The People’s Republic of China, less than six months before the Beijing Olympics, is still not a free society, not even for the Western press. McClatchy Beijing Bureau Chief Tim Johnson writes on his blog China Rises of having a non-fiction book confiscated from his luggage in the Lhasa airport by Chinese security:

One security agent signaled another one over, who knew some English, to peruse the books. They asked me to take off the plastic wrap around two of them. He opened each one and flipped through the pages. I thought maybe he believed I had sliced out a secret compartment in the middle of the books, which obviously I hadn’t done.

He took particular interest in one book: Buddha’s Warriors, by Mikel Dunham, a 2004 account of how the CIA helped turn peaceful monks into armed warriors to fight the Chinese invasion of Tibet. I haven’t read the book but best as I could tell it was a historical review of a brief and long-forgotten U.S. policy during the early Cold War era.

Here’s the problem: The book has photos, including of cadres during the Cultural Revolution belittling class enemies in mass rallies in Tibet. The agent studied the photos, and quickly looked at me. “This is false history,” he said.

Astonished that he could make such a quick determination, I said that the book was about a failed U.S. policy more than four decades old. He was not moved. He suggested that I could buy “true” histories of Tibet at the main market in Lhasa. Reminded that I wasn’t staying in Lhasa, he just shook his head and said the book was confiscated.

I’m sure it was for my own good.

Johnson was merely passing through the Lhasa airport on his way back to Beijing, but his luggage was subject to search and he had a brand new text on modern Tibetan history confiscated. It contained information – identified by border agents through photos, but knowing Buddha’s Warriors there’s certainly much more that might be objectionable to these agents – that the Chinese government does not allow inside Tibet and China. So one of the most respected and well-known Western journalists working inside China had a book confiscated.

Can it get more plain than this? China is not a free country. Tibet is an occupied country. Histories that differ with the revisionism approved by the Chinese Communist Party are forbidden, even when carried and owned by non-citizen journalists.  The pending Olympic Games have brought no relaxation of censorship, no increase in media access, no loosening of the Great Wire Wall. And yet there continues to be zero consequence for China’s continued illiberal actions in the face of their promises to the International Olympic Committee.

What a disgrace.

Hat tip to Mikel Dunham for alerting me to this incident.