‘Disastrous failure of China’s policy in Tibet’

HONG KONG: The protest demonstrations in the Tibetan areas, which continued even on Wednesday, represent a “disastrous failure” of China’s policy in Tibet since 1950, and Communist Party leaders are whipping up Sino nationalism to divert Chinese people’s attention away from their failures, says renowned Sinologist Willy Wo-Lap Lam.

“The protests since March 10 in Tibet and neighbouring provinces – which are a more serious threat than the disturbances in Lhasa in 1989 – are a big blot on the record of the Communist Party,” Lam, an “old China hand” who has been writing on China for 30 years, told DNA.

“The protests reflect the fact that the Communist Party’s policy in Tibet since 1950, when Chinese troops went in, has failed. The leaders are now therefore finding ways to hide the fact that they were unable to prevent this disaster,” Lam says.

The Chinese authorities’ vilification campaign directed at the Dalai Lama, at the Western media, “and to some extent against the entire 6 million Tibetan population” were all part of this effort, he adds.

But the more “dangerous game”, feels Lam, is the Chinese leadership’s “instigating a wave of nationalism” – directed at Tibetans, the foreign media and protestors in London and Paris. “To a certain extent, this is a traditional bogey – the ‘anti-Chinese foreign forces’ – which find mention in internal party documents.”

But nationalism, cautions Lam, is a double-edged sword, and if unchecked, it could have “boomerang” on the leadership. He recalls that in April 2005, there was a similar effort at nationalistic mobilisation in China against Japan to protest against Japanese textbooks’ downplaying of contentious events in the shared history of their two countries.

On April 15 that year, when Chinese mobs burnt down the Shanghai building that houses the Japanese Consulate-General, the authorities realised that “things were getting out of hand”.

Perhaps, says Lam, Chinese authorities and citizens, who have in recent days ratcheted up the venomous rhetoric directed at the Dalai Lama and his overseas supporters, believe that things haven’t reached that stage, and can be allowed to go on a little longer.