Try your best to stop this process.
At this stage, even I can't guess,
Its ultimate pace.
– Ajanta Sharma in Pravah
It took 30 years for the first uprising to erupt after Chinese soldiers forced the Dalai Lama into exile in 1959. But the 1989 rebellion was short-lived. It petered out when the Tibetans realised that there was nobody in this wide-open world willing to come to their rescue, as they braved the martial law imposed in Lhasa following the mysterious death of the 10th Panchen Lama.
The same year as the uprising, the Nobel Peace Prize conferred upon the Dalai Lama represented a crude effort by the West to clear its conscience. The award undoubtedly gave some visibility to the exiled leader, but it has not done much to advance the cause of Tibet's independence. The confrontations between the protesters and the Chinese authorities this March, however, have proved that a half-century of occupation has failed to kill the spirit of freedom among the indomitable highlanders. There may have been some organised efforts to publicise the plight of Tibetans in the year of the Olympic Games in Beijing, but protests in Lhasa were too widespread, and its repression was too brutal to conveniently attribute the public's spontaneous anger to the "designs of Dalai Lama supporters", as the Han colonisers suggest.