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Who is to blame for the Tibet uprising

By Arthur Thomas - posted Friday, 4 April 2008


Drafting and implementation of CCP policy on "racial management" throughout China lies with three senior bureaucrats. They are:

Wang Lequan Politburo member and Xinjiang's senior bureaucrat with an impressive record in Xinjiang:

  • architect of the model that repressed the Muslim culture;
  • banned the Uyghur language in Uyghur schools;
  • accelerated Han Chinese migration;
  • sent 240,000 16- to 21-year-old Uyghur girls to work in east coast factories. An exercise in splitting families and diluting the Uyghur population by reducing marriageable female numbers in Xinjiang;
  • March 10, 2008 Wang declared his policy on dealing with demonstrators: “No matter what nationality, no matter who it is, wreckers, separatists and terrorists will be smashed by us. There’s no doubt about that.”
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Li Dezhu the CCP's racial theoretician, 3rd most influential bureaucrat and former head of the Ethnic Affairs: he was the first leader to proclaim that "the problem of minorities would be definitively solved by mass Han Chinese migration".

Li drafted the policy for "destroying independent cultures and disintegrating religious minorities by promoting materialism". The CCP journal Seeking the Truth published an expansion of his "cultural security" policy in 2007 proclaiming "the aim was no longer to preserve minority cultures such as the Tibetans, but to refashion them".

Zhang Qingli, protégé of Hu Jintao: he worked in Xinjiang with Wang Lequan before being promoted in 2005 to Party Secretary to Tibet.

After 1959 Tibet remained relatively quiet until Zhang implemented his "people’s war to exterminate dissent" following Li Dezhu's policy to prepare the way for Chinese mass migration, industrialisation, modernisation and militarisation of Tibet using the Tibet Railway.

Tibet was never a threat to China until this strategy created and exacerbated a non existent situation. Tibetans resented being marginalised, isolated and being reduced to a minority in their own land. Despair and fear for survival of their culture and identity became real and urgent with the crackdown and coming of the railway.

One disaster led to another. Zhang's introduction of Mao's philosophy of "changing man" made things worse. It referred to changing ethnic belief and lifestyle to conform to that of the State. Lacking understanding of Tibetan culture or Buddhism, Zhang implemented Li Dezhu's cultural security strategy to refashion Tibetan culture.

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To destroy the Tibetan culture and Buddhism, monks suffered up to 18 days compulsory "patriotic education" a month under severe duress demanding they denounce the Dalai Lama and declare total allegiance to China.

Zhang's implemented Mao's philosophy "Conquering nature" - Mao's engineering solution to "problems created by nature" such as dams and mining minus environmental and ecological considerations. Mining mountains, damming and polluting rivers and lakes held sacred by the Tibetans, and the planned diversion of the sacred Brahmaputra River waters into Western China increased tensions.

Chinese entrepreneurs and miners, buoyed by the lack of enforcement of environmental legislation, responded to China's generous incentives resulting in widespread environmental degradation.

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About the Author

Arthur Thomas is retired. He has extensive experience in the old Soviet, the new Russia, China, Central Asia and South East Asia.

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