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.

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.

The Chinese government is so scared in Tibet…

The Chinese government must be so scared right now… is it losing Tibet?  Consider the following three developments:

One: The Chinese government is desperately organizing political “study sessions” all over Tibet to re-indoctrinate Tibetans working for the Chinese government (whose loyalty Beijing has always questioned).  Reading between the lines, this means that China is all the more terrified that Tibetans working for the system secretly support “separatism” — not a bad bet, actually:

China’s ruling Communist Party is ordering officials in Tibetan areas into political study sessions, a report said Friday, the firmest sign yet that China is using loyalty tests in areas where recent anti-government protests erupted.

The recently issued order emphasizes the need for officials to oppose Tibetan separatism, highlighting that Beijing was caught off-guard by last month’s protests, the most widespread demonstrations against Chinese rule in nearly 50 years.

“The numerous party members and grass-roots officials must further launch education in opposing separatism and preserving the unity of the motherland,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency said, citing a notice from the party’s powerful Organization Department, which oversees personnel issues.

Two:  The Chinese government is resorting to offering blood money.  According to The Times, Lhasa authorities today sent out a message by mobile phone to residents, offering a reward of 20,000 yuan (£1,300, or US$2,850) to anyone who could offer information leading to the arrest of wanted Tibetan protesters.  The per capita income in Tibet is about $1,000 per year, so Chinese authorities are offering close to three times the average annual income for Tibetans to turn each other in.

Three: The Chinese government is planning quick show-trials for over 1,200 Tibetan protesters just in Lhasa alone.  (Why do they bother, when we know the verdict will be “guilty?”)  There are 26 days left until May 1st so this means over 46 trials a day, every day, in just one city.  Forget about defense attorneys, international observers, transparency, or any semblance of fairness and impartiality… this is wholly the government’s desperate attempt to pretend that this messy business of Tibetan freedom protests is swept under the carpet. 

More than 1,000 people have been arrested or turned themselves in to the police in connection with deadly rioting last month in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, one of the city’s top officials said.

Trials will be held before May 1, the deputy Communist Party secretary of Lhasa, Wang Xiangming, was quoted Thursday as saying in the official Tibet Commerce newspaper. The quick scheduling of the trials is an apparent sign of the government’s determination to close the book on the events well before the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing on Aug. 8.

What a joke: “Dalai clique’s conspiracy revealed”

Okay, everyone STOP THE PRESSES. This is big news here, straight from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, published by China.org.cn (more on this site at the end of the post…):

China’s Ministry of Public Security said on Tuesday that it had gathered sufficient evidence showing that March 14 riots in Lhasa was not isolated or accidental but was part of the “Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement” plotted by the Dalai clique.

Someone should give this guy an award - HE IS THE NEXT SHERLOCK HOLMES!

China.org.cn has published the details of this “groundbreaking” investigation here: Dalai clique’s conspiracy revealed, but keep reading below as we are going to break it down for you.

First, I’d like to point out that much of the content references by the PSB official can be easily found with a few google searches or on pages like this: http://tibetanuprising.org/category/background/. No secret chat rooms, no complicated forums - the site is called “Tibetan Uprising” and the page is called BACKGROUND. Duh. There are photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tibetanuprising/ and you can find that most of the information from their investigation was openly published at Tibetan news site Phayul.com and countless other sites.

What the Chinese government cannot understand is that free people are free to gather, plan and work for change. That not everything is about violence or armed conflict. That what the fully public and transparent “Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement” is doing IS NOT ILLEGAL in most of the world, only within China, and perhaps North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe. Of course, none of those countries would ever host the Olympics.

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