An overlooked pocket of unrest
Posted: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:10 PM
Filed Under:
Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News producer
SICHUAN PROVINCE, China - It was on the 13-hour journey toward an ethnic Tibetan town in northern Sichuan province that NBC cameraman Marcus O’Brien and I saw how quickly technology could help spread the word about the unrest in Tibet and China -- and also how difficult information could be to verify.
Reports had begun to trickle out last Sunday from this remote corner of southwestern China bordering Tibet that ethnic Tibetans in a county deep in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture were protesting against the Chinese.
As our 4x4 climbed the 10,000 feet along a narrow and winding two-lane road through what was once part of the Tibetan kingdom, I fielded emails, cell phone text messages and calls from sources, and tried to figure out what was really happening inside Aba County (known in Tibetan as Ngawa).
The first report on Sunday cited anonymous residents of Aba town who said eight bodies had been left outside a major monastery. The bodies, all of them Tibetan, included a 15-year-old student who had been protesting against the Chinese. By Sunday night the figure had grown to 10. A few hours later, reports said the number of dead had edged up to 16 and continued to rise.
There was no way to confirm any of this information without traveling in ourselves; even the graphic photos of dead bodies sent to my BlackBerry were hard to verify. Meanwhile, most of the media's attention, as well as the information coming from non-governmental organizations, continued to focus on Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
But it all seemed plausible, especially in the early hours of the morning as we passed a convoy of some 40 military trucks carrying Chinese soldiers with riot shields and helmets.
A crackdown was in the making.
Aba: A model of autonomy?
Information about Aba is difficult to obtain even at the best of times. It's one of the last Tibetan-populated areas of Sichuan to have been opened up to the outside world.
The day we were driving in, a Tibetan who left Aba Prefecture in 1989 told me that NBC was the only foreign media to have tried to enter the area. But our Chinese driver, who has been leading tours in the region since 1987, claimed that foreigners have always been allowed in.
Aba Prefecture is one of the more sparsely populated regions of Sichuan province. Somewhere between 820,000 and 850,000 people live there, more than half of whom are ethnic Tibetans, followed by ethnic Han Chinese, and another minority group called the Qiang.
The dominant culture is Tibetan. Aba Prefecture is home to more than 40 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, one of which, Kirti, is the largest on the entire Tibetan Plateau, with about 3,000 monks. (The Tibetan Plateau comprises Tibet and parts of the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan.) More than 10 percent of Aba County’s 70,000 residents are monks.
Kirti has been allowed to quietly flourish, according to Robbie Barnett, adjunct professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York City, as part of an experiment in regional-cultural-political autonomy.
"In the early 1980s, China developed very different policies for [Tibet] and these Tibetan areas on the eastern plateau," he told me. "The latter were much more relaxed, and local leaders were often Tibetans.... Experts said then that (these areas) were models of nationality policy leniency and contentment."
But the events in the past week suggest this "model" of autonomy took a wrong turn somewhere. It's still unclear to experts like Barnett why anti-China protests spread to places like Aba, where the Chinese were thought to have allowed the Tibetan communities much more freedom than to the Tibetans in Tibet itself.
Bubbling resentment
The reasons for protests in Aba may be the same as elsewhere, said Barnett: The collapse of dialogue between Beijing and the Tibetan government-in-exile; the Chinese government's stepped-up rhetoric against the Dalai Lama; the new rules on reincarnation [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6973605.stm]; and a resettlement program ostensibly meant to protect the grasslands that has forced 100,000 Tibetan nomads into "model villages."
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| The grasslands in Aba, Sichuan province. |
There's also mineral extraction. After the Communist Party took over China in 1949, logging intensified in this part of Sichuan. Our driver remembers trucks traveling into Aba with basic supplies and returning to Chengdu, the provincial capital, with timber. Such was the growth of logging that the mountains in northern Sichuan are largely bare and only just recovering from the indiscriminate logging of the 1950s and 1960s.
Resentment also has been bubbling among the Tibetans over China’s plans to mine natural resources like gold and oil. Beijing gave the go-ahead for oil drilling in Aba in 2004, saying it is an important component of the country’s entire industry. Drilling was expected to begin last year.
Gold deposits are also said to be plentiful in Aba -- as are peat, marble and granite.
In addition to its great natural resources, Aba also provides a significant amount of hydropower. We passed several dams along the Minjiang and Dadu rivers, which eventually feed into the Yangtze. Chinese figures estimate Aba's hydropower stations could produce 5.2 million kilowatts of electricity -- enough to power more than 500 households for a whole year.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| Hydropower plants dot the alpine landscape in Aba. |
Sealing off Aba County
But while we could see ourselves the strategic importance of Aba, we weren't able to cover the events inside the county. Twelve hours into our journey, 55 miles away from Aba town, we ran into the first Chinese police checkpoint.
After checking our passports and making calls to their superiors, the officers discovered we were journalists and ordered us back the way we had come. As we drove through the first town on our way back, we were diverted into the local police station, where our passports were again taken, and spent the next four hours successfully resisting their efforts to view our videotapes.
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| Adrienne Mong / NBC News |
| The police station in Sichuan province where the NBC team was kept for four hours. |
As we idled on the side of the road, we watched line after line of military vehicles thunder past us. We wondered whether they were the same convoys we had passed in the pre-dawn hours at the beginning of our journey.
But it was a moot point. By nightfall, when we were back on the road towards Chengdu, several dozen military convoys rolled past us, carrying even more soldiers, equipment, and supplies.
For a moment, as the headlights lumbered past our jeep, I thought it looked like China was going to war. And no one was going to be able to cover it.
