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Propaganda, Deception, and
the 'Riots' in Lhasa
Stephen Gregory
Epoch
Times
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Before the violent unrest that occurred in Lhasa in March 2008
there was the violent unrest in Lhasa in 1989.
"On the dawn of March 5, the Armed Police in Tibet received
the action order from the Chief Commander of Armed Police headquarter,
Mr. Li Lianxiu.…The Special Squad should immediately assign
300 members to be disguised as ordinary citizens and Tibetan monks,
entering the Eight-Corner Street and other riot spots in Lhasa,
to support plain-clothes police to complete the task. Burn the
Scripture Pagoda at the northeast of Dazhao Temple. Smash the
rice store in the business district, incite citizens to rob rice
and food, attack the Tibet-Gansu Trading Company. Encourage people
to rob store products, but, only at the permitted locations."
The words are those of the journalist Mr. Tang Daxian in his
long article ""Events in Lhasa March 2-10, 1989","
which tells the story of how the CCP orchestrated riots in Lhasa
in order to violently suppress the Tibetans.
(Article continues below)
According to Mr. Chen Pokong, a Han Chinese who was a member
of the student democracy movement, then a political prisoner in
China, and now a respected economist and commentator living in
the U.S., the riot scene this March "was quite similar to
that of March, 1989. A group of young men in their twenties acted
in a well organized way. They first shouted slogans, then burnt
some vehicles near the Ramoche Monastery, and then broke into
nearby stores and robbed them, and finally burnt many of the stores."
Seasoned observers of the Chinese regime should not be surprised
by this.
After the People's Liberation Army murdered thousands of unarmed
students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, dead students' bodies
were dressed in soldier's uniforms and photographed, in order
to "prove" that the students had been violent.
The "evidence" helped set the stage for a propaganda
campaign that has still convinced masses of mainland Chinese that
the regime acted responsibly in suppressing the students.
In January, 2001 it was reported that 5 Falun Gong practitioners
had set themselves ablaze on Tiananmen Square. A careful examination
of the propaganda video of the immolations that the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) broadcast ceaselessly on mainland TV revealed that
the immolations had been staged.
But the immolations were nonetheless a propaganda triumph for
the CCP. The attitudes of ordinary Chinese, who had not been sympathetic
to the regime's persecution of Falun Gong, hardened, and the death
rate of Falun Gong practitioners killed by torture began shooting
up as the regime intensified its campaign to "eradicate"
the practice.
Mr. Ruan Ming knows something of the ways of the CCP—he
was the main speechwriter for Hu Yaobang, who served as General
Secretary of the CCP from 1981-1987.
In an interview recently with Sound of Hope radio, Ruan warned
international society that they need to keep their eyes wide open
and understand the violent and deceptive nature of the CCP.
Ruan believes the violent unrest in Lhasa the week before last
was carefully planned in order to discredit the Dalai Lama and
to justify further suppression
Why should the CCP need to suppress even further the Tibetans?
The Tibetans have been conquered and colonized, have had their
culture relentlessly attacked, their language suppressed, and
their bodies tortured, while having suffered an estimated 10 million
dead under a brutal five-decade-long occupation by the CCP.
The existence of minorities like the Tibetans and Uigher Muslims
pose difficulties for the majority Han CCP's rule of China, and
the regime has a plan for "solving" this problem.
According to an article in the Times Online, Li Dezhu is one
of three party functionaries who have laid the plans for dissolving
the Tibetans distinctive culture, thus eliminating the "problem"
of a separate Tibetan ethnic group.
The Times says that Li's contribution has been to write "the
textbook on destroying independent cultures and disintegrating
religious minorities by promoting materialism."
"Promoting materialism" involves, among other things,
forcing Tibet's monks not to acknowledge the Dalai Lama and to
require them to make solemn vows of patriotism, while Tibetan
monasteries are closed or turned into tourist attractions—in
other words, seeking to uproot Tibetan religion completely.
This strategy is supplemented by flooding the Tibetan region
with Han Chinese, so that the Tibetans are becoming a minority
in their own country.
The obvious obstacle to this plan is the central role that Tibetan
Buddhism has played in the lives of Tibetans, embodied by Tibetan
monks and especially by the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama has, in the run-up to the Olympics, been gaining
traction in a campaign to call for negotiations with the Chinese
regime for Tibetan cultural autonomy. In September, he met with
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and in October with President
Bush.
According to Ruan, the "riots" in Lhasa allow the regime
to label the Tibetans as terrorists, and so to take away the Dalai
Lama's moral authority.
At the same time, the "riots" provide a pretext for
any dirty work the regime may wish to do in the shadows to intimidate
the Tibetan population so completely that it will eventually give
up its stubborn attachment to Tibetan Buddhism, rather than "materialism."
Thus, it is not surprising that, after all Western media were
kicked out of Tibet and the region was flooded with Chinese troops,
the Dalai Lama was quoted by the Guardian as saying that "a
lot of casualties may happen" without outside observers present.
In other words, the Dalai Lama fears the Chinese regime may take
the opportunity created for them by the need to put down "riots"
in Lhasa to engage in a really bloody crackdown.
The message that Chinese propaganda has been pounding home to
a populace that has little independent access to information is
that the Tibetans, and Dalai Lama in particular, are "splittists"—separatists
who wish to threaten China itself by breaking away from it.
The head of the CCP in Tibet, Zhang Qingli, made Westerners laugh
out loud when he was quoted as saying, "The Dalai is a wolf
in monk's robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a
beast.
"We are now engaged in a fierce blood-and-fire battle with
the Dalai clique, a life-and-death battle between us and the enemy."
But inside China, Zhang's words do not seem so ridiculous. Chinese-language
chat rooms are said to be full of abuse of the Tibetans and Dalai
Lama, in some cases urging murder for the "separatists."
This cry for blood recalls how the Chinese regime successfully
turned the Chinese people against their own students, who in 1989
had simply stood up and asked for democracy.
And it recalls how the Chinese regime for a time succeeded in
gaining many Chinese people's support for its indefensible persecution
of Falun Gong.
While Western observers may think it is impossible that the Chinese
regime would jeopardize good public relations months before the
Olympics by intentionally cracking down on the Tibetans, the CCP
may understand things differently, a way of thinking completely
foreign to those not indoctrinated by the Party.
Meanwhile, the successes of the CCP so far with its campaign
against Tibet have not only been inside China. While Western media
outlets have not yet branded the Tibetans as "terrorists,"
they have tended to criminalize their actions.
While the world has been prevented from knowing the details of
happened in Lhasa in the middle of March, one thing is clear.
A people that has long suffered the most grievous and severe abuses
stood up and demanded freedom and fundamental rights. And for
this the Tibetans have been called "rioters."
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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