“New violence has broken out in a volatile Tibetan region of western China, leaving eight people dead, an overseas Tibet activist group said Friday. China’s official Xinhua News Agency said a government official was seriously injured.

The London-based Free Tibet Campaign said police opened fire on hundreds of Buddhist monks and lay people who had marched on local government offices to demand the release of two monks detained for possessing photographs of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader.”

New Violence in Tibet

I don’t know if there is a feed back loop going on in China’s subordinated frontier regions but the Uighurs in Xinjian, to the north of Tibet, have had it up to their nostrils with the Han heavy handedness.

On March 23 demonstrators in a market in the southern Xinjiang city of Hotan unfurled banners and handed out fliers urging their fellow Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) to join an independence movement, the government there says. Police moved quickly to silence what authorities described in a statement issued Tuesday as “a small group” of Uighurs trying to “trick the masses into an uprising.”

Tension Remains High

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