More Bloodshed in Tibet | Newsweek Scope

Why India Fears China
Jeremy Kahn 10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
On June 21, two Chinese military helicopters swooped low over Demchok, a tiny Indian hamlet high in the Hima-layas along the northwestern border with China. The helicopters dropped canned food over a barren expanse and then returned to bases in China. India's military scrambled helicopters to the scene but did not seem unduly alarmed. This sort of Cold War cat-and-mouse game has played out on the 4,057-kilometer India-China border for decades. But the incident fed a media frenzy about "the Chinese dragon." Beginning in August, stories about new Chinese incursions into India have dominated the 24-hour TV news networks and the newspaper headlines.
ASIA
Uneasy Anniversary
Melinda Liu 3/20/2009 12:00:00 AM
For the most part, the diplomats' efforts abroad have been effective: a California lawmaker's effort to declare March 10 Tibetan Awareness Day in the state was derailed after the Chinese Consulate expressed its strong opposition to the nonbinding and seemingly nonthreatening resolution. Closer to home, however, Chinese officials face a very different and potentially more difficult challenge: how to manage highly emotional and nationalistic anti-Western sentiments that may risk alienating China's most important trading partners.
TIBET CRISIS
Desperate Devotion
Jonathan Ansfield 3/21/2008 12:00:00 AM
For the Tibetans in Tongren, it was a sacred day of incense burning. But against a backdrop of protest and violence, the big question was whether the monks of the Longwu Monastery could come out to lead the ritual. Tuesday's occasion, depending on which Tibetans you asked, was either the start of spring or the anniversary of the Supreme Buddha Sakyamuni becoming a monk—or mourning for brethren killed elsewhere during recent clashes with Chinese security forces. To Chinese authorities it presented yet another dangerous window for Tibetans to protest against Chinese rule and clamor for the return of the exiled Dalai Lama.
POINT OF VIEW
Why Beijing Needs Tibet’s Help

Recent events in Tibet have underscored the fact that more than a Half Century of Chinese occupation—and forcible attempts to change Tibetans into Han Chinese—aren't working and never will. Resistance to Beijing's imperialism hasn't come just from the "Dalai Lama clique," as Chinese officials put it, but from all 6 million Tibetans.
PROPAGANDA
China’s Dangerous Game
Melinda Liu
It didn't take long after the outbreak of violent protests in Tibet two weeks ago before China's well-oiled propaganda machine roared into overdrive. Within days, the Web site of the state-run Xinhua news agency was offering neatly packaged facts and figures on the turmoil, while CCTV released a video of what it called "the March 14 beating, smashing, looting and burning incident." Domestic media painted a graphic picture of the Lhasa bloodshed—the blood shed by ethnic Chinese, that is. According to reports, rioters had killed an 8-month-old baby and severely beaten a woman before slicing off her ear. They'd attacked policemen and set fire to a clothing shop, fatally trapping five salesgirls inside. Chinese TV showed lingering shots of shopkeepers grieving for their dead co-workers. "We can't go to work normally," said one Chinese woman on CCTV. "This is destroying our prosperity."
INTERNATIONAL
The Next Saffron Revolution
Melinda Liu
The streets of Dharamsala, India, ordinarily a gantlet of signs for yoga schools and other New Age trekker traps, have turned into a huge open-air photo gallery of bloodied Tibetan corpses. It's a gruesome sight—awful enough, in fact, to crack the fabled composure of the Himalayan town's best-known resident, the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of some 6 million Tibetans. In a 45-minute interview with NEWSWEEK last week in Dharamsala, his first print exclusive since Beijing's latest brutal crackdown on ethnic-Tibetan unrest, he said he'd been driven to tears by images of the violence. "But at the deeper emotional level there is calm," he said. "Every night in my Buddhist practice, I give and take. I take in Chinese suspicion; I give back trust and compassion. I take their negative feeling and give them positive feeling … This practice helps tremendously."