You're going a bit metaphysical on me.
Why is there violence in Tibet? Why is there violence anywhere?
Why do puppies die?
Why do the pizza restaurants that deliver to my house all suck?
Great questions, all of them, but I don't have any answers.
Perhaps if we narrow the scope of the question a bit to something like, "Why is the Chinese government cracking down on protesters in Tibet?" I might be able to help.
The quick answer: The People's Republic of China is a repressive, one-party state that systematically limits the human, civil, religious and political rights of people under its control. The Chinese government does not tolerate free political debate, free association or free movement.
The Chinese government so revels in its Big Brotherness that it even blocks access to Web pages critical of the Chinese government in any way. China's definition of critical is absurdly broad. If a coal mine in China collapses and CNN.com reports that 12 people are buried in it, the page on CNN.com reporting it will be inaccessible to Chinese Internet users.
Back to Tibet.
On March 10, Buddhist monks in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, marched to mark the anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
Chinese troops cracked down on the marches, kicking off an orgy of protests, rioting, and a military backlash that has left untold dead. The Chinese government has effectively cut off Lhasa from the rest of the world by not allowing foreign media or international human rights monitors to visit.
A reporter from the Economist says that before he was kicked out, he saw armored personnel carriers in front of Tibet's holiest Buddhist shrine. One had a Chinese-language placard that read "Stability is Happiness." It sounds like a fortune cookie from a Chinese restaurant in hell.
The 1959 uprising was a sad milestone in Tibetan nationalism. It was the event that forced Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, into exile at the age of 24. Nine years earlier, the newly communist China's army had marched into Tibet.
Supporters of said Chinese march into Tibet don't think of it as a conquest. They think of it as Tibet's reintegration into China. The Chinese party line is that Tibet had been part of the Chinese whole since the 13th century, right around the time the Chinese supposedly invented land mines and artillery shells.
Critics of the Chinese, which includes most people who aren't actually Chinese, refer to the 1950 action as an invasion — a conquest of a Tibet that had been independent of Chinese authority since 1912, the year the 13th Dalai Lama (the current Dalai Lama's predecessor) declared independence from a weak, fractured Chinese empire.
Elliot Sperling of the East-West Center published a historical paper in 2004 that contended that both sides are exaggerating their claims. The idea that Tibet has been an integral part of China for 700 years is B.S., Sperling says (although he doesn't put it in those exact terms). Likewise, Tibet's image of itself as outside of China's historical sphere of influence is also modern construction.
Regardless, the Chinese reintegration/invasion has been brutal for the reasons I listed above. And Tibetans, whether the Chinese like it or not, don't want to be ruled by China.
Tibet's government-in-exile, led by the Dalai Lama, wants Tibet to be internally democratic and self-governing. The Dalai Lama is committed to nonviolence and has threatened to step down as Tibet's political leader-in-exile unless the rioters back down.
Will Tibet get independence or autonomy? I'm just one person, but my guess is no. I'm pretty pessimistic.
I can't even conceive of a way to get China to loosen its choke hold on Tibet. The only way to do that is through economic and diplomatic pressure.
Good luck with that. Every object on my desk is Chinese — from the computer I'm writing this on to my coffee mug. Too many powerful people have too much money to lose for the U.S. government to poke at China about Tibet.
As for diplomatic pressure? We're America. We don't even do diplomacy when it would help us — do you think we're gonna bother with it for a bunch of people in Tibet?
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2008.