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INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR TIBET
Administering control: the hands on the reins
Three individuals can be identified as being key actors in formulating and implementing
government policy in the PRC’s ethnic regions, including Tibet, since March
10. They are Zhang Qingli, the Party Secretary of the TAR; Wang Lequan, the Party
Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR); and Li Dezhu, the
Director of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC), who retired in late 2007. 7
As with Hu Jintao’s key appointments in the region and provinces into which Tibet
is now incorporated, all three of these individuals have a background in the Communist
Youth League of China (CYLC), and are therefore considered to be Hu’s close
political allies. Zhang Qingli worked at the CYLC’s central Beijing offices in the early
1980s while Wang and Li were Deputy Secretaries of provincial CYLC offices in Shandong
and Jilin provinces respectively in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. 8
TAR Party Secretary, Zhang Qingli
Zhang Qingli has been in the position of TAR Party Secretary since November 2005,
and is also First Secretary of the TAR Military Sub-Region. He sits on the main Party
body overseeing policy implementation in Tibet, the Central Tibet Work Coordination
Working Group.
Upon his arrival in the TAR, Zhang began to implement the Party’s hardline policies
on the practice and institutions of Tibetan Buddhism with a particular zeal that distinguished
his approach from his predecessors, Yang Chuantang and before him, Guo
Jinlong. It is certain that Zhang’s approach contributed significantly to the anger and
despair that fuelled the protests and riots on the streets of Lhasa in March. The hardline
policies such as an intensified ‘patriotic education’ campaign that Zhang was in
charge of implementing in the TAR, clearly failed to achieve the ‘genuine stability’
sought by the Party and exposed the estrangement of the government from the
Tibetan people. Zhang Qingli is now presiding over the implementation of even
harsher and frequently violent measures in an attempt to reassert control.
In wider society in the TAR, he has reinstated mechanisms of social and political control
that owe their roots — both historically and ideologically — to the political
extremism of the Mao era.
Zhang’s frequent and hostile rhetoric against the Dalai Lama, whom he has described
as “the biggest obstacle hindering Tibetan Buddhism from establishing normal order”,
and “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil with a human face”, are deeply offensive to the
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