As unease continues to build around North Korea’s potentially explosive nuclear ambitions, Beijing is facing with another, sustained, and local conflagration. On February 25, two Tibetan monks set themselves ablaze in neighboring provinces in northwestern China, the latest in a series of grisly public protests against Chinese repression. One self-immolated outside a temple where people had gathered to mark the end of Losar, a highly significant period of the Tibetan calendar that commemorates the end of the Lunar New Year, and the other at a monastery where Losar celebrations were being observed. Neither survived.
Such extreme protests have become common in regions of China in which there are large Tibetan populations. Since 2009, more than 100 have self-immolated, with the majority dying as a result. In an effort to both quell the protests and prevent word from getting out to the foreign press about the frequency in which these grisly spectacles occur and under what circumstances, China has criminalized self-immolations and those who aid and abet the immolators, to the extent that if someone is deemed an accomplice of a self-immolator who then dies, murder charges are against the abetter are a possibility.
But despite the legal crackdown, despite a wave of arrests and detentions, the burnings have continued at much the same pace as before legislation was enacted, and in a more dramatic style. Last week, two youths aged 17 and 18, died after performing a double self-immolation in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, which has been the staging ground for the majority of these protests. They became among the youngest to have perished as a result of self-immolation. It is almost as if China’s law, meant to keep self-immolations from spreading, has prompted those determined to carry out this protest to do so in ways that ensure maximum exposure. (Funny how that works.)
The immolations represent a growing problem for the Xi government, at least as far as its much-vaunted reformist cred is concerned. Few things undermine the notion that a government is making good-faith efforts to change political conditions for the better than a rash of the disaffected setting themselves on fire, and given that even the massive internal security apparatus of the Chinese state has so far proven incapable of suppressing them, the state is left with a unpalatable choices. Escalate the repression and risk international condemnation (though Tibet is no longer the cause célèbre it was once among Western political and cultural elites) or allow them to continue, each a political embarrassment. And if a recent PR effort — a state-produced documentary alleging that the immolations are the result of incitement by the U.S. government’s broadcasting service the Voice of America — is anything to go by, China’s toolbox here is looking empty, short of actually providing the relief the protesters demand. Don’t hold your breath on that.
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