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Thunder from Tibet - The New York Review of Books
Review of Pico Iyer's book under the current circumstances
Tags: china, tibet on 2008-05-08 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.nybooks.com
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events occur that change the ways it can be read.
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March 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the failed uprising
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three hundred or more monks from Drepung Monastery began an orderly march toward the center of Lhasa,
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made specific demands such as the release of five monks detained the previous October for celebrating the award in Washington of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama
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Some fifty of the monks were arrested straightaway and their colleagues staged a sit-down in the street
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In 1990 the police were ordered to switch from what Jiang Zemin, then Chinese Party secretary, called "passive" to "active" policing, the former meaning (crudely) that you beat or shoot protesters once they start
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average prison sentence was 6.5 years for each participant, and upward of three thousand were detained during this period for peaceful protests or possession of forbidden documents and videos.
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include campaigns forcing Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama
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prohibition on the construction of new monasteries and on any increase in the number of monk
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ban on pictures or worship of him
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ban on students and government employees having religious possessions or carrying out religious practices
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forced relocation of 250,000 farmers to roadside houses
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opening in 2006 of the Chinese railway line connecting Tibet to neighboring Qinghai
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plan for the settlement of 100,000 Tibetan nomads.
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on March 10 were clearly under orders to use restraint.
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Early that evening things got tougher in Barkor Square, in the center of Lhasa, when fifteen monks carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag and called for independence: all were dragged away and were later charged with "gathering to create a disturbance by shouting reactionary slogans" and "premeditatedly carrying homemade reactionary flags" (they are currently in detention awaiting trial)
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ive hundred monks marched from Sera Monastery the following day on behalf of those fifteen arrested monks, the PAP used tear gas briefly, but did not open fire and the monks succeeded in holding a seven-hour sit-down in the street.
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midday on Friday, March 14
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group of monks at Ramoche,
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Ramoche is in the heart of Lhasa, and opens onto a busy market street
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began to attack the police and a small squad of PAP sent in to support
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Tibetans turned from attacking police to attacking the next available symbol of Chinese governance, the Chinese migrant population.
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About a thousand Chinese-owned shops were set on fire by rioters who were seen by foreign tourists igniting cooking gas cylinders or dousing shops in gasoline
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events of March 14 challenged any assumption that Tibetan Buddhists are necessarily nonviolent or that their political actions are limited to what Deepak Chopra has called "inert pacifism."
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the 3/14 incident
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four days following the March 14 riot in Lhasa, Tibetans staged sixty-three protests throughout the Tibetan areas within China, and the number has since risen to ninety-six,
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, while 85 percent of Tibetans live in the countryside, where their average annual income, despite a 14.5 percent increase, reached only 2,788 yuan ($398) last year
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overlooks the fact that Tibet was never a Chinese province and was never under direct Chinese rule apart from a few months in 1910–1911, and that Tibet declared independence in 1913.
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priest–patron" relationship
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is partly about the difficulties of intellectual engagement with an extremely mild-mannered subject
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offers a modernist view of Buddhism as a form of rational analysis that aims to "explore the world closely, so as to make out its laws, and then to see what can and cannot be done within those laws.
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show the Dalai Lama as a man who is both committed to his belief in human tolerance and unpredictable possibilities,
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pay attention to the cleavages t
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Tibetan youths who "will use Tibet whenever it suits them"
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suggests that Tibetans have "paid a high price at times for being associated with movie stars
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often as much a victim as a maker of the system
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can a leader who aims to serve the spiritual yearnings of a world community deal with the specific needs of his nation
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difficulty that most of us face in addressing such questions is that a pathway through them requires detailed knowledge of the Dalai Lama's constituency, its language, religion, and history.
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slips stem from a worthy concern for the accessible, but they also hint at an absence in the story.
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nternational pressure on China, are seen by China as provocations and thus are used as an excuse not to meet with him.
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he events of the past two months have changed the political terrain significantly
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Estimates of the number of Tibetans detained range from 2,200 to 5,700, and Tibetans of all ages are being required to write formal denunciations of the Dalai Lama
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protests means that Tibetans
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have now become important elements of regional strategy and a political priority for Western leaders
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PREVIEW: Carrying a Torch for China
Tags: china, tibet on 2008-04-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: China
more fromwww.weeklystandard.com
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he Chinese government, in its insecure and bullying fashion, keeps pushing its luck with acts like the army-saturated torch welcoming ceremony
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endless torch relay with its unprecedented scale of 85,000 miles and 20,000 torchbearers
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adding their goon squad of "flame attendants"
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Beijing has made it abundantly clear that this is not about the Olympic spirit, but about power, Chinese power.
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we should do it eyes open, aware not only of Chinese culpability for the current mess, but also of our own.
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headline "Who's Hu?
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not surprising that the current Tibet crackdown appears cleaner than the first: well rehearsed,
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Europe has already begun to pick sides
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how comprehensive a boycott we are looking at probably lies in the United States
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Tibetan monks and activists are essentially terrorists,
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first Chinese argument
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second defense,
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who desperately need Chinese modernization for their own good.
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hird Chinese argument is rarely stated openly.
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You are hypocrites. You knew the human rights situation in China when we made our bid. Your journalists only give human rights sporadic, selective coverage anyway. So why are you complaining at this late date? And here, as the context of the original bid and the tragic history of Falun Gong fully demonstrate, the Chinese are dead right.
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Beijing's was always a blackmail bid
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It was whispered that the Beijing Olympics would buy peace in the Taiwan Strait for eight years, ensure continued economic liberalization, mollify runaway Chinese nationalism (by bolstering Chinese self-esteem), permit journalists to operate in a slightly more plausible working environment, and inhibit the Chinese leadership from overtly slaughtering its citizens.
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ensure social stability was to neutralize the "five poisons"--Tibetan separatists, democracy activists, Taiwan independence supporters, Xinjiang freedom fighters, and Falun Gong practitioners.
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The blackmail bid took place in clear sight of the mindbending persecution of Falun Gong,
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documentation that thousands had been murdered and over 100,000 had been thrown into labor camps, and finally in 2006 when credible reports of systematic organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners
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describe physical exams aimed at determining the health of their internal organs, along with close examination of corneas.
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took them by surprise
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First,
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Falun Gong has three strikes against it.
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Second,
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depend on the party's minimal cooperation for access and accreditation.
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news stories had to be suppressed directly
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Stories about persecution and torture could bring retaliation-
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third
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Beijing-based journalists have gone slightly native
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looked like an enemy of the New China that journalists actually like:
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Oversight in Washington of this sort of activity lagged because politicians absorbed the distorted perception pumped out of China by many journalists and succumbed to the lobbying pressures of businessmen eager to cut deals with Chinese officials.
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Cisco
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The record suggests an informal pact with the Chinese government to trade away mention of Falun Gong in exchange for minor concessions
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We are assisting in the construction of a simulacrum of an independent, modern society, while the reality is actually quite fascist in nature.
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Let's admit that we screwed up,
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A Passage to Tibet - New York Times
Tibet is viewed by Chinese as serfs whose lives have only improved.
Tags: tibet on 2008-04-08 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
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crash course in China’s various ethnic and religious minority groups and their resentments.
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Tibet
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Uighur Muslims
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Falun Gong
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Mongols and Kazakhs
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China can no longer pretend to be the unobtrusive power par excellence, in contrast to American intrusiveness.
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typifies the national consensus that China has delivered Tibetans from feudalism, ushering them toward modernity with infrastructure and investment. Tibet, in this view, should be grateful, and the region’s obstinate “splittists” crushed.
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The people of Tibet were serfs and have made huge progress.
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he has called for autonomy but not independence; and that he is a revered global figure.
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legitimate Tibetan fears of cultural extinction, and that a stop-go approach to allowing foreign journalists into Tibet is ham-fisted.
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how do you create the space for different peoples to express themselves?”
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China cannot afford even one mutiny
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