Dharamshala, 20th February: According to state media reports, a top Chinese official in Tibet visited monasteries in and around the Tibetan capital Lhasa this week to warn monks against behavior that is considered disrespectful to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. According to media reports, Wang Junzheng, the Tibet Autonomous Region’s party secretary, visited the Ramoche Temple in Lhasa and Gaden monastery outside the city on Thursday, telling monks to be “patriotic and law-abiding” citizens and faithful to the party.

Wang also told monastery management committees in both locations to enforce laws against assertions of Tibetan cultural and national identity that Chinese authorities term “separatist.” During key political events in Beijing and in March, a month of politically sensitive anniversaries, China periodically increases security in Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa and other Tibetan territories of China.

Tibetans in Lhasa rose up on March 10, 1959, in protest at Beijing’s expanding political and military authority over the formerly independent Tibet, starting a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of hundreds.

In the year of Beijing’s 2008 summer Olympics, a riot broke out in Lhasa on March 14, when Chinese authorities put down four days of peaceful Tibetan rallies, resulting in the damage of Han Chinese shops and violent attacks on Han Chinese inhabitants. The riot spawned a wave of generally nonviolent anti-Chinese protests that expanded across Tibetan-populated areas of western Chinese provinces, with hundreds of Tibetans jailed, assaulted, or shot by Chinese security forces as they tried to put an end to the unrest.

According to Pema Gyal, a researcher with Tibet Watch in London, China’s attitude to control and monitor Tibetan monks and nuns has become more aggressive in recent years. Tenzin Tsetan, a scholar at the Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamsala, India, believes Wang Junzheng’s recent visit to Tibetan monasteries heralds more restrictions ahead of the March 10 anniversary.

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