Burning Desire For Freedom

After 60 years of Chinese rule, some Tibetan monks have resorted to self-immolation. Where will their protests lead?

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Shiho Fukada for TIME

Young Tibetan Monks in Kardze. Throughout greater Tibet, objection to Chinese rule have become increasingly nihilistic.

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The Dalai Lama for years has tried to improve relations with Beijing by saying he wants only meaningful autonomy for Tibet, not independence. His attempt at peaceful compromise has been dubbed the "middle way." Even so, on Oct. 29, he held the Chinese government directly accountable for the self-immolations. "The local leader must look at what's the real causes of death," he said. "It's their own sort of wrong policy, ruthless policy, illogical policy." Two days later, the Chinese government's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, compared the Dalai Lama and his flock to sect leader David Koresh and his followers who perished in the 1993 siege in Waco, Texas.

This past summer, Beijing celebrated the 60th anniversary of what it calls the "peaceful liberation of Tibet." The Chinese Communist Party's version of history goes like this: Tibetan serfs struggling under the feudal yoke of Buddhist god-kings welcomed the socialist liberators, who dramatically raised the region's living standards. The truth is more complicated. Tibet may have been poor and isolated when the People's Liberation Army began its invasion in 1950, but it was also a land whose people considered themselves essentially independent. (China says Tibet has been an inviolable part of its territory for centuries.) The Chinese government's efforts to tame the Tibetans, ranging from brutal crackdowns to economic enticements, have failed. Despite decades of so-called patriotic education, Tibetans still revere the Dalai Lama and see themselves as "completely Tibetan, not even 1% Chinese," as one Kardze resident tells me.

Over the past few years, a massive influx of Han, China's majority ethnic group, into Tibetan areas has further inflamed tensions. Tibetans complain that the best jobs and access to the region's plentiful natural resources go to Han migrants. Police officers tend to be Han, as are many bureaucrats. The highest Communist Party post in Tibet has never gone to a Tibetan. The Tibetan language is taught in some schools, but fluency in Chinese is required for government careers, and official documents are in Mandarin. "If we don't do something, our Tibetan culture will be extinguished," says a high-ranking monk at a Kardze monastery popular with Han tourists. "That is why the situation is so urgent. That's why we are trying to save our people and our nation."

Kardze, in the Kham borderlands between Han and Tibetan areas, is on the front line of this battle. All the self-immolations to date have occurred in either Kardze (known as Ganzi in Chinese) or the neighboring Ngaba (or Aba) prefecture. Despite Tibet's peaceful image, the Khampas, as people from Kham are known, were renowned for centuries as fierce warriors. In the 1950s, the CIA even trained a militia of mostly Khampa resistance fighters that numbered in the thousands. But as Sino-American relations warmed in the 1970s, Washington withdrew its financial support. The Dalai Lama sent a taped message to the guerrillas urging them to lay down their guns. Some committed suicide rather than give up their armed struggle.

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