Tanks rumbling towards Tibet

Beijing has sent by road and by rail armed divisions to quell revolt in Tibet and in Gansu. Shades of 1989 in Tienamen! As 18Brumaire wrote, the Chinese leopard hasn't changed its spots. China uses forces to oppress and suppress opposition. Power after all comes from the end of a gun, dixit Mao. Deng Xiao Peng bought off the Chinese urban masses by taking the capitalist road to rapid economic development even though it left hundreds of millions in the countryside poor and out of work. The current Chinese leaders oversaw the quashing of Tibetans will to better treatment and equality and equity twenty years ago. For them, it was the crushing of annoying ants who don't count for much in Beijing's scheme of things. They are and shall ever remain vassals and serfs and less than human in China's eyes. Well these annoying red ants have upset China's bright face to the world and its applecart of showing up its own Werkschaftwunder at the 2008 summer Olympic games in Beijing. Although many countries won't boycott the games like they did to the Soviet Union when it held the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow in protest of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, they even lack the courage to condemn Beijing's brutal response to the expression of Tibet will to autonomy. The answer is easy to find since China is the workshop of the west...there west companies and banks have factories and large investments which bring them big bucks in profits and handsome returns and very black China ink at the bottom of financial spreadsheets. So for them too, Tibetans lack interest let alone concern.
The Chinese Communist leaders keep shouting splittist or splittism...but the wrenching and stretching of China's cohesion rest solely on their shoulders for 49 years of brutual colonial rule of Tibet and of the Tibetan minorities in Gansu and other provinces into which they enfolded parts of Tibet they cut off and put into other provinces. China has not learnt the lessons it shouts to other countries, and which to take a leaf out of Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh...for Tibetans there is nothing more precious than independence and freedom.