The International Campaign for Tibet has just published an English translation of a report by the Open Constitution Initiative delving into the social causes of the protests in Tibetan areas of China in March, 2008. Based on fairly extensive fieldwork, the report takes issue with the Chinese government’s claim that external forces sparked the protests, and gives a rudimentary social history of Tibet (minus the exile movement) from the mid-70s on. It’s worth reading, even if the lack of attention to the Tibetan exile movement and their Western supporters undermines the report’s attempt to explain the protests. This latter point, luckily, has already been competently argued by Barry Sautman in Protests in Tibet and Separatism on our sister site China Left Review.

We’ve converted the rather long report to a PDF below. The original report in Chinese can be found here.