SWB
FE/0073 B2/1
B. INTERNAL AFFAIRS
2. CHINA
12 Feb 88
BAINQEN FURTHER ANALYSES CAUSES AND
HANDLING OF LHASA RIOTS
Lhasa, Tibet regional service in Standard Chinese (i) 1430 gmt 8 Feb (ii) 1130 gmt 9 Feb 88
(i) Excerpts from "the first part" of NPC Standing Committee Vice-Chairman Baiqen Erdini Qoigyi Gyaicain's 19th January speech at the sixth session of the fourth Tibet autonomous regional people's congress:
Prior to my current visit to Tibet, the central authorities assigned two important tasks to me. As the 1988 Lhasa [words indistinct] prayer festival is forthcoming, the central authorities are very much concerned with successful promotion of this prayer festival. It is common knowledge that the Lhasa prayer festival was founded several hundred years ago by our Buddhist leader (?Zong Kaba). Over the past several hundred years, the prayer festival was gradually turned into a religious festival of the Tibetan masses as well as a grand national festival. However, in the past, due to the leftist idelogical influence, the festival was once suspended for 20 years. Thanks to the central authorities' loving care and much attention, the prayer festival was resumed in 1986, thus winning the warm support offered by the whole of Tibet and all the people in Tibet and evoking favourable reactions among the people at home and abroad. However, due to the recent emergence of riots in Lhasa, we are all concerned with and feel anxious about the following major issues: Are we going to hold this year's prayer festival? Can we succeed in promoting this year's prayer festival? Politically speaking, the party's policy on freedom of religious belief is a true, (?firm) policy, and is not an expedient measure. We must not change the party's policy just because of the disturbances created by a small number of people...
The first task assigned to me by the central authorities is successfully to finish preparations for promoting the yearly prayer festival. The second task assigned to me by the central authorities is the task of understanding the conditions of Tibet, studying issues concerning Tibet and offering proposals to the central authorities...
(ii) Text of "the second part" of the speech by Baingen to the sixth session of the fourth Tibet regional people's congress on 19th January 1988.
As we all know riots occurred in Lhasa several months ago. People hate to see such incidents, which are also unfortunate events. They were caused by many internal and external factors. Of course, as we all think and agree the incidents were mainly caused by splittists inside and outside Tibet who colluded with each other. This aspect has been widely discussed by us all and has been clearly pointed out, so I do not want to talk about this in detail here.
On the other hand, when we review our previous work we may find that such a review is completely necessary. Through the review we notice two aspects of the situation. On the one hand our work in Tibet has achieved great positive results and this fact is known to all. On the other hand, over a period of more than 20 years under the guidance of erroneous leftist ideology, we did many wrong things that we should not have done and we should correct these mistakes; and we left wounds in the minds of many people and need to cure such wounds. Since the third plenary session of the 11th CCP Central Committee, under the guidance of the party's correct line the whole country set aright the guideline in all fields. In this regard Tibet also did a great deal of positive work, and made great achievements.
However, the influence of leftism in Tibet was particularly deep, the situation in Tibet was more complicated than in other areas, and there were greater obstacles to setting aright the guideline. So Tibet advanced more slowly than other localities in the country, or lagged behind other localities, in setting aright the guideline. Some negative things have even occurred in the process of doing this. Because we encountered a complicated situation and major difficulties we became somewhat hesitant in the handling of some affairs, and even delayed handling some important matters for a long time. This weakened people's confidence in some matters to a certain degree.
This state of affairs in our work also provided an opportunity which the splittists could take advantage of in order to create trouble. Various errors and loopholes in our work provided the conditions, like dry firewood, for the splittists to feed the flames and stir up trouble and disturbance. Therefore, our future work is to unite as one and make concerted efforts to get rid of such dry firewood. This is a very important point.
Today, I want to make one point clear. After the riots occurred in Lhasa some people thought that it was because we had gone too far in setting aright the work guideline, redressing the wrongs, implementing the policies, and correcting the errors in our previous work; because we had gone too far in implementing the religious policy, the Lamas had become arrogant; and because we had gone too far in implementing the nationality policy, narrow-minded nationality sentiments had been abetted. So they held that after the riots occurred we should backtrack to the old practices, stop pursuing the current relaxed policies that we adopted after setting aright the guideline, and adopt some high-handed measures; otherwise, there would be no way to deal with the problems.
Although not many people hold such points of view, they do not account for a very small proportion of our cadres. We should adopt a prudent attitude towards such points of view and approach them seriously. Such points of view may cause greater trouble if they continue to spread. In Peking, when