China’s top police official called for stepped-up “patriotic campaigns” in Tibet’s monasteries to boost support for Beijing, state media reported Tuesday.
China sees monks as its biggest threat in Tibet
BEIJING: China’s top police official called for stepped-up “patriotic campaigns” in Tibet’s monasteries to boost support for Beijing, state media reported Tuesday, after a deadly clash between protesters and police in the country’s west.
The demonstration in Garze, a prefecture in Sichuan province, started Monday as a peaceful march by monks and nuns, but grew violent when armed police tried to suppress the crowd, which ballooned to about 200 after residents joined in, the Dharmsala, India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.
Garze borders Tibet, where several days of anti-government protests led by monks spiralled into violence on March 14 in the capital, Lhasa. The government says at least 22 people have died in Lhasa while Tibetan rights groups say nearly 140 Tibetans were killed, including 19 in Gansu province.
Tibetan monks have expressed fears that a stepped-up political campaign following violent anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa would target future Buddhists leaders.
China has long held a vice-like grip over Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in an effort to curb an independence drive that it blames on the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibet’s most revered spiritual leader.
But the recent riots in Lhasa and unrest at monasteries in Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces almost certainly mean that yet another political campaign against Tibetan monks will soon be unleashed, monks and analysts said.
‘There are several of us here who have gone to India and received education by the Dalai Lama, including myself,’ a monk at the Dhondrupling monastery in Yunnan province, who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Songsten, said.
“These trips have all been done in secret, but when tensions with the central government are high, these kinds of trips are impossible.” China has blamed the Dalai Lama for the recent unrest and has vowed to step up a ‘life and death struggle’ to crush ‘Tibetan splittists’ and win the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people.
Already monks sit in mandatory political classes at Dhondrupling, a monastery destroyed during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, he said.
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