High-profile Tibetan Writer & Blogger Woeser Under Attack

Woeser, the well-known Tibetan writer/blogger and political dissident, is under intense cyber-attack.

On the evening of May 27th (Beijing time), Woeser discovered that her Skype account and email address were both apparently accessed and her Skype ID hijacked. Contacts of Woeser in China and Tibet have reported that people are impersonating her and contacting them. Woeser said in a statement that “this places me and my contacts in an extremely dangerous situation.” Shortly thereafter, her website was also hacked.

[UPDATE May 29th: Woeser has managed to get her blog back up online. Currently, all the archives are gone and readers can only see posts starting yesterday. Hopefully, she'll soon be able to get everything back up that was there when the site was hacked.]

While it is currently impossible to connect the attacks directly to Chinese officials, a recent profile in The Washington Post notes that Woeser’s books are banned in China and over the past two years, three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have been shut down. She was reportedly told by a friend at an internet company that the blogs were shut down on government orders. She has also reported being warned by Chinese police to stop writing about Tibet.

The attack on her website was claimed by the Honker Union of China (it sounds way more badass in Mandarin), a well-known network of nationalistic Chinese hackers. According to Wikipedia, the name Honker (Chinese: 紅客; pinyin: hóngkè) means “Red Guest”, as compared to the usual Chinese transliteration of the term “hacker” (黑客, hēikè, literally “Black Guest”).

The hackers removed the content of Woeser’s website and replaced it with a gif animation of the Chinese flag with the headline “LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA! “DOWN WITH TIBET INDEPENDENCE!” Below the animation is a photo of Woeser with the words “Please remember this Tibetan separatist Woeser’s ugly face. Whoever sees this ugly face, please beat her hard like one beats a dog.” Further text was added and has apparently been changed several times in the hours since the site was hacked. The website is currently hosted on a server in the United States.

More recently, her husband, Chinese writer and intellectual Wang Lixiong, reported that she was placed under house arrest this past March 10th – the 49th anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising in Lhasa. Protests commemorating the 1959 uprising triggered another Tibetan uprising of national proportions, with widespread demonstrations taking place throughout Tibet and continuing to this day. It seems that the confinement has been eased but that she remains under constant surveillance.

Woeser, 41, goes by one name in the Tibetan tradition. She was born in Lhasa and lives in Beijing with her husband. She writes in Chinese and has been a lone voice among Tibetans reporting on recent Tibetan protests across the country and the ensuing crackdown, including details about the situation in Tibetan areas in the wake of the May 12th earthquake.

Below is the English translation of an urgent statement she sent out in an attempt to warn her contacts.

[Subject:] Woeser warning her correspondents on Skype!

Dear friends, in order to spy on me and others on my Skype contact list, someone has for a while on Skype claimed that he or she is an overseas Tibetan, an officer from the Tibetan government-in-exile, or having secrets to pass on etc. It looks that he or she has stolen the list of my Skype contacts. Yet, after I posted a warning to inform my contacts of such a development, someone hijacked my account around 10 pm on May 27th. My password has been changed and I can no longer log in. As far as I can tell, the hijacker has begun to make contact with people in my account. This places me and my contacts in an extremely dangerous situation. Therefore, I am sending the strongest warning. Please stop any communication with “Degewa” on Skype, delete or lock out this user’s name from your Skype account, warn anyone you know who might try to contact me through Skype, tell them to cease contact with “Degewa.”

From now on, if you receive any Skype message from “me” in any other users’ name, please speak first (Tibetan friends, please speak in Tibetan) to verify “my identity.” If the other side of the contact refuses to talk, it means you are not in touch with me.

Also, I suggest you and other friends to avoid this kind of trap by talking, rather than writing, via Skype.

Woeser
Early morning in Beijing
May 28th 2008

Woeser is probably considered a nuisance by the Chinese government for the simple reason that she engages in courageous truth-telling. Her ‘Tibet Updates’ have chronicled the protests and ensuing crackdown throughout Tibet over the last couple months. Her May 9-15 Tibet Update reported the alarming news that the regional government in the epicenter zone issued an urgent document on the day the earthquake struck entitled “Combining work on anti-separatism and safeguarding stability with disaster relief work.” She wrote that Chinese officials also sent letters encouraging local authorities in earthquake-affected Tibetan areas to “be responsible for both anti-separatism and the disaster relief work.”

Elevating her from a nuisance to a threat in the eyes of Chinese officials is the fact that in addition to telling untellable truths, she writes her essays and poetry in a voice that conveys a specific contemporary Tibetan combination of despair, pride, and resistance. Which is to say that her voice alone bears many untellable truths about Tibet, and the spirit of her generation. That her voice inspires younger generations of Tibetans is in itself another untellable truth.

As enemies of truth, it is obvious and expected that the current hard-line Chinese leadership should try to stop a compulsive truth-teller. But they can’t.

Repressing Woeser only amplifies her truth, and many others, about Tibet.

[excerpt from Woeser's poem, "Secrets of Tibet"]

Once in a while, the masked demon reveals its true face,
frightening even the ancient deities.
Yet, the challenges have emboldened the ordinary birth;
who turn prayers in the deep nights into cries under the sun,
who convert whines behind the high walls into songs spread wide.

They are arrested! Punishments increased! Life sentences!
Executions postponed! Shot dead!

I usually keep quiet because I barely know anything.
Having been born and raised under the bugles of the PLA,
I am a suitable inheritor of Communism.

Egg under the red flag, suddenly cracked and broken.
Nearing middle age, belated anger is about to blurt from my throat.
I cannot stop my tears for the suffering Tibetans younger than me.