Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Rising

Self-immolations by Tibetan monks have spiked with China's leadership change. Beijing continues to ignore their message.

On February 24, Phagmo Dundrup, a Tibetan farmer in his early twenties, committed the ultimate act of protest, setting himself on fire in the monks' debating area of Chachung monastery in Qinghai province, in eastern Tibet's Amdo region. A day later, Tseung Kyab, another Tibetan in his twenties, did the same outside a monastery in Gansu province. Both died. A third monk self-immolated in Sichuan the same day.

These were the most recent in a mounting list. According to Kate Saunders, Communications Director of the International Campaign for Tibet, since February 2009 some 107 Tibetans have set themselves alight in China — including a 19-year-old student, a widowed mother of four, and the grandfather of an important reincarnate lama. And the number is rising.

"There was an escalation in self-immolations in Tibet during and after the Chinese Communist Party Congress — a once-in-a-decade leadership transition — with 28 Tibetans setting fire to themselves last November when the Congress was held," Saunders told The Diplomat.

"This constitutes one of the biggest waves of self-immolation as political protest globally in the past 60 years."

The act is not new. This ultimate gesture of self-sacrifice was made universally iconic by the 1963 self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, whose image — sitting composed in a meditative pose, engulfed in flames — has become a global symbol of protest against injustice. But Tibet is, by and large, the present-day epicenter, where for Tibetans the act takes on a deep cultural and religious significance that leads inevitably back to their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.