Tenzin Dorjee, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, has a must-read piece in the Global Post on non-violent resistance in Tibet. It’s a great piece that outlines the efforts made over the last two years by Tibetans inside Tibet to peacefully resist China’s military occupation through both new techniques and methods that date back to Gandhi and King.
Category: Tibet & China
Good Faith FAIL
Apparently the Chinese government doesn’t know what it means to negotiate in good faith. A round of talks between the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Chinese government just concluded. It’s the first round of talks since 2008 and an important step for these two nations. However, it looks like the Chinese government is not negotiating in good faith:
It was the ninth time the two sides have met since 2002, but Mr Zhu said the positions of both sides remained “sharply divided” – a situation which had “become a norm rather than an exception”.
According to China, at this latest round of meetings the Tibetans again reiterated their hopes for the introduction of greater autonomy in the Himalayan region.
But Mr Zhu said there was no possibility of the “slightest compromise” on the issue of sovereignty in Tibet.
He also attacked the Dalai Lama, whom he said was a troublemaker.
“He should make a thorough self-examination of his words and deeds and radically correct his political positions if he really expects results of contact and talks,” he said.
How can these talks be viewed as anything other than a stalling tactic by the Chinese government if they are publicly saying there is zero chance of productive talks unless the Tibetan Government drops all of their demands for a resolution to China’s occupation of Tibet by instituting meaningful autonomy? They are ruling out any and all compromises, other than the TGIE simply giving in.
Throw in the fact that China is now “warning” the US government that we will face consequences if President Obama meets with the Dalai Lama.
The Chinese government is trying to bully the Tibetan Government in Exile, bully the United States, and bully anyone else who deigns to question their 60 year illegal military occupation of Tibet. Their behavior is embarrassing and yet another sign that they are not a legitimate member of the global community.
More Chinese Internet Espionage
Hey look, another story about the Chinese government spying on foreign companies through the internet, hacking accounts, and dropping malware on people!
This time the British intelligence agency MI5 warned a large range of British companies in 2008 about the threat of Chinese espionage and methods used by Chinese spies to entrap foreign executives.
But a starkly different picture emerges from the document circulated by MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. The Sunday Times account, quoting from the document, said that officers from the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security had approached British businesspeople at trade fairs and exhibitions with offers of “gifts” that included cameras and computer memory sticks that were found to contain bugs that provided the Chinese with remote access to the recipients’ computers.
“There have been cases where these ‘gifts’ have contained Trojan devices and other types of malware,” the document said, according to The Sunday Times. The accuracy of the paper’s citations from the document was verified by the two people contacted by The New York Times who said they had seen the document.
The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.
“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”
At this point, I’d be shocked if American intelligence agencies haven’t distributed robust documents warning of the threat the Chinese government poses to their industrial secrets and risks associated with traveling in China. The bigger question, though, is how long will the press, the public, and Western governments treat this as they do now – just the cost of doing business with China or a predictable byproduct of China’s rise as an economic power. Spying, hacking, cheating, stealing, and blackmail are not appropriate or acceptable behaviors for any member of the global community, be it individuals, nations, corporations, or terrorist cells. Some things are just plain wrong and need to be identified as such. Moreover, if Chinese spy agencies are the ones hacking and blackmailing foreign business leaders as MI5 suggests, Western governments need to deal with this directly and have it impact the outcome and progress of dealings with the Chinese government.
Kowtowing to the Chinese economy is not going to produce desired outcomes on human rights and peace – that has long been clear. But this sort of espionage and blackmail perpetrated by the Chinese government shows that obsequiousness towards China will not give Western corporations or governments any advantage in the pursuit of economic success with Chinese markets. As a result, the pretense of economics superseding all other needs must be dropped when it comes to Western dealings with China. The Chinese government must be dealt with directly and on our terms – regarding human rights, labor rights, and the rule of law. Anything less is blind idiocy in the face of the lie of balanced economic progress.
Now China to Scan Text Messages for Content
Just when you thought the Chinese government’s surveillance of their citizenry through technology couldn’t get any more intense, we see this:
Expanding what the Chinese government calls a campaign against pornography, cellular companies in Beijing and Shanghai have been told to suspend text services to cellphone users who are found to have sent messages with “illegal or unhealthy content,” state-run media reported on Tuesday.
China Mobile, one of the nation’s largest cellular providers, reported that text messages would automatically be scanned for “key words” provided by the police, according to the English-language China Daily newspaper. Messages will be deemed “unhealthy” if they violate undisclosed criteria established by the central government, the newspaper said.
The increased surveillance of text messages is the latest in a series of government initiatives to tighten control of the Internet and other forms of communication. Since November, the government has closed hundreds of Web sites in the name of rooting out pornography and piracy.
Kan Kaili, a professor of telecommunications at Beijing University, called the routine surveillance of cellphone messages a violation of privacy rights and the Chinese Constitution.
“They are doing wide-ranging checks, checking anything and everything, even if it is between a husband and wife,” he said. “I don’t think people will be very happy about this.”
He said the government had established no clear legal definition of unhealthy content. He also said commercial authorities such as phone companies, even though government-owned, should not be involved in checking the contents of private messages.
“This is totally wrong,” he said.
This will likely have an intense chilling effect on communication by text message in China by democracy and right advocates, as well as within Tibet.
The notion that this spying is to crack down on pornography is simply absurd. SMS messages are person to person communication, not distributed publications. There’s just no reasonable explanation for how this effort would limit the spread of pornography (a whole other ball of free speech wax). This is about monitoring dissent and furthering bolstering the climate of fear that the Chinese Communist Party uses to maintain their tenuous hold on power.
Chinese Govt to Ban “Avatar”
Hong Kong’s Apple Daily reported that the state-run China Film Group had instructed cinemas nationwide to stop showing the 2-D version of Avatar from January 23 on orders from Beijing’s propaganda chiefs.
It is not just the desire to entertain the masses with a Chinese movie that has prompted the censors to step in and pull James Cameron’s hit from 2-D screens. The Government fears that too many citizens might be making a link between the plight of Avatar’s Na’vi people as they are thrown off their land and the numerous, often brutal, evictions endured closer to home by residents who get in the way of property developers.
The newspaper said: “Reportedly, the authorities have two reasons for this check on Avatar: first, it has taken in too much money and has seized market share from domestic films, and second, it may lead audiences to think about forced removal, and may possibly incite violence.”
China’s favourite blogger, Han Han, a twentysomething writer and racing-car driver, was among those who quickly spotted the similarity between the film’s plot and real life. He wrote: “For audiences in other countries, such brutal eviction is something beyond their imagination. It could only take place on another planet — or in China.”
Popular views of the film as an allegory for predatory property developers across China will not have gone down well with the Propaganda Department in Beijing. Blogs are buzzing with the news of Avatar’s imminent disappearance. The film opened on January 4 and soon drew lengthy queues despite one of the coldest winters in years. Box-office takings hit a record 56 million yuan for a single day and IMAX cinemas which show the full 3-D version are booked up for weeks. The film had been due to play until February 28, well past the Chinese new year holiday, which begins on February 14.
So Avatar, after having a successful two week run in China, is now being banned as “subversive.” Coincidentally, the beneficiary will be a domestic feature, “Confucius” starring Chow Yun Fat. That benefit may be incidental as what the Chinese government is really scared of is not James Cameron’s movie, but the citizenry of China. They do not want their citizens to see a movie about people throwing off the oppressive yolk of a tyrannical, occupying force. Clearly there is resonance between “Avatar” and China’s military occupation of Tibet. And, as we see above, there is also resonance between the film and the Chinese government’s forceful displacement of poor people to make way for development projects.
The simple morality play in “Avatar” is that it’s wrong to use armed soldiers to force people off their land and exploit their resources. The film is no indictment of any particular government (though it clearly isn’t a stretch to apply it to a few nations, like China). But that the Chinese government clearly thinks “Avatar” is an allegory for their own behavior is more confirmation of how they know they have behaved than anything else. If “Avatar” is subversive, it is only because the Chinese government has engaged in and is continuing to engage in the exact same sorts of bad behaviors as the human military-corporate characters in the film. If you had any doubt, the Chinese government just confirmed it for you.
More on Google & China
Josh Schrei has a truly excellent piece on The Huffington Post about why Google’s decision to end it’s partnership with the Chinese government should be a model for all Western companies doing business in China. The whole thing is worth a read, but this passage stands out:
While I applaud Google for their brave decision, their “discomfort” around having to censor should have been taken more seriously the first time around, because there are very few good places such a decision can lead. Once you go down that road, it will inevitably lead to places of greater ambiguity, greater ethical dilemma, and greater concern. Luckily, free thinking minds prevailed, before the unthinkable ( for example, the company NOT disclosing China’s shenanigans in favor of keeping the relationship strong) happened. Over the next few weeks I encourage the Google-folk to maintain the firm stance they did yesterday. Bending on these issues is not an option. Too much is at stake.
Hopefully Google’s actions will start to show some US companies — and our good President, for that matter — that they do have influence with the Chinese, they do have power in that relationship…. and that we can make change by living according to principle. Moving forward, other companies MUST follow Google’s lead. Restrictions should be put in place on selling the Chinese government technology, software, or hardware that enables surveillance and digital privacy invasion. And when Beijing plays foul, in any circumstance, companies have a responsibility to call them out on it, as Google has done.
It is easy, in the relative comfort of our modern lives, to forget the consequences of a few small actions. Censoring a few words here, limiting a few freedoms there, these are significant actions on the perimeter of what is quite literally — along with climate change — the defining issue of our time — whether or not we will live in a free future. The democratizing power of the internet, a truly profound development in the short span of my life, can quickly be turned on its head and used as a means to control a population and as a way to access — and eliminate — those undesirables who think thoughts and write words that are deemed dangerous to power.
Google’s actions in response to hack attacks and invasion of privacy by the Chinese government and Chinese (military) hackers gives lie to the falsehood that the mere presence of Western corporations will be a liberalizing force within the Chinese government. Just as the role of business as a moderating force for Chinese government authoritarianism has been a failure, so too is the passivism in the face of China’s economy that we have seen from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. It’s hard to say that the founder of Google has more conviction and courage than the President and Secretary of State, but that appears to be the case today.
I also want to highlight that Huffington Post has a live blog running of updates on what’s happening with Google in China. It’s a great resource. Of note, they’ve flagged a Wall Street Journal report that shows that Google founder Sergey Brin was the driving voice for withdrawal of Google.cn from China, while CEO and long-time Google.cn defender Eric Schmidt opposed ending their relationship with the Chinese government. This isn’t really shocking – Brin had been publicly vocal about his doubts about this venture since 2006, shortly after Google.cn launched.
In June 2006, Brin stated that Google had “compromised its principles” in abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto to partner with the Chinese government and launch Google.cn. In January 2007, Brin again spoke out against the decision, this time citing the site’s poor business performance. He said, “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”
What’s clear is that this decision was a long time coming. And as I said when it was announced, this is exactly what rights groups like Students for a Free Tibet, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Reporters Without Borders have been saying Google should have done since Day One. It’s good that Google finally did the right thing, but it came at a high cost in their credibility, at least for many of us in the human rights community. That said, as Josh Schrei points out above, Google has now become a model for Western tech companies behavior in China. Hopefully others follow their lead and stop letting their tools and technology be used by the Chinese government to increase their control over the people of Tibet and China.
Google May Mean It
In an email circulating among China rights activists, BBC and Public Radio International reporter, Mary Kay Magistad reports:
I’m writing this at 10:30am on Jan. 13 in Beijing, where for the past hour or more a Google search for “Tiananmen” pulls up, at the top, graphic photos and descriptions of the crackdown, a Google search on “Falun Gong” pulls up videos of police beating and torturing Falun Gong members, and a Google search on “Tibet” pulls up the Tibet rights groups and documentation on the crackdown on Tibetans since March 2008. A Google search on “China” + “human rights” pulls up, as its first item, a news report that Google is threatening to shut down its operations in China after uncovering what it said were “highly sophisticated” cyberattacks, originating from China, aimed at Chinese human rights activists and at at least 20 other unidentified firms. As a result, Google has said that at the very least it will no longer censor its search engine in China.
Interesting times.
Mary Kay Magistad
China Correspondent
BBC/Public Radio International’s “The World”
I was skeptical that Google would actually pull out of China in full. That decision remains to be seen and will likely be made after negotiations with the Chinese government. I think Google is now showing the Chinese government they are serious about ending their partnership and allowing all information to appear on google.cn without prior censorship. The question will be how Google handles the Chinese government’s response. Will they hold firm for free speech and free information? It’s too soon to tell, but this opening is clearly a shot at the Chinese government.
Google Backing Out of China
Much has been made of Google’s blog notice that it may soon be shutting down Google.cn, a search engine built in partnership with the censorship requests of the Chinese government. The post cites a major targeted attack on Google and twenty other top companies originating from China, with an apparent goal of hacking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese rights activists, as well as activists around the world working for freedom in China (I would guess that includes many of my friends and colleagues in the Tibetan independence movement). Senior Vice President David Drummond writes:
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
You know, had they listened to me or other folks from Students for a Free Tibet four years ago and not done this in the first place, Google could have avoided a lot of headaches.
I’ve seen some praise for Google for backing out of what seemed to be a successful business venture, citing Google.cn’s 29% market share. Before Google partnered with the Chinese government to launch Google.cn, their Chinese portal, http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/, was the #1 customer rated search engine and had the #2 Chinese market share (32.9%). And it wasn’t censored by Google – only subject to normal Chinese Firewall hurdles. So I’m not sure that this should be hailed as having been a huge commercial success.
In the end, Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing notes that a key impetus was “the search giant experienced an internet attack aimed at Chinese dissidents’ Gmail accounts. The attack is presumed to have been the work of the Chinese government.”
Of course no one could have predicted that Google partnering with the Chinese government would fail to liberalize the Chinese government when it comes to free access to information online.
This is exactly what they claim to have wanted to avoid and any move now is a turn towards the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto which was forgotten four years ago.
China Pulls Films Because Festival Won’t Pull Tibetan Film
Chalk up another instance of the Chinese trying to control every little instance of Tibet in the rest of world (illegally occupying the nation does not appear to be enough). The New York Times Arts Beat blog reports that two Chinese film makers are pulling their entries to the Palm Springs International Film Festival because organizers have refused to cancel the screening of a film about the Tibetan independence movement, “The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet’s Struggle For Freedom.” I’m sure that these film makers are making this pro-China protest of their own volition and not at the behest of anyone in their government.
A trailer to “The Sun Behind the Clouds” is embedded above. It looks great and includes interviews with Lhadon Tethong and Tenzin Tsundue, two of the Tibetan independence movement’s most important young leaders.
Weak Sauce
New York Times columnist and frequent Chinese government apologist Nick Kristof has only mustered this Tweet in response to the jailing of Liu Xiaobo for advocating democracy in China.
@NickKristof The great Liu Xiaobo sentenced to 11 yrs by Chinese govt. For shame, Beijing.
Kristof’s column ran today. It was not on the Liu Xiaobo sentencing. He has not had any other blog posts nor tweets regarding the Beijing regimes jailing of Liu for a thought crime.
I’ll be curious to see if Kristof uses his large microphone of the New York Times’ opinion page to condemn the Chinese government for jailing Liu. I don’t expect he will and his silence should be yet another black mark upon his reputation.
Hold Fast 