In the past two years, well over a hundred Tibetans have set fire to themselves in protest against Chinese rule. Illustration by Martin Ansin

On January 12th, the day that Tsering Tashi set himself on fire, he didn’t seem particularly troubled. He ate an early breakfast with his wife and his parents in the house they shared in a village near Amchok, a historically Tibetan township in China’s Gansu Province. Then he took the family herd—most of the animals were dzomos, female yak-cow hybrids prized for their milk yield—to frozen grasslands nearby. He was twenty-two years old and an accomplished horseman, and his family was well respected locally. Tashi watched the animals graze for a few hours, then went home around noon, leaving the herd in the care of friends. It was a frigid, overcast day. Tashi told his mother that he wanted to wear a traditional Tibetan cloak, or chuba. “You should wear a nice thick one,” she said. She asked if Tashi would like to join her for lunch, but he said that he needed to get back to work.

Tashi stopped to see his friends and asked if they would look after his animals a little longer. “I have to go into town,” he said. “There’s something I need to do there.” He seemed to be carrying something heavy in the folds of his chuba, but they didn’t ask what it might be.

When Tashi got to the main square of Amchok, he took a container from his cloak, doused his clothes in gasoline, and set himself alight. He had wrapped wire around his limbs, apparently to insure that the fuel-soaked clothing would stay in place. As flames engulfed his body, he fell to the ground. Then he got up and ran, darting away from some Chinese police he saw on the road. Finally, he collapsed again, the flames sweeping this way and that in the wind. As his clothes turned to ash, Tashi managed to raise his arms and bring his hands together in a final gesture of Buddhist prayer. “Gyawa Tenzin Gyatso,” he called out. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” A thirteen-second video, apparently shot by a passerby with a phone, shows Tashi’s flaming body at the moment he raises his arms. In the background, a Tibetan woman hurries a shocked child past the blazing man.

In the past two years, well over a hundred Tibetans have immolated themselves in protest against Chinese rule. The demonstrations have spread across the Tibetan plateau, both in Chinese provinces with significant Tibetan populations—Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu—and in the Tibet Autonomous Region. In 2011, a dozen Tibetans set themselves ablaze—most of them monks or former monks of Kirti Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Sichuan. Last year, more than eighty Tibetans—monks and nuns, farmers, nomads, students, restaurant workers, and at least one writer—burned to death. The oldest was in his early sixties; the youngest was just fifteen.

Chinese security forces in Tibet quickly seal off areas where immolations occur, to block independent news coverage. Documentaries on the state-run network CCTV portray immolators as delinquents and dupes of the “Dalai Lama clique” and other outside powers, and fire extinguishers have been installed in Tiananmen Square, in case any Tibetans try to set themselves ablaze there. Financial benefits are withheld from the relatives of self-immolators, and there are large rewards for information about people who incite or abet them, an activity that can lead to a charge of “intentional homicide.” Early this year, a monk received a suspended death sentence (which in practice generally means life imprisonment) after being convicted of instigating eight immolations. A foreign-ministry spokesperson told reporters, “We hope that the international community can clearly see, via this judgment, the sinister, malicious methods used by the Dalai Lama clique.” According to the court, the man was working at the behest of monks from Kirti Monastery living in exile in India, an accusation that the monks deny.

Many of the immolations have been captured on camera, and footage and photographs circulate among Tibetan activists. On one level, the protests are a form of political theatre, designed to attract sympathetic attention to the cause of a free Tibet, but their more immediate aim is harder to pin down. There is little likelihood that Chinese policies will change significantly, or that other countries are prepared to expend much diplomatic energy on the matter. Yet, according to Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, the more oblique aspect of the protests is recognizably Tibetan—the self-expression of a people who have long been deprived of the fundamental freedom to organize and express themselves politically. He told me, “It’s a hidden politics—a politics without words, a politics of symbols, a politics of gestures.”

The tensions between China and Tibet go back more than a millennium. In the eighth century, Tibet was a sizable empire, extending into Central Asia; under the Mongols, in the thirteenth century, it was almost completely overpowered. For long periods, Tibet and China were politically linked while remaining culturally and ethnically distinct: Chinese emperors sent official representatives to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, where they served as symbols of Chinese authority. Tibet was most assertive when China was weakest. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty, in 1912, the thirteenth Dalai Lama declared Tibet independent, but in 1950, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the Communists invaded a poorly defended border region and negotiated an agreement that brought Tibet all but entirely under Beijing’s control. Many Tibetans resisted the creeping military takeover, and in 1959, during a failed uprising, the Dalai Lama fled to India.

In the People’s Republic, Tibetans became one of fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities. James Leibold, an Australian Sinologist who specializes in China’s ethnic politics, explains that the Communists, faced with the country’s demographic diversity, created a large number of autonomous areas. In theory, minorities had the right to preserve or reform their language and customs, and their regions were given preferences in education and in development funding. But autonomy was severely compromised, in part because of the dominance of the Han Chinese, who make up more than ninety per cent of the over-all population. Leibold believes that a consensus is emerging among China’s political élite that the model of autonomous regions should be jettisoned in favor of assimilation. The pro-assimilation camp points to the breakup of the Soviet Union as a sign that autonomy undermines national unity. “They say, the problem may be bad now, but it will only get worse if you don’t reduce the identification of Tibetans with their own nationality,” Leibold said.

To promote integration, Beijing has invested heavily in infrastructure, building roads and railways across the Tibetan plateau. This has led to better standards of living, particularly for a Tibetan élite that has adopted the language and entrepreneurial outlook of the Chinese. But Tibetans maintain that locals often lack the education and the capital to participate in the boom and that the main beneficiaries have been non-Tibetan migrants, mostly Han Chinese. Furthermore, the imposition of Mandarin Chinese in schools and the settlement of nomads have diluted the Tibetan language and culture. A 2009 report by independent Chinese researchers, studying the causes of a mass Tibetan protest a year earlier, found that “the current rapid process of modernization has not given the ordinary Tibetan people any greater developmental benefits; indeed, they are becoming increasingly marginalized.” The report mentions that many employers consider Tibetans lazy and lacking in business sense. It goes on to say that “non-Tibetans control all major aspects of the local economy,” and that “Tibetans have no way of competing with non-Tibetans in the modernization process.”