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TIBET AT A TURNING POINT: THE SPRING UPRISING AND CHINA’S NEW CRACKDOWN
education campaign by the Chinese authorities.
The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), based in Dharamsala,
India, reported that the nuns vowed not to take part in any ‘patriotic education’ campaigns
and said: “It is better to die than to denounce, criticize and attack the Dalai
Lama, to sign official documents denouncing the Dalai Lama, if there is no place for
us to worship and live, let us go somewhere else or die, if the Chinese authorities kill
us, let us be killed, we have no regrets.” 8 On the afternoon of May 14, the nuns marched
peacefully towards the Kardze county government headquarters chanting slogans including
“Long live the Dalai Lama” and calling for the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet.
They were detained as soon as they approached the building and taken away in police
vehicles.
According to a Tibetan source in exile, “Police and soldiers responded violently to the
protest and the nuns were arrested on the spot, many got severely beaten up and
stains of blood were seen on the street, with nuns’ robes and shoes scattered everywhere.
The nuns were seen being taken away in trucks. People were too scared to pick
up the nuns’ robes for fear of being detained themselves.”
Sympathy protests
Several protests were conceived as expressions of sympathy with those killed in the
uprising and as appeals for clemency. In most cases they were staged by monks or by
high school students. These include the prayer services held at Rabgya in Qinghai on
March 16, and Chigdril (Lungkar) in Qinghai on March 17, the marches in Sertha in
Sichuan on March 17, and Drango in Sichuan on March 25, and Tibetan student sitins
at Dalian in Liaoning on China’s eastern seaboard on March 21, and Chabcha in
Qinghai on March 30.
On March 17, Tibetan students held a silent vigil in Beijing to honor the courage of Tibetan
protestors in Tibet. The group of around 50 students sat silently in a circle with
heads bowed outside the Central Nationalities University in the Haidian district of
western Beijing for around six hours. They were surrounded by an official security
cordon preventing outsiders and other students from joining the protest, although
some foreign reporters succeeded in gaining brief access to the protestors.
While some Tibetan students are known to have taken part in the pro-democracy
demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, this was the first known demonstration
by Tibetans in China’s capital.
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