Starting Points: Tibet

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May 21, 2010

China Aims to Stifle Tibet’s Photocopiers

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Published: May 20, 2010

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — The authorities have identified a new threat to political stability in the restive region of Tibet: photocopiers. Fearful that Tibetans might mass-copy incendiary material, public security officials intend to more tightly control printing and photocopying shops, according to reports from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

A regulation now in the works will require the operators of printing and photocopying shops to obtain a new permit from the government, the Lhasa Evening News reported this month. They will also be required to take down identifying information about their clients and the specific documents printed or copied, the newspaper said.

A public security official in Lhasa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the regulation “is being implemented right now,” but on a preliminary basis. The official hung up the phone without providing further details.

Tibetan activists said the new controls were part of a broader effort to constrain Tibetan intellectuals after a March 2008 uprising that led to scores of deaths. Since the riots, more than 30 Tibetan writers, artists and other intellectuals have been detained for song lyrics, essays, telephone conversations and e-mail messages deemed to pose a threat to Chinese rule, according to a report issued this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, a human rights group based in Washington.

“Basically, the main purpose is to instill fear into people’s hearts,” said Woeser, an activist who, like many Tibetans, goes by one name. “In the past, the authorities tried to control ordinary people at the grass-roots level. But they have gradually changed their target to intellectuals in order to try to control thought.”

Ms. Woeser said she was also a target of the authorities for her views. She lost her job in Lhasa after her book “Notes on Tibet” was banned in 2003. She now lives in Beijing, but she said she was carefully watched by the authorities.

China’s leaders contend that their only goal is to guarantee stability, ethnic unity and better living standards for Tibetans. Officials say that as long as separatist leaders are kept firmly in check, continued economic development will win Tibetans over to Chinese rule.

But the International Campaign for Tibet’s report contends that the authorities are not merely punishing separatists, but also dissidents of all stripes who dare to criticize the government and defend Tibetans’ cultural and religious identity. A 47-year-old writer named Tragyal was arrested in April after he published a book calling on Tibetans to defend their rights through peaceful demonstrations, the report states. His current whereabouts is unknown, it said.

A popular Tibetan singer, Tashi Dhondup, was sentenced to 15 months at a labor camp in January after he released a new CD with a song calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, according to the report. He had been arrested on suspicion of “incitement to split the nation,” the report states.

The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese authorities. He says he supports greater autonomy for Tibet but not secession. China says the Dalai Lama’s goal is an independent Tibet.

The authorities in Tibet apparently see printing and photocopying shops as potential channels through which unrest can spread. One Chinese print shop operator in Lhasa, who is of the majority Han ethnicity rather than Tibetan, said that her husband had been summoned to a meeting last week on the new requirements.

“You know sometimes people print documents in the Tibetan language, which we don’t understand,” said the woman, who gave her last name as Wu. “These might be illegal pamphlets.”

Tanzen Lhundup, a research fellow at the government-backed China Tibetology Research Center, which typically follows the government line on Tibet, said in an interview that “the regulation itself is not wrong.” But he said that it should have been put before the public before it was put in place.

“They have never issued such a regulation before,” he said. “On what grounds do they want to issue it? I think citizens should be consulted first.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Mar 1, 2010

China Names Its Own Lama To Top Body Of Advisers

By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — China’s handpicked Panchen Lama, the teenage religious figure whose legitimacy is a matter of dispute among many Tibetan Buddhists, has been appointed to the country’s top advisory body, the state media have announced.

Although membership in the advisory group, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is of nominal interest to Chinese, the appointment of the Panchen Lama, 19, on Sunday ratchets up the government’s efforts to elevate his stature among Tibetans. Because he was appointed by Communist Party authorities rather than by Buddhist leaders, many Tibetans reject his religious authority as the ranking leader after the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

Born as Gyaltsen Norbu, he was anointed the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, after the Dalai Lama identified a different child as the latest incarnation of the Panchen Lama. A few weeks later, that boy and his family vanished. The government has said that they are in “protective custody,” but their whereabouts have been a mystery for 15 years.

According to Xinhua, the official news agency, the official Panchen Lama, just shy of his 20th birthday, is the youngest person ever appointed to the conference, which convenes this week as part of the annual pageant that includes meetings of the National People’s Congress, the country’s main legislative forum.

The advising conference is made up of wealthy businessmen, sports celebrities and prominent members of China’s ethnic minorities. It is also cynically viewed as a reward for retired officials. Among the 13 new members appointed Sunday was Li Changjiang, the former head of China’s food safety administration, who was forced to resign over the scandal involving melamine-contaminated milk.

Bkra-lo, a Tibetan scholar at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said there was nothing surprising about Gyaltsen Norbu’s appointment to the advisory conference.

“He has a lot of influence and popularity among the Tibetan people, so it makes sense,” he said. “Although he is very young, he is also very learned.”

Last month, the state media liberally featured his elevation as vice president of the government-run Buddhist Association of China. In an address, he swore to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party and promised to “adhere to socialism, safeguard national unification and strengthen ethnic unity.”

Despite its stated devotion to atheism, the Communist Party has struggled to offer a counterweight to the immense stature of the Dalai Lama, whom it views as a separatist eager to sunder Tibet from China. The Dalai Lama says his only interest is greater religious and cultural autonomy for Tibetans.

Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an exile group in India, said no amount of grooming would burnish Gyaltsen Norbu’s reputation among Tibetans.

“If you look at the Tibetan struggle for the last 60 years, neither torture nor financial incentives by the Chinese have been able to win the hearts of the people,” he said. “Tibetans will never accept him as the Panchen Lama.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Jan 14, 2010

Tibet governor tenders resignation at policy meeting

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Tue Jan 12, 2010 11:46am IST

By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - The governor of Tibet has tendered his resignation, Chinese state-owned media said on Tuesday, as Beijing convened a meeting to spur economic growth and quell dissatisfaction in the region.

Qiangba Pingcuo, an ethnic Tibetan, was governor during demonstrations by Tibetans in their capital, Lhasa, that turned deadly on March 14, 2008.

The report by Xinhua did not give a reason for his resignation, which can also indicate a person is slated for another post.

"Everyone is looking to see whether an official will be made to pay for the policy failures indicated by the events of the spring of 2008," said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University in New York.

The Xinhua report did not indicate whether Qiangba's resignation would be accepted, or who his replacement would be. He is 62, three years shy of China's mandatory retirement age.

"Qiangba was seen as one of the heavier people in the administration, but not as someone who initiates policies," Barnett added.

Image via Wikipedia

His resignation came as China convened a major policy conference on Tibet, that stressed increased industrial development and investment from Beijing as well as continued controls on religious institutions.

The most powerful official in Tibet is party secretary Zhang Qingli, a Han Chinese. Both Zhang and Qiangba were in Beijing when the 2008 demonstrations broke out.

The emphasis on greater investment at the meeting implies that China is recognising some of the economic causes of discontent by Tibetans, many of whom feel that Chinese migrants have benefitted more from large projects, including mining and a train line to Lhasa.

Tibetans demanded greater religious and civil freedoms during demonstrations in March 2008 in towns across the plateau, that China officially blamed on exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Also leaving his post is Legchok, the head of the People's Congress in Tibet, Xinhua said. An ethnic Tibetan and former governor, Legchok turned 65 in October.

Oct 31, 2009

China Is Trying the Tibetan Filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen for Subversion - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

CHONGQING, China — A self-taught filmmaker who spent five months interviewing Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations living under Chinese rule is facing charges of state subversion after the footage was smuggled abroad and distributed on the Internet and at film festivals around the world.

The filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, who has been detained since March 2008, just weeks after deadly rioting broke out in Tibet, managed to sneak a letter out of jail last month saying that his trial had begun.

“There is no good news I can share with you,” he wrote in the letter, which was provided by a cousin in Switzerland. “It is unclear what the sentence will be.”

As President Obama prepares for his first trip to China next month, rights advocates are clamoring for his attention in hopes that he will raise the plight of individuals like Mr. Wangchen or broach such thorny topics as free speech, democracy and greater religious freedom.

With hundreds of lawyers, dissidents and journalists serving time in Chinese prisons, human rights organizations are busy lobbying the White House, members of Congress and the news media. In some ways, the pressure has only intensified since Mr. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, raising expectations for him to carry the torch of human rights.

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said Mr. Obama had an obligation to press Mr. Wangchen’s case and the cause of Tibetan autonomy in general, given his decision not to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington this month.

That move, which some viewed as a concession to China, angered critics already displeased with what they say was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s failure to press human rights during a visit to China in February.

“Beijing is emboldened by such moves,” Ms. Tethong said. “They see a weakness in the U.S. government, and they’re going to exploit it. This idea that you’ll gain more through some backroom secret strategy does not work.”

Until now, the case of Mr. Wangchen, 35, has received little attention abroad. Uneducated and plainspoken, he was an itinerant businessman until October 2007, when he bought a small video camera and began traveling the Tibetan plateau interviewing monks, yak herders and students about their lives.

Tsetring Gyaljong, a cousin who helped him make the documentary, said that Mr. Wangchen’s political awareness was sharpened nearly a decade ago, when he witnessed a demonstration in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, that was quickly broken up by public security officers.

“He saw how it was dissolved in two or three minutes and how everyone was taken away,” said Mr. Gyaljong, speaking from Switzerland, where he has lived in exile since escaping from Tibet. “There were no pictures, no testimonies, and he felt like the world should know that Tibetans, despite the Chinese portrayals, are not a happy people.”

Out of 40 hours of footage and 108 interviews came “Leaving Fear Behind,” a 25-minute documentary that is an unadorned indictment of the Chinese government. Although given the choice to conceal their identities, most of his subjects spoke uncloaked and freely expressed their disdain for the Han Chinese migrants who are flooding the region and their love for the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

In his own comments at the start of the film, Mr. Wangchen said the approach of the 2008 Olympics had compelled him to record the feelings of Tibetans, many of whom were less than enthusiastic about the decision to hold the Games in Beijing.

“We have no independence or freedom, so Tibetans have no reason to celebrate,” said one young woman standing by a road. “The Chinese have independence and freedom, so this is something they can celebrate.”

On March 10, 2008, Mr. Wangchen traveled to Xi’an in central China to hand over the tapes to Dechen Pemba, a British citizen who ferried them out of the country. That same day, a protest in Lhasa turned into a rampage that left at least 18 people dead, most of them Han Chinese.

On March 26, Mr. Wangchen and Golog Jigme, a Buddhist monk who helped him make the film, were arrested. Mr. Jigme was subsequently released.

“It really is a remarkable coincidence,” Ms. Pemba said.

Mr. Wangchen’s family hired a lawyer, but the authorities barred him from court last July, leaving Mr. Wangchen with a public defender.

Before he was forced to drop the case, the lawyer, Li Dunyong, said Mr. Wangchen had told him that he was tortured and that he had contracted hepatitis B while in custody. Since then, he has been held incommunicado. Officials at the Xining Intermediate Court in Qinghai Province, where Mr. Wangchen is being held, would not comment on his case.

Mr. Wangchen seemed acutely aware that his project could get him in trouble. Just before he began filming, he sent his wife and their four children to India, where they live along with his elderly parents.

In an interview from Dharamsala, where she works as a baker, Mr. Wangchen’s wife, Lhamo Tso, said she feared she might not see him again for many, many years.

“As a wife, I’m very sad to be without the person I love so much,” she said. “But if I can separate out that sadness, I feel proud because he made a courageous decision to give a voice to people who don’t have one.”

Oct 24, 2009

Group Says China Has Executed 4 for Roles in Tibet Riots - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — A Tibetan exile group in India says that the Chinese authorities have executed four people convicted for their roles in the riots that convulsed Tibet last year.

According to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the four were put to death on Tuesday, more than six months after they were tried and convicted of starting fires in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, that killed seven people.

At least 18 people died in March 2008 during violence that was directed at Han Chinese migrants, whose growing presence in the region has angered many native Tibetans. Since then at least 84 people have been convicted during trials that rights groups say are opaque, cursory and unfair.

The executions were not announced by the Chinese news media, and a woman who answered the phone at the Lhasa Municipal Intermediate People’s Court hung up when asked to confirm the accounts provided by the exile group.

The executions come at a time of deteriorating relations between China and representatives of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader who has been trying to negotiate greater autonomy for Tibetans. This week Chinese officials angrily denounced his planned visit to a Buddhist area of India that China claims as its own. China views the Dalai Lama, who fled to India three decades ago, as an instigator of Tibetan separatism.

Although they claim that Tibetans are sometimes secretly killed in detention, exile groups say the executions this week were the first in Tibet since 2002. They identified three of those killed as Lobsang Gyaltsen and Loyak, both men, and a woman named Penkyi.

Tashi Choephel, a researcher at the center, said he was unable to confirm the identity of the fourth. “It is extremely difficult to get any news out of Tibet, and those who provide information do so at great risk to their own lives,” he said, speaking from Dharamsala, India.

In announcing the convictions in April, the state-run news agency Xinhua said the accused had set fire to downtown clothing stores, killing employees who were cowering inside. “These arsons were among the worst crimes,” according to a court official quoted at the time.

“They led to extremely serious consequences, resulted in great loss of life and property and severely undermined social order, security and stability.”

In an effort to maintain order since the riots, the authorities have intensified their grip on daily life in Tibet and imposed greater restrictions on Buddhist monks and nuns, many of whom were at the center of the initial protests that turned violent.

According to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which released a report on Thursday that documents the crackdown, at least 670 Tibetans have been jailed in 2009 for activities that include peaceful protest or leaking information to the outside world.

The report detailed a widespread “patriotic education” campaign that requires monks and nuns to pass examinations on political texts, agree that Tibet is historically a part of China and denounce the Dalai Lama.

“The government has in the past year used institutional, educational, legal and propaganda channels to pressure Tibetan Buddhists to modify their religious views and aspirations,” the report said.

Jul 19, 2009

Flare-Ups of Ethnic Unrest Shake China's Self-Image

By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

YINGDE, China -- Six weeks after a violent confrontation between police and villagers in this old tea farming region, Xu Changjian remains in the hospital under 24-hour guard.

After being hit in the head multiple times by police, Xu's brain is hemorrhaging, leaving him paralyzed on the right side. He can barely sit up. Local government officials say Xu's injuries and that of other farmers were regrettable but unavoidable. They say that villagers attacked their police station on the afternoon of May 23 and that the police were forced to defend themselves with batons, dogs, pepper spray, smoke bombs and water cannons.

The villagers, most of them Vietnamese Chinese, tell a different story. They say that about 30 elderly women, most in their 50s and 60s, went to the police station that day to stage a peaceful protest. Four farmers' representatives, who had taken their grievances about land seizures to government officials a few days earlier, had been detained, and villagers in the countryside of the southern province of Guangdong demanded that they be freed. As the hours passed, several thousand supporters and curious passersby joined them. Then, farmers say, hundreds of riot police bused from neighboring towns stormed in without warning and started indiscriminately pummeling people in the crowd.

The violence in Guangdong was echoed in the far western city of Urumqi, when clashes between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese on July 5 killed 192 people and injured about 1,700. Both incidents have shaken China's view of itself as a country that celebrates diversity and treats its minority populations better than its counterparts in the West do.

The incidents in Guangdong and Urumqi fit a pattern of ethnic unrest that includes the Tibetan uprising in March 2008, followed by bombings at police stations and government offices in the majority Uighur province of Xinjiang that left 16 officers dead shortly before the August Olympics.

Each conflict has had specific causes, including high unemployment, continued allegations of corruption involving public officials and charges of excessive force by police. But for the Chinese government, they add up to a major concern: Friction among the nation's 56 officially recognized ethnic groups is considered one of the most explosive potential triggers for social instability. Much of the unrest stems from a sense among some minority populations that the justice system in China is stacked against them. In March, hundreds of Tibetans, including monks, clashed with police in the northwestern province of Qinghai. The fight was apparently triggered by the disappearance of a Tibetan independence activist who unfurled a Tibetan flag while in police custody. Some said he committed suicide, but others said he died while trying to escape.

In April, hundreds of members of China's Hui Muslim minority clashed with police in Luohe in Henan province when they surrounded a government office and blocked three bridges. The protesters were angry about what they viewed as the local authorities' mishandling of the death of a Hui pedestrian who was hit by a bus driven by a Han man.

"In the United States and other countries, if a few police beat one person, it is big news; but here in China, it is nothing," said Zhang Shisheng, 52, a grocery store owner whose right shin and calf bones were shattered during the attacks. Metal rods now support his shin, and he will not be able to walk for at least six more months.

"I feel that Chinese cops can kill people like ants with impunity."

Xiang Wenming, a local party official and head of the Stability Maintenance Office in the area of Yingde where the clash occurred, said that "if some violence happened, that is because some people didn't listen to the police."

He denies that the Vietnamese Chinese protesters were treated any differently than non-minorities in the same situation would have been and said that if they feel set apart from other Chinese, it is their own doing. "The way they speak is not like they are Chinese but like they are foreigners," he said. "They never appreciate the assistance made by the government. They don't think they are Chinese even after they have lived here for more than 30 years."

Xiang said that about 10 villagers, including an "old woman" who was "slightly injured," were hurt during the conflict. But he acknowledges that the official government count does not include the large number of people detained by police and treated at the station, as well as those who fled the scene and avoided going to the hospital for fear of being arrested.

Vietnamese Chinese who were involved in or witnessed the confrontation said hundreds were injured.

Zhang's neighbor, 63-year-old Xie Shaochang, is still bleeding from a gash in his head that he said was caused by police. And 56-year-old Zhong Yuede can no longer straighten his arm because it was so badly beaten in the attack.

The unrest in Yingde began with a simple land dispute.

The villagers, many of whom were welcomed to China from Vietnam in 1978-79 because their ancestors had lived here, were farming tea and vegetables until a few years ago, when the local government sold part of their land to Taiwanese developers. They have been petitioning the local government ever since for compensation in the form of money, other land or subsidies for houses.

The Vietnamese Chinese villagers said that despite their efforts to assimilate -- the younger generations speak Chinese dialects rather than Vietnamese -- discrimination has been a big part of their lives.

Residents say that in 2006, when there was a flood, the Vietnamese Chinese villagers received only five kilograms of rice per person -- worth about 20 yuan, or $3 -- while others received 200 yuan, or $30, from the local government. They also say that their roads have not been paved, while those of villages inhabited largely by Han people, the country's majority ethnic group, have been. They say that factory bosses and other employers discriminate against them and that it is difficult to find decent jobs.

"The government doesn't help us, mainly because we are Vietnam Chinese. We are poor and uneducated, so no one in our group works for the government," said Chen Ruixiang, 53, a farmer who raises silkworms and grows tangerines. "The government knows we are a weak group."

On the day of the incident, Chen Ajiao, 55, the village doctor, was in the front row near the police station door with the elderly female protesters when the soldiers came toward her. She said one of them took his baton and whacked her friend on the head. The woman lost consciousness and collapsed. Chen ran, and on the way out, she said, she saw other villagers bleeding from their wounds.

When bystanders saw the women being attacked, villagers said, they grabbed stones, bricks, bamboo sticks and anything else they could find and fought back. Some men took gasoline from nearby motorcycles, put it in bottles and threw it at the police cars to set them on fire.

Zhang, who was about 30 yards outside the gates, said four police officers came at him with batons and an iron stick. He said that after he collapsed in pain, he was taken to the police station, where he was not treated by doctors until he submitted to an interrogation. He said he was asked: Who organized this? Who informed you?

"Before, I thought police would protect people. Now, I am terrified of them," he said.

Researcher Zhang Jie contributed to this report.