Juan Palop, continues its Asian blog here
March, when fucking in Beijing
March promises to be a complicated month for Beijing. Within days, coinciding with the grand celebration of the National People's Congress, on the Tibetan plateau will begin the celebration of fifty years of Chinese repression. In March 1959, the People's Liberation Army entered Lhasa blood and fire and smothered a powerful popular revolt. In the slaughter killed 90,000 people and hope that the ancient kingdom of the Himalayas could be regulated with some autonomy within the Republic, as agreed eight years ago. Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama went into exile never to return.
The echoes of that brutal repression still present. Last year, seeing the world had its eyes on the China Olympics, the embers of the rebellion rekindled again. The result: over a hundred dead (twenty, according to Beijing), thousands of detainees and the confirmation that, despite economic liberalization, the Chinese Communist Party is still installed in the most stale and outdated authoritarianism. The flagrant violations of human rights of those days, from arbitrary detention to the information gap, left evidence in the sewers of power that underpins Beijing just a few months of his coming-out to the international community.
The situation today is even more tense than last year, tells me Aritz Parra, a Spanish journalist who has spent more than three years working in China and has recently traveled through the area. Protests have already begun to spread, albeit subtle, on the periphery of the Tibetan Plateau and the controls have been increased considerably in anticipation of unrest. The situation could degenerate into violence at any time.
It seems that Beijing is scared. Is aware that his power is based solely on force and that its dual strategy of economic improvement, the injection of billions of yuan and the construction of modern infrastructure, and the dissolution of the cultural-immigration Chinese encouraged to race to the region have failed. The Tibetans, one of the most spiritual people I've seen, not at all tempted by the Chinese pragmatism. The desire for self-government, even under the designs of a religious leader of feudal dyes, are still there, intact, as half a century ago. And with them those of many other ethnic minorities in China.
Photo: stock.xchng
