James Miles of The Economist was, coincidentally, on an officially sanctioned visit to Lhasa when the riots broke out there last week. He spoke with CNN, giving the first good account that I’ve seen of the violence. Several points stand out for me, including the extent of the destruction, the lack of an immediate crackdown by the authorities in response, the surprise on the part of the Han Chinese targets of the violence, and the curent martial law effectively — although not explictly — in place now.

(His excellent article, “Trashing the Beijing Road” is available now at the Economist website, but no promises how long that link will work without a subscription.)

Miles didn’t think that there was extensive bloodshed, not on the scale of the Tienanmen massacre, which he also covered, but he described how complete the rioting and looting was, focused exclusively against Han Chinese:

[The rioters] marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves. Those businesses were left intact. Almost every single other across a wide swathe of the city, not only in the old Tibetan quarter, but also beyond it in areas dominated by the ethnic Han Chinese. Almost every other business was either burned, looted, destroyed, smashed into, the property therein hauled out into the streets, piled up, burned.

He believes that the official response was moderated by the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. Not wanting to create a major incident months ahead of China’s coming-out party, officials “effectively sacrificed the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger.”:

It seemed as if they were paralyzed by indecision over how to handle this. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, this main central thoroughfare of Lhasa, into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. But I didn’t see any attempt in those early hours by the authorities to intervene. And I suspect again the Olympics were a factor there. That they were very worried that if they did move in decisively at that early stage of the unrest that bloodshed would ensue in their efforts to control it. And what they did instead was let the rioting run its course and it didn’t really finish as far as I saw until the middle of the day on the following day on the Saturday, March the 15th.

Presumably because he speaks Chinese and not Tibetan, his comments in the CNN interview focused largely on the effects of the rioting on ethnic Chinese, not on the underlying causes of the riots or the Tibetan response to them. (His article in the newspaper is much more balanced.) He notes that some of the Han Chinese he spoke with, even long-time residents, were astonished at the course of events, apparently — astonishingly — never having suspected that there was such anger and hostility towards them. Now, however, they are very concerned:

Now numerous Hans that I spoke to say that they are so afraid they may leave the city, which may have very damaging consequences for Lhasa’s economy, Tibet’s economy. Of course one would expect that ethnic Chinese would think twice now about coming into Lhasa for tourism, and that’s been a huge part of their economic growth recently. And leaving Lhasa, I was sitting on a plane next to some Chinese businessmen, they say that they would normally come in and out of Lhasa by train. But their fear now is that Tibetans will blow up the railway line. That it is now actually safer to fly out of Tibet than to go by railway. We have no evidence of terrorist activity by Tibetans, no accusation of that nature so far. But that is a fear that’s haunting some ethnic Han Chinese now.

Miles believes that the official response is to impose martial law but without actually announcing it. The troops in control of the city are not supposed to be PLA, and their insignias and other markings have been removed. The official position is that police and PSB units are in Lhasa, not the army and there has been no official declaration of martial law. But that is in effect, he said, what has occured. The Chinese government wants desperately for things to return to a semblance of normality ahead of the Olympics and they plan to proceed with the original Olympic torch route, which passes through Tibet.

But what happens after the Olympics, after the Chinese feel that the attention of the world has wandered elsewhere? What kind of delayed reaction can the people of Lhasa, both Han and Tibetan, expect?