The Chinese government must not “eliminate individualism” but instead encourage diversity of religion, culture and language, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, stressed – after yet another Tibetan self-immolated last week in China’s Qinghai province.

Speaking at the University of Westminster in London earlier this week, the Dalai Lama exhorted the Chinese government to learn from the ‘success’ of pluralism in India, where he has lived in exile since he fled his homeland in 1959.

While he admitted, “Complete independence is… out of the question”, he bemoaned the “outdated” system of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which Tibetan advocacy groups accuse of crushing Tibetan culture.

The Dalai Lama’s speech follows the self-immolation of a Tibetan herder, Tamdin Thar, who died in Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, located in northwest China, last week.

The herder was at least the 38th Tibetan to have set himself on fire since 2009 and the 29th to have died. Last month, the immolations spread to the Tibetan capital Lhasa for the first time as two men set themselves alight outside a temple.

Last year, the Dalai Lama accused Beijing of “cultural genocide” in Tibet at a press conference in Tokyo and attributed the unprecedented wave of self-immolations to the government’s increasingly harsh crackdown on Tibetan culture and religion.

<b>Culture under attack</b>

Since the 2008 Tibetan riots, China has unleashed an increasingly harsh crackdown in Tibetan areas of the country. Government policies in monasteries have been felt most keenly: permanent police surveillance, the severing of food and water supplies, and compulsory patriotic education for monks have fueled anger and despair.

This year, Beijing distributed over one million portraits of China’s four most important Communist leaders and Chinese flags to Tibetan monasteries, houses, and schools. Images of the Dalai Lama – Tibet’s most important spiritual figure – have been banned.

But government clampdowns have not only taken place in monasteries. Authorities have shut down a locally-funded Tibetan school offering classes in the Tibetan language and culture, according to the Indian-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

The Khadrok Jamtse Rokten School, founded in 1989, was forcibly closed on Apr. 2, according to a report by the Tibetan Centre. The school is situated in Ganzi County, known as Kardze in Tibetan, in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, an area of the country where self-immolations have become increasingly frequent. Two teachers were arrested.

The Tibetan poet and author Tsering Woeser, who has been instrumental in highlighting self-immolations on an influential blog, believes such actions are designed to wear down Tibetan culture.

“Language is very important to any race. But in Tibetan areas, the Chinese government is generating education reforms to diminish education in Tibetan language,” Woeser told IPS.

“In Tibetan schools, where classes are supposed to be taught in the Tibetan language, classes are instead taught in Mandarin and even textbooks are in Mandarin.Worse still, civilian-run schools are being shut down gradually.”

“Meanwhile, modern intellectuals, including writers, NGO workers and singers have been arrested and detained,” Woeser added. “I am worried Tibetan culture will die out one day.”

<b>Burning in despair</b>

“That’s why you see these sad incidents have happened, due to this desperate sort of situation,” said the Dalai Lama at the 2011 press conference. “Even Chinese from mainland China who visit Tibet have the impression things are terrible.  Some kind of cultural genocide is taking place.”

Beijing has accused the Dalai Lama of whipping up unrest and has declared that the immolations are “terrorism in disguise”. An op-ed published in the state-run ‘China Daily’ on Monday said there is no “Tibet issue” and it is a fiction “invented by Britain”.

But the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) has also accused China of “cultural genocide”.

In a report entitled ‘60 Years of Chinese Misrule: Arguing Cultural Genocide in Tibet’, published in April, during Genocide Prevention Month, ICT stated that the Chinese authorities have made a systematic and concerted effort to replace organic Tibetan culture with a state-approved version that meets the objectives of the CCP.

“The situation in Tibet is not a case of episodic or discrete human rights violations against Tibetans; Tibetan culture has been targeted for destruction from the beginning (of the CCP’s takeover of Tibet),” ICT’s president Mary Beth Markey told IPS.

“Cultural oppression has been institutionalised through the implementation of various campaigns, regulations and laws,” Markey continued. “Where cultural expression falls within the parameters set by the Chinese state, it is tolerated and even commodified. Where it is not, culture is censored or marginalised through forcible assimilation.”

ICT released the report on Apr. 25, the birthday of Tibet’s Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima. The religious figure, the second most important in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama, was taken into custody by Chinese authorities in 1995 and has not been heard of since.

Beijing has since anointed its own Panchen Lama, 22-year-old Gyaincain Norbu, who delivered his first public speech outside mainland China this year. While the appearance in Hong Kong was widely seen as an effort from China to garner international recognition for the state-approved Panchen Lama, he is not recognised by the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan government in exile.

(END)

A dissident Chinese author has expressed dismay at the lack of independent and exiled authors represented at this year’s London Book Fair (LBF), where China is guest of honour. An ensuing public spat, revolving around accusations that the Fair’s organisers have bowed to Chinese authorities, has thrust the thorny issue of censorship to centre-stage.

In a letter sent to the British Council and LBF, Bei Ling, founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC), said that he is “astonished that no independent literature voice nor exiled writer from China is being represented at the London Book Fair programme.”

He goes on to state amazement that the state-run Chinese Writers’ Association have chosen the 31-strong author delegation travelling to London to represent China, which is this year’s market focus country.

“Also shocking is the London Book Fair’s cooperation with GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publication which overseas the Writers’ Association) – the very ministry that’s responsible for censorship,” Bei writes in the letter.

Missing voices at the fair Apr. 16-18 include the exiled novelist Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, and poet Liao Yiwu, who escaped China last July. Nobel Peace prize winner and poet Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence, will also be unrepresented.

“This is very embarrassing, because the London Book Fair should be choosing writers to join the panels independently,” Bei tells IPS. “Sure, LBF may consult the opinions of GAPP, but it doesn’t mean that it has to blindly follow GAPP’s instructions…LBF should show that they are independent instead of being manipulated.

“Exile literature, underground literature, and independent writings are also a part of Chinese literature,” he adds.

The argument echoes the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair scandal in which Bei and investigative journalist Dai Qing were cut from the list of authors invited following pressure from China. The two writers were restored after a media furore, leading to walkouts from Chinese representatives at the Fair.

Moves have been made to counter the official list in London. Bei will be sharing a stand at the LBF for the ICPC alongside a Hong Kong-based publisher. English PEN also held their own event Mar. 29 , “China Inside Out”, for authors not invited in the approved delegation.

Tibetan poet and blogger Tsering Woeser, 46, who was placed under house arrest last month, is another author excluded from LBF. Woeser was granted both the Norwegian Authors Union’s Freedom of Expression Prize and a freedom of speech medal by the Association of Tibetan Journalists in 2007. She was invited to Frankfurt in 2009, but was unable to attend because she did not have a passport.

“I am used to getting ignored,” Woeser says from her home in Beijing. “This is the reality of China. If you are a writer within the system, for example you are a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, you will have opportunities for publishing and attending literary events like book fairs. But if you are outside the system, even if you are a good writer, the chances for publishing are few and book fairs are more unlikely.”

Woeser publishes her thoughts in an influential (and blocked in China) blog which has helped expose the rash of Tibetan self-immolations and unrest over the past year in south-west China.

Authors who are part of the delegation, however, have complained that the media furore has taken the emphasis away from literature to politics.

Alice Xin Liu, managing editor of Pathlight, a new English language literary magazine featuring translations from top contemporary Chinese writers, says the LBF features many of today’s most exciting authors. Examples include Bi Feiyu, winner of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize.

“Writers such as Han Dong (author of the Cultural Revolution novel ‘Banished!’) are quite daring. So it’s quite murky – (Bei’s) distinctions are actually way too clear cut,” the Beijing-based translator and editor tells IPS.

She adds that while listening to the voices of exiled authors is important, “the large majority of the population are reading writers not like him – they are reading writers like Mo Yan and Sheng Keyi, the writers who are going (to the fair).”

Regardless, Bei Ling is holding out optimism that dissident writers will be heard. “I still have hope they can include an independent writer or exiled writer to join a panel,” he says.

Zhang Haxia and her husband received a knock on the door in the middle of one night last December. They were dragged from their home in south-west China and forced into a van. When they returned nothing was left.

The case against forced evictions – which have fast become the primary source for unrest in China – was thrust into the limelight this week with the announcement of severe prison sentences for two rights activists who have fought a lengthy battle to help victims.

Ni Yulan, 52, and her husband Dong Jiqin were detained last April after helping victims of land grabs. Ni has been sentenced to two years and eight months, while Dong will serve two years.

The couple – who lost a six-year battle to save their traditional courtyard home in Beijing from demolition in 2008 – were charged in December with “picking quarrels, provoking trouble and willfully destroying private and public property.”

At the verdict hearing, which lasted just ten minutes according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), the Xicheng District People’s Court convicted the couple with “creating a disturbance”.

Ni, who was left disabled after alleged torture during previous imprisonments, has already served a year- long and separate two-year prison sentence for “obstructing official business” in 2002 and “harming public property” in 2008, as she fought to save her home.

Property developers and corrupt local officials eager to cash in on booming development frequently coerce residents into vacating valuable land for minimal compensation. Such evictions lead thousands to protest across the country every month. Many protests lead to run-ins with the police.

The story of Zhang (whose name has been changed) is a common one. “On Dec. 4, at 3am, local government officials, along with the mafia, dragged me out of my house, put me and my husband in a van, and took us to a remote place that I didn’t recognise,” the 55-year-old farmer told IPS on phone from her home in the city Chengdu.

“But I stumbled and fell, and it was then I saw the village party secretary’s son. Four hours later, at 7am, we were taken back. Our house was already gone and the bricks and tiles had been moved to somewhere else.”

When Zhang travelled to Beijing to petition the central government, the police detained her and her husband and sent them back to their local police station in Sichuan province. She claims she was then beaten up before being released.

“We were asked to sign a paper. I didn’t want to because I know if I did, it means I would have agreed to be detained. I was beaten up. My husband called the superior police, then we got out,” says Zhang.

Zhang is not alone. This week a website in Sichuan reported that three activists petitioning for compensation for forced evictions from their properties in the eastern province Jiangsu have disappeared.

Mao Jianzhong, Gu Xingzhen and Xia Kunxiang travelled to Beijing to petition the central government. Officials from Jiangsu brought the three back to their hometown Suzhou. They have not been heard of since, according to a report by Radio Free Asia.

Such petitioners, who often face rampant corruption from police and officials at home, see no choice but to take their quarrels to the central government. They are routinely swept up by law enforcers, says activist Huang Qi who first reported the incident on his Tianwang website.

Huang claims that many protestors are taken to one of the country’s thousands of “black jails” without trial or arrested on trumped up charges. Petitions are often blocked at the local level for fear that the claims and unrest will damage local officials’ reputations, expose corruption or prevent a promotion.

“Since the Hu-Wen (Chinese leaders Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao) administration, land-grabs have increased. Therefore, cases regarding compensations and petitions have increased too,” Huang tells IPS.

“Land grabs are not over. I received a call (last week): a Sichuanese farmer’s home was destroyed at 2am. Land grabs often happen at night, because the government doesn’t want people to take photos, recordings or videos as evidence.

“Those not in the know think the hot topics (in China now) are the Cultural Revolution (revival, propagated by ousted politician Bo Xilai) or the reform of the political structure. Actually, common people are more concerned about protecting their rights.”

Flares of rural unrest over land grabs are common. Last week, a website reported clashes with police in north and south-west China. Some cases, such as the village protests in Wukan, located in the southern province Guangdong, have made international news.

In Wukan, villagers succeeded in ousting corrupt officials and winning the right to local elections following land seizures.

The village has become the symbol for protest against land grabs in China, and is widely seen as a successful example of how the government should be acting to defuse widespread unrest.

Change is in the works, according to the NGO Landesa, which works to improve land rights for farmers in developing countries. Landesa claims on their website to have worked alongside the central Chinese government to enact a series of historic legal improvements.

According to the NGO, the government has begun guaranteeing farmers 30-year-land rights, and has started to document and publicise farmers’ rights. But many rural citizens are unaware of their rights, and the law is widely ignored by local governments who often abuse their power.

Back in Chengdu, Zhang has bought land and built another house. Like many she believes that the root of the problem lies with greedy local officials, rather than with the central government.

“I will continue to petition in Beijing because I have hope in the government – it is just the grassroots government that is too corrupt,” says Zhang. She refuses to give up. “I am not asking for a ridiculous price, only for reasonable compensation.”

An escalating number of unprecedented self-immolations and violent protests that have gripped Tibetan regions of Western China over recent weeks show no sign of abating, as the country reels from the worst Tibet crisis since the 2008 riots.

Tibetan prayer flags in Zhong Lu village, China's Sichuan province. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

Radio Free Asia reported that the three herders called for freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet. However the Chinese government denies that the immolations took place.

If reports are confirmed, then the immolations will be the first by ordinary people, rather than monks or nuns, demonstrating the depth of discontent that has spread beyond the clergy to the wider population.

On Monday a 19-year-old monk, named Lobsang Gyatso, set himself ablaze in Aba county, Sichuan. According to rights groups, police allegedly beat the monk as they extinguished the flames and it is as yet uncertain whether he is still alive.

On Saturday, an 18-year old Tibetan nun called Tenzin Choedron also self-immolated in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture. The state mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency confirmed that the nun, who was a member of the Mamae Nunnery, died on the way to hospital.

Her death follows the self-immolation of a 19-year-old former monk from Kirti monastery, located in Ngaba county, Sichuan province, last week. The total number of Tibetans known to have self-immolated over the last year now stands at 20.

According to Tsering Woeser, the three herders self-immolated in Seda county, Sichuan province, on Friday, Feb. 3. It is believed that of the three, one has died and two remain seriously injured.

Seda county witnessed fatal protests late last month, as police fired into demonstrating crowds. While the number of deaths is unconfirmed, some human rights groups believe two died and others say up to 11 were killed.

Exact numbers are hard to verify as journalists and rights groups have been locked out of the area and authorities have cut off both the Internet and telephone connections in an attempt to contain the unrest. Other protests took place in Luhuo and Rangtang counties, also in Sichuan, Western China.

Xinhua, who blames “overseas forces” for attempting to “fabricate rumours”, reported that two protestors were shot dead by officers in an act of self-defence after violent rioters stormed police stations.

Robert Barnett, a Tibetan scholar at Columbia University, believes that growing protests and immolations testify to the spread of unrest.

“Before (protests) used to be just in the main city among the lower middle class groups, but now we are seeing also farmers and nomads in the countryside, and even some student demonstrations. It’s not just monks anymore. And there have been trials of famous leaders from the Tibetan business community too, extremely wealthy Tibetans who stood to gain the most from loyalty to the state,” Barnett tells IPS.

“Many more people than before are referring to independence openly or waving the forbidden Tibetan flag – perhaps people are bolder now, or perhaps nationalism has become more widespread,” he says.

A drastic step-up of security, combined with the increasing encroachment of police officers into monasteries – which are central to Tibetan communities – has provided a tipping point for many Tibetans.

Kirti monastery, home to the former monk Rinzin Dorje who self-immolated last week, has just celebrated the Great Prayer Festival (Monlam Chenmo in Tibetan), held from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, in which locals partake in ritual dance, prayer and the unfolding of religious scrolls.

According to a report from the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), far-reaching security was stepped up for the festivities. ICT quotes exiled Kirti monks in Dharamsala, India, who say around 400 police disguised as officials planted themselves in the monastery for the festival.

“Ngaba people were searched, questioned and harassed wherever they went or wherever they stayed. From the early morning of Feb. 8, people were being stopped, searched and questioned one by one as they travelled into Ngaba county town and in the town itself, and the streets were filled with army, police and special police,” the source was quoted as saying in the report.

Ahead of the recent Chinese New Year, more than one million Chinese flags and portraits of Communist leaders were distributed by the regional government to Tibetan monasteries, schools and homes.

The government’s preemptive crackdowns, increased surveillance and invasion into everyday life demonstrates a starkly different response to the recent protest in the Chinese village Wukan. When villagers challenged widespread corruption and land-grabs late last year the government orchestrated a peaceful resolution.

“I am very concerned that if current policies continue unchanged, there will be a rise in self-immolations and in the Chinese government’s crackdown. It is even more worrying to think of things getting worse, like a possible massacre. It is clear that Tibetans are set on confrontation and (will not) give in,” Kanyag Tsering, an exiled Kirti monk living in Dharamsala, India, tells IPS.

“(Tibetans) must endure the most unbearable injustice and discriminatory cruelty and oppression day after day, month after month and year after year, until in the end they make this choice (to self-immolate and protest). Recently someone from Tibet told me ‘Even if all the Tibetans in Ngaba have to set themselves on fire, or be killed, we will have no regret’,” he adds.

“People are asking whether the government is listening, whether it is a deaf system,” says Barnett. “The worrying thing is that if the state continues to act aggressively, the situation could become severely polarised, making a solution much less likely in the foreseeable future.”

Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, has been placed at the forefront of the fight for human rights in China once again with a new collection of works published in translation this January.

‘No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems’ (Harvard University Press), edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, features poems and essays penned by Liu spanning a time period of two decades. The 345-page volume also includes documents citing the claimed “evidence” that the Beijing courts used to imprison the activist.

Liu, 56, is the first Chinese citizen living in China to win the Nobel Prize, and is a national embarrassment for the Chinese authorities, who view his peaceful campaign for democracy as dangerous criminal activity.

In 2009, Liu was handed an 11-year-prison sentence for “incitement to subvert state power.” He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but was barred from attending the event.

In 1989 the veteran activist was imprisoned for over 18 months for his part in the Tiananmen Square protests. In 1995 he spent a further seven months in jail, and in 1996 was sent to a labour camp for three years for “re-education”.

‘No Enemies, No Hatred’ comes as China steps up its repression of dissidents and activists across the country. China’s approaching leadership transition, combined with the upcoming first anniversaries of the so-called Jasmine Revolution and Arab Spring, have led to severe crackdowns.

The book serves as a potent reminder of the harsh punishments dealt out to those who oppose the government.

But while ‘No Enemies, No Hatred’ has garnered critical acclaim abroad, publishing a book about the Nobel Prize Laureate has serious consequences in China itself.

This month, a prominent Chinese writer and dissident who is currently writing Liu’s biography, fled to the United States.

Yu Jie, a close friend of Liu’s and an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed in a protracted statement to have suffered repeated harassment, house arrest, and torture at the hands of the authoritarian government.

Yu, author of a blistering attack on China’s premier Wen Jiabao titled ‘China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao’, left China on Jan. 11 with his family after over a year of government intimidation.

At a news conference in Washington, D.C, Yu said that he was placed under house arrest in October 2010 following the announcement that Liu had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The writer also claims to have been detained for four days in December 2010 during which time he was nearly “tortured to death”.

According to the 38-year-old Christian, an officer told him: “Right now, foreigners are awarding Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, humiliating our party and government. We’ll pound you to death to avenge this. As far as we…can tell, there are no more than 200 intellectuals in the country who oppose the Communist party and are influential. If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture them all in one night and bury them alive.”

Yu claims to have been abducted and beaten severely by plainclothes officers the day before the Nobel Prize ceremony. The officers allegedly stripped, slapped and kicked Yu before threatening to break his fingers, leaving the writer hospitalised.

“(Plainclothes officers) began beating me in the head and the face without explanation. They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online,” he said in the statement.

“They forced me to spread out my hands and bent my fingers backwards one by one. They said, ‘You’ve written many articles attacking the Communist Party with these hands, so we want to break your fingers one by one’.”

China has attempted to delete all mention of Liu Xiaobo’s works from the public eye while concurrently printing state-backed slurs on his reputation in state media.

Government censorship has left Liu’s supporters and contemporary human rights campaigners who speak out against abuses by the Party marginalised – and with little choice but to flee, quieten up, or face lengthy jail terms.

Last July, Liao Yiwu, author of the Tiananmen Square poem ‘Massacre’, fled overland via Vietnam to self- exile in Germany. Since December, three seasoned dissidents have been sentenced to unusually harsh prison sentences, with a fourth, the poet Zhu Yufu, charged with subversion late this month.

“In China today, outspoken writers and artists who challenge the status quo of authoritarian one-party rule are increasingly being forced into a stark choice – prison, exile or intimidated silence,” says Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“Yu Jie’s difficult decision – like that of fellow writer Liao Yiwu – to go into self-exile highlights how the deepening hostility of the Chinese government to writers who won’t self-censor their works in line with the official narrative.”

Perry Link, professor of comparative literature at the University of California and an editor and translator of ‘No Enemies, No Hatred’, describes the choice to self-exile as “complex”.

Link tells IPS: “It is a very complex decision of course, to decide to go into self exile. I am sure for (Yu’s) family – his child, his wife – it feels more secure outside of China.

“The main cost of putting oneself outside in China is cutting off influence in China. There are a whole list of activists who have fled abroad and who can now write more freely but have less influence within China – I am sure Yu Jie realised that when he made the calculation.”

But, Link adds, “one reason Liu Xiaobo is admired in his circles is that he won’t leave. He wants to stay. He has made a different decision.”

A Tibetan ‘Living Buddha’ who set himself on fire in protest against Chinese rule died this week, sparking a vigil of thousands of Tibetans and creating fears that self-immolations are spreading.

The monk is the third Tibetan to have burned himself to death in 2012, and the 15th since March last year. Nine of the 15, two of whom were nuns, have died.

Sonam Wangyal, a monk in his early forties, set himself alight last Sunday in the northeastern province Qinghai and was reported dead on Monday.

In a sign that the recent unprecedented wave of Tibetan self-immolations is spreading, this was the first incident in Qinghai. The majority of immolations have occurred in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture, the site of an important Tibetan monastery that has experienced increasingly harsh crackdowns.

Referred to by local Tibetans as the ‘Living Buddha Sopa’, Sonam Wangyal is the first reincarnate lama to have turned the flame on himself, and the oldest Tibetan to have died so far. Most so far have been in their twenties or teens.

Earlier this month two Tibetans named Tsultrim and Tennyi, both aged around 20, died after setting themselves on fire in the courtyard of a hotel in Ngaba County, Sichuan province. As they burnt themselves, they shouted out, ‘His Holiness the Dalai Lama must return to Tibet’ and ‘May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live for 10,000 years!’

Suicide is frowned upon in Tibetan Buddhism, but there is a tradition of self-sacrifice for the ‘benefit of others’, advocacy groups say.

“Sunday’s self-immolation was the first by a reincarnate lama. This was someone who is older, a mature person and an esteemed figure in his community. He would have been acutely aware of the ramifications for such an act in Tibetan Buddhism, and still chose to take his life in this way,” Kate Saunders, communications director for the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), tells IPS.

Radio Free Asia reported that the monk wrote he was acting “not for personal glory but for Tibet and the happiness of Tibetans” in leaflets he handed out prior to setting himself on fire.

He then drank kerosene and doused himself in it before setting himself alight. “His body exploded in pieces (and the remains were) taken away by police,” said Radio Free Asia.

According to the Tibetan exile government in Dharmasala, India, thousands of locals staged a candlelight vigil demanding the release of his body following its confiscation by the police.

“Due to his position as a local spiritual leader, approximately 2,000 local Tibetans are said to have held a candlelight vigil urging the local police authorities to release his body,” the exile government said in a statement. The state-run Xinhua News Agency has since reported that the body has been handed to relatives.

“On the afternoon of Jan. 9, many fully-armed policemen showed up in the town, with guns, sticks, shields etc. The policemen dispersed the people demonstrating and did not allow the people to mourn in the temple,” Tsering Woeser, the Tibetan activist and author, wrote on her blog.

Earlier this week there were further signs of Tibetan unrest in a separate incident whena man was shot dead by police, sparking fierce protests in Gansu province, located in China’s northwest.

Xinhua reported that the man, Gurgo Tsering, was killed accidentally by police after he allegedly stole from a construction site.

ICT, however, cites local sources who claim the Tibetan died after police fired through the windows of his friend’s house. According to Radio Free Asia, Tibetans then attacked a local police station before police fired tear gas to stop the assault.

Both the immolations and protests have occurred during a growing period of unease between the government and Tibetan populations in China. Following protests in the 2008 Beijing Olympic year, the Communist Party has overseen a severe clampdown on religious freedom among Tibetans, who view their rightful leader as the exiled Dalai Lama.

Beijing blames the Dalai Lama for inciting unrest and has called the immolations “terrorism in disguise”.

Just hours after Sonam Wangyal’s self-immolation, Xinhua wrote that senior officials had “pledged stepped-up efforts to strengthen the management of monasteries in the fight against the Dalai Lama group.”

Officials must “push forward the patriotic and legal education among monks and nuns… and dissuade them from being duped by separatist forces,” it said.

The newswire also reported that Sonam Wangyal set himself alight after a clandestine love affair with a local woman was discovered.

“(Crackdowns) are certainly counterproductive, but the Chinese have been at loss how to handle the Tibetans for the past 60 years,” Claude Arpi, author of The Fate of Tibet: When Big Insects Eat Small Insects, tells IPS. “Today, the ‘collective’ leadership in Beijing believes that the more they will relax their grip, the worse will the situation become.”

For now there are fears that the death of the ‘Living Buddha’ will only lead to more protests and subsequent crackdowns.

“(The Living Buddha) is a religious leader who enjoys a much higher reputation and a greater influence than a normal monk. (His) death is different from a normal monk’s. It brings much greater shock and influence to Tibetans,’ Woeser tells IPS.

“The increasing deaths of monks means the situation of Tibetan areas is getting worse and worse.”

China is experiencing the worst crackdown since 1989 with a rising number of enforced disappearances of activists, a prominent Chinese dissident now living in exile has stated.

Liao Yiwu, a former Chinese political prisoner and eminent author most well known for his Tiananmen Square poem Massacre, fled China overland via Vietnam this July to live in exile abroad.

“It’s the worst crackdowns since 1989,” Liao told IPS over the phone from the United States, where he was on a book tour for ‘God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China’, a documentation of illegal house churches regularly raided by the government.

“First (the government) started to toughen their control over the Internet. Then they started to use the mafia method to treat intellectuals or dissidents to make them disappear,” said Liao. The writer believes that a softening Western stance towards human rights accounts for the increased abuses.

“After Jun. 4 in 1989 (the government) were at least sometimes worried about the pressure from Western countries. But now they have taken a hardened stance – they refuse to bow down to pressure because they feel like the West relies on them economically.

“Western countries compromise their principles in order to curry favour with China so they no longer talk about human rights. So the government is becoming more bold in the way that they crack down on dissidents,” he added.

Human rights organisations have raised concern over the increasing number of “enforced disappearances” in the country – a term coined to describe Chinese activists secretly detained by the state.

Ai Weiwei, the world-renowned artist whose work ‘Sunflower Seeds’ has been displayed at London’s Tate Modern, is the most high profile activist to have fallen victim to a vanishing act by the government. He was detained on Apr. 3, to emerge on Jun. 22 following an international outcry for his release.

But Ai Weiwei is only the most famous of dozens who have vanished into detention centres this year without recourse to lawyers or disclosure of their whereabouts to relatives.

Since mid-February, amid Party fears that the so-called Arab Spring might spread to China, at least 26 artists, writers, bloggers and human rights defenders have been subject to enforced disappearances.

Thousands more petitioners are kept in so-called “black jails” across the country, according to a 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report titled ‘An Alleyway in Hell: China’s Abusive Black Jails’.

The report cites that detainees are subjected to physical and psychological abuse as a matter of course – including beatings, food and sleep deprivation, and extortion.

Ethnic minority groups are particularly at risk. HRW reports that dozens, possibly hundreds, of Uyghurs, the Muslim ethnic minority who inhabit China’s restive north-western Xinjiang province, have “disappeared” without trace during the aftermath of the bloody 2009 Uyghur riots.

“Over the past two years the problem in China has worsened considerably,” says Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW). “Since the start of this year at least 30 high profile individuals were abducted – half for a period of days and weeks. We know that if they are targeting high profile individuals there will be many more who are not well known.”

The increasing crackdowns come as China announces that the practice of enforced disappearances might soon be enshrined in law.

On Aug. 30 China published proposed revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law which would give police the power to legally imprison suspects in secret for up to six months with no right to contact their families or a lawyer.

The proposed revisions state that the right to keep suspects at undisclosed locations will feature in cases which involve state security, terrorism, and severe corruption.

Additionally, the commonly used tactic of house arrests – including the case of the blind civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng who has been kept under house arrest since 2010 – might also be formalised.

Critics warn that the revisions violate international law and mark a step backwards for legal protections of citizens in China, a country which only implemented the beginnings of a Western-style legal system 30 years ago.

Caixin, a business magazine known for pushing the boundaries of censorship, described the potential revisions as a “grab-bag justification that would lead to investigative organs being able to decide as they please whether or not to inform family members, and to secret detentions running rampant.”

Prof. Jerome A. Cohen, an expert on the Chinese legal system and professor at the New York University School of Law, states that the revisions run the danger of being further abused by police who often take the law into their own hands.

“Under the revised criminal procedure law – if it’s enacted as it’s likely to be – then there will be for a certain category of people an opportunity to simply detain them without telling their family and without enabling them to have a lawyer,” Prof. Cohen tells IPS on the phone from New York.

“So the question of endangering ‘state security’ is the major category that worries people because under the current regime virtually anything can be deemed to endanger state security. The fact is that in practice the police will determine what these words mean.”

A Tibetan monk set himself on fire last week while shouting slogans calling for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet during a religious ritual watched by hundreds, the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) reported last week.

Tibetan prayer flags in China's Sichuan province. Credit: Mitch Moxley/IPS

The monk attempted to burn himself to death following an unprecedented wave of self-immolations in the western Chinese province of Sichuan, which has a large Tibetan population.

Dawa Tsering, a monk in his thirties from the Kardze Monastery in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, set himself on fire on the morning of Oct. 25, according to a statement released on ICT’s website which cites ‘exiled sources’ and ‘eyewitness’ accounts.

The statement claims that Dawa Tsering was participating in the Torgyak Ritual, an annual ceremony in which monks dance and burn food to make offerings for the year ahead, when he set himself ablaze in front of an audience of hundreds of local people.

The monk reportedly was still alive after the flames were put out. However, his whereabouts are now unknown.

The most recent immolation has become the tenth this year. Nine others have set themselves on fire since March in Sichuan’s Aba prefecture – the site of an influential monastery – which is located about 100 miles south of Ganzi (known to Tibetans as Kardze).

At least five have died of their wounds, including Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old nun, who set herself alight last month while reportedly calling out for the end of Chinese rule and the return of the exiled Dalai Lama to Tibet.

China, which has asserted its jurisdiction over Tibet since occupying the Himalayan region in the 1950s, claims that the immolations are “terrorism in disguise” propagated by the Dalai Lama and outside Tibetan independence groups.

While Beijing has refrained from whipping up a Chinese nationalist fever over the immolations in the state- run press – as it did during the 2008 Tibetan unrest during the Beijing Olympics – officials have claimed that the self-immolations go against the basic tenets of Buddhism.

Tibetan advocacy groups, however, say that Beijing is to blame for its increasingly tight surveillance over the Tibetan plateau region in Sichuan.

“This wave of self immolations is a new development. It is deeply disturbing,” Kate Saunders, communications director for ICT, tells IPS on the phone from Delhi. “The loss of life is indicative of the anguish and desperation experienced by Tibetans in the area under this crackdown that leaves them no space for ordinary life, no space to carry out their religious practice.

“Tibetan Buddhism is at the heart of identity, the core of what it is to be Tibetan,” Saunders adds. “So the monks really are at the frontline of what they see as a life and death struggle to protect their culture, to protect their identity and to protect what they see to be Tibetan – and this is ultimately what has compelled them to take this stance.”

Robert Barnett, a Tibetan scholar from Columbia University, believes that the increasingly tight surveillance of Tibetan areas of Sichuan has created a “pressure cooker syndrome” leading to the unprecedented immolations.

“We don’t know the exact conditions there, but we can see by looking at the government expenses in Sichuan that the amount of money spent on security in Tibetan areas of Sichuan is about four times higher per person than any other parts of Sichuan – the increase began to become very prominent since about 2006,” Barnett tells IPS.

“It seems that the authorities had already increased security activity in these areas to a very high level, even before major unrest broke out in 2008. It seems that this was a pre-emptive way of putting pressure on that monastery, which has become counter-productive.”

According to a report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, security measures imposed include armed guards surrounding the monasteries, cutting water and food supplies, and monks being removed for ‘political education’, where they are forced to renounce the Dalai Lama, considered by Tibetans to be their rightful leader.

Tsering Woeser, the Tibetan activist and author of Notes on Tibet, states that the immolations must be seen as a “process of sacrifice” to bring the increasing clampdowns on Tibetans into the public eye.

“People who think these actions are suicides don’t really understand the Buddhist doctrine,” Tsering Woeser tells IPS. “It’s a process of sacrifice. Buddhism is against suicide but those monks didn’t commit suicide for themselves but for all the Tibetan people.

“The monks sacrificed their lives to raise the issue of the Tibetan people to international society. They hope that international society can put more pressure to the Chinese government.”