WITH THEIR violent crackdown on Buddhist monks and laypeople conducting peaceful protests this week in Tibet, Chinese authorities gave themselves just the sort of publicity they have been trying to avoid before their Summer Olympics. But when it comes to religious freedom, free speech or political autonomy for a conquered land, the government in Beijing is the leopard that cannot change its spots.
No doubt the regime was embarrassed by processions of monks chanting "Long live the Dalai Lama!" and "The Dalai Lama should return to Tibet!" Beijing pretends that the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate has become irrelevant to his compatriots; that Tibetans are grateful for the economic development that has accompanied a flood of Han Chinese into Tibet; and that Chinese officials have stamped out Tibetan yearnings for independence, or at least more autonomy.
The greater embarrassment, however, is that China can find no better way than brute force to cope with the peaceful expression of Tibetan grievances. Soldiers and armed paramilitary police were seen this week beating and arresting monks who left their monasteries in mournful commemoration of the 1959 Tibetan uprising, which Maoist China put down with ruthless military repression.
This display of violence gives the lie to much of Beijing's pre-Olympics public relations. Instead, it shows that China's growing wealth has not cured its communist leaders of their totalitarian reflexes. Their resort to police-state methods on the streets of Lhasa and on the grounds of Tibetan monasteries tells the world that China's rulers have not resolved what Marxist doctrine would call their own internal contradictions.
The bosses of Beijing like to present themselves as modernizing inheritors of an ancient nation-state, one that has thrown off the shackles of European and Japanese domination and is regaining its rightful place in the world. But in Tibet, the Chinese are the colonizers. They have made it a capital crime to display the Tibetan flag. Protesting monks who committed that transgression this week were assaulted and carted off to prison by the regime's paramilitary police.
If China's leaders wish to salvage something of the reputation they hoped to burnish by hosting the Olympics, they should heed the wise counsel of the Dalai Lama. In a statement issued yesterday from his exile in India, the spiritual leader of Tibet's Mahayana Buddhists asked the Chinese leadership to "address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue with the Tibetan people." And in keeping with his principled devotion to nonviolence, he said: "I also urge my fellow Tibetans not to resort to violence."
Dialogue and nonviolence - these are the civilized alternatives to barbarism.
