A Glimpse of the World: Writings Archives

Japan’s criticism on China’s Tibet crackdown hits close to home

May 9, 2008 1:27 AM

SHANGHAI: The view has taken hold in recent weeks in China that unrest in Tibet has been trumped up to be used as a cudgel to beat up this country by false friends and outright antagonists in the West.

As China’s ambassador to Britain, Fu Ying, wrote recently in The Daily Telegraph in London, “Many who had romantic views about the West are very disappointed at the media’s attempt to demonize China.”

Even columnists at The South China Morning Post, an English-language paper in Hong Kong that champions a liberal vision for that city, adopted that view, with one of them writing, “Most people who have watched television footage of the Tibetan riots seem to have given the benefit of the doubt to the mainland authorities over their use of force to restore order.”

Like lab experiments demanding exacting conditions, this theory of China as victim also depends on tight control over the terms of argument, hence a story line that emphasizes the West and focuses on riots in Lhasa, insisting that what China did in putting them down is what any government would do under the circumstances.

In the past two weeks, though, this keenly embraced view of China as the West’s victim has faced a stern test, and it is one for which its proponents seem ill prepared.
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First came the ugly behavior by Chinese students counterprotesting against South Koreans who turned out peacefully in Seoul to support the rights of Tibetans and of escapees from North Korea, whom China often returns to North Korea against their will.

An even bigger test arrived this week with the five-day visit to Japan by President Hu Jintao of China. Lately, Tokyo, which is rarely a forceful presence in international diplomacy, has found its voice on Tibet. Unlike his former boss, Junichiro Koizumi, who sometimes baited China, Japan’s current prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, has built his career, in part, on the notion that Japan needs strong and healthy ties with its fast-rising neighbor.

In that sense, Hu, who this week became the first Chinese leader to visit Japan in a decade, could not have wished for a better partner in reconciliation. The Chinese leader came bearing pandas, a traditional symbol of warming relations in Chinese diplomacy, and the two sides have made up for time lost to the long chill that has separated them, agreeing to annual summit meetings, which is good news for all of Asia.

This did not prevent Fukuda, however, from speaking frankly about Tibet last month with the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, who was in Tokyo to prepare for Hu’s visit.

The Japanese account of Fukuda’s meeting with Yang is telling. “Prime Minister Fukuda stated that there was a need to face up to the reality that the matter has become an international issue,” according to a Japanese Foreign Ministry statement.

In a meeting with the Japanese foreign minister, Masahiko Komakura, Yang countered with a warning over Tibet. “If you say anything further on this matter, it will consist of an infringement on our domestic affairs,” The Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reported. To this, Komakura replied, “I am annoyed to be told of an infringement on domestic matters while I am advising you as a friend.”

These remarkable exchanges are important for a variety of reasons. For one, although categories are sometimes stretched, Japan is not a Western country. If not mutually exclusive, its reasons for caring deeply about events in Tibet are rather different from those of the West, whose traditional human rights discourse has been painted, cynically or perversely, as a hostile doctrine by some in China.

Japan’s Buddhist roots incline it toward natural sympathy with the people of Tibet and toward concern for religious freedom there. To be sure, China may see still Japan through the mirror of its violent past, but today Japan sees China through the mirror of its own constitutional pacifism and it worries deeply what kind of neighbor is China becoming.

The same question, naturally, arises in South Korea, where the Chinese boom of the past three decades has changed people’s feelings about this country in strongly positive ways. Beijing has worked with both savvy and patience toward this end, fashioning itself as a new kind of global power, one capable of a peaceful rise, one whose arrival marks a win-win for partners everywhere.

The lesson of recent weeks, though, is that behavior trumps slogans, and for China’s neighbors, that is why what really happened in Tibet, rather than the carefully crafted official line, matters so much.

Putting down a localized riot, even violently, may be sellable, but what about the arrest of large numbers of Tibetans who protested peacefully in other places, and the punitive “re-education campaigns” reportedly under way? What about the attendant reports of numerous Tibetan deaths? What about China’s refusal to allow foreign journalists or independent observers to freely enter Tibet? What about the censoring of its own journalists on the subject, like the editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, Chang Ping, who was fired for reflecting on the lack of honesty in Chinese reporting on Tibet? Between neighbors, openness and candor matter greatly.
In another of the preparatory conversations before Hu’s Japan visit, when Wang Jiarui, a senior Chinese Communist Party official received Bunmei Ibuki, secretary general of Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party, Ibuki pressed his host for details on conditions in Tibet.

“You came to China to make the visit of President Hu to Japan successful and not to talk about Tibet, didn’t you?” Wang asked, according to The Mainichi Shimbun. Ibuki then urged China to “solve the issue through dialogue with people close to the Dalai Lama,” to which a Japanese Foreign Ministry official added: “There was a riot in Tibet in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen incident, but the Japanese government didn’t say anything. Now, Japanese officials say things they should say, but the relationship is sustained. The quality of the Japan-China relationship has changed.”

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A step forward? Chinese media report a single Tibetan death

May 2, 2008 12:56 AM

SHANGHAI: A milestone of sorts was reached on Wednesday with the reporting in China’s carefully controlled media of the death of a Tibetan in a clash with Chinese security forces.

Estimates by Tibetan advocacy groups and international human rights groups of the numbers of Tibetan dead have ranged from scores of victims to the hundreds.

Remarkably, though, this was the very first such report of a Tibetan death since the outbreak in early March of demonstrations by Tibetans in their “autonomous region” and in the surrounding provinces where Tibetans live in large numbers.

A rolling thunder of nationalist anger has swept China in recent weeks, as Chinese have seethed over the demonstrations that have greeted the Olympic torch on its circuit around the world.

Given little context for understanding why foreigners should be moved to demonstrate in the first place, Chinese counterprotesters and countless voices in the media and on the Internet have reduced the entire matter to the realms of prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment.

This effort has been advanced tremendously by the prominent use of a quote by the ever-gruff CNN commentator Jack Cafferty. Speaking about China at the time of the San Francisco leg of the torch relay, Cafferty described the Chinese as “basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.”

Amid the predictable uproar, Cafferty issued a clarification saying that his comments were aimed at the Chinese government and not the people, but this has made little impression here, particularly among the campaigners for whom the original quote, without that context, was simply too good to let go of.

Many Americans will still be unaware of what Cafferty said, while few Chinese who follow the news could have missed it. Americans are used to sharing jaundiced views of politicians. One of the more venerable expressions in the political culture, after all, is “throw the bums out,” meaning to vote despised politicians out of office. Chinese, of course, have no such option.

The heavy amplification of Cafferty’s words here and the belated admission of a Tibetan death, albeit a single death ascribed to a gunfight, however, share more than a purely coincidental association. They form part of a much larger phenomenon acknowledged by Chinese journalists who work within the system: an information war being waged to channel opinion and nationalist sentiment in this country.

Earlier this month, an editor from a Beijing newspaper told The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, of a notice circulated by the Chinese Communist Party calling for an “unprecedented, ferocious media war against the biased Western press.”

Another editor, who confirmed the directive, said in an interview this week: The Cafferty incident “is being used to demonize the Western media, reducing their credibility here. It’s a good opportunity for the official media and for the Communist Party.”

As “wars” go, this is one that relies on a particular asymmetry that depends upon keeping people here in the dark about all sorts of details. The public asks “why is the West brandishing Tibet to demonstrate against us” because it genuinely has little information about events, whether recent or more distant in that part of their country, save for a carefully pruned and officially sanctioned story line. While the Western media are accused of bias for supposedly giving short shrift to violence committed by rioting Tibetans in Lhasa on March 14, there is no mention in the Chinese media, not even at the level of allegations, of the deaths of numerous Tibetans in the ensuing crackdown. Tibet, meanwhile, has been closed to outsiders, enhancing the asymmetry.

Recent Chinese press accounts have endlessly reminded the public of Beijing’s beneficence in ending “slavery” in Tibet and lifting Tibetans out of dire poverty since then. There has been no mention of the cultural, religious or environmental costs involved or almost anything else as seen from the perspective of Tibetans, many of whom fear forced assimilation and the destruction of their religion.

Tibetans in Lhasa and elsewhere report that their homes have been invaded by security forces searching for images of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. At monasteries and temples all over western China, “re-education campaigns” have begun to force monks and others to recite the official line on Tibet, that the province has essentially always been part of China, and to renounce the Dalai Lama as a villainous “splittist.”

The re-education drive is uncomfortably reminiscent of fumie, a practice in Japan’s 16th century campaign against Christians, in which those who were suspected as believers were forced to trample on images of Jesus.

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The need for unanimity in China exacts a hidden price

April 24, 2008 11:37 PM

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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China’s multiple victims include its own public

April 11, 2008 4:42 AM

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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Single mothers in China move out of the shadows

April 7, 2008 2:36 PM

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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Ethnic Unrest Continues in China

April 5, 2008 2:03 PM

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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China again cues up its propaganda machine

April 2, 2008 11:44 PM

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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Rejecting dissent, China exposes its candor gap

March 28, 2008 1:25 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Growing Gulf Divides China and Dalai Lama

March 28, 2008 1:18 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 20, 2008 10:36 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Tibetan areas, parallel worlds now collide

March 20, 2008 10:50 AM

By Howard W. French
March 20, 2008

GABU VILLAGE, China: For farmers whose lives in this traditionally Tibetan area revolve around its Buddhist temple, an aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is less a symbol of material progress than a daily reminder of Chinese disregard.

“Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said a 40-year-old Buddhist peasant named Caidan. The big factory, said a man sitting next to him, benefits only members of the Han Chinese majority.

“Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs,” the man said. The Han, he said, “are all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.”

In Tibet and the neighboring provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, Tibetans live in closer proximity than ever with the Han, who have flooded in with a wave of state-driven investment. But they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.

After decades of heavily financed efforts on the part of China to strengthen its control over Tibet and to tame the country’s far west through gigantic infrastructure projects and resettlement of Han Chinese from the east, the outbreak of protests and a fierce crackdown by Chinese security forces in and around Tibet have laid bare a harsh reality of policy failure.

There is no legalized ethnic discrimination in China, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

Chinese news programs on the events in Lhasa have reinforced an impression of separate universes that scarcely intersect — one Han and one Tibetan. The programs were clearly intended as propaganda to place the blame for riots on Tibetans and rally Han Chinese in support of a government-led suppression. Over and over, television broadcasts have repeated the same scenes of rampaging Tibetans smashing shop windows and of injured, hospitalized Han, while making no mention of the widely reported deaths among Tibetans during the police crackdown that followed, nor of the underlying grievances that sparked them.

Since the last widespread unrest in Tibet two decades ago, Beijing has sought to undermine separatists in what it calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region. It has invested billions of dollars, encouraged an influx of Han Chinese and inserted itself deeply into the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism to eliminate the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who fled China for exile in India in 1959 after a failed uprising. But real assimilation, if it were ever the goal, remains elusive.

Caidan, the peasant in Gabu Village, part of Qinghai Province, said there was only one way to solve the grievances of Tibetans under Chinese rule: allow the Dalai Lama to return. “We are unhappy that the state suppresses us, and as long as the Dalai isn’t allowed to return, we will remain unhappy,” he said. “Tibet is the Dalai’s home.”

In the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Han shopkeepers, hostel owners and others who are picking up the pieces of their lives after riots that destroyed many Chinese-owned business there spoke with scarcely concealed condescension, and often with outright hostility, of Tibetans whom they described as lazy and ungrateful for the economic development they have brought.

“Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,” Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of handicraft shops, said in an interview in Lhasa. Wang’s shops sell Tibetan-themed trinkets to tourists. One of his shops was smashed and burned in the riots. “Just think of how much we’ve invested in relief funds for monks and for unemployed Tibetans,” he said. “Is this what we deserve?”

Among Han in Lhasa, comments like these stood out for their mildness.

“The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,” said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver, in an interview. “We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.

“We believe in working hard and making money to support one’s family, but they might think we’re greedy and have no faith.”

Even among long-term residents in Lhasa, Han Chinese said they had no Tibetan friends and confessed that they tended to avoid interaction with Tibetans as much as possible. “There’s been this hatred for a long time,” said Tang Xuejun, a Han resident of Lhasa for the last 10 years. “Sometimes you would even wonder how we had avoided open confrontation for so many years. This is a hatred that cannot be solved by arresting a few people.” Tibetans, meanwhile, complain that they have been relegated to second-class citizenship, that their culture is being destroyed through forced assimilation, that their religious freedoms have been trampled upon.

A Tibetan university student in her early 20s who declined to give her name explained relations this way: “I really don’t want to talk about politics, saying whether or not Tibet is part of China. The reality is that we are controlled by Chinese, by the Han people. We don’t have any say, so in my family we don’t even talk about it.”

Although the young woman said that her family was relatively well off and that she was receiving a good education, the future was bleak here even for someone like her because the system favors the Han.

“I’m not even sure I can get a job after graduation,” she said. “For rich Tibetans and for officials, they send their children out to Chengdu or Beijing.”

A sense of the fear many Tibetans live with could be heard in the comments of a religious leader in Aba Prefecture in Sichuan Province, the site of a protest by monks and others this week in solidarity with the Lhasa demonstrations, and the scene of a subsequent fierce crackdown.

“I only know that the Communist Party is good, that they are good to us,” said the religious leader, Ewangdanzhen, when asked about official explanations that have blamed the Dalai Lama for the protests. “I only believe in the Communist Party. Splitting is bad. We want unity and harmony. We don’t have any contacts with him and we don’t need to contact him.”

Far from giving up on their way of life, though, or renouncing their attachment to the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader whom the Chinese government has long vilified as a separatist, or “splittist,” most Tibetans interviewed while dodging heavy police checks during a 450-mile road trip through Tibetan areas in Gansu and Qinghai Provinces professed near-universal devotion to the Dalai Lama, and vowed to continue resisting government attempts to control their faith.

“All Tibetans are the same: 100 percent of us adore the Dalai Lama,” said Suonanrenqing, a 40-year-old resident of a Tibetan village in Jianzha County, in Qinghai Province. Asked about China’s decision to commandeer an ancient Tibetan religious rite and select the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995, and the implications for how Beijing would manage things after the Dalai Lama, who is 72, dies, Suonanrenqing’s response suggested indefinite tensions between Chinese and Tibetans.

“We’re not sure if it’s true that the Panchen was appointed by the government, but if it is true, we cannot support him,” he said. “We wouldn’t support a Dalai Lama appointed by the government either. These people should be chosen by monasteries.”

Although Suonanrenqing spoke candidly, worrying only at the end of a lengthy conversation if his comments could bring him trouble, many conversations with Tibetans began with nervous denials that they knew anything at all of the events of Lhasa. Their wariness was warranted by a severe security crackdown in clear evidence wherever Tibetans live in large numbers.

After dodging one police roadblock, a reporter making his way late at night toward a town in Gansu Province where Tibetans had protested in sympathy with the Lhasa demonstrators the day before was set upon by plainclothes police officers at a highway tollbooth and forced into a nearby building for questioning before being turned away.

The following day, when visiting Taersi, an important Tibetan monastery in Qinghai Province, the reporter was closely followed by plainclothes police officers who were seen videotaping his conversations with local monks.

“I have no idea what’s happening in Lhasa,” said one 32-year-old monk, who agreed to sit and chat in a small restaurant with a foreign visitor but apparently felt the topic was too dangerous to touch upon. “We don’t have anything to do with that.”

Despite the vigilant police, the nearby Lijiaxia Valley, a starkly beautiful area dominated by the Yellow River with craggy, desiccated mountains and wind-swept farmland, Tibetan villages were easy to spot by the colorful prayer flags that flew from roofs and hilltops.

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Beijing’s unofficial Olympic slogan: Take pride, but no politics, please

March 13, 2008 10:38 PM

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: March 13, 2008
SHANGHAI: The official slogan of this summer’s Beijing Olympics may be “One World, One Dream,” but Beijing’s real mantra has been something more prosaic, and in the end, much more problematic: no politics.

Over the coming months, China will offer the world an astounding spectacle. Not the Games themselves, but rather the spectacle of a nation that is in the midst of breathtaking change and yet clings to habits of statecraft so dated that they seem like relics of the Middle Ages.

In elevating the Olympics to an official source of national pride, China has put its most precious commodities on the line: national face. And by investing so much face in the successful execution of the Games, it is making extreme demands on its citizens and on the world.

The following list is not exhaustive, but it gives an idea of what is being demanded: Smile, approve of us, behave, do not criticize, don’t dare protest and, back to the mantra, banish all thoughts of politics from your minds.

That’s asking an awful lot, and like requiring someone to hold their body rigid for an extended period, it will demand an immense and painful effort, and it brings the risk of self-injury.

Consider the government’s cascade of systematic denials of the pertinence of just about every critical issue that comes up, including human rights in Tibet, China’s Muslim northwest and the rights of the tens of thousands of migrant workers whose round-the-clock work in Beijing has made the hosting of the Games possible. All too often, they are phrased in the antique wooden tongue of an old imperial court.

On the migrant issue, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, responded to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing exploitation of the workers with a verbal equivalent of the stiff arm: “I believe that everybody is well aware that Human Rights Watch has some problem with its sight. It is biased. It has some problems with its eyes. It has weakness in seeing things properly.”

Boy, I guess that settles things.

Foreigners who persist in touching upon what are quaintly known in China as sensitive issues, thereby putting the government on the spot, risk being treated as unfriendly to the country, or even downgraded further to the status of enemies.

And this brings us to another aspect of the Olympics. As with so much the Chinese government does, the promotion of the Games and their protection from criticism contains a mildly disturbing element of popular manipulation, of managing people’s feelings for them, and of policing the divide between things Chinese and foreign.

The Olympics are intended to quicken Chinese heartbeats in their love for the motherland, and people will be encouraged to see nitpicking foreigners (Steven Spielberg, for example) for what they supposedly are, offensive outsiders who fall into a long tradition of hostility to China.

This brings to mind a saying about propaganda, which is defined as a kind of magic practiced by people who don’t believe in it for people who do.

A crude, practical example of how this all works was delivered last week after the Icelandic singer Björk ended a concert performance of her song “Declare Independence” in Shanghai with the cry “Tibet! Tibet!” Beijing said that act not only broke Chinese law, but even more preposterously, “hurt Chinese people’s feelings.”

Presumably, the infraction was the singing of a song not approved by the censors, who decide even what foreign performers can say here. Expect tighter controls in the future.

Let’s pause here to get an important item of business out of the way. China’s successes are good news for the world, not just for Chinese people, and one hopes that the Olympics will succeed. May they bring people closer, allowing curious outsiders to appreciate China as it really is, the scene of awesome recent achievement, but like every other country, also a dynamic mixture of good and bad.

The problem is that by turning the Games into a massive exercise in national face, it is the Chinese government itself which has politicized them. This all but compels anyone who is even slightly curious to meditate on what has been accomplished here, how this nation arrived at the place it finds itself today and where it is headed in the future.

And if in the end, the Chinese government finds it has to rethink its outdated communications strategy, a stubborn leftover of a not-too-distant past - when the state had almost total control over the lives and minds of its people, and foreign relations were limited at the height of Cultural Revolution to a single embassy in Albania - all the better.

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Vietnamese demonstrate how to recover from atrocity

March 6, 2008 10:57 PM

HANOI: A conspicuous sign in the immaculate baggage collection area at this city’s recently built airport proclaimed the availability of CNN, anywhere, anytime.

During a weeklong stay, I couldn’t rigorously test out this boast, but arriving here from China, I did know one thing, that such prominent ads for Western news outlets can’t be found there at all.

Hmm, I thought, as my taxi sped along the highway into the city, passing billboard after billboard announcing “Intel Inside,” along with the presence here of a host of other major Western companies.

I had read of the extraordinary growth of the Vietnamese economy, nearly on a pace with that of its giant neighbor, China; of the blossoming of a frothy stock market; and of the culture of entrepreneurship and of acquisition that often goes with such things.

What I had not heard much of lately or frankly bothered to think of very often was of the bloody and costly war that the United States waged in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975

Memories of that war had come back to me powerfully some weeks before my arrival here when I read Denis Johnson’s long and intensely imagined Vietnam novel, “Tree of Smoke,” whose story is woven together from the strands of numerous characters’ lives. Most central, though, are Colonel Francis X. Sands and his nephew, Skip Sands. They are both operatives in military intelligence, one a legend and rogue, and the other an eager novice who eventually also becomes a rogue.

The Vietnam War has, of course, already been fought and refought in literature, much as in American politics. Before Johnson dropped his massive novel on us, many might have asked what the point was, 40 years after the Tet offensive that demonstrated the power of the Vietcong to strike ferociously in the south.

Without stooping to polemic, but rather by delving into the language of myth and of religion, Johnson turns that question on its head, as his characters slog, driven by duty, folly or sheer inertia through the increasingly patent meaninglessness of the war.

The question why is asked and answered over and over again in the book, albeit never in the same way, reinforcing an impression of moral quicksand, and challenging us to ask ourselves just that: What was the point?

“We’re in a worldwide war, have been for close to twenty years,” says the colonel in one exchange with his nephew. “It’s a covert World War Three. It’s Armageddon by proxy. It’s a contest between good and evil, and its true ground is the heart of every human. I’m going to transgress outside the line a little bit now. I’m going to tell you, Skip: Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the goddam Alamo. This is a fallen world. Every time we turn around there’s somebody else going Red.”

Through history’s rearview mirror, this domino theory can look risible these days, and nowhere more than in today’s Vietnam, where the Communists “won,” and where Intel signs and the stock market players and the CNN that I faced everywhere here, and in a stop in Saigon, too, had me asking myself Denis Johnson’s questions.

There was more to it than the facile accoutrements of the capitalist West that are on plain display, though. Given our readiness to believe in good and evil, more disorienting still were the quick and genuine smiles of the people, complete strangers who welcomed me into their neighborhoods and homes, the easy conversations that I was able to have, scarcely haunted by the awful shared history of our two countries.

No, the Vietnamese have not forgotten what happened, but they have given us a humbling demonstration of the human capacity to get on with things, to get over even the most atrocious of life’s chapters and to recover.

This was brought home to me most powerfully late one afternoon when I lingered in the densely packed Ngoc Ha neighborhood, where the wreckage of an American B-52 bomber sits belly up in a shallow pond, where it fell out of the sky during the December 1972 bombing campaign. A modest commemorative plaque hangs on a wall nearby.

I was, myself, a year or so too young to have been drafted and but for that accident of birth, might have come to Vietnam as a pilot or a rifleman. Instead, I wield a notebook and camera today.

A nearby school had just let its students out, and the youngsters tagged along with me smiling and playfully testing out their English as I tried to imagine the terrible scene here decades before they were born. Adults smiled warmly too.

As a visitor, the least it seemed I could do was to reflect on the seemingly banal and yet truly profound truth that war is awful, and indeed very seldom just. It pushes us to think of others as subhuman, in terms like chinks and slopes and gooks, numbing our sensibilities and draining away our compassion.

This isn’t, by the way, even remotely an American phenomenon or an American criticism. Everywhere, mass mobilization, armament and organized killing have required it. Powerful narratives take root and carry us along, playing on our emotions bolstering self-justification and suppressing doubt.

“War is 90 percent myth anyway, isn’t it,” Johnson’s colonel says. “In order to prosecute our own wars we raise them to the level of human sacrifice, don’t we, and we constantly invoke our God. It’s got to be about something bigger than dying or we’d all turn deserter. I think we need to be much more conscious of that. I think we need to be invoking the other fellow’s gods too.”

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Containment of China hits roadblocks again

February 28, 2008 11:38 PM

LETTER FROM ASIA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Letter from Asia
By Howard W. French
February 28, 2008

HANOI: A seductive idea has taken hold in certain foreign policy circles in recent years that suggests the best way to deal with a fast-rising China is to build ad hoc coalitions of the country’s neighbors to constrain or somehow encircle it.

While never openly espoused by any government, the idea has tempted foreign policy thinkers not just in the United States, but in Japan and to a lesser degree perhaps Australia, too.

It is not hard to understand why, either, for the thought is beautiful in its simplicity. And while no one in a position of responsibility in any of these countries has started calling China an enemy, it is based on an ancient principle: that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

That this schema has never gotten very far off the ground has more than one cause.

First is China’s own diplomatic skill in foreseeing the risk of encirclement and working assiduously to disarm it.

Globalization is important, too. Whether by dint of strategy or happenstance, the rise of China as an exporting powerhouse, combined with the relative openness of the Chinese economy, has created ever stronger linkages with the international economy, giving other countries, not least China’s neighbors, a vital stake in its prospects.

The contrast with the rise of another East Asian manufacturing behemoth, Japan in the 1980s, couldn’t be more striking. Japan’s growth then was overwhelmingly seen as coming at the expense of competitors in the United States and in Europe. And because Japan never truly embraced foreign investment, few outsiders shared in the dividends from its rise.

The idea of encircling China has run into other problems, too. Quite early on, important neighbors like South Korea made it clear that they would have no part of a tacit coalition against - or perhaps in reaction to - the rise of their giant and traditionally influential neighbor.

Well before the Americans came around to the view, the South Koreans understood they needed China to help manage North Korea’s vexed transition toward a more peaceful, prosperous and open future.

China’s willingness to play a leading role in the diplomacy around the question of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program has been the political equivalent of Beijing’s enthusiasm for globalization, improving China’s standing in the world and returning it to its historical status as this region’s indispensable power, to paraphrase Madeleine Albright’s description of the United States’ place in the world.

One turns next to India, whose enthusiasm for things American is as high as it comes but stops well short of anything that even hints at a compact to contain China. Where South Koreans have historically been cautious balancers, weighing more powerful neighbors off against each other, never wanting to get too close to any one of them, India sees itself a great civilization and global power in waiting.

India has disappointingly given little indication of the uses to which it will apply this new power, should it materialize, but when one combines its belief in its own destiny with its deep seated ideology of nonalignment, it becomes hard to imagine India casting its lot with anybody - least of all against China, with whom its relations are already complicated enough.

Mention of these complications is actually where the containment theory meets its biggest obstacle: the common-sense observation that China’s relations with its most important neighbors are already seriously fraught, to the point where there is no benefit to be gained from working or even appearing to work to complicate things further.

Look around China’s periphery and quickly understand why. China fought a brief but fierce border war with India in 1960s, and the two countries - putative future rivals - have never come to terms about the disputed territory.

In the northeast, China faces claims from the two Koreas that it has absorbed traditionally Korean lands and distorted the history of an ancient Korean kingdom in order to cover its tracks.

To the east, China faces a dispute with Japan over maritime boundaries in an area thought to be rich in oil and gas. Ironically, given the longtime animosity between Beijing and Tokyo, of all of China’s disputes with its neighbors, today this one looks like the most manageable.

Washington may make all the noise about Islamic fundamentalism, but its problems pale in comparison with China’s, whose Muslim far west abuts restive Pakistan and Afghanistan and seethes with resentment toward Beijing.

Longer-term problems loom all along China’s other frontiers, too, starting with the vast northern border with Russia. Moscow and Beijing would seem to be getting along fine these days, notably working well together to hinder the United States, whether over its perceived unilateralism or its encouragement of democracy. The population of Russia, however, is in steep decline, and Russians are deeply wary of what some fear could be a creeping Chinese annexation of scantly populated regions in the Russian east.

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Posted at 11:38 PM · Comments (0)

Police Said to Have Assaulted Rights Lawyer in China

February 26, 2008 11:43 PM

Copyright The New York Times
February 26, 2008
SHANGHAI — One of China’s best-known human rights lawyers has been repeatedly beaten by police officers outside his home here in recent days, according to his wife and associates.

The lawyer, Zheng Enchong, who has lived under house arrest for several months, has been seriously injured by plainclothes police officers who, in one attack, knocked him down, then repeatedly hoisted his body parallel to the ground and dropped him on the concrete, people who have visited him said. He has been seen walking with a limp.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Zheng’s wife, Jiang Meili, described another beating, which she said took place as her husband tried to leave his house for church. “A guy stopped him and pushed him to the ground,” Ms. Jiang said. “One man held him by the neck, while another kneed him in the stomach. Then five or six men carried him back upstairs, beating him in the elevator, too.”

Shanghai police officials declined to comment.

Ms. Jiang said the beatings represented a sharp escalation of a recent campaign by the Shanghai authorities to silence Mr. Zheng. Associates who have spoken with him say the beatings started after he began advising residents who had organized a campaign against a high-tech railroad that would cut through middle-class areas of the city.

Others said Mr. Zheng had also recently spoken of details of what he called evidence of high-level corruption in Shanghai involving real estate speculation and influence peddling. “They’ve been very annoyed by this,” Mr. Zheng’s wife said.

The government is struggling with competing priorities as it works to put on its best face for the world as the host of the Olympic Games. It appears eager to eliminate dissent but would like to avoid being tagged as a gross violator of human rights.

Mr. Zheng’s corruption allegations, according to other human rights lawyers, have focused on Huang Ju, a deputy prime minister who died last year, as well as sons of former President Jiang Zemin. Mr. Jiang, who was once Communist Party secretary for the city, developed Shanghai into a personal power base.

For more than a year, Shanghai has been the scene of an embarrassing municipal corruption scandal. Its highest-ranked figure to fall is Chen Liangyu, a Communist Party secretary who has been in detention since September 2006.

Posted at 11:43 PM · Comments (0)

How Bush’s Africa visit trumps China’s foray

February 22, 2008 11:24 AM

LETTER FROM CHINA
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: February 21, 2008

SHANGHAI: Something powerful happened on President George W. Bush’s way to Africa.

Listening to Bush’s statements in appearance after appearance, one gets the impression of a major diplomatic shift. It is as if a switch had been flipped, relegating the ever-present war on terror to the background and emphasizing classical, uplifting themes with roots in the U.S. Great Society era of the 1960s.

There was the president, speaking forcefully in Tanzania about long-held American values; not just freedom as an obligatory throw away line, but of democracy in terms of good governance, and of the importance of heeding the people and serving their needs.

“I’ll put it bluntly - America doesn’t want to spend money on people who steal the money from the people,” Bush said, addressing the news media together with his Tanzanian counterpart, Jakaya Kikwete.

“We like dealing with honest people and compassionate people,” he added. “We want our money to go to help the human condition and to live human lives.”

Bush then lent credence to his rhetoric by bestowing a generous aid package on Tanzania, including $662 million for this year and $698 million more over the next five years to upgrade electricity, water supply and roads, through a U.S. agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation, whose funds are aimed toward countries that demonstrate good governance. All of this on top of big spending for AIDS and malaria prevention.

Beyond the words and the cash, the very logic of Bush’s itinerary is illuminating. In six days, in addition to Tanzania, he is visiting Benin, Ghana, and Liberia, all of which are small democracies, and post-genocide Rwanda, which although not democratic, has established a reputation for clean, effective government.

The symbolism was strengthened by the fact that none of Bush’s stops are in Africa’s emerging natural resource powerhouses: important yet highly corrupt places like Nigeria, Angola and Congo, to name three of the biggest, which either lack democracy altogether, or have recently suffered erosion in their democratic credentials.

Although Bush cannot fairly be said to have only now “discovered” Africa, this trip - from its itinerary to its rhetoric - shows that America is serious about reasserting its interest in the continent. In this regard, the international context could not be more important.

Over the past five years China’s top leaders have visited the continent five times, and the world’s emerging superpower has pretty much been the sole player in Africa. During that time, Beijing has been racking up gains on a continent neglected at an accelerating pace.

So much so, that in many countries where China has showered its largesse, Africans have spoken of the growing irrelevance of the World Bank, which has long been a leading source of financing, but whose lending, unlike China’s, comes with many strings attached.

In the United States and China, leaders have taken pains to insist that there is no competition between the two countries in Africa. Both countries, however, look to Africa as an important frontier, not just an important source of minerals and fuel, and as part of the world whose political weight will grow.

It should be said that having both countries engaged is good for the continent. Africans themselves sense this, and are determined never again to have to choose between outside partners, as they did during the last era of superpower rivalry.

Bush’s foreign policy has not built a reputation for subtlety, but the president’s tour sets up a compelling contrast between China and the United States, and achieves this in a way that shows that Beijing will face immense challenges to its ideologically hidebound foreign policy if Washington remains consistent and engaged.

As things stand, the United States, with its emphasis on good government, democracy and rights has positioned itself to be the friend of African peoples, while China positions itself as a friend of African governments. Where the Clinton administration often favored African strongmen, Bush’s visit tilts policy in favor of cleanliness and democracy. Because of its diplomatic competition with Taiwan, and its thirst for resources, China’s African embrace, meanwhile, is indiscriminate.

Make no mistake, by building roads, railways and universities, not to mention its industrial investments, China may potentially have a dramatic impact on people’s lives across the continent. The problem with its position, which is tied up with long-held notions of noninterference in internal affairs, is that China has little or nothing to say about corruption, about human rights abuses, or the lack of democracy that has been as important as any other factor in holding Africa back.

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Posted at 11:24 AM · Comments (0)

Whether at home or abroad, China is silent on matters of democracy

February 9, 2008 12:12 AM

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
February 7, 2008
SHANGHAI: For months, as the Beijing Olympics draw nearer, China has been refining its arguments in favor of disassociating the Games from politics.

This effort reached something of a rhetorical crescendo last week with an editorial in The People’s Daily. “Those who want to use the Olympics to discredit China, and those who think the Olympics will promote China to change in the way they hope, are doomed to be disappointed,” the column said. “Their efforts will be futile.”

In addressing its domestic audience, the Chinese government makes little effort to clarify what sort of changes the forces, which it vows to defy, are seeking. Instead, the predictable thrust of the propaganda campaign is to equate the Olympics with the pride and “face” of the Chinese people and to cast anyone who criticizes the country and its playing host to the Games as sinister enemy forces.

It is worth pausing to make clear what the criticism has been all about. Hitherto, most of the voices that have spoken of a boycott have objected to Chinese support for the government of Sudan, which has conducted a genocide-like campaign in its oil-rich western province, Darfur.

Before speaking further of Darfur or even of China, it should be noted that to some extent the Olympics have always been about politics. China, as many others before it, seeks to use the games to give a boost to its global “brand.” It’s an old story, and one that has been tried by all kinds of countries, from Nazi Germany to a rebuilt Japan.

China’s aims are clearly neither as sinister as the Nazis’ nor as mundane as Japan’s. In a word, the country seeks to announce its arrival in the first rank of nations, as a place of peace and prosperity and infrastructure - and there’s the rub.

China has made impressive strides, acquiring lots of shiny new hardware and many other trappings of a great modern power. But its see-no-evil attitude toward the problems of its Sudanese client raises troubling questions that differentiate Beijing from other recent hosts of the O

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