Tiananmen Square, January 20, 2013.

Beijing woke to snow on Sunday morning. We had family in town, so we made a visit to Tiananmen Square, where I discovered that a new feature had been installed. In the most critical parts of China’s sanctum sanctorum, a bright red fire extinguisher has been positioned every ten or twenty meters, in case someone sets him or herself on fire.

By now, it is a safe bet that someone will—though probably not there—and that he or she will be the one-hundredth Tibetan to do so since a campaign of self-immolations began a year ago. Yesterday, China took another step closer to that milestone when a twenty-three-year-old Tibetan, named Kunchok Kyab, set himself ablaze in Bora township, near Labrang monastery, in Gansu province. The Voice of America reports that he is survived by a wife and ten-month-old child. The burnings are a protest against Chinese rule and for the return of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader.

The installation of fire extinguishers says much about the prognosis for meaningful progress on efforts to address Tibetans’ demands for greater autonomy. In the same spirit, the state media recently reported that monks are being organized into firefighting teams, and “[l]arge rooms outside temple prayer halls are used as fire-control offices.” Chinese police also recently detained seven people accused of “inciting” a Tibetan villager to set himself on fire. The government is offering rewards of up to fifty thousand yuan for information on the planning of future protests.

The one-hundredth burning man will be a bizarre moment and, I’m afraid, not the end of this—not even close.

For more on this subject, I recommend: * The Council on Foreign Relations has a podcast with Ellen Bork, director of Democracy and Human Rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative, on “the relationship between China and Tibet and the ongoing religious persecution in Tibet.” * After months of ignoring the self-immolations, the Chinese state media has changed tack and is now actively denouncing them as a “plot being hatched by the Dalai Lama group, which deliberately creates an atmosphere of terror.” A piece this week in the Communist Party’s Global Times sums up the view. * “Storm in the Grasslands: Self-immolations in Tibet and Chinese Policy,” a new report by the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet, offers a detailed look at the issue. * A rich trove of anthropological commentary on the subject of the Tibetan self-immolations from a range of angles and disciplines.