The high mountain plateau known as Tibet has been militarily occupied by China since 1951. The Chinese government regards Tibet as part of China, citing former Mongol rule of the area, and it exiled the Dalai Lama, Tibet's former ruler, in 1959. But many Tibetans argue that Tibet has always been an independent country. These competing claims for legitimate governance can at times escalate into a sort of culture war, playing out between the high mountains.

While China has had a presence in the region for the past 60 years, its codification of restrictions against traditional Tibetan practices are relatively new. Since a wave of demonstrations embarrassed the Chinese leadership around the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, when hundreds of Tibetans protested Chinese rule, prefecture-level regulations have been rolled out in breath-taking detail. While many of these regulations appear harmless or even positive, in aggregate they make for something darker. New "social security measures," for example, ostensibly provide small cash stipends to monks as an old age benefit. But the pay-outs are contingent on meeting a state-regulated standard of patriotism. As part of this new "good behavior" allowance, the Chinese government has informed Tibet's monks they will have no need to perform the religious services they used to be paid for. The price of being "supported" by the state, in this instance, is the effective prohibition of their religion.

For those with grievances against the state, China has a tradition of finding justice in the streets. In imperial times, people would travel to centers of power and petition officials directly, sometimes by standing in the roads, banging drums and kneeling before mandarins' carriages to call attention to their problem in person. Nowadays, petitioning is still practiced, in a way. Many governmental offices still have "Letters and Visits" divisions, where citizens can report their complaints, which are supposed to be passed on to the appropriate governmental division. But since the cases often get handed back to the local governments that created the trouble in the first place, it's perhaps not surprising that a recent survey reported only 2 percent of visitors had their issue resolved. Within this cultural context, Tibet's self-immolations could be considered an extension -- albeit an extreme one -- of a practice dating back hundreds of years.

Still, some outsiders watching Tibet say that the level of unrest there now is new, and disturbing. Steven Marshall, a Senior Advisor for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, spent more than two decades researching human rights violations in Tibet. Marshall says that other new laws -- which prohibit monks from traveling anywhere without explicit permission from the governments at both ends, and allow arrests for things as small as "reactionary" cell phone ring-tones -- are likely to spark more protests. He believes this year's immolations could be just the beginning of a larger, accumulating outrage.