NEW DELHI — The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist China's history. It is a rude jolt to the world's biggest and longest surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half a century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.
The open backlash against the Tibetans' economic marginalization, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous Region. Now, the state's intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe — dwarfs other international human-rights problems like Burma and Darfur, Sudan.
Indeed, the current revolt openly challenges China's totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy's remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive by reconciling China's dual paths of market capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.