Police push away protesters as scores of Tibetans protested against China outside the Visa section of Chinese Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal, Monday March 31. (SAURABH DAS, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

For those that don’t quite get what is going on in Tibet, like me, Foreign Policy magazine has an excellent and succinct article about what exactly is going on over there.

FP talks with Tibet expert Robert Barnett, director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and author most recently of Lhasa: Streets with Memories.

We have to put aside these questions that fascinate some people, such as, “Is the Dalai Lama losing his power?” That’s the opposite of the issue here. The exile complaints are not about power. And we have to put aside suggestions that the protests in Tibet are because people are unhappy about economic loss. That really is reductive. And I think we have to get over any suggestion that the Chinese are ill-intentioned or trying to wipe out Tibet. It’s obviously horrible that people are being savagely beaten up and killed. But crucially, this is a historic change in the profile of Tibetan politics. We’re looking at something much larger than any immediate anxiety about Olympics, or whether somebody planned one of these things, or whether people are upset about economic disadvantage. Historians are going to tell us that we missed the big picture if we didn’t notice that this is the big story here. All the party cadres are going to be sent to the countryside areas to listen to the Tibetans’ complaints and find out what has gone so wrong with the policy machine in China.

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