Beijing's Crackdown Gets Strong Domestic Support

Tibet, a 750,000-square-mile territory sitting between the Himalayan and Kun Lun mountain ranges, was more or less part of various Chinese empires over the centuries, paying fealty but often too remote to be totally controlled. With the Dalai Lama as its leader, however, Tibet governed itself as an independent nation while China was torn by the upheavals of the first half of the 20th century. So for Beijing officials and the public they have educated through propaganda, the Dalai Lama is less a devout Buddhist than a secessionist rebel.

"Now the blaze and blood in Lhasa has unclad the nature of the Dalai Lama," said an editorial from the official New China News Agency. "And it's time for the international community to recheck their stance toward the group under the camouflage of nonviolence, if they do not want to be willingly misled."

The Dalai Lama's hold on people's imagination in the West has long irritated the Chinese government. The New China News Agency editorial described his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1989, as "tainted" by Friday's rioting. The Congressional Gold Medal, which injected a chill into U.S.-China relations last October, turned out to be a "fig leaf" for the "rhetoric lama to sell his deceitful philosophy," it said.

In any case, the Chinese government has portrayed its presence in Tibet as beneficial for the population, citing the breakup of traditional serfdom in the countryside, improved health care and school construction. A Beijing-to-Lhasa train that began service in July 2006 was designed to further accelerate economic development, bringing in tourists and taking out minerals.

The economic development has been accompanied by an influx of Han Chinese who, Tibetan nationalists complain, have tightened their grip on all the economic and political levers. The Han Chinese who were killed in Friday's rioting, for instance, were identified as shop owners and employees singled out by Tibetans resentful of their economic domination.

The Chinese arrivals, Tibetans and their supporters abroad say, have submerged Tibetan culture and Buddhist traditions by drawing the territory more closely into the rest of China. Signs along the main street leading to Lhasa's celebrated Jokhang Temple, they note, are just as likely to be written in Chinese as Tibetan, and the saleswomen tend to speak Mandarin rather than the region's own tongue.

A Chinese Tibet specialist in Beijing who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the tensions said the situation was inevitable as China pursues economic development of the region. Like the American West in the 19th century, he said, modernization of China's West in the 21st century is bound to dilute the traditional Tibetan ways so esteemed abroad.

"China's government does not intend to destroy Tibetan culture," he said. "But with the economy developing, the culture will change gradually, the same as in other places in the world."