A Glimpse of the World: March 2008 Archives

Seven Questions: What Tibetans Want

March 31, 2008 11:20 PM

The most vigorous Tibetan protests in decades have been crushed by Chinese soldiers and police. Tibet expert Robert Barnett explains why the most significant action is taking place outside Lhasa and what we can expect the Chinese to do next.

Foreign Policy: What does the average Tibetan want? Is it independence, or a greater share of Tibet’s modernization and economic growth, which has been dominated by Han Chinese?

Robert Barnett: Not really either of those things. We have to be very careful not to confuse exile politics, which is a demand for anti-China this and anti-China that, with internal politics, which is much more pragmatic, complex, and sophisticated.

A very important sector of Tibetans have become very wealthy because China has poured money into creating a middle class in Tibetan towns, though there hasn’t really been a dividend for the countryside and the underclass. So, we can’t explain this as just economic modernization. We could explain the violence against the [Han] Chinese in that way. It could have to do with that. But the violence is present in just one demonstration out of 50 in the past two weeks.

These protests are really about two things: A huge sector of the rural population has said, “Tibet was independent in the past. We reassert that belief. That doesn’t mean we demand that it be independent again, but we are reinserting that into the discussion.” And, “The Dalai Lama represents our interests.” I suppose a possible third thing is, “We are certainly not happy with Chinese President Hu Jintao.” This is a huge political statement that nobody anticipated.

FP: We’re primarily seeing photos of protests in Lhasa and the protests abroad. But you suggest the real significance is the groundswell of protests in the countryside?

RB: It’s not a groundswell; it’s a tidal wave. It’s the biggest thing to happen in Tibetan history for 40 years. In Lhasa, you get a protest as we [normally] recognize one. But that’s not really significant for China except in a PR way. They deal with those things with security operations; they crack down and put people away. This has nothing to do with the significance of what’s happening. The most significant of the 50 protests are the rural peasants taking over the countryside. These are people who get on horseback or march down to the local government office or police post, burn it to the ground, and raise the Tibetan flag. You can be shot on sight for having a Tibetan flag in Tibet in a non-Olympics year. Nothing like this has been seen in Tibet for decades, and it has untold political significance for China.

FP: Will the protests just fade away, or will they grow and spread?

RB: They’ll definitely fade away because the [Chinese] force level is just so high, and anyway [the Tibetans’] point has been made. We [in the West] think that people do politics by saying, “I’m going to stage this protest in order to get X.” But nobody gets X in China. It just doesn’t work like that. You’re dealing with one of the biggest power systems in the world. Instead, burn a government building, put a flag up, and then you’ve achieved this huge victory because China has created a symbolic form of politics in which everyone is supposed to have forgotten that they were independent once. So, just by doing that, you have completely changed the political equation.

FP: Is there any kind of generation gap in the exile community wherein older exiles are more dovish and the younger exiles want to confront China?

RB: There is certainly a growing group, generally young and English- or Hindi-speaking, who are very strongly animated by the idea that diplomacy doesn’t work—and will never work—in China, and instead you must go for independence. In this case, independence stands for a criticism that China can’t be trusted and an implication that a spiritual figure like the Dalai Lama can’t be tough enough. But it’s quite complicated. These people feel they are adding muscle because they are doing what he can’t as a monk and spiritual figure. But even they do not generally question his standing, and they certainly see him as the solution. Inside Tibet, nobody is questioning his standing or his potential to be key to the solution. If George Bush had 1 percent of the support this man has, George Bush would be a happy man. You cannot beat him for polling figures.

FP: Is there any chance that the Chinese recognize that mandate and sit down with the Dalai Lama in the near future?

RB: It certainly is a possibility. But this is the problem: The Dalai Lama’s mandate and most of what he’s been saying is now visibly reinforced many times over by these events. It gets more difficult for the Chinese to sit down at the table with him. Hu Jintao could talk to the Dalai Lama, and he would get enormous dividends internationally in the short term if he did. But he’s thinking about what might come back and bite him. The Chinese understand history. They’re not unreasonable in recognizing that nationalism is no longer a tameable force. You can’t assume that your own political mandate will never be challenged, so you have to constantly go back to the people and say, “We’re listening to your grievances.”

FP: Will India find it harder to tolerate the Tibetan government in exile?

RB: India is clearly moving in the direction of distancing itself from the exiles. Some people think it’s preparing for the death of the Dalai Lama, and then it will distance itself even more. There were indications of a sea change after the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in America last October. The Indians issued an order, presumably under pressure from China, that their cabinet ministers were not allowed to meet him or receive him upon his return. This was seen as very unusual. I don’t want to suggest some major realignment, but the indications are very much that India is maintaining ambiguity but showing that it largely wants to engage with China. That said, it hasn’t taken any irreversible steps yet in terms of the Tibetans.

FP: What is absent from press coverage of Tibet that you think people need to keep in mind?

RB: We have to put aside these questions that fascinate some people, such as, “Is the Dalai Lama losing his power?” That’s the opposite of the issue here. The exile complaints are not about power. And we have to put aside suggestions that the protests in Tibet are because people are unhappy about economic loss. That really is reductive. And I think we have to get over any suggestion that the Chinese are ill-intentioned or trying to wipe out Tibet. It’s obviously horrible that people are being savagely beaten up and killed. But crucially, this is a historic change in the profile of Tibetan politics. We’re looking at something much larger than any immediate anxiety about Olympics, or whether somebody planned one of these things, or whether people are upset about economic disadvantage. Historians are going to tell us that we missed the big picture if we didn’t notice that this is the big story here. All the party cadres are going to be sent to the countryside areas to listen to the Tibetans’ complaints and find out what has gone so wrong with the policy machine in China.

Robert Barnett is director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University and author most recently of Lhasa: Streets with Memories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

I know your head is spinning. The world can feel like one of those split-screen TVs with images of a suicide bombing in Baghdad flashing, and the latest awful market news coursing along the bottom, and an ad for some stool-loosening wonder drug squeezed into a corner.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

There’s a lot of noise and not much signal. Everywhere there is flux and the reaction to it: the quest, sometimes violent, for national or religious identity. These alternate faces of globalization — fluidity and tribalism — define our frontier-dissolving world.

But in all the movement back and forth, basic things shift. The world exists in what Paul Saffo, a forecaster at Stanford University, calls “punctuated equilibrium.” Every now and again, an ice cap the size of Rhode Island breaks off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

I’d been thinking about this at Dubai airport in the middle of the night, as the latest news came in from the United States of the bloody end to the mother of all spending binges. I was watching the newly affluent from other parts of the world — Asians and Arabs principally — spend their way through the early-morning hours.

The West’s moment, I thought, is passing. Money and might are increasingly elsewhere. America’s little dose of socialism from Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson might stave off the worst but cannot halt the trend.

Then I arrived in Hong Kong. The talk was all about how U.S. economic woes could impact Chinese growth. Might it tumble to 8 from over 11 percent? And what of India, powering along with growth of a mere 8 percent or so?

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Baton Passes to Asia

March 31, 2008 2:36 PM

It’s the end of the era of the white man.

The jumble makes no sense. It just goes on, like the mindless clacking of an ice-dispenser.

On the globalized treadmill, you drop your eyes again from the screen (now showing ads for gourmet canine cuisine) to the New Yorker or Asahi Shimbun. And another bomb goes off.

The breaking sound right now is that of the end of the era of the white man.

Click to read more

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

The Writer and the World

March 31, 2008 1:19 PM

Naipaul treats the world to his very special acid bath.

“I travel to discover other states of mind. An if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.

It is a writer’s curiosity rather than an ethnographer’s or a journalist’s. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don’t force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. The kind of understanding I am looking for comes best through people I get to like….”

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

The Writer and the World

March 31, 2008 1:19 PM

Naipaul treats the world to his very special acid bath.

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

Goin’ Down Slow - Chess Blues: 1960-1967

March 31, 2008 12:16 AM

Sheer genius from master.

Man, you know I done enjoyed things that Kings and Queens will never have; in fact Kings and Queen ‘caint never get. And they don’t even know about. And good times, mmmmm.
I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. Ohhh, my health is fading on me. Oh yes, I’m going down slow…
… Please write my mother. Tell her the shape I’m in. Tell her to pray for me. Forgive me for my sins.

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‘Killing Fields’ Survivor Dith Pran Dies

March 31, 2008 12:11 AM

A good friend and true colleague has passed.

Dith Pran, 65, a journalist and human rights advocate who became a public face of the horrors in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime and whose life was portrayed in the influential movie “The Killing Fields,” died today at a New Jersey hospital. He had pancreatic cancer.

For much of the early 1970s, Dith Pran was a resourceful guide and interpreter in Cambodia for Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times, whose reporting on the country’s civil war and rise of the Khmer Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize.

“Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg told the Associated Press when announcing his death. “When cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made my brother so special.”

Schanberg’s partnership with Dith Pran became the basis for the film “The Killing Fields” (1984), which conveyed in personal terms the brutality of the Khmer Rouge under despot Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during those years.

“The Killing Fields” had a major impact on public opinion, said Ben Kiernan, who directs Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. “A mass audience saw the story of what happened in a way that had never been done before, a dramatic and accurate depiction of a horrifying experience for millions of people,” he said.

“Pran was one of the major figures in the United States in bringing the issue of justice for Cambodian genocide to public attention, and in pushing the U.S. government to support the accountability of the Khmer Rouge,” Kiernan said.

In speeches and lectures, Dith Pran gave vivid and compelling accounts of the genocide, including the death of 50 members of his family. During a famine, he said he was nearly beaten to death for stealing more than the daily ration of a spoonful of rice. He was told one of his brothers, who served in the Cambodian army, was thrown to crocodiles by the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge, which followed a radical communist path of social engineering, tried to remake the country by killing anyone with political opinions or who seemed educated. Dith Pran spent four years disguising his middle-class background by dressing as a peasant and working in rice fields.

Of the killing fields, or mass graves in the countryside, he once told Schanberg, “In the water wells, the bodies were like soup bones in broth. And you could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried.”

Peter Cleveland, a foreign affairs expert working for then Sen. Charles Robb (D-Va.), said Dith Pran worked with other outside groups to help influence passage of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994.

The act, which Robb sponsored, created the State Department’s Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, which gathered evidence against Pol Pot and his deputies for crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot died in Thailand in 1998 without answering to an international tribunal. United Nations-backed trials began last year, after years of resistance from the Khmer Rouge’s supporters.

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The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq

March 28, 2008 5:00 PM

The echo of Japan’s colonial project in the 1930s resounds in the policies of today’s actual and aspiring global powers, says Jeffrey N Wasserstrom

27 - 03 - 2008

The Chinese government’s plans for the Olympic games did not include a revolt in Tibet. The immediate aftermath of the widespread demonstrations and riots in Tibetan-inhabited areas in mid-March 2008 - from Lhasa in the Tibetan Autonomous Region to Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan provinces to the east - has seen intense efforts by the authorities to restore control and manage access to information. The disruption by monks at the Jokhang temple in Lhasa of a choreographed visit of foreign journalists on 27 March indicates that the strategy is not working.

Beijing’s worried officials will do their best to defuse the potential of these unfolding events to subvert their larger understanding of what the event in their city on 8-24 August means for China. It is notable in this respect that China has avoided stressing the precedent of the Olympic games in Tokyo in 1964, and has at best only suggested in passing that there might be a parallel in the impact of the respective events on the countries’ global profile.

In principle, one attractive way for the Beijing authorities to think about the 2008 Olympics is that they will come to be seen as comparable to 1964. The Tokyo games - and the Osaka world Expo that followed in 1970 - globally promoted a vision of a Japan that had bounced back from a period of extremism and defeat to become a stable country with modern cities and forward-looking aspirations. These two high-profile international gatherings also symbolised the concurrent processes of economic development that would see Japan’s own rise to its current status as the world’s second biggest economy.

China’s leaders might consider the Tokyo 1964/Beijing 2008 analogy at least privately compelling on several levels - even if their suspicion of a historic adversary (and present competitor) might make them reluctant to voice this senti-ment too openly. China too has been climbing rapidly in the global economic hierarchy and wants to move still higher. It is preparing to follow its hosting of the Olympics with its own Expo - set to start in Shanghai on 1 May 2010, the country’s first-ever world fair. Its own modern history has seen moments of destructive extremism (the “great leap for-ward” and resulting famine, for example) and moments of defeat (including the foreign occupation of Beijing in 1900 and Japanese invasions of the 1930s) that it has good reason to want to put far behind it.

The Manchukuo lens

At the same time, a very different analogy can be drawn between China in 2008 and Japan at another moment in its past (as Howard W French points out, in one of the most thoughtful and historically minded commentaries on the current crisis in Tibet; see “Beijing’s claims of an ‘unwavering stand’ in support of Tibet are groundless”, International Herald Tribune, 20 March 2008). This alternative line of argument, however, would be much less palatable to the Chinese regime than the 1964/2008 one. Why? Because the other era in Japanese history that has lessons for China today is the 1930s - a decade that is remembered in China as one when Tokyo acted in despicably aggressive ways towards it.

Howard W French’s background as an experienced reporter of Africa, a continent that has been ravaged by many forms of imperialism, may inform his emphasis on a time when Japan was an imperial rather than a post-imperial power to highlight the colonialist aspects of Chinese policy in Tibet; in so doing, he evades the common trap in commentary on Tibet that Pankaj Mishra identifies in another insightful article - namely that of viewing any confrontation between the Chinese leadership and those challenging its policies through a distorting cold-war lens (see “At war with the utopia of modernity”, Guardian, 22 March 2008).

For both these authors, the place to start in unravelling the Tibetan crisis is not with communist ideology or Leninist state structures, but rather by appreciating what often happens when any power justifies its control by saying that it is bestowing modernity on a backward people - a view of the Tibetans held by many everyday Chinese as well as their rulers.

Beijing insistently claims to be delivering the benefits of progress and modernity to Tibetans. The recurrent problem it faces is that (in French’s words) “few indigenous people want progress ‘given’ to them”. This is not only because “they don’t see themselves as inferior, as such patronage would require”, but also because “they know of the many strings attached and of the slippery road to losing one’s soul.”

More specifically, French points out that the “Chinese, of all people, should understand” the outrage that colonial pro-jects of this sort can engender. After all, they were “offered the ‘gift’ of modernization by Imperial Japan under its erstwhile Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”. There are even, he points out, “eerie echoes of Japan’s Manchukuo with its bogus Emperor Puyi in China’s attempts to pick religious leaders on Tibetan’s behalf.”

The Chinese regime’s official Xinhua news agency seemed to confirm the thrust of this argument by issuing a statement on 22 March that, inadvertently, buttressed the Manchukuo parallel. The piece - entitled “China Garners Broad Interna-tional Support Over Tibet Riots” - provides a list of countries that had issued official declarations expressing solidarity with Beijing over its handling of Tibet; they ranged from nearby lands such as North Korea and Kyrgyzstan to distant ones such as Syria and Serbia.

The list is reminiscent of the ones that the Japanese authorities and the rulers of Manchukuo circulated in the 1930s when trying to convince local and international populations that the newly formed state was widely viewed as legitimate. To distract attention from all of the statements by world leaders dismissing Puyi as a puppet of Japan, those 1930s pronouncements trotted out a list of eleven countries - Poland, El Salvador, Romania, Spain, among them - that recognised him as a legitimate ruler (on the larger Manchukuo background, see Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern [Rowman & Littlefield, 2003]).

But lest anyone jump to the conclusion that there is something distinctively “east Asian” about this particular ploy, it is worth remembering what George W Bush and Tony Blair did in 2003: namely, use smoke-and-mirrors talk of a broad “coalition of the willing” to encourage people to overlook the lack of United Nations support for the invasion of Iraq. It is interesting too to see how far the set of countries that lined up behind Washington in 2003 had in common with that which once viewed Puyi as a true ruler rather than just a puppet. The above-mentioned four states - Poland, El Salvador, Romania and Spain - were all there again, for example, notwithstanding the great discontinuities in their own political development across the decades.

Brothers in arms

George W Bush has belatedly expressed concern over events in Tibet in a lengthy phone conversation on 26 March with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. If the discussion between the two presidents is extended, one relevant topic would be the troublesome nature of historical analogies involving 1930s Japan in relation to another contemporary issue, Iraq.
Here, it was post-war Japan that was again supposed to be the key reference-point (in this case for the United States). The influential neo-conservatives who provided the Iraq adventure with ideological varnish built upon the strained but prevalent comparison of 9/11 to Pearl Harbour by arguing that the American occupation of Japan, by leading to the emergence of a grateful democratic ally to the US, provided a preview of what would happen after Saddam Hussein fell.

It is not just retrospect that undermines this perspective - for anyone who really knew their history would not have ex-pected events on the ground to develop in this way. John Dower, the leading American historian of mid-century US-Japanese interaction, expressed such a view in various periodicals just before and during the early stages of the invasion, highlighting a host of specific ways in which the situation in Iraq differed from that in post-war Japan (see, for example, “A warning from history”, Boston Review [February/March 2003]).

But Dower went a step further, arguing that the best Japanese parallels for contemporary US policy and rhetoric lay in how much Bush and company seemed to have in common with the militarists who led Japan in the 1930s. As he wrote in mid-2003 in an online publication linked to the Nation: “Regime change, nation-building, creation of client states, control of strategic resources, defiance of international criticism, mobilization for ‘total war,’ clash-of-civilizations rhetoric, winning hearts and minds, combating terror at home as well as abroad - all these were part and parcel of Japan’s vainglorious attempt to create a new order of ‘co-existence and co-prosperity’ in Asia” (see “The other Japanese occupation”, TomDispatch.com, 20 June 2003).

When Bush and Hu meet in Beijing in August, the subject-matter of their conversation is more likely to be a new record in the high-jump or pole-vault than about Pu Yi’s similarities to the Panchen Lama; which country heads the medals-table than parallels between American actions in Iraq and Japan’s in Manchukuo.
That is a pity, since a modicum of historical self-awareness - perhaps especially among the powerful - is one of the best defences against political misjudgment.

But even if the exchange between the leaders of an actual and an aspiring global power remains focused only on current affairs, they may find some common ground. Each man, thinking of a different quagmire, could commiserate with the other about how vexing it can be when people you “liberate” aren’t properly grateful for what you’ve done for them.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the_perils_of_forced_modernity_china_tibet_america_iraq

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Weeping monks’ cry for freedom gives the lie to peace in Lhasa

March 28, 2008 4:13 PM

Lhasa
Mar 28, 2008

Weeping and shouting, Tibetan monks interrupted a government tour of Lhasa for foreign media yesterday - showing grievances persist in the Tibetan capital despite the apparent restoration of calm following the worst unrest there in nearly 20 years.

The journalists, the first from Hong Kong and overseas media allowed to visit Tibet since reporters were barred last week, had been scheduled to meet victims of the riots and see some of the damage to property, apparently to show how bad the Tibetans’ protests had been.

But government officials bowed to the journalists’ repeated requests to visit the Jokhang Monastery, one of the most important centres of religious life in the Buddhist region.

A temple official, Ngawang Choedra, began the tour by briefing journalists on the history of the monastery and repeated the official line about the riots, then went on to show reporters around one of the monastery’s sanctuaries.

Suddenly, a group of about 30 young monks in red robes rushed to the door of the sanctuary and began shouting in Tibetan. Some wept. After about five minutes they were able to contain their emotions enough to switch to Putonghua and tell of their grievances.

Authorities say 19 people were killed in the city, most burned to death when rioters set fire to shops owned by Han Chinese migrants on March 14 and 15.

The Tibetan government-in-exile headed by the Dalai Lama claimed this week it had confirmed 135 deaths in Tibet.

The young monks said 117 of their number had been locked in their dormitories since March 10, but that authorities had accused them of involvement in the March 14 riots.

“We did not go out since March 10 so how could we get involved in the smashing, beating and looting?” said one tearful monk, who requested not to be named for fear of reprisals.

Another young monk with a picture of the Dalai Lama around his neck, said: “The monastery has been locked. It is the first time that people could enter. We don’t have freedom.”

Asked what they were fighting for, several shouted: “Freedom.”

They said about 400 monks had been detained by the government and 1,000 Tibetans arrested. The monks demanded the detainees’ release.

Their figures were countered by Pelma Chiley, vice-chairman of the Tibetan government. He said the government had detained 414 people, but would not say how many of them were monks. Thirty had been charged with crimes so far.

The young monks said they wanted the authorities to talk to the Dalai Lama but denied their actions were incited by the exiled spiritual leader.

“We are in our twenties and we have not seen the Dalai Lama in our lives. How can they say the Dalai Lama has been telling us what to do?”

They added: “We want peace for Tibet.”

The central government has accused the “Dalai clique” of masterminding the disturbances, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the uprising in Tibet in 1959 which led the spiritual leader to flee into exile in India.

Asked what made the rioters so angry, the monks said: “The Tibetans are not happy.” Some shouted: “We want the Dalai Lama to come back.”

Pelma Chiley confirmed that monks from the Sera, Ganden and Drepung monasteries had been detained to “help the police collect evidence about the riots” since “a handful of unlawful monks have taken part in the riots”.

Dorji Tsedrup, Lhasa’s mayor, said the monks were emotionally unstable and they might affect the stability of the city if released.

But he denied reports that electricity and food supplies to the monasteries had been cut off.

The Jokhang Monastery was sealed off by paramilitary officers in the afternoon, witnesses said.

The monks who took the risk to talk to reporters said they expected reprisals. Pelma Chiley was asked whether they would be punished.

“No government would do such things,” he replied.

http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a0a0/?vgnextoid=664e4688411f8110VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=China&s=News

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Rejecting dissent, China exposes its candor gap

March 28, 2008 1:25 AM

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
March 27, 2008

SHANGHAI: Over the past couple of weeks, two of the world’s biggest news stories were the outbreak of protests and riots in Tibetan areas of China and the repression that followed them, and the uproar over comments by the pastor of the American presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Two continents, two very different topics. What, pray tell, could possibly link them?

In the most immediate sense, the answer is that China’s response to the events in Tibet, in particular its ferocious denunciations of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, reminded me of one of the most distinguishing characteristics of my own country.

I don’t just mean the right to free speech. I refer to an American character not enshrined anywhere in law, but a vital trait nonetheless.

Although Americans may often take it for granted, at their best they enjoy a largeness of spirit that permits them to air their dirty laundry in public, not to shy from controversy, and to be able to visit and revisit even the most painful aspects of their past and to explore them in the light of day.

I refer to the intellectually refreshing sensation they can receive in seeing conventional wisdom formed on any given topic and then just as surely challenged. Finally, I refer to the right to be wrong, and the right even to make a fool of oneself in public.

The sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. and Obama’s response have involved all of these things, while the Chinese conversation about Tibet, carefully policed through censorship and through myriad other methods that China’s authoritarian government employs to enforce consensus has involved none of them.

In the United States, while political correctness may occasionally grate, in China, it is suffocating. Although the Dalai Lama has repeatedly renounced all claims of independence for his homeland, the Chinese press universally dismisses him as a “splittist,” scarcely bothering to report opposing views.

The Chinese press is similarly full of claims of Western media bias and distortion, a charge made straight-faced in a country that routinely blocks foreign media, strictly censors its own news, and has only allowed the media to cover street violence by Tibetans. The Chinese government has effectively banned coverage of the use of force by the authorities in clamping down not just on dissent in Lhasa, but on the largely peaceful protests by Tibetans that swept much of western China.

On the face of it, the Dalai Lama and Wright would seem to have precious little to do with each other. Scratch the surface just a bit, though, and a relationship emerges. Although the nature of their rhetoric is quite different, one serene and the other angry, each man is a member of a historically aggrieved minority group who has condemned the behavior of a powerful ethnic majority in his society.

The Dalai Lama has earned fevered denunciations as a “wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” from China’s state-controlled media for, among other things, warning of what he has called “cultural genocide” in Tibet.

Wright, a former marine, seems to have drawn the most ire for the phrase “Goddamn America,” for what he perceives as his country’s abuses of power around the world. In the clips of his sermons played endlessly on television these last two weeks, he has also spoken of the “U.S. of KKK A.,” an in-your-face and, to many, offensive critique of American racism.

Others were outraged by his characterization of the Sept. 11 attacks as “chickens coming home to roost,” although thoughts like these fit within a broader narrative of dissent, one animated by the likes of the late Susan Sontag, who provocatively asked shortly after the destruction of the World Trade Center: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world,’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?”

In hearing his words, though, I wondered what would happen to a Wright in China, were there to be someone with the temerity to publicly damn this country for, say, tens of millions of deaths in politically caused disasters, or wave after wave of political witch hunts, which destroyed countless lives in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, or the atrocities committed against Tibetans, or Uighurs or Mongolians in various drives to bring ethnic minorities under control?

The likely answer should give pause to those who are quick to take offense at speech that goes against the grain: He would be sent for re-education, like the monks in Lhasa today, or he would be locked up, never to be heard from again, and certainly not in the Chinese media.

Wright sustained self-inflicted wounds with statements about the U.S. government being the source of the AIDS epidemic and with offensive language about Hillary Clinton’s privileged life as a white person.

For much of the rest of what he has been exhaustively quoted as saying, though, Americans can actually feel proud. Not because they approve of his views on the use of American power or his calls for our damnation, but because the capacity for vigorous, even bruising discussion of our failings is a sign of health in a society and not cause for lamentation.

In some quarters, people obsess about China’s rise, focusing on its GDP figures or military spending, but there is a gap that shows no sign of closing and that is at least as fundamental as these: Call it the candor gap, and until Chinese society can learn to get over its seemingly allergic aversion to conflicting views, to the airing of controversy, and to unsparing exercises in truth-telling, it is hard to imagine this country truly fulfilling its potential.

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Growing Gulf Divides China and Dalai Lama

March 28, 2008 1:18 AM

SHANGHAI — Across much of the Western world, the Dalai Lama is known as the beatific spiritual leader of a humble community of Buddhists, beloved in Hollywood, Congress and the White House, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Chinese leaders cast him in a different light. They call him a separatist and a terrorist, bent on killing innocent Han Chinese and “splitting the motherland.” That gap in perception, which has grown immeasurably wider in the two weeks since violent unrest rocked Tibet, is breeding pessimism that Chinese leaders are willing — or perhaps even able — to embark on a new approach to Tibet even as it threatens to cast a long shadow over their role as hosts of the Olympic Games this summer.

President Hu Jintao, whose rise to leadership of China’s Communist Party was built partly on his record as party boss in Tibet during a period of unrest in 1989, has shown no signs of making a historic gambit for peace there.

Rather, he seems to be wagering that China can hunker down, keep a tight lid on Tibet through the Olympics and wait for the Dalai Lama, who is 72, to die, analysts say.

“I would obviously like for there to be a policy debate, but I see no suggestion of one,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese expert on Tibet and a signer of a recent petition by Chinese lawyers and scholars urging the government to resume discussions with the Dalai Lama. “There has been a big failure, but to see the government change its path or policy right before the Olympics isn’t likely.”

The inflexibility in Beijing’s position leaves Western countries with a problem. President Bush and a roster of European and Asian leaders have called for Mr. Hu to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama as a first step toward reducing tensions in Tibet. If Mr. Hu declines to do so, those leaders seem likely to face pressure from their own constituencies to take stronger diplomatic or political steps against Beijing at the moment it had expected to bask in the international limelight.

Already, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has suggested that he might consider using his presidency of the European Union this summer to organize a boycott of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. An embarrassing protest at the lighting ceremony of the Olympic torch in Greece, and the cries of monks in Lhasa who disrupted a scripted tour of the Tibetan capital for foreign reporters on Thursday, portend a steady drum roll of criticism of China.

The call for some kind of Chinese-Tibetan talks continues to mount. On Friday, the Dalai Lama, speaking in India, made his most extended comments on the violence, accusing China’s state-run media of trying to “sow the seeds of racial tension” there but calling for “meaningful dialogue” with Beijing about how to defuse tensions.

President Bush, speaking of the possibility that Mr. Hu might pursue diplomatic talks with Tibetan exiles, said “it’s in his country’s interest.” Standing by Mr. Bush’s side, Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new, Chinese-speaking prime minister, who was visiting Washington, said, “It’s absolutely clear that there are human rights abuses in Tibet.”

Mr. Hu told Mr. Bush during a phone call on Wednesday that he was willing to talk to the Dalai Lama, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency. But what was most striking about the exchange was the consistency of Beijing’s language on Tibet, which analysts say provides little reason to expect new initiatives.

Mr. Hu’s formulation, which has been used almost word for word since the time of Deng Xiaoping, in the 1980s and ’90s, was that China would resume contact with the Dalai Lama as long as he abandoned advocating Tibetan independence, stopped activities aimed at “splitting the motherland” and accepted that Tibet and Taiwan were inalienable parts of China.

The problem with Beijing’s line is that even when the Dalai Lama insists that he does not seek independence, as he and his representatives have repeatedly done, the Chinese government has merely repeated this trope, leaving little room for progress.

As it is, the Tibetan protests of the last two weeks seem to have taken Beijing by surprise, spreading quickly outside of the province officially known as the Tibetan Autonomous Region and into areas of neighboring provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers. The unrest has been the broadest in scale since sustained riots and a bloody crackdown in 1989.

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Africa without Africans: The Mecca of the Mouse

March 27, 2008 10:39 AM

The Imagineering Field Guide to Disney’s Animal Kingdom reveals that theimagineers deliberately left the parking lots out in front of this Disney-style zoo as bleak and barren as they could. A wasteland, with no strips of grass to interrupt the endless asphalt slab. They wanted to heighten the contrast we feel when entering into the lush, wooded Animal Kingdom park. The scheme “ensures that the immersion into nature … will be very impactful.”

My first thought upon reading this was: Screw you, imagineers! Parking lots suck enough as it is. You’re saying you made yours even more depressing than necessary, just so you could showcase some cutesy landscaping idea? Go imaginuck yourselves!

Once I’d gotten this indignation out of my system, my second thought was: Gosh, they sure do put a lot of thought into this stuff. Leafing through these behind-the-scenes books (I also have The Imagineering Field Guide to Epcot) brings to light, yet again, the insane attention to detail you find at every Disney property.

For instance, once you’ve made that transition from the parking lot, through the gates into the Animal Kingdom entrance area, the imagineers’ next goal is to carefully orchestrate your first glimpse of the massive Tree of Life. (It’s one of this park’s two wienies—the other being a replica Mount Everest.) Various inclines, berms, and hollows have been arranged so that you’re forced to ascend a small rise before suddenly stumbling onto a gorgeous, unimpeded view of the tree. (The tree itself is an impressive feat of engineering. And is, of course, totally fake.)

I’ve been curious to see how this obsessive nano-focus would be reconciled with the challenges of a zoo. Live animals seem decidedly un-Disney, as they can’t be compelled to perform a repeated, synchronized sequence. (Unlike an animatronic robot. Or a low-wage employee.) With the animals’ free will involved, it’s impossible to ensure that every guest will receive the same, focus-group-approved experience. This sort of thing makes the imagineers extremely uncomfortable.

Their response was to make the animals into a sideshow. In many cases, you don’t even get to watch the animals from a static viewing point, as you would at a regular zoo. Instead, there’s a “ride” with a silly narrative structure (about, for instance, chasing poachers), during which you get quick, oblique glimpses of the animals as you speed by. The true stars of Animal Kingdom aren’t the lions, apes, and elephants. The stars are the precision-crafted environments you walk through.

Here, come with me as we visit the delightful little village of Harambe. Harambe is the perfect East African port town of your mind’s eye. When you first come upon it, it’s hard not to feel you’ve been teleported to Kenya.

All the signs are in the right typeface. The buildings are lovingly dilapidated. The paint-color choices are perfect. (The imagineers say they took paint chip samples on research trips and did surface rubbings to get the building textures right.)

Having traveled to Africa myself, I can tell you that Harambe gets only two minor details wrong. The first is that Africa has many more flies than this. And the second is that Africa has black people.

Given the otherwise remarkable accuracy of Harambe’s set design, I’m sort of surprised that Disney didn’t manufacture 15,000 animatronic Africans. OK, so they did import a few actual, nonrobot Africans to work the snack stands. Jambo! But perhaps the bigger issue is: Where are the black tourists visiting the park? I’ve seen maybe two black families all day. As in the rest of Disney World, there are literally more French people here than African-Americans.

Another population dynamic I’ve noticed: the dearth of children at this supposed family destination. I’ve seen lots of adult couples with no kids in tow. Even when there’s a token toddler present, there are often six or seven grown-ups attached to it. I’m beginning to suspect it’s the adults who really want to be here, while the kids are just serving as fig leaves.

This theory is bolstered by a scene I witness while waiting in line for food. An elderly, gray-bearded gent is in front of me, trying to buy a soda, when all of a sudden he’s interrupted by his twentysomething daughter, who is scurrying toward us. “Daaaaaad! She’s not tall enough to go on the ride!” whines the woman, gesturing with a pout at the tiny girl clinging to her thigh. “So now I can’t go! And you wandered off!” The man says nothing. “Take her hand,” the woman demands. The poor old fellow is mortified by this behavior (and is in the middle of his beverage transaction, to boot). But he silently takes his granddaughter’s hand so his horrid daughter can go enjoy her fricking roller coaster.

Admittedly, Disney has some pretty great roller coasters. Toward the end of the day, I walk over to Anandapur (a fake Himalayan village, complete with Tibetan-style prayer flags) and board the Expedition Everest ride. I’m seated in a rickety rail car, which creaks up to the top of the 200-foot mountain before swooping, banking, and dropping at insane speeds. Everyone screams together. It’s a group outpouring of white-knuckle terror. When the ride’s over and I disembark, I find I’ve broken out in a light sweat. My dazed fellow riders look at each other in total awe: Can you believe what we just went through?

The same thing happens on the nearby Kali River Rapids ride. There are seven other people on my raft, and as we float down the rushing river, I can feel us starting to gel into a team. We shout warnings to each other when the white water rages ahead. (“Look out, here it comes!”) We catch each others’ eyes and can’t help but smile. The little girl sitting next to me cackles every time we get hit with a splash. She’s shouting, “I’m soaked!” with a big, adorable grin.

If I’ve found one redeeming feature of the Disney World experience, it’s the community spirit that’s fostered when strangers all join together for a primal shriek of fear—or joy.

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Backgrounder: Historical facts of Tibet

March 26, 2008 2:17 PM

BEIJING, March 25 (Xinhua) — China is a unified multi-ethnic country and Tibet is an inalienable part of China. The Tibetans cultivated a close relationship with Han and other ethnic groups from the Chinese interior since ancient times.

In the 7th century, this relationship reached its peak when Srong-btsan Sgam-po (Songtsan Gambo, the king of the Tubo kingdom who ruled the Tibetan Plateau at that time twice sent envoys to the Tang Dynasty emperor to propose to Princess Wen Cheng who he later married. The Tibetans and Hans had through the marriage of their royal families and various meetings, formed close economic and cultural relations laying the groundwork for the ultimate foundation of a unified nation.

After Tibet became part of the territory of China in the 13th century, the central governments of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and the Republic of China, while assuming the responsibility of approving the local administrative organs, and deciding and directly handling important affairs concerning Tibet, maintained, by and large, the region’s original local social setup and ruling body, widely appointed upper-strata ecclesiastic and secular members to manage local affairs, and gave the Tibetan local government and officials extensive decision-making power. This played a historically positive role in safeguarding the unification of the country, but as the feudal autocratic rulers in various periods exercised an ethnic policy marked by ethnic discrimination and oppression, keeping the original social system and maintaining the power of the local ruling class for their administration of Tibet, they did not solve, nor could they possibly solve, the issue of ethnic equality and that of enabling the local people to become masters of their own affairs.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, Tibet remained a society of feudal serfdom under theocracy, one even darker and more backward than medieval Europe. The ecclesiastical and secular serf owners, though accounting for less than five percent of the population of Tibet, controlled the personal freedom of the serfs and slaves who made up more than 95 percent of the population of Tibet, as well as the overwhelming majority of the means of production. By resorting to the rigidly stratified 13-Article Code and 16-Article Code, and extremely savage punishments, including gouging out eyes, cutting off ears, tongues, hands and feet, pulling out tendons, throwing people into rivers or off cliffs, they practiced cruel economic exploitation, political oppression and mental control of the serfs and slaves. The right to subsistence of the broad masses of serfs and slaves was not protected, let alone political rights.

After the Opium War of 1840, China was reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal country. Tibet, like other parts of China, suffered from the aggression of imperialist powers, which grabbed all kinds of special privileges by means of unequal treaties, subjected Tibet to colonial control and exploitation, and, at the same time, groomed separatists among the upper ruling strata of Tibet, in an attempt to sever Tibet from China. Therefore, the removal of the fetters of imperialism and feudal serfdom became a historically paramount task for safeguarding the unification of the country and realizing the development of Tibet.

The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 ended the dark history of the semi-colonial, semi-feudal China, realized unification of the country, unity of ethnic groups and people’s democracy, and brought hope to the Tibetan people that they could control their own destiny in the large family of the motherland.

Peaceful liberation laid the foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. On May 23, 1951, the “Agreement of the Central People’s Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” (“17-Article Agreement” for short) was signed, and Tibet was peacefully liberated. The peaceful liberation put an end to imperialist aggression against Tibet, enabled the Tibetan people to shake off political and economic fetters, safeguarded the unification of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, realized equality and unity between the Tibetan ethnic group and all other ethnic groups throughout the country as well as the internal unity of Tibet, and laid the foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.

In April 1956, the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region was established in Lhasa, with the 14th Dalai Lama as the chairman, the 10th Panchen Lama the first vice-chairman and Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme the secretary-general. The establishment of the Preparatory Committee enabled Tibet to have a consultative work organ with the nature of a political power, and vigorously promoted the realization of regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.

The Democratic Reform cleared the way for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. When Tibet was peacefully liberated, in consideration of the reality of Tibet, the “17-Article Agreement,” while confirming the necessity for reform of the Tibetan social system, provided that “The Central Government will not use coercion to implement such a reform, and it is to be carried out by the Tibetan local government on its own; when the people demand reform, the matter should be settled by way of consultation with the leading personnel of Tibet.” But in face of the ever-growing demand of the people for democratic reform, some people in the upper ruling strata of Tibet, in order to preserve feudal serfdom, and supported by imperialist forces, staged an armed rebellion all along the line on March 10, 1959, in an attempt to separate Tibet from China. On March 28 of the same year, the State Council announced the dismissal of the original local government of Tibet, and empowered the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region to exercise the functions and powers of the local government of Tibet, with the 10th Panchen Lama as its acting chairman. The Central People’s Government and the Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region led the Tibetan people in quickly quelling the rebellion, implemented the Democratic Reform, overthrew the feudal serfdom under theocracy, and abolished the feudal hierarchic system, the relations of personal dependence, and all savage punishments. As a result, a million serfs and slaves were emancipated, and became masters of the country as well as of the region of Tibet, acquired the citizens’ rights and freedom specified in the Constitution and law, and swept away the obstacles, in respect of social system, to the exercise of regional ethnic autonomy.

The establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region marked the full implementation of the regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet. After the Democratic Reform, the Tibetan people enjoyed all the political rights enjoyed by people of all other ethnic groups throughout China. In 1961, a general election, the first of its kind in Tibetan history, was held all over Tibet. For the first time, the former serfs and slaves were able to enjoy democratic rights as their own masters, and participated in the election of organs of state power at all levels in the region. In September 1965, the First Session of the First People’s Congress of the Tibet Autonomous Region was convened, at which the organ of self- government of the Tibet Autonomous Region and its leaders were elected, and the founding of the Tibet Autonomous Region was officially proclaimed.

The establishment of the Tibet Autonomous Region marked the establishment of the people’s democratic power in Tibet and the commencement of exercise of regional ethnic autonomy in an all-round way. From then on, the Tibetan people were entitled to enjoy the right to administer their own affairs in the region and, together with the people throughout the country, embarked on a socialist development road.

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Olympic Fallacies

March 25, 2008 4:18 PM

“We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations, and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this.” Thus spoke Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing it any concern. Coca-Cola, another Olympics sponsor, has stated that while it would be inappropriate “to comment on the political situation of individual nations,” the company firmly believes “that the Olympics are a force for good.” The chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, was also quick to declare that “a boycott doesn’t solve anything” — just as he was quick to dismiss the demonstrators who waved a black banner showing interlocked handcuffs, in mockery of the Olympic symbol, at yesterday’s lighting of the Olympic torch in Greece. “It is always sad to see such a ceremony disrupted,” he declared, rather pompously.

And no one was surprised: Companies that have invested millions in sponsorship deals and Olympic bureaucrats who have spent years trying to justify their controversial decision to award the 2008 Games to Beijing are naturally inclined to use those sorts of arguments. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to believe them.

Look a bit closer, in fact, and none of those statements holds up at all. “A boycott doesn’t solve anything.” Well, doesn’t it? Some boycotts do help solve some things. The boycott of South Africa by international competitions was probably the single most effective weapon the international community ever deployed against the apartheid state. (“They didn’t mind about the business sanctions,” a South African friend once told me, “but they minded — they really, really minded — about the cricket.”) The boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics helped undermine Soviet propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan and helped unify the Western world against it. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later was successful, too. Presumably, it was intended to solidify opposition among the Soviet elite toward the United States in the Reagan years, and presumably it helped.

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Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?

March 25, 2008 1:22 PM

March 31, 2008

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

As Pico Iyer writes in his new book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama” (Knopf; $24), it is easy to imagine that the Dalai Lama is “the plaything of movie stars and millionaires.” Certainly, like all those who stress the importance of love, compassion, gentle persuasion, and other unimpeachably good things, the Dalai Lama can appear a bit dull. Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room.”

His simple-Buddhist-monk persona invites skepticism, even scorn. “I have heard cynics who say he’s a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes,” Rupert Murdoch has said. Christopher Hitchens accuses the Dalai Lama of claiming to be a “hereditary king appointed by heaven itself” and of enforcing “one-man rule” in Dharamsala, the town in the Indian Himalayas that serves as a capital for the more than a hundred and fifty thousand Tibetans in exile. The Chinese government routinely denounces him as a “splittist,” who is plotting to return Tibet to the corrupt feudal and monastic rule from which Chinese Communists liberated it, in 1951. Many Tibetans in exile grumble that he is too attached to nonviolence, and too much in the grip of Western event coördinators, to prevent the Chinese from colonizing Tibet.

But the events of recent weeks are a reminder of the fervor he inspires among the six million ethnic Tibetans. It was a protest on the forty-ninth anniversary of his exile that led to the current civil unrest in Lhasa; the initial peaceful demonstrations met with a predictably harsh response from the Chinese authorities. As the prominent Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong acknowledges, “Virtually all Tibetans have the Dalai in their hearts.” And the more that their economic prospects and traditional culture are undermined by Han Chinese immigration, the more this long-distance reverence is likely to grow.

Iyer writes that “the heart and soul, quite literally, of the Dalai Lama’s life existed precisely in parts that most of us couldn’t see.” His arduous daily regimen begins at 3:30 A.M., after which he proceeds, as he told Iyer, to “meditation, prostration, reciting special mantras, then more meditation and more prostrations, followed by reading Tibetan philosophy or other texts; then reading and studying and, in the evening, ‘some meditation—evening meditation—for about an hour. Then, at eight-thirty, sleep.’ ”

This sounds like a lot of meditation and reading for a monk in his seventies—especially someone who, beginning at the age of six, underwent a gruelling education for nearly two decades in Buddhist metaphysics, Tibetan art and culture, logic, Sanskrit, and traditional medicine, and eventually secured a geshe degree (roughly equivalent to a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy). But Buddhist spiritual practice is relentlessly exacting. “Strive on diligently” were the Buddha’s last words, and even the Dalai Lama can’t presume to have reached a summit of wisdom and serenity. It is his fairy-tale childhood that exalts him above most mortals. Born in 1935 to a family of farmers in the outer reaches of the Tibetan cultural domain, he was a two-year-old toddler when a search party of monks from Lhasa identified him as the potential reincarnation of the recently deceased Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Rainbows arcing across the northeastern skies of Lhasa were among the colorful portents that alerted the monks to his presence. In 1939, the child was brought ceremonially from his mud-and-stone house to Lhasa, and given the run of the marvellously labyrinthine Potala Palace.

The Dalai Lama learned calligraphy by copying out his predecessor’s will—which, in its prophetic cast, is one of the spookiest documents in Tibetan history. It was written in 1932, when Tibet, after centuries of uneasy coexistence with its big neighbor in the East, enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. Mao Zedong’s Communists were still far from winning their civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Nevertheless, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama sensed that Tibet’s isolation would soon be shattered by “barbaric red Communists”:

Our spiritual and cultural traditions will be completely eradicated. Even the names of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas will be erased… . The Monasteries will be looted and destroyed, and the monks and nuns killed or chased away… . We will become like slaves to our conquerors … and the days and nights will pass slowly and with great suffering and terror.

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Holy Man: What does the Dalai Lama actually stand for?

March 25, 2008 1:22 PM

March 31, 2008

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No. 98 Mardy Fish upsets No. 1 Roger Federer in Indian Wells semifinal

March 23, 2008 10:21 AM

Federer’s loss, even more surprising because it was so lopsided, continued his frustration this season. The once invincible-seeming Swiss star has lost three times this year, beaten by Djokovic in the Australian Open semifinals and Andy Murray in the opening round at Dubai….

….Federer looked like just another player Saturday, with his backhand especially mediocre. He hit just one winner and had 13 unforced errors with his backhand against his American foe.

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Using jet lag as an excuse just wouldn’t fly

March 22, 2008 11:37 PM

March 22, 2008

TOKYO - I am here to tell you that this whole jet lag thing is overrated. I know Mike Mussina is still trying to recover from his 2004 trip to Japan with the Yankees, but most Red Sox players should be OK by the time they play the Hanshin Tigers at the Tokyo Dome this afternoon.
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That’s not the conventional wisdom, of course. We’re trained to think that jet lag is worse than childbirth and water boarding. Seasoned travelers, physicians, and the Players’ Association would have you believe that a 12-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo is equal to NFL two-a-days or 15 rounds with Floyd Mayweather. For those truly in need of an excuse, a long plane ride across the international dateline gives you plenty of ammo.

The Red Sox official handbook for this trip includes more than a page under the heading “Fighting Jet Lag.”

“Jet lag is a very real factor that all international travelers must deal with,” started the memo, which went on to suggest drinking plenty of water and avoiding coffee and alcohol. Sox team internist Dr. Larry Ronan also suggested the players avoiding sleeping on the plane to get their body clocks on Japan time.

“That went out the window for me in the middle of the flight when I saw Dr. Ronan snoring with the mask over his eyes and a glass of wine in front of him,” said manager Terry Francona. “I feel like [expletive] today, but I feel like [expletive] every day, so I’m fine. We’re fine.”

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What we talk about when we talk about love…

March 21, 2008 7:02 PM

I get my magazines late here in China and tend to let them pile up before reading them. I was completely floored by this issue of The New Yorker, which appeared in late December, and contained a lot of stuff about Raymond Carver and his troubling relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish. It also included the unedited version of one of his most famous stories: “What we talk about when we talk about love.”
Carver had called it “Beginners,” and the original is as powerful and elegant a piece of short fiction as you’re likely to encounter. I highly recommend people read it through the link below.

First, from the article about Carver and Lish:
In the years following the book’s publication, Carver seemed determined to keep Lish as a friend and “brother,” even as an editor, but he now set stricter editorial boundaries. There was a shift in power. Carver demanded his autonomy. “Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now,” he wrote in August, 1982, about his latest stories. “I can’t undergo the kind of surgical amputation and transplant that might make them someway fit into the carton so the lid will close.”

Carver’s next story collection, “Cathedral,” was published in 1983, and was an even greater success, winning praise again on the cover of the Times Book Review, this time from Irving Howe, who wrote that in Carver’s more expansive later work one saw “a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.” In an interview with The Paris Review that year, Carver made clear that he preferred the new expansiveness: “I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end––writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn’t want to read myself, and that’s the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a ‘minimalist’ writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn’t like it.”

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Beijing’s claims of an “unwavering stand” in support of Tibet are groundless

March 20, 2008 10:36 PM

XINING, China: Count the ways that China has sought to bring Tibet to heel since the People’s Liberation Army rolled into the country in 1950, brutally ending a phase of nominal independence.

It has tried decapitation. No, heads didn’t roll, but one of the heads of Tibetan Buddhism has disappeared. Here, I speak of Gendun Choekyi Nyima, a 6-year-old boy who was apprehended by Beijing after the Dalai Lama named him Panchen Lama, the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995. Nyima, ostensibly one of the world’s youngest political prisoners, has not been seen or heard from since.

It has tried cartographic dismemberment, gerrymandering western China to place heavily Tibetan areas under non-Tibetan jurisdictions. That is why when protests broke out in Lhasa last week, they were followed quickly by sympathetic demonstrations by Tibetans here in Qinghai Province, and in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan.

It has tried ethnic drowning, flooding Tibetans with officially encouraged westward migration of members of China’s Han majority, who may already outnumber Tibetans in Lhasa and control both the political administration and every meaningful sector of the economy.

It has attempted suffocation, as well: not literally smothering Tibetans, but rather rewriting the region’s history to take out every politically inconvenient or embarrassing fact. Such ambitious management of history is hard and never-ending work, which partially explains why Chinese news accounts of recent events have been so one-sided, and in the end, believable only to people who have been raised within the intellectual garden zealously roped off and tended by the Chinese state.

As I prepared to leave home for work Thursday, I overheard via the Internet an interview with China’s ambassador to Canada, Lu Shumin, who likened China’s use of heavily armed police and military forces to put down protests in Tibetan areas to the responses of the authorities in the United States and France when there are civil disturbances. “This is normal,” he said, striving for a reassuring line. Others have spoken of China’s “utmost restraint” and pledges to avoid lethal force.

What, then, was I to make of the pictures that greeted me in the foreign press that showed Tibetans gathered around the corpses of several of their brethren slain near a monastery in Sichuan Province the other day?

Many Tibetans think of Chinese as faithless, but the people who govern China believe firmly in one thing, the irresistible power of the state. Under Mao Zedong, under the guise of Marxism, this ideology was unleashed on man and on nature alike, the first of which Mao repeatedly sought to remake, and the second, to tame.

A war on religion soon followed in the 1960s, with marauding youths and troops smashing temples and burning relics all over China, but nowhere more fiercely than in Tibet, which suffered more than most places during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

But while most of China has succumbed to official teaching that religion is superstition, replacing spiritual pursuits with the quest for money and personal advancement, the events of the last week or so suggest strongly that in the Tibetan world, dialectical materialism has met its match in the Tibetan’s people’s attachment to their own culture, to their identity and to their beliefs.

Tibetan anger, and the willingness to die for a cause, is more than a routine minority grievance, such as one sometimes sees in civil disturbances in the West. It is about survival as a people with cultural and religious integrity in the face of state-sponsored migration and Chinese-style modernization.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao may have thought he addressed this in saying that China “not only has the ability to maintain stability in Tibet and normal social order, but also will continue to support Tibet’s economic and social development, to raise the life standards of all ethnic groups in Tibet, and to protect Tibetan culture, ecology and the environment. This is an unwavering stand.”

To Tibetans, it is a stand with no ground to support it. All along China’s northern periphery, once strong local cultures are being supplanted or just plain wiped out. Kerry Brown, in his book “Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century,” writes this about Inner Mongolia, which has already been largely homogenized:

“Dressing up in colorful clothes, dancing exaggerated dances, eating mutton and drinking white spirit are all O.K. But musing about just what the historical claims of the current Chinese state on Inner Mongolia are, or writing more trenchant articles in Chinese about the gradual annexation of the region are good ways to be rewarded with unwanted police attention and very probably lengthy prison sentences.”

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Posted at 10:36 PM · Comments (0)

Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey

March 20, 2008 7:19 PM

April 2008
Copyright Vanity Fair

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

The shop was hidden away in the shadow of a Confucian temple in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, China, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing, where Frank had come as an honored guest of a photography festival. The city is a photographic dream, a 2,700-year-old dollhouse of clay brick, camels, coal embers, and carved cornices. So many photographers had descended upon the place that a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a picture was considered interesting enough and yet nobody at the dead man’s table had so much as a sketching tablet.

Frank had not looked well even before the soup arrived. He was lumpy and disheveled, his eyes rheumy, the lids bloated. He carried the general form of a man who had been pummeled senseless with a feather pillow. His Dunkin’ Donuts cap had the flat, leathery texture of a dead cat on a highway. His shirt was misbuttoned, his shoes untied, his trousers—his trusted friend the trousers: he had not changed them in a while. They became such companions during his road trip to China—the old Beatnik and these new blue leggings—that I gave the trousers a name: Billy. Frank liked the name. It seemed unsentimental in some way. Frank liked things unsentimental.

Frank had arrived in this coal-choked outpost without a proper pair of pants. The cuffs were tattered on his other ones, ragged from being worn every day for three consecutive years. This would never do, as the titan of postwar film—the “Manet of the new photography,” the critic Janet Malcolm had called him—would be expected by the Chinese authorities to make speeches and grand statements about the world’s newest superpower and say something to encourage the awakening sensibilities of its artists. Robert Frank had consented to hang the photographs from his seminal book, The Americans, at the Pingyao International Photography Festival late last fall—only the second time the complete work has ever been displayed since the book was published 50 years ago.

And to mark the occasion, a junior Communist Party official was dispatched to purchase a pair of trousers for him: size-44 waist, 29 leg.

Frank is old now. At 83 he has reached that age when a man does not have to apologize for his cruelties, his eccentricities, or his grooming habits. His prints have sold for more than a half-million dollars, but he shambles around looking like a Bowery bum. He has by turns been described by people who do not know him as ornery, reclusive, hard, manipulative to the point of destructive, and cold as a bowling ball. He rarely gives interviews. He speaks in short, elliptical snatches and views life with the detached outlook of an undertaker. He came to China to have a look before he dies. “To travel the road of possibilities,” he said. “Turn on a whole new audience.”

But it’s a long trip for an old man. From the day he arrived from New York, Frank’s health began to disintegrate. During the opening ceremonies, he was asked to say a few words. He took the dais and spoke in a lugubrious, Mitteleuropean accent that sounds something like Bela Lugosi in the Dracula pictures.

“I am very moved to be here because it is the first time I’ve come to China and I am moved looking at the landscape and the people and there is my love of mystery,” he said, looking somewhat overwhelmed among the drums and dancers and military guard. Some wise guy dressed as Mao was ranting on about the evils of capitalism. He was bringing the whole party down and was soon muscled away by the police.

“At my age to see all this for the first time—I am proud to be here and I am almost proud to be a photographer,” Frank continued, the Chinese interpreter bleaching out the “almost” bit.

When he finished, Frank was showered in confetti. The crowd of hungry lenses grew ravenous, mugging him now, mauling him, pinning him to the wall at the back of the stage. He looked like a veal calf at slaughter.

Frank began to swoon, but rather than take his wife’s arm, he grasped the belt loops of his trousers and wrenched them around as though he were churning butter, like a seasick sailor grabbing for the gunwale. He was taken by the elbows and squired away into an anteroom behind the stage. It was an old torture chamber, by the look of things. Frank sat in a chair and pondered the genius of the stretching rack.

Frank and his wife, June Leaf, at 78 a long-boned, large-eyed woman, needed to collect themselves. The weather was hot. The air gray with coal vapors. The time was 12 hours ahead of New York. They were disoriented and tired and they stole away with their interpreter for a quiet lunch. I went along, as did the ubiquitous trousers.

It was a drab place of five or six tables, with a bar in one corner, a sink in another, and two large plate-glass windows. Outside you could see beggars near the public toilet, and Frank commented on this China—a place of dung and diesel and dragon-ornamented rooftops and breakfast cabbage and

Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)