A PICTURE is emerging of desperate and prolonged Tibetan resistance despite the huge scale of China’s military operation across the mountainous region that one ancient poet called “a place where snow lions dance”.

The Chinese press focused yesterday on a campaign to whip up resentment against the foreign media as reports outside China spoke of at least eight unarmed Tibetans shot dead by paramilitary police.

Scraps of evidence collected by exiles, campaigners, military analysts and daring witnesses inside Tibet all point to the conclusion that China can subdue the Tibetans but cannot win the spiritual war.

There is also new evidence this weekend in eyewitness accounts provided to The Sunday Times of the spread of unrest among Muslims in the vast province of Xinjiang, which borders Tibet.

These are the two most turbulent regions in the People’s Republic and a simultaneous crisis in both of them would present the Chinese leadership with the most serious challenge it has faced since 1989.

Piecing together official statements with accounts reaching Tibetans in exile, the size of the Tibet operation suggests that the Chinese are having to hold down dozens of villages, man hundreds of checkpoints and retain control of more than 100 important monasteries and shrines.

China has committed the key 52nd and 55th divisions of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), dressed soldiers up as paramilitary police and employed Marxist psychological warfare tactics to break the Tibetan resistance.

Most of the security forces are Han Chinese from the farmlands of eastern China, untrained for hard work at high altitudes on the Tibetan plateau.

Thousands of regular troops backed by armoured vehicles have deployed to support the police, patrolling roads in a vast area stretching from the Himalayan border with India to the provinces of southwestern China. “No military machine on earth is designed to do that permanently,” commented a foreign military attaché.

So far China’s top leadership, the nine-man standing committee of the politburo, has thrown its support behind the PLA’s iron-fisted response. The prospect of talks with the Dalai Lama seems unlikely.

Zhou Yongkang, the security chief, and Li Changchun, the Communist party’s head propagandist, are said to have persuaded the rest of the standing committee that China can win in Tibet and in the arena of world opinion.

On the propaganda front, the farcical results of a conducted tour for journalists to a temple in Lhasa, where monks wept and pleaded for freedom, suggest that official plans to reopen Tibet to tourists on May 1 look distinctly optimistic.

In terms of what China calls “stability”, Tibet remains volatile. The fresh violence broke out near a military headquarters at Kangding which controls the passes between the Tibetan plateau and the city of Chengdu.

The state news agency conceded that a “riot” broke out in Kardze, west of Kangding, in which a government official was seriously wounded.

However, reporters for the Tibetan service of Radio Free Asia found witnesses who said that one monk and seven lay people had been shot after the police banned pictures of the Dalai Lama and tried to force people to criticise him.

According to Urgen Tenzin, director of the Indian-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, the number of dead could be as high as 15.

The officials had not only demanded that all photographs and posters of the Dalai Lama be destroyed but also that all monks denounce their spiritual leader. “Skirmishes” broke out when officials began room-to-room searches in a monastery. Two monks, Tsultrim Tenzin and Yeshe Nyima, were arrested when they protested at Chinese officials throwing pictures of the Dalai Lama on the floor.

This intensified the protest, with more than 300 monks and several hundred Tibetan villagers demonstrating close to where the monks were being held.

Police opened fire on a crowd of Tibetans at Nyatso Monastery in Dawu, west of Chengdu, on Saturday at midday after lay people joined monks in a religious observance. The police intervened and the situation developed into a protest. It is believed that at least five Tibetans were hit. Injured monks and civilians were unable to get medical treatment.

It was a sketch of the nightmare that unites the Chinese leadership in the fear that any show of weakness will embolden its numerous enemies. They range from all the losers in China’s economic upheaval to followers of the banned Falun Gong meditation group, Tibetans and Muslims.

The Sunday Times has obtained the first independent confirmation of the outbreak of protest in China’s restive western province of Xinjiang, which is home to the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority. Hundreds of Muslim women, many with their babies, are still in detention after Chinese security forces broke up a protest led by mothers calling for human rights in the remote Silk Road city of Hotan.

Eyewitnesses spoke of an unprecedented scene in the grand bazaar of Hotan on March 23, when veiled women advanced holding their infants in the air, defying the paramilitary police to open fire.

“At first some people came past handing out leaflets and then a group of women in Arabian-style clothes and veils came by, some of them with their babies in their arms,” said a Han Chinese resident of the town.

“They were surrounded by the armed police, then thrown into trucks and driven away. Even those who weren’t marching were rounded up before the police cleared the streets.” Between 700 and 1,000 people, the majority of them women, had been arrested, witnesses estimated.

The Muslims were apparently emboldened by news of the uprising in Tibet, just to the south of Hotan beyond the Kunlun mountains. The demonstrations were set off by the death in police custody of a prominent local philanthropist and trader in jade, for which the city is famous.

The body of the man, 38-year-old Mutallip Hajim, was handed back to his family on March 3 by the police, who said he had died of heart trouble and ordered his immediate burial.

However, protests spread to other towns as Muslims called on the authorities to stop torture, abandon plans to restrict the veil and free political prisoners, Radio Free Asia reported.

Chinese officials said that “terrorists, splittists and religious extremists” had tried to “stage a riot” in Hotan.

Last month China claimed to have foiled a “terrorist plot” to attack the Olympic Games after raiding a militant hideout in Urumqi, the provincial capital.

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