When the Party’s over…the joke will be on them
It’s unbelievable the lengths to which the Chinese government will go to cover up the June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: It has denied it ever happened; erased it from China’s history books; imprisoned and exiled survivors; threatened anyone who dares to openly mourn, demand justice, or even talk about what really happened in Tiananmen Square in the lead-up to and on that fateful day. They have forced an entire generation to ‘forget,’ and they have effectively kept the next generation from ever hearing of their parents’ struggles, hopes, and horrific losses.
Twenty years later, as the above video demonstrates, the Chinese government has not changed. However, the Party leadership has learned that when a government opens fire on its own people, it attracts intense international scrutiny – exactly 100% more negative attention than they want. In turn, they have adapted and developed new, more subtle tactics, like the umbrella assault, to distract the world’s attention from the Chinese government’s brutally repressive policies.
Your instinct when watching this video is to laugh; even one of the Chinese undercover thugs reveals a smile. But behind the humor and the lightness of the umbrella assault is a smart, strategic, and very scary government that regularly detains, tortures, and disappears Tibetans, Chinese, and anyone who threatens its control by advocating for change.
But, this video also demonstrates the Party’s ultimate weakness. By not acknowledging or taking responsibility for its heinous crimes in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, or today, the Chinese leadership is driving a wedge between the Party and the people. The people remember the brutality, the death, and the pain. If you are never able to mourn openly, to grieve and to share the truth of your experience, how can you ever fully move on? The Chinese government’s strategy of balancing an open economy, while simultaneously keeping the door to historical honesty and political freedom slammed shut, is unsustainable.
If one thing is certain, it’s that change will come to China. The scales will inevitably tip in favor of political openness, and when the Party falls, it will fall hard. In the end, the joke will be on them.
Tibetans, Supporters March on Eve of Tiananmen Massacre Anniversary
Photos of yesterday’s Solidarity March in NYC. We took to the streets in support of the survivors of Tiananmen Square, their families and all those in China who continue to courageously advocate for their basic rights and freedom. Check out SFT HQ’s Flickr site to view more photos.
This is what democracy looks like
Members of Students for a Free Tibet meet with the top staffer for Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who recently replaced Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate, to ask for her support on a number of congressional bills, resolutions and efforts in support of Tibet.
Senator Gillibrand was on the floor of the Senate that day speaking so she could not meet with them directly, but she is a strong supporter of the Tibetan people:
At Dartmouth, she learned to speak and write Chinese before spending a semester in China, and wrote a senior project titled “The History of Tibetan Resistance to the Chinese Occupation of Tibet 1950-1988.” As part of her studies, she and her mother visited the Dalai Lama’s house while traveling in India.
An Open Letter by Tibetan Students in the UK
Mao Tsetung once said, “Where there is oppression, there is resistance” and in 2008, Tibetans risked everything to speak out. The Uprising in March has been the strongest message to the outside world from Tibetans inside Tibet since 1959.
The special meeting in Dharamsala from November 17th - 22nd that has been called by His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a unique platform to revitalize the movement. Thus, we Tibetan students in the UK would like to voice our suggestions at this crucial time to the international Tibetan community and the public. (more…)
Leadership FAIL
Not that it should surprise anyone, but John McCain is calling on President Bush to not say anything principled or possibly effective when Bush goes to China for the Olympics. In an interview with David Broder, McCain demands full on obsequiousness from Bush, lest American business interests be threatened by cranky Chinese dictators.
In an interview with The Washington Post at his Arlington headquarters, the prospective Republican presidential nominee advocated a cautious course for Bush, despite U.S. unhappiness with the Chinese crackdown on Tibet, complaints of harsh repression of domestic dissidents and strained relations stemming from last week’s breakdown of global trade talks in Geneva.
McCain, who harshly condemned Russian behavior in the same interview, said some of China’s actions are “also regrettable, but I don’t think China is regressing the way that Russia is. We have a greater opportunity to work in a cooperative way with China.”
That’s some real compelling leadership you’re offering up there, John. Really let’s not anger China by using words like “condemn” or “human rights violations” because doing so would surely send us back to the Cold War. These words are just like nuclear weapons when you’re dealing with China, apparently.
George Bush has hardly been an ally to Tibetans during his tenure as President. America’s business ties to China have drastically expanded with no regard to human rights and freedom. That said, Bush has met with the Dalai Lama in the White House, a step forward in relations between the US and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile. And the US Congress, led by Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the late Congressman Tom Lantos, awarded HHDL a Congressional Gold Medal. Neither of these actions pleased the Chinese government, but both represent small steps in the right direction when it comes to US-Tibet relations.
That’s why it’s so sad to see McCain, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, calling for Bush to do even less for Tibet and for China. In effect, McCain is calling for Bush — who, like it or not, remains one of the most influential politicians in the world — to abdicate his bully pulpit so as to not upset the Chinese government. McCain’s position is a total failure of leadership and one that the American electorate should judge him harshly for holding.
Transcript of Press Conference by Tibet Activists on Eve of IOC Meeting in Athens
TIBET ACTIVISTS SPEAK OUT ON EVE OF INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE MEETING IN ATHENS
TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENTS MADE AT PRESS CONFERENCE
JUNE 3RD, FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION OF GREECE, ATHENS
1) INTRODUCTION BY LHADON TETHONG, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, STUDENTS FOR A FREE TIBET (SFT) INTERNATIONAL
2) TENDON DAHORTSANG, PRESIDENT, TIBETAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION IN EUROPE, ON THE CURRENT SITUATION IN TIBET
3) BORIS EICHLER, PRESS OFFICER, TIBET INITIATIVE DEUTSCHLAND, ON THE TORCH RELAY THROUGH TIBET
4) LHADON TETHONG, SFT, ON INTERNATIONAL MEDIA ACCESS TO TIBET
Below is the transcript of remarks by Tibet campaigners at a press conference at the Foreign Press Association of Greece in Athens, June 3rd. The press conference was broadcast live on the Internet and can be viewed at: www.sfttv.org. The remarks were followed by questions by reporters present in the room as well as by viewers who watched the press conference live online and asked their questions in an accompanying web-forum. Transcript may vary slightly from the remarks as delivered by the presenters but the following should be regarded as the official remarks of the identified activists.
INTRODUCTION BY LHADON TETHONG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, STUDENTS FOR A FREE TIBET INTERNATIONAL
Good Morning and thank you everyone for joining us.
My name is Lhadon Tethong and I am the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet International based in New York.
As you know, we are here in Athens because the International Olympic Committee is meeting from tomorrow, June 4th to June 6th. This is their last meeting before August, followed shortly thereafter by the Beijing Games. Meanwhile, the meeting also comes just days before the Olympic torch is scheduled to make its first stop in Tibet.
(more…)
China’s Security State
Naomi Klein, author of the great book The Shock Doctrine, has an in-depth look at the Chinese security state in Rolling Stone. In the article, Klein looks at how China’s infamous Golden Shield surveillance system has been deployed and implemented as a tool in crackdowns in Tibet.
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces….
When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government’s own measure, there were at least 87,000 “mass incidents” — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.
This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China’s rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people’s-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China’s dizzying expansion could grind to a halt….
The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: “Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability.”
During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn’t mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.
During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren’t the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.
The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 “most wanted” Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive “streetlamp” view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China’s major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.
The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a “nightmare” for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn’t happen.
Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government’s high-tech web.
Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.
Klein’s entire article paints a frightening picture of government power, all-seeing surveillance, and the willingness of the Chinese government to use the infrastructure of a surveillance state to brutally crack down on any acts of democracy or perceived threats to their power.
Australia to China: Let’s Be “Real” Friends
From John Pomfret of the Washington Post, an interesting take on a new type of “engagement” — Kevin Rudd’s approach to telling China the truth, rather than appeasing the delicate feelings of the Communist Party:
Does the West have a new secret weapon in dealing with China in the person of Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia?
Rudd is the only Western leader who speaks Chinese, and his Chinese is pretty good at that. But deeper still is Rudd’s understanding of China.
Australian China scholar Geremie Barme unpacks Rudd’s marvelous speech, given at Beijing University last week, in which he bluntly called on China to recognize its human rights problems in Tibet.
Most Western leaders probably would have either punted or come on too strong. Rudd’s tone, however, was pitch perfect.
Rudd’s brilliance in the speech involves turning the Chinese term “friend” on its head. Friend (pengyou in Chinese) and frienship (youyi) are two of the most distorted concepts in modern China culture. In modern China, a friend is someone who will do you favors and who expects favors in return. A “foreign friend” is someone the Chinese party-state expects will carry water for them and NEVER criticize them.
Whenever a Chinese official called me “foreign friend” (waiguo pengyou), I knew some type of horrible deal would soon be asked or expected of me.
“To be a friend of China, the Chinese people, the party-state or, in the reform period, even a mainland business partner,” Barme writes, “the foreigner is often expected to stomach unpalatable situations, and keep silent in the face of egregious behaviour. A friend of China might enjoy the privilege of offering the occasional word of caution in private; in the public arena he or she is expected to have the good sense and courtesy to be ‘objective.’ that is to toe the line, whatever that happens to be. The concept of ‘friendship’ thus degenerates into little more than an effective tool for emotional blackmail and enforced complicity.”
So what did Rudd do? He went back — way back — into Chinese history, to the 7th century AD, and used another word for friendship (zhengyou).
“A true friend,” Rudd said, “is one who can be a zhengyou, that is a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis for continuing, profound and sincere friendship.”
“Rudd’s tactic,” Barme wrote, “was to deftly sidestep the vice-like embrace of [the current] model of friendship by substituting another.
“A strong relationship, and a true friendship,” he told the students, “are built on the ability to engage in a direct, frank and ongoing dialogue about our fundamental interests and future vision.”
This type of engagement could be a model for how the West interacts with China. Enough with the back door, private stuff that Western powers have relied on to engage with China — private conversations that Chinese officials can then ignore. But at the same time, stop the screaming, with its hint of “Yellow Peril,” racism and fear. Rudd got it right. It remains to be seen whether others can follow his lead.
US House Passes Pro-Tibet Resolution
Great news from the US Congress. The Gavel reports:
The House has just overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on the Chinese government to end its crackdown in Tibet and to enter into a substantive dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, H.Res. 1077. House Resolution 1077 was introduced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of the bipartisan Congressional Delegation that met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile in India. Speaker Pelosi, along with Reps. Rush Holt, Jay Inslee, and Hilda Solis traveled with the Congressional Delegation and spoke in favor of the resolution during debate last night, as did Chairman Howard Berman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Speaker Pelosi: “I was reading the paper the other day as the torch was going through Paris that one of the carriers of the torch said that what was happening with the protesters was ‘very unpleasant.’ And I thought ‘You think that’s unpleasant? Maybe you should be in the subhuman conditions that the refugees are in Darfur. If you think that’s unpleasant maybe you should be in a prison in Tibet for your faith in His Holiness the Dalai Lama. If you think that’s unpleasant maybe you could still be in prison from the Tiananmen Square Massacre, some people are still in prison from that time.’” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=I9nY-8AwnE0 Rep. Holt: “I have in my office a crayon-drawn Tibetan flag given to me during our delegation’s visit to the Tibetan children’s village and I keep this flag in my office because it reminds me of the human toll of this situation. Children and adults flee the villages of Tibet, cross the highest range of mountains in the world to reach the promise of a life where they can preserve their culture and have freedom. The journey is treacherous but children try to escape the oppression in Tibet. I am pleased that all the members of this important trip joined Speaker in introducing this resolution.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=xcb_RgzAlcE
Chairman Berman: “China’s response to Tibetan protests over the last month has been tragically predictable. For half a century the Tibetan people have struggled under the repressive policies of the Chinese authorities. And sadly, the current crackdown is only the most recent example of Beijing’s mistreatment of Tibetans. As the world watched events unfold inside China, we were sickened, not only by the shock of seeing images of Chinese authorities beating Tibetans in the street, but also by the realization that these are images we have seen before and fear we may see again.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9NZH51up20
These statements and this resolution come not from Tibetan exiles or activists marching on the streets of American cities, but some of the most respected leaders of the US government. This resolution is a recognition of the brutal oppression Tibetans live under, the courage it takes for them to rise up in protest, and the importance of speaking out on about the political weight of the Beijing Olympics.
A refutal of the NCCC pronouncement
Watch our videos!
Phayul Latest News- Two monks arrested in Tsawa Pashoe January 31, 2009
- Man Blinded, Sentenced to 4 years' in jail January 31, 2009
- Nationwide Journey for Tibet Stops over in Dharamsala January 30, 2009
- Non-violent approach can change China: Tibetan PM January 29, 2009
- China should resume dialogue with Dalai Lama:Merkel January 29, 2009
