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

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The Australian

April 30, 2008

CHINESE artist Ai Weiwei spoke out like a true rebel in Sydney
yesterday, criticising Beijing’s adoration of the Olympic Games and the
torch relay.

“I don’t see myself as a dissident artist, I see them as a dissident
government,” the Beijing-based artist said at the opening of a major
installation of beams and tables called Through at the Sherman
Contemporary Art Foundation.

Courting an official reprimand, he also took aim at the state-run
Chinese newspapers, which continually referred to the Games as the “Holy
Games” and the torch relay as the “Holy torch”.

Holiness, he said, wasn’t even a communist concept. “I think they (the
Chinese Government) encourage nationalist behaviour,” he added,
referring to the torch relay.

“It’s blind; it’s sentiment without a clear intellectual concept. It’s
crazy, what they’re so excited about.”

An internationally esteemed artist, Ai helped design the Beijing Olympic
Stadium, now usually referred to as the Birds Nest Stadium.

He hasn’t been invited to the opening ceremony, but he said he didn’t
care. “It’s such a bureaucratic society we have, they don’t even dare to
invite someone like me,” he said. “The architect is nothing to such an
official society.”

China has never taken kindly to criticism, but Ai refuses to self-censor
too much.

“I think I could get into trouble because all the journalists ask me
these questions,” he said.

Told he didn’t have to answer, he replied: “That’s not my style.”

He is ready for a stern official reaction. “I’ve been waiting for that
moment. Everybody warns me of this. If nothing happens, it will be a big
disappointment.”

Still, he said he was not sorry he was involved in the design of the
stadium. “It’s for the people and for the city. The stadium is good work.”

Ai is in Australia for a week, with an exhibition called Under
Construction at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in Sydney. It features a
work commissioned for the centre titled Marble Chair.

He said he was surprised at how slowly China was changing - yet he
agreed that massive changes had occurred over the past decade. “You can
talk about sex, you can talk about anything, society is so free. There’s
no strong moral discipline.”

But he said politics was the exception, with much forbidden.

“I hope China will learn a bit from this event (the Olympics), and
really try to rethink its position and its own values,” Ai said, adding
that he hoped values such as democracy, freedom and human rights would
begin to take hold.

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Posted at 11:03 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Newsweek

The recent crisis over the Olympic torch and Tibet represent an epic clash: not just between Tibetans and Beijing, but between a self-congratulatory Western worldview and the very different vision of a billion-plus Chinese. Until Western leaders start trying to understand the Chinese perspective, friction is likely to grow, and the victims will include the Tibetans themselves—the very people Western leaders say they want to protect.

According to the current U.S. and European narrative, the popular protests in Tibet and elsewhere were entirely justified. The demonstrators pushed a moral cause: to free the poor Tibetans from an oppressive communist government. And the European leaders who decided to boycott the Olympics’ opening ceremonies, like Germany’s Angela Merkel, deserved nothing but praise for their courageous stance.

The Chinese view could not be more different. Before describing it, however, it is vital to dispel a major Western misconception. Many Americans and Europeans think that China’s furious reaction to the protests—a reaction that has now inspired a massive boycott of Western goods and businesses in China—has been the result of media manipulation and information control by Beijing. If only the Chinese public had access to real facts, Westerners think, their attitudes would be different. This is a huge mistake. The reality is that some of the strongest anger toward the West at the moment is coming from liberal Western-educated Chinese intellectuals who have access to accurate information. China today enjoys the most competent governance it’s ever had, and its elites are intelligent, well educated and sophisticated—the exact opposite of the “goons and thugs” described by CNN’s Jack Cafferty.

The Chinese are so angry because virtually all of them believe that the Western protests have had little to do with human rights, Tibet or Darfur. Instead, the Chinese think, the West’s real motivation is to deny China the triumph it deserves for its enormous successes. According to this view, Westerners cannot stomach the thought that China is poised to hold the best Olympics ever. Such a spectacle would vividly demonstrate how power has shifted from West to East. This would be intolerable, and thus Americans and Europeans are dead set on finding some way to disrupt the Games—and if Tibet or Darfur won’t suffice, they’ll find some other method. As several Western-educated Chinese friends have whispered to me, “Kishore, this is pure racism. The West cannot bear the thought of China’s succeeding.”

Chinese skepticism about the Western commitment to human rights is well founded. Indeed, there is something ironic about those who have committed genocide against American Indians or Australian Aborigines now castigating China on Tibet. Furthermore, Guantánamo—which Amnesty International has described as “the gulag of our times”—plus Abu Ghraib and European complicity in Washington’s extraordinary rendition program have badly damaged the West’s credibility and legitimacy.

Most Chinese also believe that Tibetans have received special treatment from Beijing. After the disastrous Cultural Revolution, in which all Chinese suffered, Deng Xiaoping adopted a more pragmatic approach to the region. Ruined religious sites were repaired, monasteries were reopened, new monks were allowed to join orders and the Tibetan language was permitted to be used more extensively than before. Chinese leaders believe that China has exercised sovereignty over Tibet for 700 years now, ever since the Yuan dynasty—one reason the “Free Tibet” slogan angers them so much. Then there’s the recent territorial disintegration of the Soviet Union and memories of how the West seized Chinese territory in the 19th century: still more reasons why Chinese suspicions run deep.

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Posted at 10:58 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
April 28, 2008
On Wednesday night, employees of The Wall Street Journal gathered in the Grill Room at the World Financial Center to bid farewell to Stuart Karle, the former general counsel of The Journal, a tenacious defender of journalism who is regarded as a reporter’s lawyer.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Murdoch’s ‘Head of Content’ (April 28, 2008)

The event was held by Marcus W. Brauchli, the paper’s managing editor, who will be getting his own send-off soon enough after it was revealed last Tuesday that he would be stepping down just four months after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought the paper’s corporate parent, Dow Jones & Company, and serving as a consultant with unspecified responsibilities instead.

Mr. Brauchli, who had the look of the recently run over, stuck to prepared remarks, wanly observing that he chose this time to resign because he didn’t want to be outshone by Mr. Karle, his friend and former classmate at Columbia. Mr. Karle then cracked wise that he was glad Mr. Brauchli’s corporate credit card hadn’t been canceled yet. Funny stuff.

Mr. Karle then urged the journalists in attendance — along with an interloper from another newspaper who hung in the back — to continue the newspaper’s history of vigorous and unfettered pursuit of the truth. But there were elephants, big ugly ones, all over the room, chief among them that neither Mr. Brauchli nor Mr. Karle would now be there to defend that work.

Both men, who had spent their lives helping others speak truth to power, were unwilling to do the same after getting kicked to the curb. Each is under a nondisparagement clause as part of his negotiated agreement, so Journal reporters and editors watched the odd specter of a First Amendment lawyer and a lifelong journalist talking about everything except what was on everyone’s mind.

Mr. Karle acknowledged as much and said from the dais, “You could imagine what I am thinking right now.” Full stop. “Keep going, keep going. …” he said, as laughter rolled around the room.

Not everyone was smiling.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/business/media/28carr.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Posted at 10:51 PM · Comments (0)

Deeply impressive tales from China’s underbelly.
I’m working on a full-blown review of this now.

Posted at 2:39 PM · Comments (0)

An odd book in the positive sense that it follows the rules of no particular genre. Instead, it manages to be deeply thoughtful, keenly observed and both learned and person. Beautifully written, too.

Posted at 2:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

… It makes the head spin, this talk of who’s elitist and who’s not. I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.

It’s as if Someone Out to Prevent Me From Getting What I Worked For is preventing me from getting what I worked for. If only there were something — a lapel pin or other sartorial accessory — that would reassure people that I can do the job.

Some people say Barack Obama and I get everything handed to us on a silver platter. But we don’t let it bother us. We’re taking those silver platters and making them our canoes. Then we’ll grab our silver spoons and paddle to a place where people get us. North Carolina, maybe. Or Indiana. I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. We’ll paddle on, brother, paddle all the way to the top. …

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Posted at 4:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
April 24 2008

It is the men with red-glowing Darth Vader nightsticks who provoke particular scorn. These are the people, employed by Japanese construction companies, who stand by roadworks or building sites, waving pedestrians and traffic out of harm’s way. So vital is their function that sometimes they are replaced by plastic cut-outs.

Then there are the elevator ladies, with their doll-like mannerisms, who press the lift buttons, the shop assistants who work in pairs, and the hotel attendants with so much time on their hands they physically walk guests to the lavatory or cigar bar.

These are the examples regularly invoked to illustrate Japan’s supposed service-sector failings. While Japanese manufacturing is held up as world class, its service sector, which accounts for 70 per cent of output, is regularly lampooned as being years behind the efficiencies achieved in the US and even sleepy Europe.

The latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report on Japan, released this month, treads familiar ground. It states that “boosting productivity in the service sector is a key priority for promoting long-term growth” as the workforce ages and shrinks. While manufacturing labour productivity per hour increased from 1999 to 2004 by 4 per cent annually, keeping pace with the US, it notes, service-sector productivity lagged behind badly, rising just 0.9 per cent.

There is a problem with such analysis. You need only to read, in a previous finding, that Japan’s transport system is 30 per cent less efficient than that of the US to smell a rat. Common sense tells you that passenger transport is vastly superior in Japan, where tens of millions of people are moved daily at reasonable cost. The Shinkansen bullet train, for example, with 300 daily services between Tokyo and Osaka, makes the 552km journey in 2½ hours with an average delay measured in seconds.

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Posted at 4:41 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
April 9, 2008

Johannesburg, South Africa - You will have missed it if you’re not a fanatical Africa watcher. Last Wednesday Botswana, often referred to as the Switzerland of Africa, saw a change of leadership. It’s a nice, and instructive, contrast to the current shenanigans in Zimbabwe.

President Festus Mogae stepped down, a year before his term was due to end, and handed over power to his part’s new leader, Ian Khama. He did so to demonstrate his readiness to prepare a new man for the position. Mr. Mogae himself had won free and fair elections in 1998, and steered the country on a fabulous growth path that followed on from the successes of his predecessor, Ketumile Masire.

After discovering diamonds in the 1960s, the poor, sparsely populated country spread the benefits of mineral wealth across the board. Botswana made great strides against AIDS, reducing mo ther-to-child transmission of HIV from 40% of all births 10 years ago to 4% today. It is the world’s largest diamond producer and the most stable and prosperous country in Africa. And it has held regular elections since independence in 1966.

At a farewell rally on March 29, the day Zimbabweans went to the polls, Mr. Mogae warned: “Let me advise those leaders in similar circumstances: leave when the time for you to leave comes and you will be embraced with love by your people.”

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Posted at 12:21 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

LETTER FROM CHINA

By Howard W. French
April 24, 2008

SHANGHAI: A university student in a journalism class taught by an American in southern China wrote his professor with an urgent question the other day.

Given that Westerners have been inundated by biased news reports about China and Tibet in recent weeks, he wrote, “How can Chinese people and Chinese media make the foreign world understand the real China?”

For all the apparent simplicity and innocence of the question, behind it lies a world of complexity, along with the real potential for increasing conflict.

The pre-Olympic crisis in Tibet has revealed China and the West to each other in disturbing new ways. Even before concerns over serious human rights abuses in Tibet could fade, people who followed this story outside of China were given additional reasons to worry, by the vehement Chinese responses to virtually any criticism of their country.

In the United States this was brought home most powerfully by an incident that took place recently on the campus of Duke University, where a freshman from China, Grace Wang, was berated by Chinese students when she tried to mediate between pro-Tibetan demonstrators and a much larger group of pro-Chinese demonstrators during protests on campus. At one point a group of Chinese students surrounded her, taunting: “Remember Chai Ling? All Chinese want to burn her in oil, and you look like her,” according to an account Wang wrote in The Washington Post. The reference was to a female leader in the student democracy protests in Beijing in 1989 that led to the Tiananmen massacre. Details of Wang’s background were quickly revealed on the Duke Chinese Students and Scholars Association Web site, including directions to her parents’ home in Qingdao. Feces quickly turned up on their doorstep, as the threats against them came pouring in, and Wang’s parents eventually went into hiding. Even her high school back home convened a special assembly to condemn her for supposedly breaking with the motherland, and her diploma was revoked

For many Chinese, meanwhile, events of recent weeks have revealed a West that is out to get their country, jealous of its successes and lying in wait for the right opportunity to pounce. The events in Tibet, with their Olympic background, provided the perfect chance, and virtually everything said or done by outsiders in relation to the crisis is seen in this light.

This sentiment was given catchy form in an entry in an Internet chat room under the title, “What do you want from us?”

“When we were labeled the ‘sick man of Asia,’ we were called a peril,” the entry read. “When we are billed to be the next superpower, we’re called the threat. When we closed our doors, you smuggled drugs to open markets. When we embrace free trade, you blame us for taking away your jobs.”

As sentiment like this spread in recent weeks, so did Chinese expressions of outrage over perceived Western bullying and bias. The symbol of this movement became Jin Jing, a wheelchair athlete who carried the Olympic torch in Paris during its global circuit and managed to cling tightly to it as pro-Tibet protesters tried to snatch it away and extinguish the flame.

The Chinese media had a field day with these images, whose potency exceeded the wildest propagandists’ dreams, and for several days the public here was inundated with them, as clear an illustration of Western perfidy as they were of Chinese nobility.

What followed was an angry boycott movement against the French retailer Carrefour, set off by an apparently unfounded rumor of a link between its owner and the country’s recent Enemy No. 1, the Dalai Lama.

What then, does all of this have to do with the student’s question to the journalism professor? The common narrative from 30,000 feet about China’s rise has been all about the triumph of capitalism in a nominally communist country. China has opened up and joined the world, riding the great wave of globalization that is under way with the best of them. Look, they even have McDonald’s! The differences between us are shrinking all the time, and fast.

This great story even holds true for the most part. It’s the sticky bit at the end of the paragraph that demands more careful consideration and arguably, concern.

The great divide in perceptions over the Tibet crisis may indeed have revealed that the Western press is not perfectly accurate or credible, as the Chinese government and its carefully controlled media have wasted no effort in pointing out in recent weeks. To Westerners, this will come as no big surprise.

A good deal more revealing, though, has been a picture that has emerged during the crisis of a Chinese political system that remains devoted to the manufacture and enforcement, when need be, of unanimity on whatever is deemed a vital question.

Tibet and the Olympics both fit that bill, and saying anything but the “right thing” on either subject just won’t do here.

In fact, if the state doesn’t get you first, one risks having emotional, screaming mobs shouting you down, or worse, instead. People speak solemnly all the time about what “the Chinese people think” and about their feelings, as if unquestioned unanimity were the most natural of things, and moreover a conferral of moral legitimacy.

As China’s power rises, the implications for the world are potentially quite profound. An implicit question, in fact, is already being posed: “How dare anyone offend our feelings?”

As a 57-year-old Chinese blogger, He Yanguang, recently pointed out, invoking memories of when a wave from Chairman Mao sufficed “and we all marched forth and really messed the country up,” the price of unanimity can cut in other ways, too. “When the information we get all comes from one source, people’s thinking will certainly not be rational,” He wrote in his lonely warning. “We have had too many lessons and seen too many stupidities. Making a mistake is not a big deal. The big danger is making the same mistake again and again.”

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Posted at 11:37 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Times

American Exception
Millions Behind Bars

This series of articles examines commonplace aspects of the American justice system that are actually unique in the world.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

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Posted at 6:56 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
April 21, 2008

Allow me to introduce myself. According to the general clucking of the national punditry, my 2004 book – “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” – is supposed to have persuaded Barack Obama to describe the yeomanry of Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or … anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Mr. Obama’s offense is so grave that the custodians of our national consensus have elevated it to gatehood: “Bittergate.”

In truth, I have no way of knowing whether some passage of mine inspired Mr. Obama’s tactless assertion that the hard-done-by clutch guns and irrationally oppose free-trade deals. In point of fact, I oppose many of those trade deals myself.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty. The media flurry kicked up by Mr. Obama’s gaffe powerfully confirms an argument I actually did make: That as they return again to the culture war, what the soldiers on all sides are doing is talking about class without actually addressing the economic basis of the subject.

Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama – “elitism.” No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn’t until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

“Elitism” is thus a crime not of society’s actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has “a dash of Harvard disease,” proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of “supercilious” Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an … anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here’s a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers’ organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton’s own sins, when these are our standards? Didn’t he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes’ folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little … bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That “bitterness” is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That “divisiveness” is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement’s job is to “organize discontent.” And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry.

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Posted at 11:26 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Straits Times
22 April 2008
HONG KONG - THE recent crisis in Tibet focused attention on whether there would be yet another ‘colour revolution’ - this time on the roof of the world, leading to a substantial portion of China breaking away.
China has reasons to be concerned. The actors involved in Tibet are essentially the same as those who were involved in toppling legitimate governments elsewhere in the Eurasian heartland.
After doing a comparison, William Engdahl, author of A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics And The New World Order, has concluded that the Tibetan uprising is but another colour revolution - this time ‘crimson’.
‘As in the other Colour Revolutions, the United States government is fanning the flames of destabilisation against China by funding opposition protest organisations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),’ Engdahl said.
He also cited Freedom House, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), and Trace Foundation, which is funded by financier George Soros through his daughter Andrea Soros Colombel.
The NED was set up by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s on the recommendation of, among others, then-CIA director Bill Casey. It was designed as an independent NGO, one step removed from the US government. Yet its first acting president Allen Weinstein admitted to the Washington Post that ‘a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA’.
The NED has been instrumental in the staging of every ‘colour revolution’ - from Serbia to Georgia, from the Ukraine to Myanmar, says Engdahl.
In the case of Tibet, the NED has supported five major Tibetan exile groups: the Gu-Chu-Sum (ex-political prisoners’ association) Movement of Tibet; the International Campaign for Tibet; the Tibetan Women’s Association; the Longsho Youth Movement of Tibet; and the Voice of Tibet.
These groups tried to organise a protest march by Tibetans in India back to their homeland, and had a hand in organising the recent riots in Tibet.
The NED’s funding comes almost entirely from the US government. A 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service says US foreign operations appropriations for the People’s Republic of China grew from US$10 million (S$13.5 million) in 2002 to US$23 million in 2006. Most of this money went to democracy-related programmes and for the support of Tibetan communities.
About 40 per cent of US government funding for human rights and democracy-related programmes in China was allocated through the NED. Funds for Tibetan exiled communities also came from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, the US Agency for International Development and the New York-based Tibet Fund.
Advice and training for the exiled Tibetans were provided, among others, by the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI), which is funded by Soros foundations and the US government.
AEI founder Gene Sharp once said his institute specialised in ‘non-violence as a form of warfare’. AEI’s former president Robert Helvey, a retired US Army colonel and former Defence Intelligence Agency official, is on record as stating that he got involved in ‘strategic non-violence’ after observing the failure of military approaches to toppling dictators. He found this other approach - non-violence - more appealing.
According to a source with access to the Tibetan movement, prior to the March 10 demonstrations in Lhasa, 40 grassroots activists representing 25 Tibetan communities in India were given advanced training on grassroots activism and capacity-building by the five leading Tibetan NGOs, with training manuals provided by the AEI. Held from Feb 15 to 17, the course familiarised participants with the concept of non-violence as warfare.
The AEI has translated its two main ‘colour revolution’ ma-
nuals into Tibetan, one with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. Activists from Serbia and Ukraine have said that AEI’s training and manuals were instrumental in the formation of their strategies.
American NGOs were not alone in stoking the fire. German ones, funded by the Berlin government, have played an increasingly significant role recently.
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF), a think tank linked to the German Free Democratic Party, has been actively involved in the Tibetan independence movement. According to German-Foreign-Policy.com, a website founded by a group of German journalists and social scientists, the FNF ‘gave the impetus to the current anti-Chinese Tibet campaign that violently forced the interruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris’.
Last May, the FNF helped organise the Fifth International Tibet Support Groups Conference in Brussels. According to a Tibetan Government in Exile statement, the event led to a ‘road map’ for the Tibet movement for the coming years. It was decided then to make the 2008 Olympics the focus of their activities.
The road map called for global protests, a march of exiles from India to Tibet and rallies within Tibet. The Olympics were seen as a chance for Tibetans to come out and protest ‘like one mighty force’ - or else Tibet would ‘slip out of the world map’.
Mr Rolf Berndt, from the FNF’s executive council, has said the Games were ‘an excellent opportunity to publicly promote the cause of the Tibet Movement’.
Early this January, the five exile organisations issued a statement saying ‘the 2008 Olympics will mark the culmination of almost 50 years of Tibetan resistance in exile. We will use this historic moment to reinvigorate the Tibetan freedom movement and bring our exile struggle for freedom back to Tibet. We will bring about another uprising that will shake China’s control in Tibet and mark the beginning of the end of China’s occupation’.
Clearly, the immediate cause of the recent bloodshed in Tibet should be attributed to this road map, not the suppression of peaceful demonstrations by the Chinese government, as claimed by most of the Western media.

chingcheong@hotmail.com

Posted at 9:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

‘Socialism is Great!’ A Worker’s Memoir of the New China. By Lijia Zhang. Illustrated. 357 pages. $24; £14.99. Atlas & Co.

The 1980s were a heady and befuddling time of change in China. The Communist Party never acknowledged the pain inflicted by Mao’s internecine political struggles and mass mobilizations. But after his death in 1976, it eased its grip and opened up the economy just enough that some of the urban youth could start earning enough to focus on their own desires.

Lijia Zhang is a child of the 1980s. In “Socialism Is Great!,” her coming-of-age memoir, that decade is to her what the 1960s were to American baby boomers. Zhang grew up in Nanjing at a time when her family, friends and bosses were trying to divine the new social and economic order. Her reflexively cautious mother lived a life of stultifying routine, working at a state-owned missile factory. In spite of this, Zhang developed a love of money, personal freedom, self-education and sexual adventure that seemed to spring from some gene of individualism rendered only temporarily recessive by Mao’s policies.

Autobiographical accounts by people who have endured the political crusades and intense psychological dramas of Communist China abound. The most harrowing examples to appear in English are Jung Chang’s multi-generational family history, “Wild Swans,” and Nien Cheng’s “Life and Death in Shanghai.” Both women survived relentless assaults on their families and their dignity, and fled China to tell their stories.

Zhang’s memoir, with its arc of resistance and personal struggle, at first feels familiar. But Zhang’s tale, written in fluent English peppered with dated Chinese idioms, begins where those older memoirs leave off. She devotes so much more attention to boyfriends than to politics that her relationship to politics, though crucial to the climax of the book, comes across as a flirtation.

Ambitious from a young age, Zhang grew up battling her conservative mother, who dominated their dysfunctional family. Her father, mostly absent, got into political trouble in the 1950s, and the mother blamed his reckless fondness for books and ideas. The mother struggled to support the family on her measly state salary and belittled Zhang’s aspirations of becoming a writer.
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Zhang’s plans to attend college were quashed when her mother took advantage of an early retirement program at her factory that allowed her to name her daughter as her successor. In 1980, when she was 16 and her friends were gearing up to compete in college entrance exams, Zhang became a worker at the Liming Machinery Factory.

Liming made ballistic missiles, artillery and guns. Its production was a high-level state secret. But Zhang was assigned to a minor workshop, where her colleagues took advantage of their sick leave and undermined their rivals. In her ample free time, she began reading a form of protest literature known as Misty Poetry. She also taught herself English by listening to the music of the Carpenters and devouring classic English novels. During interminable political study sessions, she read “Jane Eyre,” hiding it behind The People’s Daily.

She had her first taste of political trouble when a boss discovered her trick. Zhang seems to have modeled herself on the English governess who defied society’s conception of her proper place.

Though Zhang describes herself as ugly, she had few inhibitions when it came to men. Infatuated with a student she met while climbing a mountain, she took a train to Beijing to visit him, becoming the first person in her family to see the capital. He greeted her coolly. She woke in the night to find him and another woman squirming in the next bed.

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Copyright The Financial Times

An excerpt…

…Few writers have trudged a harder road to the Nobelist’s podium than Naipaul. Born the descendant of “indentured” (ie enslaved) workers in Trinidad, he won a scholarship to Oxford (driven by his journalist father – one of French’s many brilliant pen-portraits). He encountered racism every inch of the way. (“Where are you from?” asked the don examining his thesis – before failing it.) Naipaul was only middlingly successful at university, and later at the BBC. Careers were irrelevant. He wrote all the time – so intensely that, French records, he would wear out the nibs of his pens.

Eventually the quality of that writing shone through. His break came with what is still his most read work, A House for Mr Biswas. That literary achievement is the main fact in this biography. But what has outraged readers are the moral monstrosities which French here lays bare. Naipaul’s unashamed declaration that his wife Pat, who loyally supported him for three decades, did not attract him sexually, for instance – and was, as he coolly informed her, “the only woman I know who has no skill”. Or indeed his mistreatment of Margaret, his long-serving mistress. “Many of the gruesome sexual depictions in the novels,” French records, “were not the work of imagination, but drawn from his life with Margaret.” Pat died, lingeringly, of cancer, unloved and betrayed. “On the day after he cremated his wife,” French bleakly notes, “V.S. Naipaul invited a new woman into her house”. It was a prospective second wife – but not Margaret. She was abandoned.

If there were a Nobel Prize for rudeness, Naipaul would win it. Indian by genetic origin, he sees the subcontinent as a great, uncleaned lavatory (“Indians defecate everywhere”, he once said). Trinidadian by birthplace, he mentions the island only to insult it. Asked why he left, he replied “to join civilization”.

Not that civilised England escapes his lash. Observing on a wall the graffiti “Keep Britain White” he would, he observes, insert a comma after “Britain”…

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This is billed as a celebration of the music of Miles Davis, which has become a sub-genre unto itself. This one caught my attention immediately, though, even against the usual cacophony of Virgin Records, in Times Square.
This recording could have very easily have wallowed in cheap gimmicks and left it at that. Instead, it’s bubbling with ideas, and interesting ones, at that. The set brings together Miles stalwarts like Ron Carter and John McLaughlin and Chick Corea (and many more) with a large cast of Indian performers. The musicianship is high throughout and all kinds of sparks emanate from the unusual instrumentation.

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Copyright Contexts

The summer of 2007 witnessed a perfect storm of controversy over immigration to the United States. After building for months with angry debate, a widely touted immigration reform bill supported by President George W. Bush and many leaders in Congress failed decisively. Recriminations soon followed across the political spectrum.

Just when it seemed media attention couldn’t be greater, a human tragedy unfolded with the horrifying execution-style murders of three teenagers in Newark, N.J., attributed by authorities to illegal aliens.

Presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R–Colorado) descended on Newark to blame city leaders for encouraging illegal immigration, while Newt Gingrich declared the “war at home” against illegal immigrants was more deadly than the battlefields of Iraq. National headlines and outrage reached a feverish pitch, with Newark offering politicians a potent new symbol and a brown face to replace the infamous Willie Horton, who committed armed robbery and rape while on a weekend furlough from his life sentence to a Massachusetts prison. Another presidential candidate, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, seemed to capture the mood of the times at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner: “Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children around the world.”

Now imagine a nearly opposite, fact-based scenario. Consider that immigration—even if illegal—is associated with lower crime rates in most disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Or that increasing immigration tracks with the broad reduction in crime the United States has witnessed since the 1990s.

Well before the 2007 Summer of Discontent over immigration, I proposed we take such ideas seriously. Based on hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised by the intense reaction to what I thought at the time was a rather logical reflection. From the right came loud guffaws, expletive-filled insults, angry web postings, and not-so-thinly veiled threats. But the left wasn’t so happy either, because my argument assumes racial and ethnic differences in crime not tidily attributable to material deprivation or discrimination—the canonical explanations.

Although Americans hold polarizing and conflicting views about its value, immigration is a major social force that will continue for some time. It thus pays to reconsider the role of immigration in shaping crime, cities, culture, and societal change writ large, especially in this era of social anxiety and vitriolic claims about immigration’s reign of terror.
some facts

Consider first the “Latino Paradox.” Hispanic Americans do better on a wide range of social indicators—including propensity to violence—than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages. To assess this paradox in more depth, my colleagues and I examined violent acts committed by nearly 3,000 males and females in Chicago ranging in age from 8 to 25 between 1995 and 2003. The study selected whites, blacks, and Hispanics (primarily Mexican-Americans) from 180 neighborhoods ranging from highly segregated to very integrated. We also analyzed data from police records, the U.S. Census, and a separate survey of more than 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.

Notably, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans compared to blacks and whites. A major reason is that more than a quarter of those of Mexican descent were born abroad and more than half lived in neighborhoods where the majority of residents were also Mexican. In particular, first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than third-generation Americans, adjusting for individual, family, and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation. This pattern held true for non-Hispanic whites and blacks as well. Our study further showed living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration was directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of correlated factors, including poverty and an individual’s immigrant status). Immigration thus appeared “protective” against violence.

Consider next the implications of these findings when set against the backdrop of one of the most profound social changes to visit the United States in recent decades. Foreign immigration to the United States rose sharply in the 1990s, especially from Mexico and especially to immigrant enclaves in large cities. Overall, the foreign-born population increased by more than 50 percent in 10 years, to 31 million in 2000. A report by the Pew Hispanic Center found immigration grew most significantly in the mid-1990s and hit its peak at the end of the decade, when the national homicide rate plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s. Immigrant flows have receded since 2001 but remain high, while the national homicide rate leveled off and seems now to be creeping up. Both trends are compared over time at left.

The pattern upends popular stereotypes. Among the public, policy makers, and even many academics, a common expectation is that the concentration of immigrants and the influx of foreigners drive up crime rates because of the assumed propensities of these groups to commit crimes and settle in poor, presumably disorganized communities. This belief is so pervasive that in our Chicago study the concentration of Latinos in a neighborhood strongly predicted perceptions of disorder no matter the actual amount of disorder or rate of reported crimes. And yet immigrants appear in general to be less violent than people born in America, particularly when they live in neighborhoods with high numbers of other immigrants.

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Copyright Guernica

While many governments now involve indigenous groups in environmental conservation, India is on the verge of creating what might become the largest mass eviction for conservation ever. Groups like India’s Adivasis have come to be called “conservation refugees.” But many conservationists now say conservation initiatives are doomed to fail without them. (Art by Emily Hunt)

In the spring of 2003 about 8,000 tribal people and low-caste farmers living in the Kuno area of Madhya Pradesh, India, were summarily uprooted from the rich farmlands they had cultivated for generations and moved to 24 villages on scrub land outside the borders of a sanctuary created for a pride of six imported Asiatic lions. “I’ll never forget when we left,” recalled village headman Babulal Gaur. “Even the men cried that day. Is it fair to do this to 1,600 families for a few lions?” By then almost 500 villages occupied by a total of 300,000 families around India had experienced similar forced relocation to protect the habitat of tigers, rhinos and Asiatic lions residing in the 580 national parks and sanctuaries that have been created in India since the colonial period.

Wildlife conservation in India has generally emulated the early American (Yosemite/Yellowstone) model which regarded forests as pristine wilderness, excluded human beings from national parks and other protected areas, and saw its aboriginal people as “marauders,” “poachers” and “encroachers,” all the while sanctioning the lifeways and hunting practices of elite sportsmen and urban tourists. Throughout rural India, tribal Adivasis, ancient forest dwellers who occupy thousands of villages, are routinely blamed for declines in local biodiversity. As a government training manual for foresters instructs its students:

Forest dwelling communities are invariably inveterate hunters and have in most areas practically annihilated game animals and birds by indiscriminate hunting and snaring. It is surely time to instill in the tribal mind a respect for the basic game laws of the country.

In the past three decades 28 major relocations of Adivasis have been documented, seven more are known to have occurred, but not officially recorded, and there are several more in early planning stages. There are no hard numbers available, but estimates of conservation refugees in India range from 100,000 to 600,000, with millions more slated for future forced, voluntary and induced displacements.

Fig Leaves

The Nagarhole National Park (now Rajiv Gandhi National Park) in the state of Karnataka is part of the larger Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, one of 440 such reserves existing in 97 countries. Several Adivasi communities have inhabited the Nilgiri Reserve for centuries, including the reclusive Cholanaikans, the last surviving hunter-gatherers on the Indian subcontinent.

While the alleged purpose of the evictions was wildlife conservation, teak and eucalyptus plantations eventually replaced more than 40 of the evacuated hamlets.

When the Nagarhole Park was officially constituted in 1983 there were about 9,000 other tribal peoples living in 58 small hamlets throughout the park. There were the Jenu Kurubas, a honey gathering tribe, the Hakki Pikki bird trappers, the Betta Kuruba bamboo artisans, the Yeravas, a fishing tribe, and the Soligas, goat herders. There were also about 25,000 other Adivasis living outside but near the Park who relied heavily on the Nagar Hole forests for their survival. In violation of UN policy for Biophere Reserves, which calls for equal protection of forests, birds, agriculture and human wellbeing, the Indian government began pushing the Adivasis out. During the 1970s, 6,000 were evicted.

Anger arose among the Adivasis, who had begun to organize nationally and express their disapproval more boldly. In response, the Indian Forest Policy statement of 1988 recognized the role of Adivasis in the conservation and sustenance of India’s forests. However, evictions continued from the Nagar Hole, albeit in less violent and forceful ways.

While the alleged purpose of the evictions was wildlife conservation, teak and eucalyptus plantations eventually replaced more than 40 of the evacuated hamlets. As it has in Botswana, Kenya and elsewhere, conservation in India has become a convenient and respectable cover for less savory motives when the very same national government that removes native people from their land in the name of conservation has no compunctions about giving up ecologically sensitive areas to large-scale development projects.

The fig leaf of conservation was eventually spread to cover a World Bank-funded eco-tourism lodge proposed by the Taj Hotel Group. In December of 1996 Adivasis filed for an injunction with the Indian High Court and called for a general strike in the Nagar Hole to stop the Taj project. A month later the High Court found the Taj Group in violation of conservation laws, a ruling that was upheld on appeal. The half-finished, abandoned structures of the Taj in the Nagar Hole represent one of the very few Adivasi victories anywhere in India.

However, people who were allowed to stay in the reserve after construction was halted were subjected to severe restrictions on both their lifeways and food security. No cultivation of any kind was allowed, despite the fact that local Adivasi farming practices never cut down trees, plowed land or used pesticides or fertilizers. All hunting was banned and no livestock or pets were allowed. The gathering of tubers, mushrooms and wild vegetables was forbidden, and most sacred sites and burial grounds were placed off limits. However, these limitations did not seem to satisfy all conservation NGOs.

In 1993, the World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF-I) petitioned the Indian government to enforce its own Wildlife (Protection) Act. The Act, which was passed in 1972, prescribes procedures for setting up and managing the country’s protected areas, which at the time included about 80 national parks and 443 sanctuaries which made up about 4.8% of India’s land mass, a little more than half the current area under protection.

India’s protected areas harbor the remains of the nation’s biological diversity, and perform critical ecological functions like regulating hydrological cycles, stabilizing river catchments, protecting soil and maintaining land productivity. India’s agriculture would be seriously threatened if those areas did not exist, and its climatic patterns much more erratic. And industrial and commercial forces would have long ago occupied these habitats were it not for the protected status granted them by the Wildlife (Protection) Act.

Almost four million people were at that time living inside India’s formally protected areas and were heavily dependent on local natural resources for fuel, fodder, medicines, fish, water and non-timber forest products.

WWF’s petition focused on the fact that vital enforcement procedures were not being implemented in most protected areas, and that state governments were often allowing them to be opened for industrial development. Darlaghat Sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh, for example, was denotified to host a cement factory. Very few protected areas had adequate management or equipment. The whole situation was becoming as bad for wildlife as it was for people. This was a suit that had to be filed.

However, there remained the question of land and tenure rights in protected areas. Neither was mentioned in the WWF suit. In national parks all human activities had to cease; in sanctuaries, certain activities were allowed to continue, but only if they were shown to be of use to wildlife conservation. In August 1997, at the behest of WWF-I, the Indian Supreme Court ordered all state governments to complete settlement procedures within one year.

That order was a clear victory for WWF and was regarded worldwide as a landmark event in the history of conservation. However, the ill-defined rights of Adivasis and local villagers remained a major problem in the management of India’s protected areas. Unfortunately the order caused nothing but trouble. When government officials issued unclear and confusing notices of new regulations inside protected areas, villagers interpreted them as attacks on their right to reside in traditional settlements.

Almost four million people were at that time living inside India’s formally protected areas, and alongside several million others in surrounding towns and villages. Most of them resided there before the protected areas were created, and all were heavily dependent on local natural resources for fuel, fodder, medicines, fish, water and non-timber forest products. “To pass an order that denies all ‘rights and concessions’ to such people is virtually like telling them to pack up and go,” proclaimed Indian sociologist Ashish Kothari. “Both the WWF petition and the learned judges’ order are, to put it bluntly, devoid of any sense of grounded reality. Even if the procedure for inquiry was to be done properly, it could be grossly unjust to villagers.”

Increased resentment rose toward conservation, which often expressed itself in the setting of forest fires, colluding with poachers and undermining conservation in any way possible.

Strangely enough, this all happened as the government of India was, at least rhetorically, endorsing and agreeing to abide by an agreement of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which called for full participation of indigenous peoples in the management of wildlife conservation. The agreement commits all signatories to recognize the rights of local communities to participate in conservation planning, to respect their land and resource rights, and to seek prior consent to any resettlement of people in protected areas.

The Indian government was also ignoring its own 1990 report on Scheduled Castes and Tribes, which includes a clear framework to deal with the livelihood consequences of conservation for displaced Adivasis and other forest dwellers. And they were in violation of Article 338 (9) of the Indian Constitution, which provides protection for tribal welfare and stipulates that the Commission for Scheduled Tribes should be consulted in conflicts over resettlement. Bijoy Panda, a tribal activist in Madhya Pradesh, called the Adivasis “azaad desh ke gulaam log” (slaves of a free nation).

Ashish Kothari has predicted growing demands from Adivasis to do away with protected areas and unpopular wildlife laws. There would also, he said, be more acts of subversion and deliberate violation of conservation laws, such as poaching and theft of timber. “Never mind the issue of human rights and social justice,” he said. “Even from a purely conservation point of view, these moves are suicidal.” He turned out to be right.

Increased resentment rose toward conservation, which often expressed itself in the setting of forest fires, colluding with poachers and undermining conservation in any way possible, similar in many ways to responses of the Maasai and other African pastorals to being pushed out of their grazing lands. A 2005 report commissioned by the Prime Minister called the situation as “truly a war within, imploding inside reserves and taking everything in its wake.”

In Semarsot, Kanha and other sanctuaries of Madhya Pradesh, each village was sent a form which families were to use to claim compensation. As most tribal villagers cannot read, they were dependent on interpretations of the notice offered by non-government organizations, forest staff, or the few semi-literate people in their village. Misunderstandings were rampant. In many places, villagers thought the notices were for eviction. History had given them ample reasons to believe that.

The Wildlife Protection Act and the Forest (Conservation) Act have set the stage for what might become the largest mass eviction of indigenous peoples in any one country.

While the notices never mentioned the e-word, activists like Kothari believed that massive displacement could nonetheless become the unintended outcome of the process. “Once final notification is issued,” he pointed out, “no one will be allowed to collect non-timber forest produce. For a tribal whose life and livelihood depends on things from the forest like fruits, gum, honey, leaves, thatch, etc., this is like telling the urbanites that they may continue to live in their houses, but without the use of water, electricity or the kitchen. For forest dwellers, this is tantamount to forcible displacement.”

Kothari was right again about the increasingly violent response to forced resettlement. In Madhya Pradesh, 20,000 tribals rallied to protest against what they considered an unfair abridgment of their rights, and a mass sit-in was organized in front of the Vidhan Sabha in state capital of Bhopal. Conflicts between forest staff and people turned to open clashes and villagers began poisoning wildlife to eliminate the raison d’etre for protected areas. Eventually the entire protected area network of India came under attack as local people became increasingly hostile to all conservation efforts. Not all protests were violent. In Phoolwari ki Nal Sanctuary, Rajasthan, one village filed a petition to the high court asking for the sanctuary notification to be quashed. But violent or nonviolent, the Indian government had created a public relations nightmare.

The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and the Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980, later fortified by the WWF lawsuit, have set the stage for what still might eventually become the largest mass eviction of indigenous peoples in any one country. Millions of people are still threatened with displacement. “Even while the rest of the world moves towards environmental policies that reconcile wildlife conservation with human rights and justice, India is headed in completely the opposite directions,” warns Ashish Kothari.

The Forest Act froze about 22 percent of India’s land for conservation. Land claims of mapped and demarcated forests have been ignored. In fact, some of the areas set aside weren’t forest at all. A May 2002 court order mandated the government to record all encroachments on forest lands, whereupon the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued an order to every state to evict “encroachers” in the nation’s forests, with no consideration to be given to the age or tenure of a community.

Eventually the tense state of affairs in India’s forests reached the attention of Delhi. In early 2005 The Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill was drafted by the Tribal Affairs Ministry and introduced in the Indian parliament. If passed, the bill would recognize Adivasi rights to ancestral forest lands and resources, and grant 2.5 hectares of forest land to each Adivasi, even if their current residence is in designated wildlife reserve. Communities would also be entrusted with some conservation responsibilities.

Indian conservation, influenced by WWF-International and other foreign NGOs, has persistently embraced a model that focuses on ‘mega-charismatic metavertibrates’— elephants, rhinos or tigers, rather than on whole habitats.

Affecting about 68 million people, 8% of the country, the bill was severely criticized by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which feared that it would hinder efforts to preserve India’s dwindling forest cover. Social groups were also concerned that the bill would harm the livelihood of forest dwellers who are not considered to be part of Scheduled Tribes. Conservationists were apoplectic, saying it would cause irreparable damage to forest ecosystems and lead to class conflict throughout the country. In May 2005, the Indian cabinet removed the bill from their agenda. However, after extensive debate and discussion, and some refinements that aren’t so popular with tribal people or their supporters, the Act passed into law on December 18th, 2006. Rules and amendments are being devised, after which the Recognition of Forest Rights Act will be enforceable.

Sariska

In early 2005, a national debate erupted in India over the future of its national animal, the Royal Bengal Tiger. Media reports of a “tiger crisis” led to the creation of several “Project Tiger” sanctuaries around the country. As one might expect, the sides taken on the status and protection of tigers were, on the one hand, wildlife conservationists intent upon saving a truly magnificent species from extinction, and on the other, anthropologists and tribal activists intent upon preserving the cultures of tribal people, 325,000 of whom still live inside the core and buffer zones of tiger reserves.

Indian wildlife conservation, which was still strongly influenced by WWF-International and other foreign conservation NGOs, has persistently embraced a model of western practice that focuses on individual endangered species—‘mega-charismatic metavertibrates’—like elephants, rhinos or tigers, rather than on whole habitats or eco-systems. Prominent Indian conservationist Valmik Thapar insists that tigers can only be saved “in large undisturbed, inviolate landscapes” unoccupied by human beings. “As far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “tigers and forest dwellers cannot co-exist.” Following Thapar’s advice, the entire Gujjar community of Sariska, a formerly posted tiger sanctuary, faced the prospect of total eviction and relocation, a process that had slowly begun over a decade before the creation of “Project Tiger.”

No one questions that Gujjar villagers, a traditional grazing community, have had an adverse impact on the wildlife conservation potential of the Sariska reserve or that at least some of this pressure on forests will have to be removed to save it. That is obvious to even the untrained eye. The question in Sariska is why relocation of the Gujjars was selected as the first option for solving the problem, without input from villagers, when so many other options were available for consideration. Moreover, the number one cause of tiger depletion throughout India is poaching by organized networks of smugglers, none of whom live in the forests.

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Copyright The Daily Northwestern

Despite its history of involvement in the forefront of world politics, America won’t be a member of the most important economic relationship in the next two decades, said Howard French, the Shanghai Bureau Chief for The New York Times.

“The most important relationship over the next 20 years … is the relationship between China and Africa,” French said to a crowd of about 40 people in his presentation Monday in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum. The talk, entitled “A View of the World: The life and career of a foreign correspondent in changing times,” was part of the Crain Lecture Series.

French has served as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for more than 20 years, reporting on issues from the Caribbean, Africa, Japan and China. He recently accepted a teaching post at Columbia University, thus “ending” his career as a daily reporter, he said.

The multilingual journalist detailed his life experiences for about an hour and then fielded questions from the audience. He focused almost exclusively on China during the half-hour Q-and-A period.

China is starting to influence Africa faster than most people in the West have been able to comprehend, French said, citing the recent loan of $40 billion from China to Nigeria in exchange for crude oil and gasoline.

He also touched on Africa’s current population boom. Africa and China may comprise 40 percent of the world’s population in the next 30 years, French said.

Students asked questions about the balancing act reporters must perform between unbiased reporting and advocating for change.

“There’s only one bias that won’t go away with me, and that’s a bias in favor of human rights and freedom,” French said.

While China needs to make improvements in their approach to human rights, the Western world must keep in mind the country’s state of flux, French said.

“There has been a huge progression between the China of 15 years ago and the China of today,” he said. “We’re dealing with a country changing very fast.”

Although the talk was aimed at Northwestern journalism students, Evanston residents comprised most of the audience.

Carol Albertson, a former NU admissions office employee, returned from a trip to China last summer and said she was interested in what French had to say.

“I found his talk very fascinating and interesting, especially his views of China and Africa,” Albertson said.

French also offered advice to aspiring journalists, and recounted his first assignment as a foreign correspondent covering a war the war-torn African country Chad in the 1980s. He landed the assignment after the original reporter had to take leave for personal reasons, and covered it for The Washington Post.

When he reached the border, the country had closed to travelers, causing French to take a more creative approach: He rented a canoe to get across the river into Chad.

“I was covering essentially World War I-style trench warfare, except with aircraft,” he said.

Medill senior James Shih said he was interested in international journalism as a career, and attended the event to hear French’s take on becoming a foreign correspondent.

The fact that much of French’s success was the result of luck was “disheartening,” said Shih, a former Daily columnist.

While he was surprised that French was so opinionated about the Chinese government, Shih said he was glad French was honest about his opinions.

“That’s part of being a good journalist … that you have to have your judgement,” he said.

Despite his acknowledgement that many of his assignments fell into his lap by pure luck, French said students must be ready for the opportunities that come their way.

“Chance favors the prepared,” he said.

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When it took on the games, China promised heroic efforts for change. But the torch debacle has left it snarling in a corner

Copyright The Guardian,
April 12 2008

There is never any shortage of public relations advisers willing to take on unpromising clients, especially those with deep pockets. Reports that the Chinese government has called for bids from foreign PR companies indicate that Beijing, at some level, understands that its own attempts to mould world opinion have tanked. But if the exercise is to have any success, the client does, occasionally, need to take the advice. It would not be an easy account to manage.

On the day that the Olympic torch - or, as Beijing calls it, “the sacred flame” - went into hiding in a San Francisco warehouse, Beijing’s second in command in Tibet, Qiangba Puncog, held a press conference. He was talking against the background of another news management failure: the appearance of a group of monks at the lovely and historic Labrang monastery in Gansu, bearing a Tibetan flag to remind a visiting press party that this was another propaganda exercise.

Puncog joined the Communist party in the cultural revolution, and his political attitudes do not seem to have progressed much. He epitomises the policies that have helped to generate this perfect storm of bad publicity for China. Of his fellow Tibetans he observed, in a phrase that would not have shamed a recalcitrant 19th-century imperialist, “I believe Tibetans are a good, simple people who know how to be grateful”. And in the event of any of these humble, grateful people disrupting the torch relay through Tibet, he promised: “They will be dealt with severely.” As western political leaders glumly contemplated their August diaries, conscious that there were no good options, Beijing’s putative public relations consultants must have been reaching for the hemlock.

Since the unrest in Tibet began, everything Beijing has done and said has reinforced its critics’ case. The foreign press is accused, in strident terms, of lying, while its capacity to report directly is cut off by Beijing. Behind a security cordon, overwhelming force has been brought to bear. Precisely how it is being used we do not know, but when an authority with a violent past reaches for a stick and slams the door shut, there is little reason to be sanguine.

As the trouble spread last month to the Tibetan areas of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai, convoys of trucks carrying military police fanned out across the Tibetan plateau. The faces in the trucks looked young, but the fixed bayonets leaning against the tailboards spoke of their seriousness of purpose.

No foreign visitor could testify directly to the result because the provincial foreign affairs bureaux were already at work, combing through the hotels for foreigners who were to be swept back to the cities, where they would be blind to further trouble or reprisals. Chinese migrants sat in flyblown restaurants watching the official story on television, scenes of riot on a loop, played and replayed, cursing Tibetans for what viewers had been told was unprovoked violence against hardworking Chinese migrants. Tibetans kept their distance, wary of revenge attacks.

The exercise was reminiscent of China’s recent, closed, dogmatic past, when all citizens were obliged to subscribe to the official version of events, however much they might privately dissent. A dictatorship can oblige this acceptance of a single narrative as the price of living unmolested in the state, but it only works if the outside world, with its diverse point of view and different stories, is kept at bay. The method, though, is incompatible in a society open to the outside world, as China now wishes to be.

The story of China in the past month is tragic on many levels. Prepared to fling open the doors to show off its best furniture and fashionable new clothes, official China is snarling in a corner instead, its confident image shredded by the real-time street theatre of London, Paris and San Francisco.

The issue is no longer confined to Tibet. Now it is about the nature of China’s rise, and a leadership capable of misreading the reactions of others so catastrophically. It is revealed as a regime that clings to symbolic politics, without realising that symbols carry different messages and, in the wider world, nobody can monopolise how they are read. What is now at risk is not only the success of the Olympics, but the direction of Chinese politics. This matters to us all, so here, at no charge and with respect, are some suggestions.

Firstly, stop digging. The torch relay was introduced at the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a triumphalist exercise. Proposing to run the longest relay ever, and including Taiwan and Tibet, was bound to open Beijing to the charge of exploiting an international sporting symbol for a nationalist agenda. At this point, the more security the torch needs, the more negative the message.

Secondly, get some honest advice and listen to it. In intolerant, top-down systems, subordinates tell the boss what they think he wants to hear. By the time the boss discovers the deception, the damage has been done. It may be painful to admit errors in public, but it would have a positive effect. In grown-up systems, the humbling of politicians is something in which the people can take pride, rather than feel as a national humiliation.

Thirdly, it’s time to take the initiative back, sit down for talks with the Dalai Lama and take a hard look at China’s record in Tibet. To insist that the Dalai Lama is single-handedly responsible for the failure of China’s policies in Tibet just makes Beijing look ridiculous internationally and does nothing to resolve the crisis. In the long run the choice is between more decades of repression and rebellion, and the chance of a constructive settlement that offers long-term stability for China and cultural survival for Tibet. For the past 50 years Chinese policy in Tibet has provoked intermittent uprisings. It is time to draw the right lessons.

When China signed up for the Olympics, it promised to improve human rights and press freedom, as well as to clean up the air and provide impeccable organisation. There have been heroic efforts on air quality, and nobody doubts the logistics or the shining new venues. But on human rights Beijing has fallen back on repression and has thrown away the chance to argue, with justice, that China has made considerable progress in building a legal state, in personal freedoms and in creating prosperity. Now those achievements have been sidelined by a torch that cannot venture on to the streets without an armed escort.

There is still a choice to be made, and a change of policy is by far the best decision. So far, Beijing has reached for the tattered flag of nationalism. The official story blames China’s enemies; that line may convince many - even most - Chinese, but if the end of the story is to force 1.3 billion people back into a position of antagonism towards the outside world, when the strategy for the past 15 years has been to open up, what will have been gained?

· Isabel Hilton is the editor of Chinadialogue.net

isabel.hilton@guardian.co.uk

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
April 10, 2008

Central Africa cannot afford another failed state - but it may get one nonetheless.

Leaving Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, after a recent business trip, my colleagues and I settled into our airliner’s seats and breathed a sigh of relief. We had planned a retreat for emerging African leaders to devise practical ways to produce change within their individual countries and institutions. We had selected Yaoundé as the meeting place because of Cameroon’s presumed political stability, relatively reliable infrastructure and easy access.

But within days of our arrival in my country, riots and protests ignited by the rising costs of fuel and food resulted in a nationwide lockdown.

Much of the public’s frustration is due to the stark need for political reform. Cameroon’s 75-year-old president, Paul Biya, suggested in his New Year’s address that he intended to modify the Constitution to extend his term in office beyond 2011. Biya has been in power almost as long as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Under his rule, Cameroon has endured endemic corruption, weak institutions, official impunity and fraudulent elections.

During our trip, I found the presence of armed security forces across the capital’s hilly landscapes frighteningly reminiscent of the atmosphere in Rwanda and Burundi in the mid-1990s. Thousands of ordinary citizens suspected of participating in the protests were arbitrarily rounded up and detained, subjected to summary trials and harsh sentences, some for up to six years in prison. Witnesses reported that many people in custody were beaten, tortured and abused. There were also reports of dead bodies floating on the Wouri River in Douala, the country’s economic capital, although it is unclear how many people died.

Even more disturbing is the inflammatory and divisive rhetoric by some high-level government officials seeking to incite hatred and manipulate ethnic differences. In a country with over 125 different ethnic groups, this is a sinister game that could trigger inter-community conflict.

The president recently made good on his New Year’s promise. The ruling party has formally introduced a bill that would amend the Constitution to allow Biya to run for another seven-year term after his current mandate ends in 2011.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
LETTER FROM CHINA
China’s multiple victims include its own public
By Howard W. French
April 10, 2008

SHANGHAI: Ihad hardly finished writing a news article on repression in Xinjiang last week when word reached me of the violent suppression of yet another protest by Tibetan monks in western Sichuan Province.

There were conflicting reports. Some said eight Tibetans had been killed, some of them ordinary bystanders. Other reports put the number as high as 15.

The Tibetans were not the only casualties, though, in the unfolding story of disaffection, protest and repression in China’s western region. In a bitterly ironic way, the plight of Xinjiang’s Uighurs had been obscured by the news of yet more brutality against Tibetans.

The news out of China in recent weeks has involved multiple, interlocking tragedies, with a cast of victims much larger and more complex than the easily digestible narrative people in the West are accustomed to thinking about, a tale of put-upon Tibetans and imposing Chinese.

The onrush of Western sympathy for the cause of Tibet is well-intentioned but often naïve. The way the Tibet story has been reduced to a binary matter, almost literally of Tibetan saints and Han Chinese sinners, is problematic on many levels, not least because of hypocrisy implicit in the West’s selective outrage.

Moreover, our many oversimplifications and perceived double standards fuel nationalist outrage in China and provide ready ammunition for ripostes by propagandists, whose task is to drum up popular support for the government as it digs deeper into the very positions that protesters seek to overturn.

Unfortunately for conventional Chinese opinion, the first instance of hypocrisy that needs to be dealt with involves the plight of the Uighurs, whose situation very nearly mirrors that of the Tibetans, the distinction being that Tibetans have become lovable because of popular notions about Buddhism and because of the way Hollywood has romanticized Tibet and its saffron-robed monks and supported the Dalai Lama.

Natives of Xinjiang, by contrast, are Muslim, and geopolitics and popular culture have combined in ways that have been deeply prejudicial to the Uighurs, who have no celebrity sponsors or young Western sympathizers eager to identify with their culture or support their cause.

The biggest and least obvious victims in this crisis, however, are the Chinese themselves. This has nothing to do with the ritualized self-pity combined with zealous nationalism and occasionally vicious hate speech that one encounters from Chinese all over the Internet these days. Here, we speak of people who insist that any criticism of China is really motivated by deep-seated Western contempt for the Chinese people themselves, or of the strident Chinese voices that say that people in the West have no standing to criticize them because Westerners have plenty of awful things to answer for themselves.

Yes, it is true, the Americans massacred the Indians and the Europeans conducted a centuries-long Atlantic slave trade. One could go on and on compiling a list of sins. But surely it does neither China nor its image any good to say don’t criticize us because of your past - or worse, it doesn’t matter if we do bad things because you’ve done bad aplenty, too.

On one issue after another, many Chinese fashion themselves as victims in these terms, or cut themselves unlimited moral slack, doing themselves neither honor nor good. It often goes like: How dare you criticize us as undemocratic, since it took you hundreds of years of development to become democratic; or how dare you say anything about our pollution, because you’ve been the biggest polluters in the past.

Arguments like those are effective in China largely for one reason, because the state, which has so tightly controlled the narrative in China through the strict filtering of information and education, has pulled off a feat of monumental political manipulation, persuading China’s great Han majority that any criticism of its government is a deliberate slight against the Chinese people.

One may spare a thought for China for having arrived rather late to the party of modernization, when things like environmental standards and democratic participation and human rights and openness are standard expectations, but demands for them won’t go away, including increasingly from China’s own people.

The reason the people of China are the biggest victims in the ugly spectacle of the last few weeks is that the Chinese government sold them on the Olympics as a measure of their standing and stature in the world. It did so, moreover, as if hypnotized by its own peculiar and stilted rhetoric, which demands that the world applaud its achievements with no pause for questions or thought.

That, after all, is the meaning of Beijing’s insistence that politics have no place in the Olympics, even as the country uses the Games to bolster its domestic standing and to make an unsubtle statement to the world: We are successful and grand. Behold and admire us. We have arrived.

One hopes that the Chinese public, smart, increasingly sophisticated and more and more exposed to the kind of reality checks that come from contact with others, can figure out the trick that is being played on them. A criticism of an action of their government is in no way a criticism of them.

Go to any auto show and see for yourself. Whenever a shiny new model is rolled out and the manufacturer hands out glossy promotional brochures, the normal reaction of those in attendance is to kick the tires for themselves.

Beijing showed the world last week what happens to its own citizens who dare hold up a mirror to the system and assess things for themselves: The activist, Hu Jia, was imprisoned for daring to write. When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg.

The greatest insult an outsider could pay to the Chinese people would be failing to understand what lies beneath.

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Copyright The Washington Post

The Post has just won six Pulitzer Prizes, which looks like a typo. It was a newsroom-wide triumph — Metro, National, Investigative, Foreign, Financial, Magazine. Within that Variety Pack of journalism, there’s a common ingredient — something we too seldom discuss when we cogitate about how to reinvent the business model: Reporting.

Original reporting still matters. It’s probably our best gimmick. It’s what we do (imperfectly to be sure) better than anyone else in the news business. It also can’t be easily replaced on the cheap by some other information-delivery system.

The Post’s winning entries are full of shoe-leather journalism, from the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy to Steve Pearlstein’s reporting-driven columns in the biz section. Bart Gellman and Jo Becker went after the hardest target in Washington, Dick Cheney. Dana Priest and Anne Hull broke the story of deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. Steve Fainaru easily could have won a couple of years ago for his stories obtained at great risk in Iraq.

Some folks out there at other papers may be thinking how unfair it is that The Post, which has certain innate advantages — big staff, big news budget, a metropolitan area chockablock with news junkies, for example — won all these awards. Not getting the glory is, in fact, the common experience of most people in this business, and most human beings on the planet more generally.

Which is why it might be a good moment to re-read Gene Weingarten’s winning entry in the Features category. Let me note that Gene is a special person in my life - really, almost like a grandfather to me. I will try to be objective here.

What do you notice about Gene’s story? Of course you see the signature Weingarten moves: The daring stunt that frames the story; the use of internal kickers, also known as “zingers”; and most important, the way that the story is not just about music or a violinist or the over-stressed American workforce, but about the Meaning of Life.

You may also have noticed that he managed to get his editor, Tom Shroder, to chase after people in the Metro and get phone numbers for him. That alone is worth a Pulitzer.

But here’s what jumps out at me: The story is immaculate. There’s not a loose word in the whole thing. You could pick that story up, turn it upside down, and shake it and nothing would drop out. Maybe there’s something in there I missed - but it sure looks like everything’s bolted down.

This is partly because Gene chews on pens and rubber bands. It helps him concentrate as he obsesses obsesses obsesses over his copy.

Moreover, nothing gets into the Post magazine without going through a fine filter of editing, revision, copy-editing, fact-checking, and proof-reading, culminating in a process known as Reading the Boards. Shroder and Sydney Trent and the other editors take a final look at this thing that’s about to go to press. A lot of that labor is unglorious [inglorious? Paging the copy editor!]. So I’d put, as a newspaper virtue right up there with Original Reporting, what you might simply call Sweating the Small Stuff. Which also isn’t cheap, or easily automated.

Too often in these discussions about the future of newspapers we get hung up on platforms, on the mechanisms and shapes and sizes of the product. We want to figure out how to put our product where people can find it, even if that means cramming it into a cellphone. We have to make that transition. We have to adapt to a new world, and probably we need to adapt a lot faster. But the platform isn’t the soul of a news organization.

A final thought: A bunch of the people who wrote or edited these stories and columns are of an age at which they are eligible for a buyout. There’s a phrase that has popped up in recent years, in which people are described as being “still in their vertical hour.” That means they’re still rising in their career.

But don’t count out the veterans. Apparently some of these geezers know what they’re doing.

Posted at 11:47 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By Howard W. French
April 6, 2008

BEIJING: As a young migrant worker, Lei Gailing sought her fortune in China’s fast-industrializing and freewheeling south. She found a steady factory job but a less stable boyfriend, then became pregnant.

The routine course for most women would have been to marry the man or to arrange an abortion. Lei, who was then 33 and fiercely independent, did neither. Refusing to marry the man but afraid she might never have a child, she chose to become a single mother.

That decision carried implications that Lei never fully anticipated, marking her as something of a social outcast in a country that still strictly controls population growth and makes few concessions to women like her.

Today, at 41, Lei says she has no regrets, even after a life of bitter twists and turns: pretending to be divorced at one point to avoid bringing shame on her son, and ultimately marrying a much older man in an effort to obtain the basic identification documents her boy needed to go to school and receive other social services.

For all this, Lei, who now lives with the older man in Beijing in what she describes as an abusive relationship, said she would do it all over again for her son. “I look at him today, and know it was worthwhile,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “He is so lovely, I cannot regret it

In a society where until quite recently premarital sex was often punished - both officially and socially - the issue of single motherhood has been slow to enter the public arena. But now, a new awareness of the issue is raising questions about the status of women in China, as well as other rights issues like the hukou, or residency permit, a central tool of population control passed down from the Maoist era that restricts movement by linking people to the towns of their birth.

The Chinese government has long maintained that the Communist Party liberated women - along with the rest of the country - in 1949. But in an era of rapid modernization, China has lacked anything like a broad current of thought about women’s rights.

“When we argue that a woman owns the uterus, and it’s her right to decide whether to deliver the baby or not, people won’t buy it,” said Yuan Xin, director of psychology at the Consulting Center of Nankai University. “If you are a woman, your personal choice is monitored and supervised by a lot of others, and they expect you to do what everyone else does.”

Official statistics on the number of single mothers are unavailable in China. But with premarital sex now commonplace and women’s earning power growing, particularly in the wealthy cities of the east, experts believe their numbers are rising fast, albeit from a small base.

“This is of great significance,” said Li Ling, a professor of arts and sciences at Beijing Language and Culture University. “It’s hard for me to judge other people’s choices, good or bad, but it means a lot that women are making such decisions on their own, as a matter of choice. In Chinese tradition, women don’t have such rights. We are only the bearers of offspring for our husbands’ families.”

In many ways, Xie Jing, 33, a newspaper reporter in Shanghai, is typical of an emerging generation of single mothers who are professionals and whose choices on child-rearing are eased by their financial security.

Xie said that she became pregnant while she was engaged, but that her fiancé’s ambivalence over the unexpected news prompted her to set her own course. When her former fiancé asked her, “What is the point of having a child if we are no longer together?” she had a ready answer: raising the child alone.

“My quality of life isn’t so bad, so I don’t want to lower myself to staying with another person just for the sake of being together,” Xie said. “If that means I have to sacrifice a lot, so be it. But I am in a good situation now with my baby, and I’m not willing to lose it.”

Her son was born two years ago in a partly foreign-owned hospital, where registration of the pregnancy with a neighborhood committee - standard in most of China - was not required. Xie lives with her parents, who are retired and help take care of her boy. To all but her closest friends, she explains that the father is overseas on a three-year assignment. Her son bears Xie’s family name, and the father was told that if he did not accept legal responsibility as a parent, he would be kept at bay until the boy turned 18.

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Copyright The New York Times

April 6, 2008

THE soft-colored photographs of Sze Tsung Leong capture contrasting landscapes: the verdant green of Germany; the mirage of shimmering towers in Dubai; the urban geometry of Amman, Jordan; the red tiles roofs of Italy. But always the eye is drawn to the distinct line where sky meets earth.
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Courtesy of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

“Amman, Jordan, 2007.”

In Mr. Leong’s panoramic photographs of major cities and rural landscapes around the world, the horizon line consistently falls in the same place. So when his images are hung side by side — as 62 of them are now at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea — they create an extended landscape of ancient cities and modern metropolises, desert vistas and lush terrain.

“The horizon is such a basic way of comprehending the space around us, comprehending our basic relationship to the globe,” Mr. Leong said one recent morning over tea in Manhattan.

If the horizon seems to offer possibilities, he said, it also establishes a boundary. “In terms of looking, the horizon is the farthest we can see,” he explained, yet in terms of knowledge, it reflects “the limit of experience.”

For the last seven years Mr. Leong, a 38-year-old Chinese-American with a British accent and a Mexican birth certificate, has expanded his experience by traveling to unfamiliar cities, where his first priority is to find a sweeping view from an elevated position.

“When I’m really familiar with a place, it is more difficult to visualize it,” he said, citing New York, his home, as an example. “But being confronted with a new situation, I find that I’m more aware of things visually.” He traveled to Amman because he hoped the uniform construction of its buildings might cast an even pattern and tone across the surrounding hills, which would offer him distant vantage points. And the Roman ruins there attracted him as a reminder of the reach of the Roman Empire across national borders.

He often travels alone to new cities. Asked about his sense of isolation during his five days in Amman, he referred to his childhood in Mexico City, where he lived until his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 11. “There’s always a sense that was natural to me from the beginning of being an outsider,” he said. “I don’t think about feeling foreign, because that is the natural state.”

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Copyright The Globe and Mail

Apr 4, 2008

Emotions have been running high on all sides since riots and unrest broke out last month in Tibet and the surrounding provinces. Critics of the Chinese government charge that what happened was the result of a resistance movement by the Tibetan people against Beijing’s long-time repressive policies in the region. They call for international attention to the Tibetan situation, organize protests along the routes of the 2008 Beijing Olympic global torch relay and push for a boycott of the Summer Games.

The Chinese authorities claim that the Dalai Lama and his separatist forces masterminded these unrests, which turned into violent rampages, looting, burning and killing of innocent civilians. Beijing insists that law and order be restored and rioters be punished; it will not tolerate further violence, and has indicated it will do whatever is necessary to fight Tibetan independence, even at the cost of damaging its reputation as Olympic host.

It is not surprising that such a bitter confrontation has extended beyond China’s borders. Tibetans in exile took to the streets in India and Nepal. In major European and North American cities, well co-ordinated demonstrations were staged in front of Chinese embassies and consulates as the unrest was spreading in Tibet and neighbouring provinces.

For their part, many in the Chinese diaspora have exhibited a strong sense of nationalism that opposes any Tibetan independence movement and resents any form of boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

What is surprising, however, is the very high level of mobilization of Chinese public opinion that is not as much a response to Beijing’s rallying calls for national unity as it is a strong reaction to what many Chinese perceive as the one-sided reporting of the Tibetan unrests by the mainstream Western press. Chinese people everywhere want their side of the Tibet story told.

Unlike in 1989, when Chinese all over the world, including scholars and students from the mainland, protested against the government crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square, Chinese people have taken to streets this time in support of Beijing. In the past week, such rallies have taken places in European cities, in Montreal and Calgary, and one is expected in Edmonton this weekend.

While many overseas Chinese believe that Beijing’s extremely harsh and hostile words against the Dalai Lama are neither effective nor well received by the Western public, they still see mainstream Western news media as being excessively anti-China. (Many noted errors in the reporting, including the mislabeling of photos of Indian and Nepalese police confronting demonstrating monks as Chinese soldiers cracking down in Tibet.)

They have fed their observations back to Chinese cyberspace instantly, and what we are witnessing is an emerging synergy of cybernationalism connecting many Chinese at home and abroad.

But what has propelled this strident nationalism? Why has the disdain for Tibet independence and its ambitions become so highly charged and emotional? Hasn’t the Chinese Communist Party simply been using nationalism as a tool of legitimacy for staying in power? Aren’t most Chinese brainwashed since childhood?

First of all, there is an overwhelming sense among the Han Chinese (the country’s predominant ethnic group) that Tibet has been part of China for centuries. True, Chinese control over Tibet was weakened when China was invaded by Western powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. But the Han have not forgotten the earlier ties. As well, Central Intelligence Agency-funded Tibetan covert operations against China in most of the Cold War years are well documented, stirring further resentment.

As such, historical memory ensures that in the minds of the Han, any perceived attempts to separate Tibet from China will be linked with the humiliation the Chinese suffered at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialism. So, to most Chinese, a potential boycott of the Beijing Olympics is viewed as a denial of China’s moment in restoring its respectable position in the world.

Second, many Chinese deeply believe to this day that the People’s Republic of China has lifted Tibet’s people out of a medieval serfdom that was degrading to the majority of Tibetans, especially women.

The attitude, felt particularly by the communist and socialist idealists, is not unlike that felt some years ago by many in North America who saw the spread of their European culture as bringing civilization to the native people. Just as aboriginal children were put in boarding schools and forced to learn English, many Chinese thought they were giving emancipation to an oppressed people under the name of socialism and progress.

While not denying Chinese policy failures in Tibet over the years, many reacted angrily to the recent charge that they were committing “cultural genocide” in Tibet. They point out that what China did in Tibet is generous in contrast to how native Indians were treated in North America over 400 years.

Finally, many Han Chinese also think Tibetans should appreciate the tremendously high level of financial and other support that has been poured into their region, both from the central government, in the form of subsidies, and from the market adventurists who have invested heavily in the area in recent years. To the Han, such economic development is seen as eliminating poverty and bringing prosperity to the ordinary people of Tibet, as in the rest of China.

That’s why the shocking images of angry young Tibetans violently attaching Han Chinese and other non-Tibetans made Chinese people recoil in indignation. (Even though they might note that while the gap between the rich and poor in the rest of China is mostly a distribution issue, the division line between the haves and have-nots appears to be drawn along ethnic lines in Tibet.)

Taken together, these historically-conditioned perceptions will continue to shape events. And failing to understand the deep-rooted emotions on both sides will not only hinder potential solutions to the complex issues involved, but may risk generating further divisions.

Wenran Jiang is an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta.

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Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 5, 2008

SHANGHAI — Fresh ethnic violence has erupted in a Tibetan region of southwestern China, with disputed reports of eight people shot dead by the police, and the Chinese government on Friday vowed swift and severe punishment of Tibetans accused of rioting and taking part in last month’s antigovernment protests.

Police officers on Thursday evening fired on a crowd of protesters outside government offices in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, along the Tibet border. A Tibet activist group said the shooting killed eight protesters, The Associated Press reported, but other unconfirmed reports put the death toll as high as 15.

Signs of ethnic unrest in another area, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, have also begun to emerge in recent days, with details of protests and rumored plotting by Muslim separatists in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and of police crackdowns.

China’s official Xinhua news agency confirmed the latest incident of Tibetan unrest in Sichuan Province, saying that a riot had broken out in the town of Donggu and that the “police were forced to fire warning shots to put down the violence,” citing a local official. It said a police officer was killed and a government official seriously wounded, but gave no details of other injuries or deaths.

The pro-Tibet activist group, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign, said the protests followed what the government called a patriotic education campaign, in which monks in the area were told to denounce the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. According to the Free Tibet Campaign, when Buddhist monks at the Ganzi monastery denied entry to the police, a large deployment of paramilitary forces was sent to the temple on Thursday, and two monks were arrested for possessing photographs of the Dalai Lama.

The arrests prompted a march by hundreds of monks and lay people on the government offices to demand their release, and soldiers later fired on them.

“The Donggu town authorities agreed to release the monks within a couple of hours, but when they were not released the protesters began marching toward the government offices a second time,” said Anne Holmes, a spokeswoman for the Free Tibet Campaign in London. Before they even reached there, the police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least eight people, she said.

Tibet was shaken by protests last month by Buddhist monks demanding religious freedoms. Riots followed in Lhasa, the capital, on March 14, in which shops owned by the country’s ethnic Han majority were attacked. China says 19 people were killed in the rioting and ensuing crackdown, while Tibetan exile groups say they have reports of 140 deaths. The events in Lhasa quickly brought a wave of sympathy protests in parts of several neighboring provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers.

Like Tibetans, Uighurs, who are the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, harbor memories of political independence and deep resentment of Chinese control, particularly over the practice of their Islamic faith.

Residents of townships and villages near Gulja, a city in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, said that about 25 Uighur Muslims were arrested last week on a tip that people in the area were making bombs. Residents said the police search had turned up three bombs in a cowshed, but the authorities were still looking for more devices that they believed were hidden in the area.

A resident of Yengiyer, a township near Gulja, speaking by telephone on Friday of the uncovering of a bomb plot, said the police tip had come after the recent arrest of a Uighur in the provincial capital, Urumqi. The police contacted in the area declined to discuss the tip. But local residents with connections to the government said the bombs were part of a conspiracy to undermine Communist rule.

“Their goal is pretty simple: They want to overthrow the rule of the Communist Party,” said Hong Xiuhua, 50, a retired local party official. “They claim that Xinjiang belongs to them and want to drive all the Han people out.” Ms. Hong said that the police were holding two couples, as well as a local baker, but that they had released some of the other initial suspects. She said that unauthorized gatherings in the region had been banned.

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I put off reading this for a long time, basically because of too many other interests competing for my time, and because of a native distrust of hype.
Having tucked into it the other day and quickly finding myself unable to put it down, I must say, however, that that this is one of the most astonishingly well-written - meaning both stylistically limpid and honest - memoirs I have come across for a very long time.
I’ll add some favorite excerpts here shortly.

Posted at 12:38 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
April 5, 2008

This week, a Beijing court sentenced human rights activist Hu Jia to 3 1/2 years in prison for subverting state authority and to one additional year’s loss of his “political rights.” He was arrested in part for co-authoring, with Teng Biao, an open letter on human rights. Below, The Post printsHuman Rights Watch’s translation of the Sept. 10, 2007, letter.

On July 13th 2001, when Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese government promised the world it would improve China’s human rights record. In June 2004, Beijing announced its Olympic Games slogan, “One World, One Dream.” From their inception in 1896, the modern Olympic Games have always had as their mission the promotion of human dignity and world peace. China and the world expected to see the Olympic Games bring political progress to the country. Is Beijing keeping its promises? Is China improving its human rights record?

When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.

We are going to tell you the truth about China. We believe that for anyone who wishes to avoid a disgraceful Olympics, knowing the truth is the first step. Fang Zheng, an excellent athlete who holds two national records for the discus throw at China’s Special Sport Games, has been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the 2008 Paralympics because he has become a living testimony to the June 4, 1989[,] massacre. That morning, in Tiananmen Square, his legs were crushed by a tank while he was rescuing a fellow student. In April 2007, the Ministry of Public Security issued an internal document secretly strengthening a political investigation which resulted in forbidding Olympics participation by 43 types of people from 11 different categories, including dissidents, human rights defenders, media workers, and religious participants. The Chinese police never made the document known to either the Chinese public or the international community.

Huge investment in Olympic projects and a total lack of transparency have facilitated serious corruption and widespread bribery. Taxpayers are not allowed to supervise the use of investment amounting to more than $40 billion. Liu Zhihua, formerly in charge of Olympic construction and former deputy mayor of Beijing, was arrested for massive embezzlement.

To clear space for Olympic-related construction, thousands of civilian houses have been destroyed without their former owners being properly compensated. Brothers Ye Guozhu and Ye Guoqiang were imprisoned for a legal appeal after their house was forcibly demolished. Ye Guozhu has been repeatedly handcuffed and shackled, tied to a bed and beaten with electric batons. During the countdown to the Olympic Games he will continue to suffer from torture in Chaobei Prison in Tianjin.

It has been reported that over 1.25 million people have been forced to move because of Olympic construction; it was estimated that the figure would reach 1.5 million by the end of 2007. No formal resettlement scheme is in place for the over 400,000 migrants who have had their dwelling places demolished. Twenty percent of the demolished households are expected to experience poverty or extreme poverty. In Qingdao, the Olympic sailing city, hundreds of households have been demolished and many human rights activists as well as “civilians” have been imprisoned. Similar stories come from other Olympic cities such as Shenyang, Shanghai and Qinhuangdao.

In order to establish the image of civilized cities, the government has intensified the ban against — and detention and forced repatriation of — petitioners, beggars and the homeless. Some of them have been kept in extended detention in so-called shelters or have even been sent directly to labor camps. Street vendors have suffered brutal confiscation of their goods by municipal agents. On July 20, 2005, Lin Hongying, a 56-year-old woman farmer and vegetable dealer, was beaten to death by city patrols in Jiangsu. On November 19, 2005, city patrols in Wuxi beat 54-year-old bicycle repairman Wu Shouqing to death. In January 2007, petitioner Duan Huimin was killed by Shanghai police. On July 1, 2007, Chen Xiaoming, a Shanghai petitioner and human rights activist, died of an untreated illness during a lengthy detention period. On August 5, 2007, right before the one-year Olympics countdown, 200 petitioners were arrested in Beijing.

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Copyright Slate

In 1991, when Wong Kar-wai released his dreamy 1960s period piece, Days of Being Wild, he wrote in the director’s statement: “I really do not think it matters much if my films are critically well-received or not. What is essential is that I want my audience to leave the cinema having enjoyed the film, and that means the whole world to me.” Imagine his frustration, then, when Days was released to resounding critical acclaim and complete commercial failure, as were his next four movies. At some point he must have decided to reverse the formula—valuing critical acclaim over audience enjoyment—because this week his first American film, My Blueberry Nights, arrives in the United States, and it’s the cinematic equivalent of seeing Wong disappear up his own posterior, eased by gobs of critical praise.

Twenty years ago, his first movie, As Tears Go By, caught lightning in a bottle when Andy Lau pulled Maggie Cheung into a phone booth and passionately made out with her as a Cantonese cover of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” swelled on the soundtrack and the booth’s fluorescent lights burned brighter and brighter until they seared the screen white. It was the first “Wong Kar-wai moment,” and, in the six movies he made between 1988 and 1997, there would be many more: Faye Wong singing “Dreams” by the Cranberries in Chungking Express as a lovelorn cop sipped coffee in slow motion while the world hurled itself around him in fast forward; Frank Zappa’s satirical “I Have Been in You” transformed into a breakup dirge in Happy Together; the Flying Pickets closing Fallen Angels with their rapturous cover of “Only You”; Tony Leung gearing up for a night of breaking hearts while Xavier Cugat’s “Perfidia” cha-chas in the background of Days of Being Wild.

Wong’s movies showed how pop songs let us escape the world for a place where emotions are stronger, colors are brighter, and everyone can say exactly how they feel—but for only three minutes at a time. He blended the tragic transience of pop with an aching nostalgia for the eternally ending present, a uniquely Hong Kong attitude. Hong Kong is a city fascinated with the next new thing while simultaneously feeling as cramped and close-knit as a small town. (See Wong’s Fallen Angels, in which a hit man escapes a bloody shootout only to run into a high-school classmate.) Most Hong Kongers live a short commute from where they grew up, and everyone knows everybody else, but development happens at the speed of light, and most people’s childhood memories have been paved over by the time they’re adults. Living in Hong Kong means experiencing a constant, low-level mourning for the way things used to be while rushing at breakneck speed into the future—a lot like living in a Wong Kar-wai film.

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Posted at 11:52 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Letter from China
By Howard W. French
April 3, 2008

SHANGHAI: Mao Zedong announced the tune himself, in 1927, when he wrote: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

For the next half-century, China was one of the most violent places on earth, and not just because of the vicious foreign invasion and civil war that swept the country, or the ceaseless purges of supposed traitors and class enemies. There was also the matter of language, which in China has been both an underrated means of violence and a vehicle for it.

Mao’s state created a propaganda system built on a crude triage: a world of heroes who were unalterably and impossibly good, and an even larger one of villains who were irredeemably, cartoonishly bad. Over-the-top became the routine in official rhetoric. Enemies were called “monsters” and “cow ghosts,” “snake spirits” and “running dogs.” And in one campaign after another the public was called upon to “resolutely crush” or “relentlessly denounce” them.

This was a universe of variable geometry, where people were not to reason things out on their own, but to fall in line. Today’s hero could be tomorrow’s villain, with no clear evidence or explanation. The sole moral compass point was the immoral leader himself, Mao, who to this day remains a sacred cow whose likeness peers out from every bank note.

In recent years, it had seemed as if this movie had been retired, but last month the production was cued up once again. The bad guy this time has been the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and the fact that outside China this villain is one of the world’s most admired people has only caused the propagandists to ramp up the volume.

For the purpose of the cause he has been turned into a canine and called a “wolf in monk’s robes,” “a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast” and the “scum of Buddhism.” In case anyone missed the message, the government has also called the struggle against the Dalai Lama “a life-and-death battle.”

The Chinese public should by now recognize all the signs of an old-fashioned political campaign and, given the state’s history of manipulation, immediately mark a long, skeptical pause.

It’s not clear, though, if that’s how it worked this time. The propaganda means of the Chinese state remain overwhelming, as is its inclination not just to shape opinion, but to corral it, playing on what the documentary filmmaker Tang Danhong called the “great Han chauvinism,” referring to the dominant ethnic group, a chauvinism that has been evident throughout the Tibetan crisis.

After watching the first week of heavily propagandized television coverage here over dinner recently - reporting that focused almost exclusively on images of lawless Tibetan rioters smashing shops in Lhasa, along with the images of ethnic Han victims of the violence, typically recovering in the hospital - a senior Chinese newspaper editor eagerly questioned me about what was “really happening in Tibet.”

The question was scarcely out of his mouth when he added: “When people see the kind of one-sided propaganda that’s been in the media here, nobody trusts it anymore.”

This might be reassuring, were it true, but the next few days provided many causes for doubt. A young Chinese acquaintance who is a journalist sounded a troubled note in an e-mail message to me: “I read some news reports recently and am confused why the Western media reports on Tibet are inconsistent with the facts? Like they only report on the Chinese police but not the thugs attack the innocent people and the police? And even worse, why are they reporting lot of false and prejudiced news?”

The irony here, of course, is that Western coverage, whatever its faults, generally detailed the street violence in Lhasa, despite being barred access to Tibet by a country that made a big to-do last year over having supposedly lifted restrictions on the movements of international journalists in China.

Unlike the heavily controlled domestic press, the Western media also reported on the largely peaceful sympathy protests that unfolded over a broad stretch of the Tibetan plateau. They generally sought to give at least two sides to the story and questioned Beijing’s assertions about Tibetan protesters and about their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in the textbook way an independent press should.

Beyond the headlines, though, this crisis tells us a lot about China, and although the government may still have the means to control opinion, the more strenuously it has pressed its case, the less the picture of the country concurs with the image that China so eagerly wishes to promote of itself to the world.

China has invested hugely in its hosting of the Olympic Games in August with the idea of introducing itself as an overwhelming success story: increasingly prosperous, harmonious and forward-looking. The first statement is certainly true, but one needn’t be an enemy of China, as the propagandists would have it, to question the other two.

This may yet turn out to be China’s century, but it seems clearer than ever there’s a lot of work to do, reforming an awfully rickety system, rethinking policies built on bald fictions, such as the “autonomous regions” in China’s west, and learning to deal with criticism without turning it into a matter of ethnic pride or betrayal.

The official slogan of the Games may be “one world, one dream,” but that’s not the feeling one gets listening to the state’s organs. It is an ugly, wound-nursing nationalism one hears. “So strong,” said the filmmaker Tang, “that there’s almost no introspection, not even among Han intellectuals.”

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Copyright The Sun

A TORTOISE whose owner claims it is addicted to smoking can apparently finish a cigarette in four minutes.

Owner Li Yun from the town of Kouqian in Yongji county, said his pet was addicted to cigarettes after it started smoking smouldering butts he left lying around his garden.

He said the animal is now addicted and he has timed it smoking a cigarette in four minutes, and gets upset if he can’t smoke half a pack a day.

He said: �Whenever I smoke the tortoise lifts its head out of the water and stares at the cigarette. If I don’t let it smoke, it swims around crazily in its little pond, scratching the sides.

�The tortoise won’t stop until I give it a cigarette and it bites the butt, and you can see the tip glowing. Within four minutes the cigarette is gone.�

Tang Jingwen, deputy secretary-general of the Jilin City Animal Protection Association, said they wanted to contact Yun over his claims.

He said: �If the tortoise smokes voluntarily there is little we can do, but we want him to stop making it public.�

The pictures are the key to this story. See the link, parts one and two:
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Posted at 11:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
HEIDI HOLLAND
April 1, 2008

Johannesburg

WHILE Zimbabwe’s opposition party is claiming victory in its effort to unseat President Robert G. Mugabe, it would be a mistake to count him out. And if Mr. Mugabe prevails, it would be a mistake to continue to isolate him, as Western governments have done for the last decade.

Mr. Mugabe is bad, but he could get worse.

•

“My granny was a heathen,” Mr. Mugabe muttered from behind his big wooden desk at his office in Harare, the capital. It was not the sort of comment I had expected to hear from the 84-year-old dictator, but during our 2 ½-hour interview late last year, some of my assumptions about the most enigmatic figure in modern Africa were crumbling.

As soon as I entered the room I realized that the awkward man wearing a finely stitched white shirt and an elegant dark suit was apprehensive of me, just as I was of him. Mr. Mugabe stared hard, and then cleared his throat nervously. I had expected to meet someone exuding power — an older version of the steely freedom fighter I encountered over a secret dinner at my home 30 years ago.

Instead I saw a mild and diminished figure, his rumbling but faint voice often barely audible, his head at times lolling forward self-consciously as if he wanted to hide away. As the interview progressed, he slumped and then slid down like a gangly teenager in his threadbare swivel chair, his long limbs dangling. What I eventually realized from Mr. Mugabe’s earnest efforts to justify his actions to me was that he is more vulnerable than his outlandish public posturing suggests.

Certainly, Mr. Mugabe is no feeble recluse — we have seen him campaigning with sudden bursts of vigor at staged rallies before busloads of supporters of the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front — yet he almost never grants interviews to journalists. To obtain mine took two years of requests, the persistent intervention of Mr. Mugabe’s priest and then a five-week wait in Harare.

Early on I had assumed that he was too busy to spare the time. Only later did it dawn on me that he might be fearful of the independent press.

That fear is understandable. Zimbabwe’s once booming economy is in tatters. Inflation has soared to fantastical levels, unemployment is near universal, starvation looms. And Mr. Mugabe, for all his protestations about the wicked West and for all the sycophantic comments from the yes-men who surround him, must know that he is to blame.

So why talk about his heathen grandmother? I wanted to understand the Robert Mugabe who had been obscured amid the chaos and misrule. The one described by his classmates as shy, bookish, a loner deeply attached to his mother and resentful of his absent father. The one who was at first remarkably forgiving of white landowners when he came to power in 1980. (For instance, Mr. Mugabe allowed his predecessor, Ian Smith, who led the white minority government that ran Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known, to live on in Harare without harassment, even when Mr. Smith embarked on a campaign against him.)

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Copyright The New York Times
HEIDI HOLLAND
April 1, 2008

Johannesburg

WHILE Zimbabwe’s opposition party is claiming victory in its effort to unseat President Robert G. Mugabe, it would be a mistake to count him out. And if Mr. Mugabe prevails, it would be a mistake to continue to isolate him, as Western governments have done for the last decade.

Mr. Mugabe is bad, but he could get worse.

•

“My granny was a heathen,” Mr. Mugabe muttered from behind his big wooden desk at his office in Harare, the capital. It was not the sort of comment I had expected to hear from the 84-year-old dictator, but during our 2 ½-hour interview late last year, some of my assumptions about the most enigmatic figure in modern Africa were crumbling.

As soon as I entered the room I realized that the awkward man wearing a finely stitched white shirt and an elegant dark suit was apprehensive of me, just as I was of him. Mr. Mugabe stared hard, and then cleared his throat nervously. I had expected to meet someone exuding power — an older version of the steely freedom fighter I encountered over a secret dinner at my home 30 years ago.

Instead I saw a mild and diminished figure, his rumbling but faint voice often barely audible, his head at times lolling forward self-consciously as if he wanted to hide away. As the interview progressed, he slumped and then slid down like a gangly teenager in his threadbare swivel chair, his long limbs dangling. What I eventually realized from Mr. Mugabe’s earnest efforts to justify his actions to me was that he is more vulnerable than his outlandish public posturing suggests.

Certainly, Mr. Mugabe is no feeble recluse — we have seen him campaigning with sudden bursts of vigor at staged rallies before busloads of supporters of the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front — yet he almost never grants interviews to journalists. To obtain mine took two years of requests, the persistent intervention of Mr. Mugabe’s priest and then a five-week wait in Harare.

Early on I had assumed that he was too busy to spare the time. Only later did it dawn on me that he might be fearful of the independent press.

That fear is understandable. Zimbabwe’s once booming economy is in tatters. Inflation has soared to fantastical levels, unemployment is near universal, starvation looms. And Mr. Mugabe, for all his protestations about the wicked West and for all the sycophantic comments from the yes-men who surround him, must know that he is to blame.

So why talk about his heathen grandmother? I wanted to understand the Robert Mugabe who had been obscured amid the chaos and misrule. The one described by his classmates as shy, bookish, a loner deeply attached to his mother and resentful of his absent father. The one who was at first remarkably forgiving of white landowners when he came to power in 1980. (For instance, Mr. Mugabe allowed his predecessor, Ian Smith, who led the white minority government that ran Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known, to live on in Harare without harassment, even when Mr. Smith embarked on a campaign against him.)

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Copyright the Washington Post
April 1, 2008

The world has watched in horror recently as Tibetan monks, nuns and laypeople engaged in peaceful demonstrations have been met with brutality by the Chinese People’s Armed Police. Tibet’s descent into chaos and violence is heartbreaking. As has been made clear by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has dedicated his life to peacefully promoting the Tibetan people’s legitimate aspirations for cultural autonomy and survival, lasting peace and meaningful change must be achieved through nonviolent means.

In watching recent coverage of the demonstrations in Tibet and their bloody aftermath, I have been reminded of a turning point in my own life, the moment I decided I had no choice but to speak out against the Chinese government’s policy of cultural destruction and its human rights abuses. It was a decision that led to six years in a Chinese prison and then to exile in the United States. Two of my sons are serving lengthy prison sentences in East Turkestan in retaliation for my human rights advocacy.

In February 1997, thousands of Uighurs demanding equality, religious freedom and an end to repression by the government peacefully protested in the Ghulja region of East Turkestan, an area designated the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region by the Chinese government. Armed paramilitary police confronted the unarmed demonstrators and bystanders, killing dozens on the spot, including women and young children. In the aftermath of the protest, thousands of Uighurs were detained on suspicion of participating in the demonstration. Tragically, hundreds of Uighurs were executed.

Just as I grieved with and for the families of the Uighurs killed in the Ghulja massacre, I grieve for the families of peaceful Tibetan demonstrators who have been killed or detained by Chinese police, perhaps never to be seen again. I have seen firsthand the suffering of parents who have lost their sons or daughters to an executioner’s bullet or a dark prison cell.

Because of our shared experience under the Chinese regime, Uighurs stand in solidarity with the Tibetan people and support their legitimate aspirations for genuine autonomy. The Chinese government’s fierce repression of religious expression, its intolerance for any expression of discontent, its discriminatory economic policies and its support for the movement of migrants have linked Tibet and East Turkestan and have led to the tremendous social tensions in both regions. To Beijing, any Tibetan or Uighur who is unhappy with China’s harsh rule is a “separatist.” Uighurs are also labeled “terrorists.”

With the media focused on the military crackdown in Tibet, few noticed that the Chinese government imposed a curfew in cities in southern East Turkestan. Police patrolled streets with German shepherds and broke up small groups of Uighurs. Like the Tibetan people, Uighurs have suffered for decades under a regime that seeks to eliminate a unique culture to placate paranoid leaders in Beijing. Our religion, a moderate form of Sunni Islam vital to Uighur ethnic identity, has been fiercely repressed. The Uighur language is disappearing from East Turkestan’s schools. Hundreds of thousands of government-sponsored Han Chinese migrants are brought to East Turkestan, while locals struggle with unemployment and poverty. Meanwhile, a Chinese government program transfers young Uighur women out of East Turkestan to urban areas of eastern China.

The Olympic torch arrived in Beijing yesterday, and at the end of June it will be carried through Tibet, to the top of Mount Everest and through the streets of Lhasa. From there the flame will be carried to the cities of East Turkestan, including Kashgar, a center of traditional Uighur culture, and Urumqi, the regional capital. China calls the torch relay a “journey of harmony,” hoping the unifying spirit of the Olympics will disguise the reality of its brutal rule.

But true harmony can never be achieved as long as the Communist Party enforces policies of cultural assimilation and political persecution in Tibet and East Turkestan. If China wishes to become a responsible member of the international community, its government must engage in a meaningful dialogue that addresses the sources of discontent in Tibet and East Turkestan.

The writer is president of the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress.

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