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Checkpoints dot the roads, though the area is 300 miles (500 kilometers) to the northeast of the recent troubles. The temple itself does not belong to one of Tibetan Buddhism's main schools, but is Bon, a pre-Buddhist sect, and the area has not had a history of large-scale demonstrations in recent decades. Security weeds out foreign journalists, who were followed on a recent visit by uniformed and plainclothes security and ordered not to report in the area. But it's also directed at Tibetans. Monks in particular are being closely scrutinized and need to produce identification and sometimes letters of explanation to travel outside the immediate environs of their monasteries, according to people in Sichuan and overseas Tibet groups. Kanyag Tsering decided to flee Kirti, Aba's most prominent monastery, in 1998, when the first denunciation campaigns hit. This year, he said, several hundred political instructors and other officials moved into Kirti "to monitor everything that is going on" during an important festival. The number of monks, he said, has fallen to around 2,000, from more than 2,500. Heavier security and tighter religious controls have seemed to fuel protests, rather than quell them. Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, said that security spending in Tibetan areas of Sichuan began soaring above that in non-Tibetan areas in 2006 and reached four times the average by 2009. Yet in 2008, the largest uprising against Chinese rule in 50 years occurred. Swarms of security came to the region and never left. "Roughly speaking, China now seems to be facing increasingly cohesive discontent across an area twice the size of that it faced 10 or 15 years ago," said Barnett.
Despite attempts by authorities to stifle information, including shutting some communities' phone and Internet service, the immolators have become heroes. Accounts and snippets of their acts, usually captured by mobile phones, have circulated by Internet, instant messaging, homemade DVDs, foreign shortwave radio broadcasts and even posters. Kanyag Tsering and other exiled activists said sometimes calls from public phones manage to get information of an immolation or a protest out quickly. More often, however, word seeps out days later, as people smuggle mobile phone images out of cordoned-off areas. The government has signaled no intention of changing tacks. A senior official overseeing policy on Tibet, Vice Minister Zhu Weiqun of the United Front Department, called this month for full-throttle assimilation of minorities through migration, economic development and the spread of Mandarin. "Our policy orientation should conform to this trend and deepen this trend so that it is irreversible," Zhu wrote in the Study Times, the newspaper of the Communist Party's top training academy.
[Associated
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