Edward J. Cody on Chinese Response to the Protests in Tibet
Edward J. Cody, a foreign correspondent in Beijing for the Washington Post, has produced a few pieces in recent days on Chinese response to the protests in Tibet. Today, he writes about the strong domestic support for Beijing’s crackdown on the protests.
- In the West, the name Tibet has long evoked unspoiled Himalayan landscapes, cinnamon-robed monks spinning prayer wheels and a peace-loving Dalai Lama seeking freedom for his repressed Buddhist followers.
Here in China, people have embraced a different view; they regard Tibet as a historical part of the nation and see its sympathizers in the West as easily fooled romantics. Thanks to government propaganda, but also to ethnic pride, most Chinese see the Dalai Lama and his monks as obscurantist reactionaries trying to split the country and reverse the economic and social progress that China has brought to a backward and isolated land over the past 58 years.
The violent protests by Buddhist monks and other Tibetans that exploded in Lhasa on Friday, therefore, have generated widespread condemnation among the country’s majority Han Chinese. In street conversations, Internet discussions and academic forums, most Chinese have readily embraced the government’s contention that the violence resulted from a plot mounted by the Dalai Lama from his exile headquarters in India.
Against that background, the Communist Party has met with broad popular approval in vowing to crack down on the rioters — most of whose victims were Han Chinese — and in qualifying the “impudent” Dalai Lama as a “master terror maker” who has hoodwinked the West with his appeals for peace. While the rest of the world invokes the Beijing Olympics and advises restraint, Chinese specialists and the public have urged the government to move decisively–and gamble that the Olympics will not be spoiled.
