Xi Jinping in Tibet, Sisci: “Visit to reaffirm belonging”

“The meaning is to reaffirm Tibet’s belonging to China”. Francesco Sisci, sinologist, professor of geopolitics at Luiss, thus reads Xi Jinping’s visit to the ‘roof of the world’, in what is officially an “autonomous region” of China, 70 years after what was a ” peaceful liberation “. Xi had already been to Tibet in July ten years ago as vice president and in 1998 as party head in Fujian province, but what the official media of the Asian giant reported today is the first visit as a leader. Xi, president since 2013, arrived in the region on Wednesday. The visit has been kept secret until today because the Tibetan one is a “sensitive issue” and – Sisci tells Adnkronos – because the Chinese usually consider “security issues” and act accordingly to “avoid various forms of organized protests. in advance “in an area subject to” a policy that the Chinese define as’ control ‘and the Tibetans as’ forced assimilation’. “‘Much less problematic than Xinjiang’Xi in Lhasa. The Dalai Lama in exile in India since 1959. “The Tibetan issue has historically been more delicate than that of Xinjiang”, comments Sisci, referring to the region inhabited by Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group of Islamic faith, the region in which the Chinese government is accused to have carried out one of the most serious human rights violations of these times. “In recent decades, Tibet has been much less problematic than Xinjiang”, continues the sinologist, without forgetting the “acts of self-immolation that have taken place in Tibet in the last ten years, the protests”. “But – he says – there hasn’t been a wave of terrorism like the one that hit Xinjiang”. Although Tibet has “a much more delicate border question (with India).” ‘Internal message, for the president a’ victory lap”Xi – president since 2013, but also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and head of the Central Military Commission – was in the Nyingchi area, not far from Arunachal Pradesh. And China and India have a long-standing dispute over the border, marked in the past by clashes between the troops of the two Asian giants, eternal rivals. But the visit to Tibet, according to Sisci, remains “a very internal message”, to say “we have liberated Tibet, today it is pacified, it does not give us problems and therefore this policy has worked”. It is, he concludes, “what the Americans would call a ‘victory lap'”, a ‘lap of honor’.