China's Spring and Summer

The Brookings Institution next door of the ISH was always one of my favourite think tanks being liberal and being so close by. One day, we decided to sleep in a bit longer and then I dragged Tommy, my co-intern, to a journalist's (The Economist) field report on "China's Spring and Summer: The Tibet Demonstrations, the Sichuan Earthquake and the Beijing Olympic Games".

The journalist James Miles had some interesting insight. He reported that the Tibet Demonstrations started as an economic riot - the ethnic aspect was only added later for the West to understand the conflict. Miles was the only foreign journalist in Lhasa when violence broke out on March 14th.

Miles: "I’ve been a journalist in China (...) for about 15 years or more. This was my first officially approved visit to Tibet. It came about I think, because of a conversation I had with a foreign ministry official, late last year, to whom I said kind of teasingly, that I had been in China all this time, and I’ve never been to Tibet. He said, why don’t you apply then? Which I have to confess, I hadn’t done for quite a long time. They do organize trips for journalists from time to time, in big groups, but it is very rare for them to allow individuals to go in."

Miles: "It was striking to me, watching all this, that hardly anyone said to me, as I watched this violence occurring, that this was anything related to independence or support for the Dalai Lama or anything else. Inflation was in fact one of the issues that kept coming up. Oddly, the price of clothing, which I was told had risen very rapidly, and there was resentment expressed that officials had given the impression that this new train service would help somehow keep prices down in Lhasa."

The Journalist also reported about a growing self-esteem of the Chinese population. The young Chinese see China as a serious global player who can stand up to the Western world. The governments learning process of handling international relations is pretty steep. When Brown met with the Dalai Lama, Chinese authorities reacted less critical than before, when the Dalai Lama met with Merkel in Germany.

"The Olympics was clearly a major factor in their decision to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama. (...) It is very hard to imagine what the kind of end game of such a dialogue could be. The Chinese do not want the Dalai Lama back in China. From their perspective I think it would be seen as bringing in a Trojan horse. A champion of democracy who would – no matter what he said – be trying to whittle away at Chinese sovereignty over Tibet."

There is a middleclass arising in China. Urban residents start to own property and know how to use the internet and how to make money.

Considering the earthquake, Premier Wen Jiabao was highly respected for the government's quick reaction and their openness of working together with NGOs. Miles: "Unlike in such situations normally in China, there wasn't an attempt to keep one away from information but rather to provide as much as possible."