Tibetan monks gather a day after rioting began in March 2008
The distinctive features of the 2008 protest movement in Tibet are their geographical spread and social diversity, says Tsering Shakya, the leading historian of modern Tibet. “They seemed to take place simultaneously in almost all the areas where Tibetans live,” he notes, due to the widespread use of cell phones and text messaging to communicate and mobilize for demonstrations. Fewer protests occurred in Western Tibet, where there is no mobile phone network.
Whereas the 1980s protests were led by the monks, the demonstrations this year engaged a wide range of groups, including schoolchildren, students, intellectuals, workers, and farmers. “This level of involvement from different sectors of Tibetan society was unprecedented,” says Shakya, author of the acclaimed history of modern Tibet, The Dragon in the Land of Snows.
Shakya dismisses reports that the protests were externally “engineered” like the National Endowment for Democracy as “wide of the mark“.
The Chinese Communist Party will not readily cede greater autonomy for Tibet, let alone countenance independence. Having abandoned its Marxist-Leninist ideology, one of the Communist Party’s strongest claims to legitimacy is that it unified China territorially. Any concessions on sovereignty will “weaken the Party’s legitimizing appeal.”
Despite the media coverage of nationalist demonstrations by Han Chinese in response to the Tibetan protests, reaction was not uniform, Shakya suggests. Over 300 intellectuals signed a petition criticizing the government’s response and appealing for dialogue and some Chinese lawyers offered to defend Tibetan detainees. “These people are risking their livelihood,” he says, since “the government is threatening not to renew their licenses.”
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