Where the party has no control

 

With the eruption of violence in Tibet that still rages, and the crackdown by Chinese police on people demonstrating for freedom, I keep asking the question I’ve wondered about for the past couple of years: How did China ever get the Olympics?

In the midst of all the other mainstream media reporting this week on the current outrages in China, Tibet and surrounding region, there’s this commentary by Bret Stephens in the WSJ online that probes the roots, suggests they may be breaking the surface and hopes they’re growing into a hopeful future for people who crave freedom.

The violent protests in Tibet that began last week and have since spread across (and beyond) China are frequently depicted as a secessionist threat to Beijing. But the regime’s deeper problem in the current crisis is neither ethnic nor territorial. It’s religious.

The persecutions and violations of human rights are fundamentally coming back at the regime on a scale they, finally, cannot control.

The repression of Tibetan Buddhists and the Falun Gong has been severe, mainly because both dared to challenge the Party directly…Yet precisely because the party’s captains and engineers tend to assess threats and opportunities in purely utilitarian terms, they tend to miss the real threat that a religious revival poses to their power.

As French essayist Guy Sorman notes in his brilliant book “Empire of Lies,” religion operates “in the realm of beliefs and conscience, where the party has no control.” Mr. Sorman, who spent the year of the rooster (2005) traveling the length and breadth of China, recalls that one religious uprising, the 19th-century Taiping rebellion, destabilized the Manchu Dynasty, which in turn was succeeded by the Republic of Sun Yat-Sen, a Christian.

Might the same happen again in China? Nobody can say. But on the streets of Lhasa, China has again had a vivid demonstration of the power of conscience to move people to action against a soulless, and brittle, state.

More power to them.