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 …

From New Left Review, NLR 51, May-June 2008, pp. 5-27. The leading historian of modern Tibet discusses the background to recent protests on the Plateau. “The joke in Tibet is that the Dalai Lama wants ‘one country, two systems’, but what people there want is ‘one country, one system’—they want the more liberal policies that prevail in China also to apply in Tibet.”
Interview
Your landmark history of modern Tibet, The Dragon in the Land of Snows, suggests a broad four-part periodization for developments since 1951. During the first period, 1951–59, the …

The protests in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas last week were
organized to embarrass the Chinese government ahead of the Olympics.
The Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), the major Tibetan exile organization
that advocates independence for Tibet and has endorsed the use of
violent methods to achieve it, has said as much. Its head, Tsewang
Rigzin, stated in a March 15 interview with the Chicago Tribune that
since it is likely that Chinese authorities would suppress protests in
Tibet, “With the spotlight on them with the Olympics, we want to test
them. We want them to show their …