Chinese Olympics & Tibet

As you might know, the Olympics are scheduled for China this year. China is trying to show itself as a great modern humanitarian country. They started cracking down on their Muslim minority in the name of preventing terrorism, but now they are cracking down on Tibet, a favorite place of some people like in the movie Seven Years in Tibet, and are beginning to get some backlash. Anyway, here is an article describing this situation.

Geopolitical Diary: Beijing's Tibetan Dilemma
March 17, 2008 0224 GMT
Each March, there are demonstrations in Tibet commemorating a 1959 uprising against the Chinese occupation. This year, the normally small and easily contained demonstration progressed from marches to shouting, to rock-throwing, to burning things and attacking ethnic Chinese stores and businesses. The Han Chinese represent the economic elite in Tibet — as well as the political, military and security elite. The outburst was clearly focused on the economic dominance of the Chinese but wasn’t confined to it.What was extraordinary about the rioting was that it happened at all. The Chinese have confronted and contained Tibetan unrest with relative ease for years. Their normal approach would have been to seal off the area of unrest, arrest as many of the participants as possible and later release those deemed not to represent a particular threat. This time, the Chinese failed to contain events. Indeed, the protests turned into an international media spectacle, with China appearing to be simultaneously repressive and helpless — the worst of both worlds.The reason the Chinese pulled their punches this time around is undoubtedly the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. China has tried to portray a dual image in the months leading up to the games. On the one hand, the government has tried to appear extremely vigilant on terrorism, hoping to allay tourist concerns. The Chinese, for example, went out of their way to showcase a foiled March 7 hijacking of a flight to Beijing from Urumqi in Xinjiang province. The Chinese claimed that the hijackers intended to crash the plane. At the same time, Beijing released new information on a January capture of a Xinjiang Islamist cell that allegedly was plotting attacks against the Olympics.The Tibetan situation is another matter. The Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet in India, is extraordinarily respected and popular in the West. The question of Tibetan autonomy has been taken up by public figures in the West, and some companies have indicated they would not participate in sponsoring the Olympics because of the Tibetan issue. Tibet is not a shared concern, like terrorism, but rather an issue that puts China and the West at odds. Therefore, the Chinese didn’t want to be seen as conducting another Tiananmen Square in Tibet. They were hoping that it would die down on its own, leaving them time later to deal with the instigators. Instead it got out of hand, in a way very visible to the international media.Tibet matters to the Chinese geopolitically because it provides a buffer with India and allows Chinese military power to be anchored in the Himalayas. So long as that boundary is maintained, the Chinese are secure in the Southwest. Tibetan independence would shatter that security. Should an independent Tibet — obviously hostile to China after years of occupation — fall into an alliance with India, the regional balance would shift. There is, therefore, no way that the Chinese are going to give Tibet independence and they are unlikely to increase its autonomy. In fact, they have built a new rail line into Tibet that was intended to allow Han Chinese to move there more easily — an attempt to change Tibet’s demographics and tie it even closer to China. The Chinese are sensitive about their international image. They are even more concerned with their long-term geopolitical interests and with threats to those interests. The Chinese government has attempted to portray the uprising as a conspiracy undertaken by the Dalai Lama, rather than as a spontaneous rising. The Chinese have not mentioned this, but they undoubtedly remember the “color” revolutions in the former Soviet Union. During those uprisings, the Russian government accused the United States of fomenting unrest in countries such as Ukraine in order to weaken Russia geopolitically. The Chinese government is not big on the concept of “spontaneous demonstrations” and undoubtedly is searching for explanations. Having identified the source of the trouble with the Dalai Lama, it is a short step to accusing India — or the United States — of having sparked the rising. Both have been official or unofficial allies of the Dalai Lama.This is not the way the Chinese wanted the run-up to the Olympics to go. Their intention was to showcase the new China. But the international spotlight they have invited encourages everyone with a grievance — and there are plenty such in China — to step forward at a time when the government has to be unusually restrained in its response. Undoubtedly the Tibetan situation is being watched carefully in Beijing. Xinjiang militants are one thing — Tibetan riots are another. But should this unrest move into China proper, the Olympics will have posed a problem that the Chinese government didn’t anticipate when it came up with the idea.Click Here to Send Stratfor Your Comments