The sun of Tibet setting from Lhasa?

(TibetanReview.net, Oct30, 2009)  Tibet had changed more between 2007 and 2009 than it had in the preceding eight years thanks to the Qinghai-Tibet Railway and the commercialization of a "mystical Tibet" to both the Chinese and Western consumers, according to a Student Correspondent Corps report in the GlobalPost online Oct 27. The report also confirmed that Tibet’s capital Lhasa continued to be a city under siege by Chinese security forces.

The report said: “Armed military details are stationed at every street corner 24/7, six-troop patrols march up and down the lanes of the old town in synchronized step, and watchmen stand sentry on rooftops adjacent to all sensitive zones like the Ramoche and Jokhang temples, two of the most sacred sites in Lhasa as well as the focal points for past protests.”

The reporter also found, “saddest of all”, that the streets of Lhasa were filled with beggars consisting of men, women and children. Last summer the authorities banned all begging in the city and expelled the beggars to their respective villages, considering them an embarrassment before the hordes of travelers expected to arrive in connection with the Olympic Games.

But “(t)he travelers never came, the gates were finally opened, and the beggars returned in a flood,” the report said. The reporter found it “disturbing to confront such untold numbers resorting to a livelihood by desperation.”

The reporter found that economic and social developments in Tibet had created a volatile situation that radiated from Lhasa across the country, with the greatest impact resulting from two causes: “first, railroad and highway construction, and its resulting rapid transfer of people and material goods to and from mainland China, and between the plateau and the Indian subcontinent; second, the commercialization of a ‘mystical Tibet’ to both the Chinese and Western consumer. These developments gather steam by the day.”