Beijing Think Tank Faults Domestic Policies, Issues for March 2008 Tibetan Rioting

August 6, 2009

A Beijing-based think tank released a report in May 2009 that rejected the Chinese government's principal assertion about the cause of Tibetan protests and rioting in March 2008. The report, titled "An Investigative Report Into the Social and Economic Causes of the 3.14 Incident in Tibetan Areas," concluded that the protests and rioting were not the exclusive result of external influence by the Dalai Lama and organizations that the Chinese government associates with him (i.e. "masterminded by the Dalai Lama's clique," Xinhua, reprinted in People's Daily, 22 March 08), but were also the result of domestic ("internal") issues.

A Beijing-based think tank released a report in May 2009 that rejected the Chinese government's principal assertion about the cause of Tibetan protests and rioting in March 2008. The report, titled "An Investigative Report Into the Social and Economic Causes of the 3.14 Incident in Tibetan Areas," concluded that the protests and rioting were not the exclusive result of external influence by the Dalai Lama and organizations that the Chinese government associates with him (i.e. "masterminded by the Dalai Lama's clique," Xinhua, reprinted in People's Daily, 22 March 08), but were also the result of domestic ("internal") issues. See English translation of the report (via International Campaign for Tibet) and original Chinese-language version (via Google Docs). The Open Constitution Initiative (OCI, Gongmeng) which issued the report, uses the term "3.14 incident" in a manner consistent with Chinese government, Communist Party, and state-run media use: a collective reference to Tibetan protests and rioting that began on March 14, 2008, in Lhasa, and spread in the following days to other locations in the ethnic Tibetan area of China. (See Section V―Tibet of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) 2008 Annual Report for information on the March 2008 Tibetan protests and rioting.)

A June 5, 2009, New York Times (NYT) article referred to the study as "the first independent investigation" into causes of the Tibetan protests and described OCI as "a group of prominent Chinese lawyers and legal scholars" that "seeks to promote legal reform in China." As an example, the NYT article pointed out that OCI lawyers attempted to file lawsuits on behalf of families whose infants or children had become ill as a result of consuming products made with tainted milk powder (see, CECC 2008 Annual Report, 59, 157-158, 165, for more information). A May 26 Time Magazine report described OCI as "a six-year-old NGO run by Chinese lawyers" and quoted one of the group's founders, Xu Zhiyong, saying that OCI seeks to be objective: "On questions like Tibet, human rights, and so forth, the Chinese government has a standpoint, foreign governments and foreign media have a standpoint. But it's also important to have an independent look at the problems." Xu said, according to Time, that OCI had been able to post the report on the group's Web site, but he doubted that "printed copies will ever be permitted to circulate on the mainland."

The OCI report identified policy-driven factors underlying the protests and rioting and expressed findings in a manner that suggests the authors hope that Chinese government officials will review the document:

The research panel discovered that the 3.14 incident was caused by the confluence of many factors, including psychological loss created by development, discontent among economic classes, the question of migrants, influences from abroad, religious sentiment, and on-scene "mass reactions," which cannot be simply reduced to "splittist violence."

The OCI panel conducted field research in two county-level locations in each of two Tibetan autonomous areas:

  • Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR): Lhasa city, the TAR capital; and Naidong (Nedong) county, the location of Zedang (Tsethang), the capital of Shannan (Lhoka) prefecture;
  • Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP), Gansu province: Hezuo (Tsoe) city, the Gannan capital; and Xiahe (Sangchu) county.

Lhasa and Gannan TAP were locations of alleged Tibetan protests and rioting that resulted in more than 4,400 detentions, according to state-run media reports in March, April, and June 2008. More than 3,000 of the 4,400 Tibetans were later released, according to the reports. The OCI report did not include research or analysis on the eastern Tibetan area that Tibetans know as "Kham," which includes Ganzi TAP in Sichuan province. Political detention of Tibetans in Ganzi accounted for 271 of the 630 political detentions of Tibetans (43 percent) during the period beginning March 10, 2008, based on information available in the CECC's Political Prisoner Database (PPD) as of July 6, 2009. It is certain that PPD documentation of Tibetan political detention since March 10, 2008, is incomplete. Naidong is the only one of OCI's four county-level research locations on which Commission staff observed no reports of Tibetan protests or rioting in March 2008. The OCI report provided nine policy recommendations that, like the report's findings, appear to be directed toward the Chinese government. The recommendations, summarized briefly in the order that they appear, follow.

  • Listen to the views of ordinary Tibetans and adjust policies in Tibetan areas on the basis of respecting and protecting the Tibetan people’s rights and interests.
  • Guide economic development so that Tibetans acquire ample benefits, and reduce the discrepancy between urban and rural income.
  • Increase central government supervision over local governments in order to reduce local corruption and dereliction of duty, and to speed up the process of democratizing power structures.
  • Treat the education of Tibetans as the key to the long-term resolution of "the question of Tibetan areas"; improve educational opportunities available to young Tibetans, especially farmers and herders; develop appropriate content on Tibetan history and culture.
  • Respect and protect Tibetan "freedom of religious belief," including recognizing the importance of religion to Tibetans; allow the resumption of "normal religious activities" such as Buddhist teaching, monastic travel to attend Buddhist teaching, and "the transmission of Tibetan Buddhism." (The latter is a reference to the Tibetan Buddhist belief that some Tibetan Buddhist teachers reincarnate, a tradition that the Chinese government seeks to control through regulations issued in 2007.)
  • Seek to "reduce inter-ethnic prejudice, ignorance, and injury"; when "sudden incidents" occur, seek the support of "positive forces," such as religious figures, to help resolve them.
  • Promote the rule of law in Tibetan areas by encouraging the introduction of "laws and regulations" at the local level; regulate the ownership and exploitation of natural resources; encourage experts to participate in policy discussions.
  • Build up ethnic unity by "propagandizing" the success of the reform and opening up policy in Tibetan areas, and avoid depicting the Tibetan past as "serfdom." Along with highlighting the "vitality" of development, admit the "social problems facing Tibet."
  • Handle crisis situations by first determining whether a problem is social, economic, or religious, and use different methods for handling each type. The central government should function as an "arbiter" and keep itself distinct from "local officials' inappropriate conduct."

OCI's third and ninth recommendations refer to what may be the report's least known or widely understood area of inquest: the rise of a "new aristocracy" made up of ethnic Tibetan government officials who exploit a "blindspot in power supervision in nationality areas" by pointing to perceived threats such as "Tibet independence" or "foreign forces" to serve as "fig leaves to conceal their mistakes in governance and to repress social discontent." The report observes that the "new aristocratic class" is "even more powerful" than the former Tibetan aristocracy that the Party brought to end in the years following the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Phuntsog Wanggyal (Pingcuo Wangjie), a retired government official, researcher, and a founder of the Party's Tibet branch, referred to the Tibetans who make up the new elite and told OCI researchers that such officials "eat the food of anti-splittism," "consolidate their positions and interests," and "accumulate even more power and resources."

Prior to the publication of the OCI report, a Tibet issue expert, Tseten Wangchuk, Senior Research Fellow with the University of Virginia's Tibet Center and Senior Editor with the Voice of America's Tibetan Language Service, addressed a March 2009 CECC roundtable and called attention to what he described as a powerful Tibetan "interest group."

In the past 20 years in China, the people who manage Tibet . . . have really gained power. Their economic interests and everything else are built on this power. They blame everything that goes wrong in Tibet . . . on the Dalai Lama, or on Tibetans in exile. . . . Sometimes it looks as though we are seeing only the truly top-level of China’s state leadership, and we assume such high-ranking views are the only reason for what is happening. [If] you look at the details, there's a messy political process going on. In that process, there are people who have political and economic self-interests playing a role in this particular policy.

The OCI report is noteworthy not only for the analysis and recommendations that it included, but also for the topics that the authors chose to avoid or minimize. For example, the report mentioned the Dalai Lama only three times: one instance acknowledged that the "3.14 incident" had "external causes" that included "the influence of the Dalai Lama abroad"; another instance included the name as part of a book title; the final instance noted that in the late 1980s "calls for dialogue with the Dalai Lama . . . were repeatedly frustrated." (The third example appears to refer to a 1989 invitation from the Chinese government-regulated Buddhist Association of China to the Dalai Lama to attend a funeral ceremony for the 10th Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama did not accept the invitation. See, Agence France-Presse, reprinted in World Tibet Network, 27 August 03.)

The OCI report authors did not mention the Dalai Lama's stature among Tibetans or refer to his objective of achieving "genuine autonomy" for the Tibetan areas of China through dialogue with the Chinese government. Raising politically sensitive issues with international implications could have resulted in heightened Chinese government unwillingness to review the OCI report―and perhaps exposed the Beijing-based drafters to government accusations of being sympathetic toward "foreign" or "splittist" entities. Instead, by treating the Tibetan protests and rioting as the result of problems that can be addressed through Chinese government action on issues that include governance, economic development, education, employment, religion, and cultural expression, the OCI report focused on established areas of Chinese domestic policy and law.

UPDATE: According to a July 17, 2009, New York Times report, officials from the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau shut OCI down on July 17. Xu Zhiyong, one of OCI's founders, said the officials claimed that OCI was not registered as a non-governmental organization (NGO). Xu said that OCI did not need registration as an NGO because it is a charity organization functioning under the properly licensed Gongmeng Company. Xu characterized the shutdown of OCI as "unreasonable" and said, "We'll continue to be conscientious and help those who need help."

For more information on Chinese government policy toward Tibetans and the dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama, see Section V―Tibet of the CECC 2008 Annual Report, and Tibet: Special Focus for 2007 of the 2007 Annual Report.