Post by Peter TerpstraTibet : More than 1,000 Tibetans detained in Driru
Chinese authorities have detained more than 1,000 residents of a restive
Tibetan county since March, targeting mainly educated youth involved in
promoting the revival of Tibetan language and culture.The crackdown
followed the deployment of large numbers of security forces to Driru
county in the Nagchu prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region in March
following area demonstrations.After the deployment of Chinese forces in
the area, over a thousand Tibetans were either detained or put in jail,
or disappeared.Younger, educated Tibetans and the children of wealthier
Tibetan families were especially targeted for detention.
Tibetans in Driru have been in the forefront of opposition to Chinese
rule in the TAR, with monks and nuns protesting and abandoning
monasteries in order to defy Chinese regulations.
Some were detained for only a few hours, some were held for days. Many
were jailed, and many others have simply disappeared.
http://www.dossiertibet.it/node/11594
Give them a drink of hemlock. If it's good enough for Socrates, it's
good enough for the Tibetans.
rst0/rst9, isn't that your opinion as a cheerleader of Beijing's
imperialism in Tibet?
If you were speaking a a Chinese American owing loyalty to democratic
USA, you would have commiserated with the Tibetans.
Your callousness and contempt toward Tibetans is the expected
response from the imperialists in charge of Beijing's bandit regime.
The imperialists in Beijing and their running dogs like the 74-year
old Chinese American rst0 who lives in Merced, CA revel in the idea of
torturing and eliminating Tibetan "trouble makers". They want Tibet's
land and natural resources but not the people.
rst0/rst9, open your eyes and open up your heart. Even the Taiwanese
can sympathize with the aspirations of occupied Tibet:
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http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2012/07/23/2003538442
Taipei Times
July 23, 2012
PRC steps up repression of Tibetan ‘separatism’
AFP
China’s propaganda chief has ordered officials to intensify the fight
against separatism in Tibet, a report said yesterday, following a
series of self-immolations in protest at Beijing’s rule.
Li Changchun (李長春), ranked fifth in the hierarchy of the Chinese
Communist Party, called for the campaign during an inspection tour of
Lhasa, where he visited the Jokhang Temple, the center of Tibetan
Buddhism, the People’s Daily reported.
“The lifeblood of Tibet rests in ethnic unity, social harmony and
stability,” the paper quoted Li as saying during his visit to the
Himalayan region last week.
“We must guide officials and the people to continually strengthen
their understanding of the great [Chinese] motherland and people and
deepen and expand the fight against separatism,” he said.
Li, China’s top propaganda official, also urged an education campaign
to “underscore the historic fact that Tibet is an inseparable part of
China,” and which should form “the ideological basis for the fight
against separatism and the maintenance of stability.”
During his trip, Li also visited the Potala Palace, once home to the
Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism’s highest spiritual leader, who fled
after a failed uprising in 1959.
Li’s comments come after a teenage Tibetan Buddhist monk self-
immolated in a Tibetan region of southwest China last week, the 42nd
Tibetan to set fire to themselves in recent months.
The 18-year old monk, identified as Lobsang Lozin, set himself alight
in Bharkham County in Sichuan Province, which borders Tibet, as he
marched towards a government office, the India-based Central Tibetan
Administration said in a statement.
The monk died on the spot, the statement said.
Tibetans have long chafed under China’s rule over the vast Himalayan
plateau, saying that Beijing has curbed religious freedoms and their
culture is being eroded by an influx of Han Chinese, the country’s
main ethnic group.
Beijing, however, says Tibetans enjoy religious freedom and have
benefited from improved living standards brought on by China’s
economic expansion.
On May 27 two men set themselves on fire in front of the Jokhang
Temple, the renowned center for Buddhist pilgrimage, in the first such
incident to occur in Lhasa.
Lhasa was the scene of violent anti-Chinese government protests in
2008, which later spread to other areas inhabited by Tibetans and
authorities have kept the city under tight security ever since.
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http://gwynnedyer.com/2009/china-trouble-in-the-colonies/
4 July 2009
China: Trouble in the Colonies
By Gwynne Dyer
“The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There’s no point
in interpreting this otherwise,” said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep
Tayyib Erdogan last Friday. He was talking about the deaths of at
least 184 people in the recent street violence in Xinjiang, the huge
province that occupies the north-western corner of China.
A majority of Xinjiang’s people are Uighurs who are Muslims and speak
a language closely related to Turkish, so Erdogan’s comments were
bound to appeal to his audience in Turkey. The Chinese government,
predictably, condemned his charges as “irresponsible and groundless.”
The Chinese government was right – but also terribly wrong.
It wasn’t a genocide. The deaths of 184 people, for whatever reason,
do not constitute a genocide. Erdogan was claiming that there had been
a genocide against the Uighurs, but three-quarters of the people
killed in the riots were Han Chinese.“Genocide” is a word that should
only be used very precisely, and Erdogan owes Beijing an apology.
Even if the Chinese authorities exaggerated the number of Han dead and
understated the Uighur death-toll, as Uighur nationalists abroad
claim, there is no doubt that this violence started as an Uighur
attack on Chinese immigrants. However, Beijing owes the Uighurs more
than just an apology, for it is Chinese policy that drove them to such
desperate measures.
The Chinese authorities genuinely believe that the development they
have brought to Xinjiang has been for the Uighurs’ own good, even if
it has also brought huge numbers of Han Chinese immigrants to the
province. But they are certainly not distressed to see this sensitive
frontier province that was 90 percent Uighur and Muslim sixty years
ago become a place where a majority of the residents are instinctively
loyal Han Chinese.
More importantly, they lack the cultural imagination to see that this
process will be profoundly a lienating for the Uighurs. It may sound
preposterous, but most of the men who rule China simply could not come
up with an answer to the question: “Why don’t they want to be
Chinese?” So if there are anti-Chinese riots in Xinjiang, it must be
“outside agitators stirring up our Uighurs.”
That is how Beijing explained the riots to itself and to the nation.
As Xinjiang’s Communist governor, Nur Bekri, said in a televised
address, exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer “had phone conversations
with people in China on 5 July in order to incite [the violence].”
Beijing explained the even bloodier anti-Chinese riots in Tibet in
March of last year in exactly the same way, except that that time the
outside agitator was the Dalai Lama.
What’s more, most Chinese believe it. They have been schooled to
believe that Xinjiang and Tibet have been an integral part of their
country since time immemorial. They also believe the Uighurs and
Tibetans who live in those places are (or should be) profoundly
grateful for the development and prosperity that have come to their
provinces as a result of their membership in the Chinese nation.
The gulf of incomprehension is so vast that it is reminiscent of the
gap between the Russian and non-Russian inhabitants of the former
Russian empire before the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991.
Almost all Ru ssians believed that the non-Russians were (or should
be) grateful for all that had been done for them, and even resented
the fact that they got more investment per capita than the Russians
themselves. As for the non-Russians, they took their independence as
soon as they could.
The truth is that the Chinese empire first took effective control of
Tibet and Xinjiang in the same period when the Russian empire was
conquering the other Central Asian countries. Whatever vague claims to
“suzerainty” Beijing can dredge up from the more distant past, they do
not convince the Uighurs and the Tibetans themselves, who would cut
loose from China instantly if they got the chance.
; It’s called decolonisation, and China is the last hold-out. The only
way it can ensure a different final outcome to that of the other
empires is to swamp the local people with Han Chinese immigrants – and
that, oddly enough, is the principal result of its “development”
policies. The development creates an economy that the local people are
not qualified to work in, and Chinese immigrants come in to fill those
jobs instead.
The Tibetan Automous Region still has a large Tibetan majority, but in
Xinjiang the Uighurs are already down to 45 percent of the population,
while the Han Chinese are up to 40 percent. The Uighurs feel that
their country is disappearing in front of their eyes, and they are
right.
So they attack innocent Chinese immigrants, which is shameful but all
too understandable. Chinese mobs attack them back, which is equally
shameful and equally understandable.
It is already ugly, and it’s probably going to get a good deal uglier.
The repression needed to hold down Xinjiang and Tibet may lead to
increased repression in China in general, and it will almost certainly
lead to more violence in the colonies.
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http://www.economist.com/node/21560618 ;
Economist
August 18, 2012
Tweets from the plateau
A Tibetan blogger dares to challenge the party line
IN A recent posting on her blog, Tsering Woeser accused the
authorities in Lhasa of carrying out racial segregation, welcoming Han
Chinese visitors to the Tibetan capital but not Tibetans. “Has the
world forgotten its boycott of governments that practised apartheid?”
she fumed. As a chronicler of repression in Tibet, Ms Woeser has long
been China’s most daring voice online, and a very rare one.
Ms Woeser’s dogged determination, despite close surveillance by
security agents in Beijing where she lives with her (Han Chinese)
husband, has kept open a rare window on conditions in Tibetan-
inhabited areas. These have been largely off-limits to foreign
journalists since riots in Lhasa in 2008. The 46-year-old writer
scours the social media for titbits of news from the plateau, passing
them on through her blog, “Invisible Tibet”, or on Twitter. Her
postings are in Chinese, which has helped to raise awareness among non-
Tibetans.
Both Twitter and her blog are blocked by China’s censors, but Ms
Woeser bypasses the controls with firewall-leaping software. She has
posted many updates to her nearly 30,000 Twitter followers about a
spate of self-immolations by protesting Tibetans, including the two
latest which reportedly occurred on August 13th in the town of Aba in
Sichuan. More than 50 Tibetans have been killed or injured by self-
immolation since February 2009.
The police often contact Ms Woeser to make their displeasure known. At
politically sensitive times, she and her husband, Wang Lixiong,
himself a Tibetologist and outspoken dissident, are sometimes kept
under virtual house arrest. Yet Ms Woeser, who worked for a state-
owned publication in Lhasa before falling foul of the authorities in
2004 because of her politically edgy writings, is undeterred. She also
uses China’s home-grown version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, to post
messages under a pseudonym. Several times, Ms Woeser says, censors
have shut down her accounts.
Growing numbers of Tibetans are using Chinese microblogs, or weibo,
writing in both Chinese and Tibetan. Ms Woeser says that on the Dalai
Lama’s 77th birthday on July 6th, many posted congratulatory messages
on weibo. Censors quickly deleted them, but the no-less vigilant Ms
Woeser passed on several through her blog. She believes the censors
employ ethnic Tibetans to help them.
Phoenix Weekly, a Hong Kong magazine, reported in June that China
Tibet Online, a government portal, had given up plans to host Tibetan-
language blogs because of the difficulty of censoring postings. It
said efforts to develop the sophisticated software needed to sniff out
sensitive content in Chinese were being hampered by a lack of proper
vocabulary databases in Tibetan and other ethnic-minority languages.
But it added that the police were testing an internet monitoring
system they think will help them.
Officials believe there are threats aplenty. A recent paper by
academics and a police official in the north-western city of Lanzhou
said the number of Tibetan internet users was growing “exponentially”,
adding that this could provide a conduit for “harmful information”.
Ironically, a Chinese state-owned company could be helping the
information flow. According to China Daily, a Beijing-based newspaper,
China Telecom launched the first Tibetan-language smartphone in June.
This, it said, had received an “enthusiastic reception”, with some 700
sold so far.
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