explode together

Away from the parish pump, Roland Soong translates a 9000 word essay on China, Tibet and the Olympics by Huangfu Ping, a former chief editor of the People’s Daily who enjoys a kind of unofficial role as representative of Beijing on earth. This is basically as close to a detailed explanation of the Chinese government’s current stance as anyone is going to get, or at least that of its generally reformist wing – and the fact that Huangfu Ping is the message bearer on this issue means that the reformist wing has been given general control on the issue. Here he takes a swipe at some of his more aggressive comrades:

We also need more flexible social administrative systems and ethnic autonomous-rule systems to ensure that social problems do not get politicized. Wise leaders are always good at separating political and ideological problems and reduce things to specific individual social problems to be solved one at a time. They do not label the various demands from various interest groups as "political plots" "with ulterior motives" and let these demands coalesce into politicized problems that explode together. Therefore, the relevant leaders in charge of the Tibet issue must break away from the traditional political thinking and deal with the unique social, ethnic and religious problems in Tibet in a pragmatic way.

There have been concerns expressed that the latest Tibetan uprising would tilt power towards hawks in the Chinese administration. They were already in charge in Tibet and across the Chinese far West generally, and for all their bluster after the event they are the ones who allowed the uprising to happen. As for the “pragmatic way”, that seems to consist of holding talks with the DL in an attempt to split him from militants in the Tibet independence movement, one of whom recently speculated that the Tibetan cause may be better advanced if it resorted to suicide bombings.

Comments

[Jim]

I've seen a couple of internal briefing papers submitted to Party Centre by retired minority cadres - one a book-length effort on minorities policy from an old ethnically Mongolian cadre - that were pushing a similar line, that the original nationalities' policy called for genuine ethnic autonomy but it has become mere regional autonomy. Perhaps someone like Hu who's shown he can take a hard line in Tibet, as he did in the 80s as Party secretary there, can pull off a liberalisation.

[jamie]

Maybe, especially as the current Tibet leadership group came to power on his coattails, so he has a corresponding need to move aggressively against them now. It's also interesting how confident liberal journalists and commentators generally seem to be in the face of fenqing agitation. You get the sense that they feel they have backup.