Tibet leader in spotlight after anti-China protests

By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - His credentials as a hardliner in China's ruling Communist Party are unblemished, but more than two years after he took power in Tibet, analysts are asking whether Zhang Qingli was the wrong man for the job.

Tibet's capital Lhasa burst into violence last week, a show of unrest that capped days of peaceful protest led by the mountainous region's Buddhist clergy that were all the more rare in light of Zhang's assertion of political control.

"He immediately went into attack mode," Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University, said of Zhang's tenure.

"The campaign against the Dalai Lama was very aggressively stepped up and he had a zero tolerance policy for even very small incidents," he said.

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has lived in India since 1959, where he fled following a failed uprising against Chinese rule. Despite his exile status, he is still widely revered within Tibet.

Zhang, 57, was brought in from Xinjiang, another far-western, restive region, where he headed the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary organisation aimed at asserting Beijing's hold over the ethnic Uighur population, some of which has agitated for greater autonomy.

In Tibet, he presided over a "patriotic education" campaign that extended from the monasteries to the general population, in which analysts say even government employees were forced to denounce the Dalai Lama in lengthy, hand-written essays.

China's leadership regularly calls the Dalai Lama a traitor bent on splitting on the nation, but even in that context Zhang was seen as inflammatory.