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A woman’s gruesome hanging shocked Tibet — but police have silenced all questions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/
By Simon Denyer
August 26 at 5:00 AM


JIQIE NO. 2 VILLAGE, China — She was 27, a kind, hard-working woman who supported her family by herding yaks and harvesting caterpillar fungus, a prized health cure, on the high grasslands of Tibet. Last October, Tsering Tso was found hanged from a bridge in a small town near her home.

Her family and local villagers gathered outside the police station in Chalong township to demand answers: She had last been seen in the company of a local Buddhist priest and two policemen.

The authorities insisted it was suicide. Family and friends suspected foul play and demanded an investigation. That night and the following morning, an angry crowd stormed the gates of the police station, smashing windows, according to local police.

The authorities’ response was brutal, revealing much about the crackdown taking place in Tibetan parts of China and showing how unrest and unhappiness is increasingly viewed as dangerously subversive.

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In a statement issued on its social-media account, the Ganzi county Public Security Bureau contested that version of events. It said some of the protesters had carried knives, iron pipes or stones and had caused nearly $10,000 worth of damage. The bureau ran photographs of several men climbing over a gate, but only two broken windows were shown.

The jailed men, the statement said, had either carried weapons or organized the protest and had been found guilty of “assembling a crowd to attack state organs.”

But relatives who spoke to The Washington Post outside the family’s tent on the remote grasslands said they were not convinced that any investigation had been carried out.

No one denied that a few stones had been thrown during the protest, hitting a police car and office building, but they said that as a result, their entire community had been accused of “splittism.” That is a serious crime implying support for the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader, or for Tibet’s independence from China.

Internet connections have been cut off in Chalong township since the incident, and relatives have been threatened with further punishment if they talk to outsiders. The village — a scattering of tents and yaks in a scenic, sweeping grasslands valley — has been told it will not get government subsidies for roads or houses for three years because of its “bad character.”

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In a May report, Human Rights Watch catalogued nearly 500 arrests across Tibetan parts of China between 2013 and 2015. It concluded that dissent had spread from urban to rural areas. Whereas the vast majority of arrests in the 1980s and 1990s had been of monks and nuns, most of those detained more recently were ordinary people.

Many “had merely exercised their rights to expression and assembly without advocating separatism” — criticizing local officials, for example, or opposing a mining development, the report said.

Yet even relatively mild protests about poor governance are increasingly seen through a political lens and labeled as “criminal acts,” rights groups say. Punishment can be severe.

The incident in Chalong “reflects the unrest and instability in Tibetan society,” said Golog Jigme, a filmmaker and former political prisoner who now lives in exile in Switzerland. “It’s not outsiders or the Dalai Lama stirring things up, it’s social issues.”

On the evening of Oct. 4, 2015, Tsering Tso had received a phone call from her boyfriend, a lama at the Gertse Dralak monastery in Chalong. He insisted that he was ill and wanted to see her.

Her father gave her a lift, only to find the lama drinking with two policemen. He left her there. The following morning, Tsering Tso’s body was found hanging from a small bridge in the town.

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He said another relative walks with a limp after being beaten on his legs; a third, a Buddhist monk, was beaten so badly on the head that he bled from one ear and today cannot walk at all. Family members who work for the government lost their jobs.

The police statement merely said that 44 people had been subpoenaed.

Many Tibetans are too scared to speak out publicly against injustice, but the communities around Chalong appear to have gathered to write a remarkable open letter about the incident. The letter, first obtained by Golog Jigme, claims to have been written in the name of 700 residents across 13 communities in the area.

“These days the Chinese Communists are claiming and announcing how they are building a perfect Tibet and how free and happy Tibetans are in China, but now we have no option but to show the world an actual example of the real suffering endured by the people of the three regions of Tibet under Chinese oppression,” the letter begins.

Local officials, the letter continued, had “conspired to use force to bully the common people,” ending with an appeal to President Xi to “investigate and rectify.”

ICT said the incident reveals the extent of the impunity of officials and police in Tibet, and the fact that it took so long to reach the outside world shows how tightly information flows are restricted. Free Tibet said it “clearly exemplifies not just the brutality of life under the Chinese occupation but also how arbitrary and illogical it can be.”

Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.

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