From The River at the Centre of the World (Simon Winchester, 1996) pp400-1
We had passed another chain gang, hundreds of men and women lashed together in small groups to repair a section of road at least twenty miles long. Even though there was little enough traffic, soldiers with flags were holding up all northbound trucks to make way for a string of southbound army convoys.
‘Trouble in one of the monasteries,’ speculated Tang, shaking his fist at the tail-lights of one of the army trucks. He had seen some of the rioting in Lhasa ten years before, when Chinese troops had beaten monks, and it had incensed him. He talked about it sparingly he knew that Lily held very pro-Chinese views, and Miao’s job with the Chengdu Propaganda Department hardly made him a likely sympathizer with the Tibetan cause. But when we were alone Tang spoke openly about his distaste for what the Chinese were doing.
‘It’s more insidious these days, you know. They’re advertising for people to come and live here – Chinese people, that is. Before long there will be as many Han as there are Tibetans and because the Han people who come to live here are allowed to have as many children as they like, they may well outnumber the Tibetans. Then this will stop being Tibet. The people will just be another minority, like the Yi or the Nakhi. They’ll lose everything.
‘I know the arguments – that before the Chinese came the Tibetans were ruled by despots, by cruel old priests. That may be so. But at least it was their country. It was up to them to decide what to do about It. It’s none of our business. We come in, and give them good roads and water and hospitals, all the things they never had. But we think that gives us a right to tell them how to live their lives.’
‘And if they don’t do it the way we tell them, then’ – he jerked his hand in the direction of yet another convoy, the fifth, another hundred trucks steaming southwards towards the capital. ‘Then we send in force and crush them.’
The people were reportedly up in arms just then about Beijing’s decision not to acknowledge the youngster who had recently been chosen as the reincarnation of, or successor to, the Panchen Lama, the senior legal Tibetan lama. A group of wise men chosen by Beijing had settled on a candidate some weeks before, and the candidate – a boy of nine living in a remote part of western Tibet, near Shigatse – had been accepted by the Communist leadership. But then the wise men had made the error of telling the Dalai Lama, living in exile in Dharmsala in India and he had agreed with the decision.
His agreement, which legitimized the boy’s candidacy for the thousands of followers of the most revered (as opposed to the most legal) of Tibet’s lamas, made Beijing promptly change its collective mind. The national leadership condemned the choice, criticized the child for all manner of sins and his parents blameless people to their very core for corruption and publicity seeking. A new child was chosen, and was due to be formally installed as the future Panchen Lama later in the year. The Dalai Lama was pointedly not consulted: he had already made his choice, said Beijing, and unhappily it was the wrong one.
This row would dominate the rest of the year, and almost certainly did result in some disturbances across Tibet, particularly in the western monasteries, where support for the Dalai Lama is at its most fervent. Now there seemed little doubt but that these soldiers officially heading south for ‘routine resupply’ – were going to help put down an incipient rebellion, yet again.
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