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Posted on 03/22/2008 7:38:35 PM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
The architects of Chinese repression in Tibet are three senior bureaucrats little known to the outside world but destined to be the focus of condemnation from human rights groups in the months ahead.
China preserves the facade of an autonomous regional government and has paraded its ethnic Tibetan figureheads over the past week. Chinese researchers say they are political nonentities.
The real mastermind of Chinese policy towards the restive ethnic minorities is a 67-year-old lifetime communist functionary named Wang Lequan.
Wang has proclaimed himself to be the top terrorist target in China. Nominally, he heads the party in Xinjiang, which, like Tibet, is a vast, remote and resource-rich region troubled by separatism.
However, Wang sits on the powerful politburo in Beijing and has assumed overall direction of policy in both places. He devised the model that has stifled Muslim culture in Xinjiang, staged political trials and executions, poured in millions of Chinese settlers and extracted mineral and energy resources to feed the economy.
Wang almost never gives interviews and operates behind the scenes, but on March 10 he gave away the extent of his responsibility by telling China Central Broadcasting: “No matter what nationality, no matter who it is, wreckers, separatists and terrorists will be smashed by us. There’s no doubt about that.”
His henchman, now applying the master’s methods in Tibet, is Zhang Qingli, the region’s sharp-tongued party secretary. Zhang is the man who called the Dalai Lama “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil with a human face”. He rose up the hierarchy in Xinjiang and was transferred to Tibet in 2005 as a reward for his loyalty.
He accelerated campaigns against Tibetan culture and religion, brought in more settlers and stepped up the commercial exploitation of Tibet’s huge reserves of raw materials.
Zhang is on record as saying that “those who do not love the motherland are not qualified to be human beings”.
The third most influential figure is Li Dezhu, the party’s racial theoretician. Until recently the head of its innocuous-sounding Ethnic Affairs Commission, Li wrote the textbook on destroying independent cultures and disintegrating religious minorities by promoting materialism.
In 2007 he elaborated the theory of what he called “cultural security” for China in an article in a party journal called Seeking Truth. In it he unfolded a radical change in Chinese policy, stating that its aim was no longer to preserve minority cultures such as the Tibetans but to refashion them.
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says Li is the first leader explicitly to state that the problem of minorities would be “definitively solved” by mass Chinese migration.
Let me guess...George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the Pope?
Sounds like Khrushchev.
He certainly has the look.
“...destined to be the focus of condemnation from human rights groups in the months ahead.”
No way — human right groups are only outraged when there is talk of water boarding and panties on terrorists’ heads.
Ping.
Zhang Qingli
On The Ground reports (through Japanese TV tonight).
Two of importance:
a) Troops pouring into Tibet from Communist China, are coming in from the furthermost areas with Red China, away from Tibet. i.e. reporters are noting vehicles coming in as far from as former Manchuria (Heiliungjang, etc). This confirms to the traditional Soviet and China crackdown of sending troops to rebelling areas with ethnics not connected in the remotest way to the area to be suppressed, to be more effective. It will be easy to order troops from Harbin to fire upon citizens in Lhasa in this way.
b) PLA troops are covering over their tanks that have the Chinese PLA marks ("81": 八一) for the 8th Route Army, with newspapers, to avoid coverage from foreign media or others (side and front of the tanks where these normally appear--a Japanese military specialist commented on the photos taken out of Tibet by Japanese tourists today). I saw these photos on Japanese TV just two hours ago.
(9:00 a.m. Eastern, Easter Sunday morning)
I’ve noticed you’ve been repeating this in a couple of other threads, but no matter how many times you type it up, it doesn’t make it any more true.
The “tanks” are actually type 92 (ZSL92) armored personnel carriers. They are part of the inventory of the PAP, however only in limited numbers and not all localities. The so called military specialist is quoting Andrei Pinkov aka Andrei Chang aka Yihong Chang who is the single man who runs Kanwa. The symbols being hidden are actually red stars and unit designation numbers. The 8-1 ideogram is inside the star does not represent the 8th route army, but rather August 1st the founding day of the Chinese Red Army (later the PLA) by elements of the Chinese Republican national army during the civil war. Also the locations of the emblems are on the sides and rear, not the front. The purpose of the covers is not to disguise PLA soldiers at PAP, but rather to hide the star on requisitioned equipment from the PLA. The PAP functions somewhat akin to the national guard, especially in equipment procurement, i.e. they get the old hand me downs of the army. The forces involved are not the army, but they have borrowed equipment that they are lacking in from the army.
So you are telling me I did not see the photos that I saw with my own eyes on Japanese TV about 24 hours—with the markings covered over with newspaper taped on the side and front of the vehicles, photos taken surreptiously by a Japanese tourist? You are welcome to respond.
Additional eyewitness accounts from female university students from Kagawa Prefecturing, just back from visiting Lhasa.
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