Easy China bashing, roiling up the ‘free tibet, save darfur, support kosovo’ crowd.
The Quing controlled Vietnam, Korea,Tibet. France and Japan changed that picture. (…)
From 1912 on, Tibet and Mongolia became de facto independent in some measure, as the Chinese left. Both had their own Gvmt, army, etc. and they recognized each other mutually. No other country recognized them, and China continued to claim.
Mongolia and Tibet were in the same situation as Kosovo until the Kosova decl. of independence. Sort of.
Mongolia turned to the USSR who helped it defeat Japan in 39.
Stalin pressured China for Mongolian independence. In 49, China recognized Mongolia as independent, Mongolia recognized China. Other countries followed, Mongolia became a member of the UN in the early 60s. (it turned ‘democratic’ after the fall of the wall.)
Tibet was under the wing of GB. No Western country, or any other (?), ever recognized it as ‘independent’, to this day.
The US and GB have always affirmed in public that Tibet was part of China. Afaik.
In 1950, Salvador (!) raised the question in the UN, as Chinese troops were ‘invadin’ Tibet. The US and India stated categorically that Tibet is Chinese, thus it was an internal matter, not to be taken on board by the UN.
Last chance for Tibet independence lost, China took control, slowly.
Then The Tibet resistance found support – Bingo! Bling! The US (light arms only.) Today teens agonize about those poor oppressed Tibetians (often confusing them with the Nepalese, better tourist industry, it has all to do with prayer wheels and the spiritual life…)
Heh, no one in the US has car stickers saying FREE PALESTINE, right?
note: i’m no historian, this is ‘potted’ history with a personal slant, all of it can be seen as rubbish or wrong, i have no deep knowledge, but this is the kind of thing ppl in the EU discuss, storm of letters to the papers, on the internet, etc.

Posted by: Tangerine | Mar 22 2008 19:43 utc | 4

Small quibble (IIRC) Mongolia came directly (1912ish) under the wing of first Tsar Russia then Soviet Union (first satellite of the Soviet Union).
If not for the ww1, I think China would have been divided wholesale between the imperial powers. It was already divide into ‘spheres of influence’ and those had a tendency to turn into colonies. And it was sort of the last frontier of colonialism.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Mar 23 2008 2:12 utc | 6

A fresh WaPo outlook piece points to uneven economic development as reason fro the recent rebellion: RAILROADED
What They’re Really Fighting for in Tibet

Six years ago, on my first visit, Lhasa could still be described as a quaint city brimming with Chinese influence but largely characterized by its ancient Tibetan architecture, Tibetan goods and, of course, Tibetan people. The Chinese who did reside there often left in the winter, when temperatures drop below freezing and the 12,000-foot-high city is whipped with winds off the Himalayan plateau.
I was dumbfounded, on four subsequent visits, to see how much had changed. The population exploded — from 250,000 to 500,000 — and despite official figures that insisted otherwise, few of the newcomers were Tibetan. And they stayed in Lhasa year-round.
…
in interviews with Tibetans, I heard a different thread: Many had been eager for modernization and had anticipated its perks — higher living standards, more education and better jobs. At first, they had welcomed the promised price drops and opportunity the railway was supposed to bring. But as the perks failed to materialize, they lost faith in a system that seemed blatantly designed to leave them out.
On a cold winter night in the capital, a young Tibetan entrepreneur gave me his perspective. “This is the universal trend,” he said, gesturing to the thriving rows of lit storefronts and bustling commerce around us. “It would be happening whether China was doing it or Tibetans were doing it.”
This man was trilingual, educated at one of Beijing’s best universities. But he was having trouble making it in the new economy, and he was not alone.
…
In October 2006, several hundred young educated and otherwise “modern” Tibetans gathered in front of the local government administrative offices in Lhasa in what may come to be viewed as the precursor to the widespread unrest of March 14. The protesters didn’t take aim at religious persecution or human rights complaints but at the unfair rules of their new economic world. They were upset that, despite their own education and middle-class standing, jobs were going to Han Chinese instead.

Posted by: b | Mar 23 2008 15:13 utc | 8

NYT participates too. NYT recently printed another photo of Nepalese police beating demonstrators on its front page, to illustrate that day’s story about Tibet. Caption correctly identified photo as showing Nepal, with no explanation, and Nepal was mentioned nowhere else, neither in the story on Tibet nor anywhere else in the paper.
Makes one wonder who is coordinating and disseminating the Tibet narrative. And the “paper of record” runs a correct caption, yet still uses the photo with Tibet story. This cannot be carelessness. Planting images with emotional associations. What does such blatant news tampering signal?
And why does US want to ruin China Olympics?

Posted by: small coke | Mar 24 2008 15:41 utc | 10

Finally some eye witnesses from Lhasa – looks like the riots were instigated from outside of Tibet:
Eyewitnesses Recount Terrifying Day in Tibet

In the moment, Canadian backpacker John Kenwood recalled, he was “young and stupid, and it was all adrenaline.” He was running, one in a mob of 200 or so, screaming, “Free Tibet!” and chasing riot police down a narrow street in downtown Lhasa in the early afternoon of March 14.
…
“There was no more crowd to be part of. It looked like they were turning on everybody,” said Kenwood, 19, describing the scene to reporters last week when he arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, after 10 days in the Tibetan capital. “It wasn’t about Tibet freedom anymore.”
What he witnessed next was a violent rampage unlike any in decades in Lhasa, a city where Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered temples sit among office buildings and concrete markets built by Chinese bent on developing the remote Himalayan region. Hundreds of mostly young Tibetans broke up into roaming gangs and attacked Chinese passersby and vandalized shops, killing 19 people and injuring more than 600 over two days.
During the riots, looters set fire to a clothing store, burning to death five young employees who were huddled on the second floor. Most police officers kept their distance while the center of Lhasa descended into chaos.
Nearly two weeks later, there are still more questions than answers about what sparked the violence. But several witness accounts suggest that what began as a small protest by Buddhist monks on the morning of Friday, March 14, turned quickly into ethnically charged rioting, possibly fueled by rumors that monks had been roughed up by police.
…
Zhang Bing Quan saw it, too. The 38-year-old Beijing native was standing on the roof of the hostel he owns in Lhasa, watching the tendril of smoke rise, when one of his guests ran in, breathless, from the street. He told Zhang he had just seen a Tibetan man wielding two knives jump on top of a police sport-utility vehicle, shouting and slashing. The man quickly jumped down and was whisked away by two women while others upended the vehicle and set it on fire. Then another. Then another.
The crowd in the square grew to more than 100, including five or six people in monks’ robes, according to two Swiss tourists who later compiled a timeline of what they had seen. The crowd began pelting a nearby fast-food restaurant with rocks, then surged inside, throwing boxes of restaurant supplies onto the street. “Join us!” the tourists heard some in the crowd cry.
Firefighters arrived to douse the flames but ran away after the mob took over their truck. The Swiss tourists decided to leave, and as they headed out into the street, they came upon the mob that was confronting riot police. They saw several people injured by rocks.
James Miles, a correspondent for the Economist magazine and the only accredited Western journalist in Lhasa at the time of the riots, was walking in the same area a short time later but did not see the mob attack police. Indeed, he did not see any police anywhere.
“That’s what astonished me,” he said in an interview after he returned to Beijing. “There was a complete absence of security or any uniformed presence on the street.”
Claude Balsiger, another Swiss tourist, said he saw an elderly Chinese man clawed off his bicycle and thrown to the ground, where a rioter smashed his head with a large rock. “Some older Tibetans went to try to stop them, but others were howling like wolves. That’s how they supported” the rioters, said Balsiger, 25. “Everything that looked Chinese was attacked and beaten up.”
…
Then, about 3 p.m., he heard a “strange, high-pitched sound.” He looked down to see a gang of 30 to 40 people swing into his street, howling. He was surprised to see that most in the mob were young women, who had masks over their mouths and were wearing backpacks. “They were attacking even more fiercely than the boys,” he said.
The mob began kicking down doors and wrenching open shops, including the offices of the state-run Tibet Daily newspaper and the local bureau of the official New China News Agency. Zhang saw a man in his 30s shouting into a megaphone and a woman nearby, pointing. They appeared to be directing the mob where to attack, he said.
One group grabbed a white barrel of gasoline, poured the liquid into the doorway of a shop and ignited it. In the space of about 30 minutes, seven fires were blazing on the block, including one in the building next door.
…
They did, discussing Friday’s chaos and swapping stories of rioters they felt certain could not have been local Tibetans; many of the guests said they had heard different dialects. They questioned how the government could have allowed the city to get so out of control.

Posted by: b | Mar 27 2008 7:56 utc | 12