Chinese New Year is a raucous time, with celebrants detonating firecrackers late into the night to scare off evil spirits. But in the remote Tibetan-dominated reaches of Sichuan province, in China’s far west, the crackles erupting on the afternoon of Jan. 23, the first day of the new Year of the Dragon, were not just a symbolic cacophony. They were deadly. Xinhua, China’s state news agency, acknowledged that one Tibetan had been killed in Kardze’s Dragko county (or Luhuo in Mandarin) stating "a crowd began attacking a police station with clubs and stones [and] one protester was killed in the following clash with the police, which also left five officers injured."
Overseas Tibetan groups say that hundreds of demonstrators were arrested on Monday afternoon but that thousands of Tibetans were flooding in from other counties in Kardze, including Tawu (or Daofu in Mandarin), where a monk and nun self-immolated last year.
There’s little indication that the Year of the Dragon will bring an end to the conflict in Tibetan areas. News of the self-immolations, protests and crackdowns are traveling fast through the snowbound, mountainous region, even as the Chinese government has tried to black out information by blocking roads, shutting off cell-phone networks and severing Internet connections.
ORIGINAL SOURCE
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