Security weeds out foreign journalists, who were followed on a recent visit by uniformed and plainclothes security and ordered not to report in the area. But it's also directed at Tibetans.

Monks in particular are being closely scrutinized and need to produce identification and sometimes letters of explanation to travel outside the immediate environs of their monasteries, according to people in Sichuan and overseas Tibet groups.

Kanyag Tsering decided to flee Kirti, Aba's most prominent monastery, in 1998, when the first denunciation campaigns hit. This year, he said, several hundred political instructors and other officials moved into Kirti "to monitor everything that is going on" during an important festival. The number of monks, he said, has fallen to around 2,000, from more than 2,500.

Heavier security and tighter religious controls have seemed to fuel protests, rather than quell them. Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, said that security spending in Tibetan areas of Sichuan began soaring above that in non-Tibetan areas in 2006 and reached four times the average by 2009. Yet in 2008, the largest uprising against Chinese rule in 50 years occurred. Swarms of security came to the region and never left.

"Roughly speaking, China now seems to be facing increasingly cohesive discontent across an area twice the size of that it faced 10 or 15 years ago," said Barnett.





Protests, Self-Immolation Signs Of A Desperate Tibet : NPR
www.npr.org
The authorities in China are said to have tightened security in Tibet and surrounding provinces after a series of demonstrations by Tibetans demanding more religious and political freedom. Several self-immolation protests by Tibetan monks and nuns has lead to violent confrontations with security for...

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