Uneasy Anniversary

Meanwhile, Xinhua continued the anti-Western theme in an article that documented the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's covert support for anti-Beijing Tibetan rebels during the 1950s. It cited U.S. government documents and the CIA's "notorious involvement" in training and supplying Tibetan rebels by pointing out the presence of U.S.-supplied weapons used during the insurrection, which are now enshrined in a recently opened Beijing exhibition on the 50th anniversary.

This exhibition on Tibet's "democratic reforms" was also the subject of a commentary in the March 13 edition of the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily. The display, which focused on the plight of serfs before and after soldiers of the People's Liberation Army marched into Lhasa half a century ago, "has shown to all the Tibetans' miserable life in the old days and their happy life in the new Tibet," it said. (The piece also quoted an expert from the China Tibetan Research Center as saying the exhibit shows "Tibet has been walking towards brightness from darkness, from backwardness to advancement, from poverty to riches, from dictatorship to democracy.")

That theme has been picked up elsewhere in the Chinese media, along with an unmistakable degree of anger over the way the Tibetan story has been told outside China.

"Western media don't pay attention to the … positive changes that have taken place in Tibet, but only to the one-year anniversary of the March 14th incident," stated a commentary in Xilu Junshi, referring to the violent riots that broke out in the Tibetan capital a year ago and then spread to other ethnic Tibetan communities. The commentator declared that the Western media's aim was to "make trouble on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in order to prolong the length of the economic crisis in China."

Such feverish hyperbole is typical of the emotions that this sensitive subject provokes in China—and it also helps explain why many Chinese citizens have grown up with little nuance in their understanding of the Tibetan issue.

© 2009