TIBET:IN THE lull between violent clashes in Xiahe in Gansu province at the weekend, monks and pilgrims in Tibetan costume walked the streets using the most dangerous weapons in the world - the cameras on their mobile phones. Who needs a gun or even a big stick when you can do far more damage with a grainy picture of police brutality from your cheap phone handset?
Many of the young monks who went head-to-head against heavily armed Chinese riot police near the Labrang monastery weren't born the last time Tibetan Buddhist monks fought against Beijing rule back in the late 1980s.
The protesters in the last round of violence two decades ago didn't have the conduit of the internet and the mobile phone, the most powerful and widely available weapons of public dissent on the planet.
Significantly, Chinese internet nannies yesterday shut down the video-sharing site YouTube in China to prevent people watching foreign news footage of events in Lhasa.
When US president George Bush awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama in October, the monks in Labrang watched it on satellite television, through Voice of America's service. The ecstatic holy men took to the streets of Xiahe in celebration and the police of course cracked down, turning water cannons on the protesters and crushing the demonstrations. The monks had made their point.
The Great Firewall of China is a blunt but effective tool in controlling the growing number of dissenting voices.
But most internet-savvy young Chinese and Tibetans know how to get around it by using code words or avoiding key phrases that trigger a shutdown.
However, eyewitness accounts and low-resolution but telling photographs are making their way into the wider world via China's excellent mobile phone network. And the impact of these images is providing a real challenge for the authorities.
