A riot broke out. Law enforcements put it down and try to hunt those who broke the law. Should it not been Tibet, it wouldn’t have gotten this much attention. 

In fact such riots occur rather often in China, almost all of them occurred because economy issues, not religious issues. Corrupted government official have caused riots because they abused their power; Real estate developers have caused riots because they illegally takes the farmer’s land (thus take away their living) and got away from it; Large number of stated owned factory worker layoff have also caused numerous riots simply because those laid off workers can no longer make a living.

Almost in all cases, the government tries to restore the social order first. While I have a rather different view about how many people are really suppressed in China, I know there are A LOT OF unhappy people in China. There are a lot of reasons for them to be unhappy, but the root of the problem is that they view the society as being unfair. Things like they know somebody who broke the law got rich; like their local government officials are so crooked but there isn’t much they can do about it; etc. And they always manifest on the economy front --- those who got the money won’t say a thing because they would be betting too much to lose. Those who got left out eventually reached the breaking point and decided to get even by force.

There is no single silver bullet to solve this problem. When the economy develops, some people will be left out. When the whole society going through such a trenching transformation like China does now, a lot of people will be left out. There are two primary reasons why they are left out. One is that they were not afforded any opportunities; second is that they lack the skills to survives through hash times. This is the case for many laid off state factory workers: for decades under Mao’s years they worked on so out-dated factories that they did not learn anything. When the factory finally has to shut down, they do not have any useful skills to secure them a new job. They felt betrayed and abandoned. They would criticize the government for shutting down the factory, but obviously the history is not rolling back. Many of them eventually riot.

Whenever it occurs, it is inevitable that it will be linked to democracy, human rights, etc. Because these people are not happy with the government and they wanted to get their “shares” like so many others had. So they start by criticizing and attacking the government or even going extreme, and many of them end up being harshly handled down by the government.

The general belief among Chinese leaders, and many ordinary Chinese, is such criticism/attack has no values because there is no real/quick solution for the underlying economy problem. In the case state owned factory shutting down because it no longer makes any economy sense to keep it running, there is no way for the government to turn it back running not only because it would be a bad economic decision, but also simple because it’s not financially feasiable. At many occasions, the only thing the government can do is to rob something off John and give it to Joe. Some times they do that, sometimes they don’t. It also depends on whether the local government has the skill to do it right. Some times John was OK but Joe was crying, so you rob off something off John to give it Joe and ends up both crying.

On the contrary, the Chinese government has been putting great effort in developing the economy, in the hope that better economy provides better employment opportunities thus make more people happy. It also can provide better revenue for the government so that the government can improvements a lot of fundamentals social infrastructures/programs. It has worked to certain degree but as in the case of Tibet, it some times back fires when wealth are not distributed as many people thought it should be distributed, in another word, the existence of great wealth imbalance.

What the Chinese government has been doing to Tibet in recently years was exactly intended to avoid such situations. During the 90s the east cost started to develop and the Chinese leader foreseen the country is going to run into big problems if only the east develops and the gaps gets bigger and bigger between the east and the west. People in the west still need to be feed and if they get poorer and poorer while seeing the east get richer and richer, they would get extremely unhappy and that would be very difficult to handle. So at the end of 90s the government started to systematically planning shifting resources into the west so that the west can develop. Thus they started to build railroad, highways, and other infrastructures into the west and also use various monetary/administrative tools to attract people to invest in the west. Tibet has been one that benefits most from such plans, with many Han Chinese moved their along with their businesses.

It is unfortunately to see such effort has been misperceived as trying wipe out the culture in Tibet. That is very much ironic because “culture” is probably one of the least concerns in Chinese leader’s mind (as long as it does not cause problems). Today’s Chinese leader are very pragmatic (read “money matters first”) and it would be one of the stupidest thing for them to suppress a culture unless it started to give them problem (which obviously is the case for many other incident, such as FaLunGong). But when that occurs, it’s often the culture itself being hijacked by other movements. The culture itself, as long as it’s not perceived as unhealthy by general public (For example, any explicit sex related stuff), they are generally tolerated without any interfering from the government.

In the case of Tibet, there is no doubt that there been long history and religious reasons for many Tibetans wanted to be independent. At the same time, there are also huge economy reasons for many Tibetans wanted it to be a part of China so that it can continue to reap the great benefits of the center government’s economy development plan. So there are deep conflicts there. More over, the fact that the government try brings in more Han’s business in (and they are richer) has a negative impact on many Tibetans because it widened the wealth gap.

So it all comes down to there is a problem and what’s the best way to solve it. And Chinese leader rarely acts on “ideology principles” (they embraced capitalism faster than everybody would have expected! --- there is one exception though: sovereignty). They try to find out the best and most affordable way to solve the problem. So far to put the violence down first has been effective --- until it happens in Tibet and the government got framed into all these political dictatorship stuff.
 
Obviously just putting the violence down can not be the only action. There are other things can and need to be done to avoid/improve the situations. Better legal system, better employement/education opportunites, better social security system and more transparent government are all important elements that the government has been working to improve. But just like a seed won’t become a tree overnight, there is still a long way to go.