Category: Tibet & China

The Tibet Question

Rebecca Novick at the Huffington Post has an excellent write-up of a report by four Chinese academics on the Tibet question. The report, translated by the International Campaign for Tibet, goes into great detail looking at the causes of unrest in Tibet as they exist separate from Chinese government and state-run media propaganda. The spring 2008 protests were the impetus for the report, but the team of researchers look at larger underlying social and economic conditions that have lead to unrest in Tibet.

The analysis of how Tibetans were being treated by the Chinese government during the spring of 2008 seems sensible and the reports drive to look past propaganda about the protests being caused by the Dalai Lama to understand actual causes of last year’s Tibetan national uprising seems spot on:

The researchers cite “major errors in government policy,” in the wake of the protests, including the “over-propagandizing of violence,” that encouraged “racist sentiment” towards Tibetans. “The excessive response of governments all over Tibet was to regard every tree and blade of grass as a potential enemy soldier.” This apparently left Tibetans feeling even more alienated and relations in Han/Tibetan communities more strained. “The fascination that Han citizens have expressed toward Tibetan culture changed to fear and hatred of the Tibetan masses, and Tibetans were rendered as a people incapable of gratitude.”

The research panel concluded that the “3.14 incident” was caused by “the confluence of many factors…which cannot be simply reduced to splittist violence,” the term “splittist” being a reference to those in the Tibetan freedom movement who want a completely independent Tibet. The Chinese government include the Dalai Lama in this category despite his repeated statements that he only wishes for Tibet’s “genuine autonomy” within China. The authors don’t completely rule out influence from Tibetan exile groups or the Dalai Lama, but do not support the Chinese government’s claim that he orchestrated the protests, and conclude that the unrest “could not have been created solely by external factors.”

Novick rightly highlights a  line that should give anyone in the Chinese government serious pause about the efficacy of their policy positions on Tibet.

One line in the report holds the key to any serious analysis of last year’s events in Tibet. “The notion that appears impossible to understand is the implication that reasonable demands were being vented, and this is precisely what we need to understand and reflect upon.”

Unfortunately, the Chinese government’s actions during the Olympics in shutting down Tibet and again blocking all access to foreigners, tourists, and journalists this winter and early spring shows that they are uninterested in learning about why their failed policies have lead to unrest in Tibet. Instead,  the Chinese government only sees the continuing desire for freedom — held by Tibetans for more than 50 years of occupation — as a disease to be crushed. What is missed is that these uprising, these consistent acts of protest are simply the symptom of the Tibetan spirit remaining free and uncrushed by more than half a century of Chinese military rule and economic exploitation.

The report is truly a rare moment of honest intellectual analysis being done within China about how their government has handled Tibet. I hold out hopes that reformers within the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party will read this with open eyes and begin to recognize that when it comes to Tibet, nothing other than an about-face in their policy course will lead to improved conditions. Of course, even reformers should not delude themselves that providing more positive social and economic policies that benefit Tibetans in Tibet will be sufficient to end the Tibetan desire for freedom and independence in their land. A change in policy and attitudes on these issue will reduce human suffering and should thus rightly be pursued. But progressive social and economic policies are no stand in for Tibetans having their birth right…the human right of self-determination.

Massive New Internet Surveillance in the Works in China

Yesterday Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep Links blog posted a detailed report on new Chinese domestic surveillance software. O’Brien reports:

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and IT’s announcement that all PCs sold in China must include government-approved filtering software is a profoundly worrying development for online privacy and free speech in that country. While the application, “Green Dam Youth Escort”, claims to only block pornographic sites, the access to a home computer such filtering software requires means that it could also have the power to conduct all sorts of other surveillance and control — far more than China’s current monitoring and blocking systems at the ISP level permits.

On present day operating systems, government-controlled software that are granted such admin rights would be able to collect IM and email conversations, install keyloggers, relay microphone and webcam recordings. It could prevent or detect the use of web proxies (the primary method of Chinese citizens seeking an uncensored Internet), and scan for privacy-protecting software like Tor and PGP. Business users of Chinese PCs will be vulnerable to state-sponsored corporate espionage. Foreign users of computers in China will be unable to guarantee the security of their communications.

…

But until now, such software has relied on duping its users as to its function or on the poor security of their operating systems. “Green Dam Youth Escort” will allow the Chinese state an automatic foothold on every Chinese PC, installing their own code remotely through automatic upgrades.

O’Brien notes that the movement of this spyware will be dependent in part on the extent to which American tech vendors agree to allow it. Dell, who was under fire yesterday from Credo Action for their assistance in Chinese government censorship, seems hesitant to install this spyware as-is and wants protections that it’s only for porn and can be disabled by users.

Stories like this are important because like China’s shutting down of Twitter and censorship of news sites around the Tiananmen Square anniversary, it’s yet another example of how scared the Chinese government is of their citizenry and what they are reading. These are hallmarks of a totalitarian society and should be massive warning signs for both Western technology companies who are considering working with them and Western governments who seek to prioritize economic relationships over advancing freedom and human rights. But this is simply unacceptable behavior for a government that aims to be a respected member of the global community and as long as it continues, China should be condemned.

Kristof: Prolong Dictatorship!

Any reader of this blog knows that I think New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is one of the most intellectually dishonest and profoundly unserious members of the American press who write with any regularity on China. That’s why I found it quite surprising last night to read Kristof’s column on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times then — something I did not know — and was covering the protests. His retelling of the protests and the zeitgeist in Beijing in 1989 is powerful and it seems Kristof is walking down what for him is a rarely walked path: criticizing the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party. Of course I was wrong to get excited about the first half of his colum, as what followed in the second half was Grade A wankery.

I saw it coming when I read this line:

One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn’t have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.

Yes, because obviously an uneducated worker in a totalitarian state has no idea what democracy looks like. No idea what his basic rights are or why it is fundamentally wrong for a government to respond to mass protest by rolling out armed troops and giving them the order to fire on peaceful students. How could this man possibly know that a government must be accountable to its people and not the other way around? Naturally Kristof’s column only got worse from here.

So, 20 years later, what happened to that bold yearning for democracy? Why is China still frozen politically — the regime controls the press more tightly today than it did for much of the 1980s — even as China has transformed economically? Why are there so few protests today?

One answer is that most energy has been diverted to making money, partly because it’s a safer outlet. One of my Chinese friends explains that if he were to protest loudly, he might be arrested; if he were to protest quietly, it would be a waste of time. “I may as well just spend the time watching a pirated DVD,” he said.

Another answer is that many of those rickshaw drivers and bus drivers and others in 1989 were demanding not precisely a parliamentary democracy, but a better life — and they got it. The Communist Party has done an extraordinarily good job of managing China’s economy and of elevating economically the same people it oppresses politically.

Living standards have soared, and people in Beijing may not have the vote, but they do have an infant mortality rate that is 27 percent lower than New York City’s.

Kristof apparently was the lone member of the press who covered the lesser-known Tiananmen Square protests for government action to increase infant mortality that faced a brutal crackdown leaving hundreds dead in June of 1989.

Kristof asks “Why are there so few protests today?” First, Kristof is clearly unaware of the country that he is writing about. Earlier this year The Strait Times reported on the number of mass protests in 2005:  “China’s Public Security Ministry reported 87,000 mass incidents in 2005, up 6.6 per cent over the number in 2004, and 50 per cent over the 2003 figure.” To put it differently, in 2005 in China there were on average of 238 mass protests every day. What Kristof likely means, though his word choice does not make this clear, is why are there so few protests of the scale of Tiananmen that garner international attention? That’s a much harder question to ask, but I would hazard that the Chinese government has learned how to stifle these protests, detain dissidents, and jail advocates for democratic reform prior to any boiling point. Tiananmen Square is surveilled by countless video camera, armed guards, rooftop sentries, and undercover security officers. There have not been protests there on this scale because China has created the ultimate security state where the government monitors and restrains its citizenry dramatically.

Not all is sweet: The environment is a catastrophe, an ugly nationalism is surging among some young Chinese and even nonpolitical Chinese chafe at corruption and at Web censorship (including the blocking this week of Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail). Balancing that, their children now get an education incomparably better than in earlier generations — better overall than many children get in the United States.

When you educate citizens and create a middle class, you nurture aspirations for political participation. In that sense, China is following the same path as Taiwan and South Korea in the 1980s.

Yes, except that on the same timeline of censorship and political repression and economic liberalization, South Korea and Taiwan actually became vibrant democracies. On the same scale, China became more repressive and less free for political discourse.  While the governments of Taiwan and South Korea moved intentionally towards democracy, the Chinese government has deliberately stopped political progress.

Some of my friends are Communist Party officials, and they are biding their time. We outsiders also may as well be similarly pragmatic and patient, for there’s not much we can do to accelerate this process. And as we wait, we can be inspired by those rickshaw drivers of 20 years ago.

Kristof’s closing line really gives away his bias. The outside world – governments, the media, people of conscience – really should just keep our mouths shut and not do anything to unwind 20 years of silence and repression in China for those who seek democracy. We cannot do anything about the jailing of political dissidents, nor the deliberate steps towards eradicating the culture and thus political legacy of Tibet and East Turkestan. We cannot do a thing when it comes to stopping the persecution of people for their religious beliefs, be they Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, or practioners of the Falun Gong. There is simply nothing to be done about the Chinese government shooting Tibetan refugees as they try to flee to Nepal or India. How can the global community possibly stop the Chinese government from using secret trials to sentence dissidents to long prison terms for thought crimes, let alone stop killing cell phone networks, internet access and popular online communities every time a politically threatening anniversary arrives (See Wired’s reporting on this for more)?

Kristof preaches complacency and do-nothing-ism. Leave the Chinese government to its own devices and all will be alright in the end. Sure, they’ve had two decades to listen to the wills and desires of Kristof’s ignorant rickshaw driver, but maybe in another twenty years they’ll magically decide to listen to the sentiments of the populace forty years prior.

Unfortunately what Nick Kristof does is ensure that his readers will continue to ignore the moral imperative to help people achieve freedom and democracy. The Tiananmen Square protests are one of the great inspirations of nonviolent political action in pursuit of freedom, a symbol for the best of what we can do for our beliefs akin to the work of Gandhi, Otpor, and the work of the Dalai Lama. When Kristof looks at this heroic activism, his response that we should all do nothing is simply bizarre. It is thoroughly disappointing that the editors of the New York Times continue to allow Kristof to write about China, as this sort of writing will someday be a monument for how Western passivism in the face of the Chinese economy lead to the prolonged tenure of a totalitarian government.

“What Being A Dissident Means”

I missed this earlier, but the New York Times also has short op-eds from a number of critics of the Chinese government, including the Tibetan writer, poet, and dissident Woeser. She writes:

China is not as open politically today as in 1989. The atmosphere in the 1980s felt freer — it was suffused with an enthusiasm for culture and ideas, with people craving and absorbing new thoughts. Although China has made enormous economic strides since then, it still insists on an authoritarian political system. This doesn’t mean that there are no avenues for an exchange of views.

To be a dissident is to express oneself publicly and engage actively in a civic discourse. For me, I blog, write books and reach out to the Western media. I began blogging in 2005. My blog has been hacked and shut down by the Chinese. Now I’m on my fifth blog. Of course, the Internet is also a double-edged sword; the dictatorship can use it to serve its purposes, sometimes as tool to hunt down dissidents.

I am a Tibetan, and my voice belongs to Tibet. Almost all of the official Chinese narratives implicitly or explicitly advance the control of my people and my land. When I see my people silenced, wrongfully arrested or persecuted, I turn to the Web to speak out for those who are voiceless. In changing China, the Internet is also changing Tibet and its connection to the world.

Tank Man


As we approach the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests by Chinese students in seek of democracy and economic reform, the New York Times has an amazing article of the accounts of the four different photographers who captured images of the lone man, carrying home bags of groceries, challenging a column of massive military tanks. This scene is undoubtedly one of the most powerful images of people in pursuit of freedom of the last century. To look at it is to feel a well of emotions at the strength and clarity of this anonymous act of defiance in the face of tyranny and violent brutality. Sadly, the Chinese government still treats the Tiananmen Square protests as something threatening, to be hidden from the citizenry and banned from internet searches. I fear that the defiance in this act is, in many ways, only felt outside of China as it should and does not reverberate through history with the same force behind the curtain of censorship erected, maintained, and continually modernized by the Chinese government.

Razing Kashgar

Sadly, it looks like China is going to take a major step in destroying Uighur culture and the world (and specifically the global media) will not say a word in protest. The cultural genocide of the Uighurs is a clear path to ending the Uighur desire for freedom from Chinese occupation for East Turkestan. Obviously this is similar to the Chinese government’s policies aimed towards destroying Tibet’s culture and language as a means of solidifying their illegal military occupation and stifling Tibetan’s desire for freedom.

China’s Greenhouse Gas Problem

Paul Krugman has a great column today taking China to task for its solipsistic views on greenhouse gas emissions and China’s massive contributions to global warming. It’s good to see an economist put forward an argument involving emissions, tariffs, trade, and global warming that yields a conclusion that points towards actually helping sustain the globe, not abstract principles of trade and economy.

The Dalai Lama Visits the NYS Senate

Via my friend Noel Hidalgo, His Holiness the Dalai Lama visited the New York State Senate yesterday. The video above shows HHDL as both the visionary leader and philosopher that he is, as well as a man with a world-class sense of humor.

Incidentally, Noel is just one of the recent new additions to the New York State Senate’s staff. They’ve added a great online communications and traditional communications team, including some of the best young minds in New York when it comes to politics and the online space. In addition to Noel, my friends Phillip Anderson, Brian Keeler and Nathan Freitas are doing work the the NYS Senate. That work is reaching a new benchmark for openness and transparency in government, as evidenced by the the redesigned and relaunched state senate website: http://www.nysenate.gov/