments in and trade with Sudan, and by its vetoing of "efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter" in the Security Council. The Farrows and other political activists and groups saw Beijing's desire for a successful staging of the Olympics as "a lone point of leverage with a country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism." They advocated shaming corporate sponsors of the Olympic Games and foreign artistic advisers to the Chinese government such as Steven Spielberg, and applying other tactics, including the threat of an Olympics boycott, to pressure Beijing into improving human rights at home, and using its influence to stop mass deaths and political repression in Sudan, Burma and other countries.
Four days after the Farrows' editorial, Steven Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao, "condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there.”" The Chinese government dispatched Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun (翟隽) as a special envoy to Sudan from April 6 to 9, 2007, during which he urged the Sudanese government to accept an UN peacekeeping force and toured three refugee camps.
Chinese Peacekeepers Departing for UN Mission to Sudan, Jan. 15, 2007
China's concern for its image abroad and emerging doubts about whether uncritical support of such widely condemned regimes as Sudan, North Korea and Burma best serves its foreign interests have prompted a shift in its foreign policy. As Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt and Andrew Small pointed out in a paper for the January-February 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs:
China is often accused of supporting a string of despots, nuclear proliferators, and genocidal regimes, shielding them from international pressure and thus reversing progress on human rights and humanitarian principles. But over the last two years, Beijing has been quietly overhauling its policies toward pariah states. It strongly denounced North Korea's nuclear test in October 2006 and took the lead, with the United States, in drafting a sweeping United Nations sanctions resolution against Pyongyang. Over the past year, it has voted to impose and then tighten sanctions on Iran, it has supported the deployment of a United Nations-African Union (UN-AU) force in Darfur, and it has condemned a brutal government crackdown in Burma (which the ruling junta renamed Myanmar in 1989). China is now willing to condition its diplomatic protection of pariah countries, forcing them to become more acceptable to the international community. And it is supporting -- in some cases even helping to create -- processes that chart a path to legitimacy for these states, such as the six-party talks on North Korea, thereby minimizing their exposure to coercive measures.
To be sure, there are limits to how far China will go to pressure those pariah states, since it still favors non-intervention in its relations with foreign countries, and ultimately acts to promote what it sees as in its best interests. Nonetheless, it has unquestionably become a much more responsible stake-holder in global politics.
Moreover, China has been unfairly attributed with an amount of power and influence it does not possess over sovereign dictatorial nations such as Burma and North Korea and unstable regimes such as Sudan, where the national crisis is much more complex and much larger than simply the massacre of African tribespeople by the Sudanese government and Arab militias in Darfur. In point of fact, China's economic stake in Burma and Sudan has been grossly exaggerated: according to the CIA Factbook, in 2006 Japan ranked no. 1 as Sudan's export partner with 38% as compared to China's share of 31% of Sudan's total exports, while China's share of 5.2% of Burma's exports was a distant third to Thailand's 48.8% and India's 12.7% share. Have the global activists agitated for Japan to pressure Sudan to end the killings in Darfur, and for Thailand and India to pressure Burma to stop political repression and free Aung San Ssu Kyi from house arrest? Have they properly acknowledged China's positive contributions as the facilitator of the 6-Party Talks in an effort to end the North Korean nuclear crisis?
On the contrary, the world activists have not been mollified by China's actions. Steven Spielberg withdrew as an artistic adviser to the 2008 Summer Olympics on February 13, 2008, stating that he had been unsuccessful in getting President Hu to do more on the Sudan crisis for almost a year. Far earlier than the Darfur activists, international supporters of Free Tibet have been mobilizing to focus world attention on their cause by taking advantage of the impending Olympics. Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail (Toronto) documents three young women from British Columbia who have spent the last seven years "organizing thousands of international volunteers and hundreds of Tibet-related organizations into a six-month campaign of stealth activism intended to humiliate China before an international audience." What Kate Woznow, Canadian National Coordinator of Students for a Free Tibet, Freya Putt, Olympics Campaign Coordinator of International Tibet Support Network, and Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet have succeeded to do is to build on their experiences as student activists and historical precedents of protests at and boycotts of Olympics, and transformed a Free Tibet Movement from its "passive image typified by bumper stickers and drum circles" into a well-organized and sustained protest campaign.
Lhadon Tethong at Buddhist
Temple in Beijing in 2007
The Tibetan riots have further galvanized the campaign of the Free Tibet activists, and engaged the full attention of the world on Tibet. "As the torch makes its slow journey around the world ... before returning to China for its controversial trip through Tibet in May, the three Canadian women are working their BlackBerrys and laptops late into the night, ensuring that something dramatic will happen at each stop." They "are determined to have non-violent direct action in the heart of Beijing, inside the Games, every day."
Chinese and Westerners, influenced respectively by the divergent and selective reporting of the official Chinese media and the mainstream Western media, held diametrically opposed interpretations of what happened in Tibet in mid- to late March of 2008. Was the March 14 riot in Lhasa "a brutal, unprovoked attack against innocent civilians by Tibetan hoodlums bent on breaking China apart," and Chinese police action legitmate acts of peace preservation, as many Chinese believed? Or was the Lhasa riot "an eruption of anger provoked by harsh crackdowns on peaceful protests against authoritarian Chinese rule," as asserted by many Westerners? As Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN chief correspondent in Beijing and currently a media studies professor in Hong Kong, observed, "There are two alternate realities that are not connecting."
What is certain, however, is that China's image in the world took a nosedive, and Chinese relations with Western countries and some Asian neighbors worsened as Western media coverage was mostly negative, and the Olympic torch relay was repeatedly disrupted by protesters.
Even before the Tibetan riots, a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll "of three western and three Asian countries finds widespread criticism of Chinese policies toward Tibet." Large majorities of those polled in the United States (74%), France (75%), Britain (63%), and South Korea (84%) held critical views. 54% of Indonesians polled disapproved of China's Tibet policies, and only in India was opinion divided, with 37% critical of and 33% approving China's Tibet policies while 31% were neutral. Opinions of China became even more negative following the outbreak of unrest in Tibet. A Zogby interactive poll released on April 7, 2008 found that 70% of likely voters in the U.S. presidential election believed that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) should not have awarded this summer's Olympic Games to Beijing on account of China's poor human rights record. "Europeans now see China -- not the US -- as the biggest threat to global security," Der Spiegel reports on a Harris poll conducted between March 27 and April 8. "35 percent of respondents in the five largest EU states see China as a bigger threat to world stability than any other state. Last year, that figure was 19 percent, and in 2006 it was only 12 percent. In contrast, the US has slipped back into second place, with 29 percent of the respondents viewing it as the biggest threat, down from 32 percent in 2007."
In response, Chinese around the world became increasingly agitated by the protests at the Olympic torch relays that at times turned violent, and by their perceptions of biased Western reporting on the Tibet issue and coordinated efforts to deny the Chinese their celebratory moment at the Olympics. Anger expressed verbally and on the Internet has escalated to mobilization of pro-China demonstrators at each stage of the Olympic torch relay, and even calls for a boycott of Carrefour(家乐福), the French retail giant and the largest foreign hypermarket chain in China, after pro-Tibet demonstrators at the Paris torch relay forced the flame to be extinguished at least 4 times and even violently assaulted Jin Jing (金晶), a disabled woman athlete who was one of the torch carriers.
Paralympic Fencer Jin Jing Attacked at Paris Torch Relay, April 7, 2008
Last revised: May 1, 2008
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