Uneasy Anniversary

March has been a particularly busy month for Chinese diplomats around the world. From Sacramento to Dublin, Hong Kong to Paris, Chinese officials have been working diligently to blunt activists' efforts to mark the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan revolt that resulted in the Dalai Lama's flight to India. (Article continued below...)

For the most part, the diplomats' efforts abroad have been effective: a California lawmaker's effort to declare March 10 Tibetan Awareness Day in the state was derailed after the Chinese Consulate expressed its strong opposition to the nonbinding and seemingly nonthreatening resolution. Closer to home, however, Chinese officials face a very different and potentially more difficult challenge: how to manage highly emotional and nationalistic anti-Western sentiments that may risk alienating China's most important trading partners.

Throughout the month, state-controlled media outlets such as the Xinhua News Agency and the People's Daily have continued to lambaste the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader. In both publications, a strident anti-Western tone has resurfaced, reminiscent of the highly nationalistic tone that exploded after anti-Chinese riots erupted in Lhasa a year ago. And that has been echoed—and amplified—on the many online bulletin boards that form the backbone of the social media web in China.

One Web commentator on the Tiexue.net BBS ranted: "Western people, as we all know, are cheating rascals, jealous and cheap … They and China are enemies forever." The writer, apparently in reference to the recent naval confrontation in the South China Sea in which the U.S. accused five Chinese ships of harassing its submarine-hunting vessel USNS Impeccable, went on to say, "Some recent incidents show the necessity for a strong military. If we don't have the strongest military in the world, reforms are insignificant."

Such emotional outbursts present Beijing leaders with a dilemma. While nationalistic fervor has consolidated domestic support for the communist regime, it also threatens to spin out of control to target Western countries that are now China's major trading partners, particularly the U.S. In a globalized world, with the Chinese and American economies closely intertwined, a surge of anti-Western sentiment in China risks provoking an anti-Chinese reaction in the U.S.—especially now that the global economic crisis has triggered talk of trade protectionism and "monetary nationalism."

Meanwhile, Xinhua continued the anti-Western theme in an article that documented the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's covert support for anti-Beijing Tibetan rebels during the 1950s. It cited U.S. government documents and the CIA's "notorious involvement" in training and supplying Tibetan rebels by pointing out the presence of U.S.-supplied weapons used during the insurrection, which are now enshrined in a recently opened Beijing exhibition on the 50th anniversary.

This exhibition on Tibet's "democratic reforms" was also the subject of a commentary in the March 13 edition of the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily. The display, which focused on the plight of serfs before and after soldiers of the People's Liberation Army marched into Lhasa half a century ago, "has shown to all the Tibetans' miserable life in the old days and their happy life in the new Tibet," it said. (The piece also quoted an expert from the China Tibetan Research Center as saying the exhibit shows "Tibet has been walking towards brightness from darkness, from backwardness to advancement, from poverty to riches, from dictatorship to democracy.")

That theme has been picked up elsewhere in the Chinese media, along with an unmistakable degree of anger over the way the Tibetan story has been told outside China.

"Western media don't pay attention to the … positive changes that have taken place in Tibet, but only to the one-year anniversary of the March 14th incident," stated a commentary in Xilu Junshi, referring to the violent riots that broke out in the Tibetan capital a year ago and then spread to other ethnic Tibetan communities. The commentator declared that the Western media's aim was to "make trouble on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in order to prolong the length of the economic crisis in China."

Such feverish hyperbole is typical of the emotions that this sensitive subject provokes in China—and it also helps explain why many Chinese citizens have grown up with little nuance in their understanding of the Tibetan issue.