What About Tibet?
Reliable information is a bit hard to come by, but it seems as if the policy of increased Han Chinese colonisation in Tibet has finally run up against a violent popular backlash. I haven’t anything very insightful to say about this, but it is one of the major foreign affairs stories this week and merits some mention here.
Update: The Economist‘s correspondent reports that repression and violence against a number of monks helped spark the rioting.
Does Tibet constitute a viable state? Would a free Tibet set of an avalanche of destabilizing state creation? I hope you address these questions.
In fact, I doubt Tibet would be a viable state, unless it remained tied in to China’s markets and continued receive generous investment from China. To my knowledge, Tibet has no large reserves of natural resources to fall back on if it became independent, and its infrastructure remains fairly poor. If Tibet somehow managed to break free of China, which seems highly unlikely, it would set a far *more* powerful precedent for separatists around the world than anything that has happened in recent years elsewhere. Just imagine–a major nuclear power losing a huge swathe of its territory to one of the poorest peoples in the world. Not only will this never happen under this or any other Chinese government, but any serious attempt to achieve independence by force would be met with a devastating response.