Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who had cancelled a scheduled visit to Nepal in December for unexplained reasons, stopped over in Kathmandu for a little more than four hours late last week on his way from Beijing to Saudi Arabia for an official visit.
This is the first time a Chinese Premier has visited Nepal since 2001, when the then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji went over. There have been a number of high-level visits of political and military figures from Nepal to China since the Nepalese Maoists came overground, suspended their insurgency and joined the power structure in Nepal, but there were few reciprocal visits from the Chinese side to Nepal.
The Chinese have stepped up assistance to the Nepalese since the end of the monarchy in 2008; in 2009, they even established a “comprehensive and cooperative partnership” with Nepal.
China has strong security concerns in Nepal due to the presence of about 20,000 Tibetan refugees in Nepalese territory and their support to the Dalai Lama and the radical Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC).
These concerns have been magnified by fresh indicators of unrest in the Tibetan community of China, particularly in western Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai regions. There have been 16 self-immolation attempts since the beginning of last year by pro-Dalai Lama monks and others. Twelve of them were reported last year and four in the first 15 days of this year. Fourteen of these attempts were in western Sichuan and one each in Tibet and Qinghai.
The large-scale round-up and detention in a special military camp of suspected pro-Dalai Lama monks of the Kirti monastery in Sichuan last year aggravated the situation, leading to frequent public demonstrations in support of those attempting self-immolation. The public demonstrations remained largely non-violent last year, but since the beginning of this year there have been two violent attacks on police stations by enraged Tibetans.
In the latest such attack reported on 14 January, a crowd of about 1,000 Tibetans, who were demanding the body of a Tibetan who had committed self-immolation earlier in the day, attacked a police station where they suspected the body was kept. The police reportedly opened fire to disperse the protesters killing two of them, one of them a woman.
