Spinning Tibet

Simon, you lazy slut.

Btw, one of your readers posted in the previous log an article on Washington Post where some real reporting was done on the Lhasa riot:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/26/AR2008032603275.html

Also, a lot of readers are waiting for your response to you recent argument regarding Tibetan independence. See here:

"Simon Elegant backing down on his attempt at arguing Tibetan independence"

http://chinablog.typepad.com/china_blog/2008/03/simon-elegant-b.html

Observantly, two facts from the Washington post article:

1. The violence was organized and planned.

"Zhang saw a man in his 30s shouting into a megaphone and a woman nearby, pointing. They appeared to be directing the mob where to attack, he said."

"a gang of 30 to 40 people swing into his street, howling."..."had masks over their mouths and were wearing backpacks". "They were attacking even more fiercely than the boys,"

2. Those criminals are not local Tibetans

"they felt certain could not have been local Tibetans; many of the guests said they had heard different dialects. "

Simon,

In your yesterday article 'China and Tibet: The Spin Campaign', you mentioned the incident of US bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. You wrote this: '... be it over the ACCIDENTAL U.S. bombing of...'

I would like to ask you, how are you so sure it is ACCIDENTAL?

You did not even mention that there is a different explanation from the Chinese side.

Where is your supposed neutrality? Just another piece of evidence of your deep-rooted bias? Or your slack journalism?

By the way, three Chinese died in the bombing, while your West mainstream media just focused on explaining the incident as ACCIDENTAL, showing no interest in the loss of Chinese lives.

For your reference, here is what is said on Wikepedia about the incident:

"On May 7, 1999 in Operation Allied Force, NATO bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese citizens and outraging the Chinese public. At the time of the bombing, the embassy was located in Novi Beograd – later, a new site was designated for the embassy in Dedinje. NATO later apologized for the bombing, saying that it occurred because of an outdated map provided by the CIA. Few Chinese accepted this explanation, believing the strike had been deliberate.[2] Several media reports from the US, UK, Denmark and Canada supported this view.[3][4] Some US sources such as New York Times maintain culpability still lies with U.S. strike planning.[5] CIA director George Tenet said the operation which led to the bombing of the Chinese embassy was the only one organized and directed by his agency.
The three Chinese citizens killed in the attack were Shao Yunhuan (邵云环), Xu Xinghu (许杏虎) and his wife, Zhu Ying (朱颖)."

I hope you can give an explanation why you used the word 'ACCIDENTAL'.

I don't think the Chinese government should care about those monks if the government is wise enough. The Tibetan monks are "brainwashed" or manipulated by CIA agents according to an article that I read, which writes that CIA has put in great efforts to topple the communist government in Tibet.
I’d rather see a few monks to fake cries than mobs to loot shops and kill people. I would like to suggest the Chinese government, especially, Tibetan government encourage or just force all young Tibetans either join the army or become a monk/nun if they can not find proper training programs or jobs so that all those wild (aka “freedom loving”) people will be easier to be fed, clothed, hygienically educated or simply brainwashes. The key point is not to allow Tibetans roaming like wild animals.

We must blame the monks for this. These bad, bad monks must have pretended and dope the Chinese officials that they will behave themselves so that they can appear before the foreigners. And then they broke their promise. What kind of monks are they if they lied to Chinese officials. These monks are not qualified to be Buddhists.

Nah, Whenever the Chinese gets caught for doing something naughty they just go and blame, the US, Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Dalai Lama, Wild Tibetans, the West, White people, Mexicans, dogs, cats, birds, the rain, weather, bad food, fish, bums, beggars, Simo Elegant, other Times bloggers, commenters, webmasters, The British, Japanese, Taiwanese, people who critizes China, Chinese who criticizes their own government, Bananas, racoons, squirrels, John Smith, tainted products, poisonous toothpaste, people who makes typing errors, clowns and everything else that I didn't mention. GO CHINA!

Well, well, well, it is indeed an embarrassment of the Chinese government. How incompetent can this government be? Why on earth haven’t the Chinese officials learned their lessons that there are CIA agents in Tibet or maybe, a James Bond alike?

The “Tibet Protest/Riot/whatsoever 2008” can be made to a good 007 movie. The first step is to find a sexy Tibetan actress as a Bond-girl. Are Tibetan women allowed to be sexy?

i'm sure they are tibetan not satisfy with current condition. like any countries, there are no 100% satisfy happy citizen, there will always someone one not happy with he/her country. the fact is most tibetan who has the skills to find a good job are happy. only those who lock the skills, dont know how to speak mandrain or english are not happy with the society. but whos fault is that? like most ethnic minority in china, they get alot advantage over han chinese, such as exclude single child policy, scholarship for minorit etc etc, the list goes on. do you know most tibetan prefer religion clerk rather than get a good education. whats the education level of those monk, do they know anything beside their religion? the mind is easy to get clouded if lock the knowledge of rest of world. I talk to few people i know who support free tibet before, but thing is none of them went to china before. everything they know about tibet is from TV. of course we all know the western bias on the recent event, so no wonder those people yelling "free tibet" after they saw the news.

@s002wjhwjh

"I talk to few people i know who support free tibet before, but thing is none of them went to china before. everything they know about tibet is from TV. of course we all know the western bias on the recent event, so no wonder those people yelling "free tibet" after they saw the news."

Don't blame these people. It's human nature to draw conclusion based on the information he can access. It's impossible for ordinary westerner to have enough knowledge about Tibet. It's Chinese government's responsibility to speak out for themselves, though the dumpiest government in the world know nothing except blockage.

The monks in Tibet were the rulers of the land until their privileges were stripped away in the 50s. They used to be able to cut people's hands for punishments. Now they have nothing. They are just monks. That is progress.

Why would a bunch of westerners starts to "care" for those medieval barbaric monks? Racism. Simple old-fashioned racism.

The goal of those racist journalists are to make sure that the only power in the world is white power. They are the warriors of civilization clash. Be that in Middle East, Far East and Americas, they are the ones instigating a white population to commit genocide again non-whites.

The group journalists have basically seen both sides of the story on their trip:

1. Tibetan monks feel they are oppressed and
2. Evidence of violence, caualties and property damange by Tibetan youths including monks

It is important to remember that all this happens amidst an emotionally charged period right after some pretty violent riots. To put things into perspective, if you visit LA in summer 1992, blacks will no doubt tell you that they are OPPRESSED, many may probably say things like:

THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN AMERICA!!!

FREEDOM IS ONLY RESERVED FOR WHITES IN THIS F**KIN' COUNTRY!!!

WE HATE THOSE RACIST H**KIES!

WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST AS HELL!!!

Using the logic of "Free Tibet" activists such comments by African Americans should be broadcast around the world and used as evidence on how they are still exploited, blacks need to be free and blacks need to declare independence from white rule.

To Not Radical,

It's an accident because there is absolutely no logical evidence to show it was intentional. Ever hear of friendly fire? All the American soldiers that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan by friendly fire were "accidents" Or do you think they were killed intentionally? That's one of the worst parts about wars, accidents happen.

Where is your proof of the embassy attack being intentional and for what reason? I suppose you think the Bush staged the 9/11 bombing and the holocaust never happened also?

Jay, Don’t try to insult others’ intelligence here. How can you be so sure it is accidental? Because the US government says so? The US government also says that Iraq had WMDs and Saddam is linked to 911 and Osama Bin Ladin? Americans who claim the Chinese are brainwashed but believe so easily in their government’s propaganda are the ones truly brainwashed.

While there is NO conclusive evidence MADE PUBLIC that says whether the bombing is accidental or deliberate, there are CIRCUMSTANCES which suggest that the bombing is deliberate:

1) The building was targeted from 3 different directions. Your analogy of friendly fire simply won’t fly because we are NOT even talking about people running around the streets getting killed. Remember this is a building deliberately targeted.

2) Embassies in war zones, including the Chinese one, should have been marked out already so they won’t be attacked. Thus the chance of an accident using a wrong map is extremely low.

3) If it were indeed an accident, then someone in the US military must have SCREWED UP BIG TIME. Even if you do believe this allegation that the US military is REALLY this incompetent, why are there NO officers taking responsibility, nobody got fired or sacked?? This suggest that it was a conscious decision made high above rather than an accident.

4) Is it just co-incidental that every time there is a vocal critics of US policies get bombed. It is the Al Jazeera, not the CNN that got “accidentally” bombed in Iraq. It is the Chinese embassy that got “accidentally” bombed in Belgrade, not the British.

While the above circumstances won't prove beyond a doubt, they suggest that the deliberateness of the embassy bombing is at least a possibility.

Monday 17 March 2008
Using Tibet to settle scores with China

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4880

Tibetans want to be free. But they've been given a green light to riot by Western elements driven more by spite and envy than a love for liberty.
Brendan O'Neill

The grainy, sneaked-out footage of Tibetans rioting in Lhasa and in parts of China itself clearly reveals one thing: Tibetans want more control over their daily lives and destinies. Frustrated with living under illiberal and undemocratic Chinese rule, they are lashing out against what they consider to be symbols of Chinese domination: Han Chinese businesses and buildings owned by Chinese officialdom.

But there's another story behind the images of instability being broadcast around the world, a more complex, dangerous and difficult-to-spot story of cynical, spiteful political manoeuvring. Elements in the West have effectively encouraged Tibetans to riot, not because they are committed to democracy and liberty, but because they fear and loathe the Chinese. Western encouragement of Tibetan instability may dress itself in the rallying cry of 'Free Tibet!', but its real motivation is to 'Humiliate China!'

The Tibetan protesters' angry outbursts reveal their deep-seated dissatisfaction with life under the Stalinist regime. Yet the protests can also be seen as a physical, violent manifestation of Western China-bashing, which is increasing in intensity as the Beijing Olympics approach. For the past three months, Western officials and commentators have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encouraged Tibetans and others to 'use the Olympics to humiliate China' (1). Taking their cue, at least in part, from Western culture's feverish fear and suspicion of China, Tibetans have launched protests that seem designed as much to please Western observers as to push through real, meaningful changes in Tibet and China.

In both their timing and their presentation, the protests seem more a product of Western cajoling than of an independent, groundswell demand for liberty amongst Tibetans. It is no coincidence that the protests, reportedly the biggest amongst Tibetans since the late 1980s, have erupted in the run-up to Beijing 2008. Vast numbers of political entrepreneurs and activists are trying to transform the Olympics into a platform for moral posturing and China-bashing. According to the International Herald Tribune, such is the frenzied politicisation of the Olympics by Western officials and campaigners that athletes are becoming confused about which cause to support. They have found themselves 'overwhelmed by menu choices' and also by numerous 'wardrobe decisions': should they wear a 'China, Please' armband to protest against China's links with Sudan, or a yellow 'Livestrong' bracelet to indicate their support for a 'pollution-free games and lead-free toys'? An American triathlete has complained: 'Every time you turn around, there is someone trying to make a statement about something.' (2) The relentless politicisation of the Olympics by Western elements, the widespread discussion of Beijing 2008 as an opportunity to 'humiliate China', has helped to create a volatile atmosphere in the more restive parts of China and its surrounding territories, including Tibet.

Presentation-wise, the protesters' use of English slogans and their speedy dissemination of mobile-phone footage suggest the demonstrations are aimed very much at a Western audience. In the march of the Tibetan monks in northern India last week, and during the more fiery protests in Tibet and China over the weekend, Tibetans carried placards with English-language demands such as 'Tibet Needs You'. They wore headbands saying 'Free Tibet' - the favoured slogan of Western middle-class and even aristocratic pro-Tibet sympathisers, such as Prince Charles (3). Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, India (where the Tibetan government-in-exile resides, led by the Dalai Lama) have put up English posters saying 'Beijing 2008: A Celebration of Human Rights Violations' (4). One British newspaper has celebrated Tibetan protesters' use of 'the most dangerous weapon in the world - the cameras on their mobile phones' (5). Many Western observers who cheer Tibetans for using this 'weapon' to beam images of their struggle around the world would probably feel very uncomfortable if Tibetans used real weapons to force their Stalinist rulers to make changes or concessions.

The protests seem orientated very much towards the outside world. They appear to gain their legitimacy and fire from today's widespread China-bashing, and they seem designed, in some ways, for Western consumption. This shows the extent to which Tibetans have become caught up in a global tug-of-war between the West and China. No doubt some people feel genuinely inspired by the Tibetan unrest, but many of the Western elements cheering the Tibetan cause and encouraging the Tibetans to 'humiliate China' are motivated less by a genuine commitment to liberty and democracy than by a deep and cynical desire to make life difficult for the Chinese.

Today's Tibetan protests are taking place in a broad, quite sinister political context: the West's transformation of China into a cultural and political target. In recent years, China has inexorably, and in some ways unconsciously, been transformed into a whipping boy for the West. Anti-Chinese sentiments cut across the political divide: on both the old right and the new left, attacking China for its economic growth, human rights record, environmental destruction or suppression of the Tibetan people has become de rigueur. There is an unspoken consensus today - amongst Western officials, commentators and radical activists - that China is a global threat which must be put back in its place with a short, sharp dose of humiliation. Far more than the demonisation of the Soviet Union as the 'Evil Empire' during the Cold War era, the labelling of China as a dirty, uncontrollable, violent beast enjoys widespread, unquestioned support throughout political circles in the West.

On the right, China-bashing has become a way of settling old scores from the Cold War. American right-wing thinkers and officials seem to take comfort in the familiar feeling of standing up to an 'old communist foe'. Robbed of the 'Evil Empire' in the East by the end of the Cold War, and thrown by the unpredictability of global affairs more broadly, old right elements cling to China as an old-fashioned enemy from an era when politics was simpler and international affairs were more black-and-white; they are trying to recreate that era with a new 'yellow-and-white' divide between barbaric China and the civilised USA (6). Last week, the Pentagon made a splash with its annual report to US Congress on the threat posed by Chinese military power. It was hard not to nod, at least in partial agreement, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman who accused officials in the Pentagon of being consumed by 'Cold War thinking' (7).

There is also an element of palpable jealousy in right-wing attacks on contemporary China. As America's economy spins from one crisis to another, becoming reliant in many ways on East Asian cash to bail it out, traditionalist economic thinkers are discussing Chinese growth as a problem and a threat. Using the language of environmentalism - clearly sensing that old-fashioned protectionism would not go down very well today - establishment publications in the US publish essays with headlines such as 'Choking on growth'; they argue that if China is to reduce its carbon emissions (that is, slow down its growth) then there will have to be a 'wholesale mindset change' amongst the Chinese people (8). Books such as The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future are snapped up and celebrated by traditionalist American thinkers and economists (9).

Amongst left-leaning campaign groups and writers, China has become the No.1 International Bogeyman because of what they see as its ceaseless industrialisation. Westerners who find the idea of growth so nineteenth-century openly discuss China as a poisonous nation that is killing its own people and possibly the planet. Liberal green writers see only the 'dust, waste and dirty water' in modern China; they describe the economic progress there as the 'mass poisoning of a people and the ecological devastation of a nation', which is a product, apparently, of greed - 'ours and theirs' (10). Those greedy Chinese, getting jobs in the city and buying cars and TVs… why don't they go back to the paddy fields where they belong? Green campaign groups call on Western nations to cut their political and economic ties with China, and instruct Western consumers that 'If it says "Made in China", don't buy it': only then, they argue, will 'The World's Biggest CO2 Emitter' and 'The World's No.1 Consumer of Coal' (that's 'China' to those of us who don't think and speak in the dehumanising language of trendy China-bashers) be forced to change its ways (11). They fancy this as a radical stance, but in today's Great China-Bashing Consensus, greens are merely the protesting wing of the backward, fearful, protectionist politics of a West worried about the 'Chinese threat'.

In many ways, campaigners and commentators in the West are projecting their own disgust with 'the Western way of life' on to China. They see in China everything that they doubt or loathe about modernity itself. That is why commentators frequently tell China not to make 'the same mistakes that we made'. On everything from economic growth to sporting competitiveness, from the use of coal to the building of skyscrapers, today's China-bashing is motivated by Western self-loathing, as well as by spite and envy towards the seemingly successful Chinese. Ironically, this means that China is now seen as 'the Other' precisely because it appears too Western: it is China's ambition, growth, its leaps forward - things that a more confident West might once have celebrated - which make it seem alien to Western observers who today prefer carbon-counting to factory-building and road tolls to road construction. China-bashing is underpinned by a crisis of belief in the West in things such as progress, growth, development.

It is the sweeping consensus that China is dangerous and diseased that has attracted Western observers to the issue of Tibet. Both left and right elements in the West are exploiting the Tibet issue as a way of putting pressure on China. They are less interested in securing real freedom and equality for Tibetans, and for the Chinese people more broadly, than they are in using and abusing internal disgruntlement in China and nearby territories as a way of humiliating the Chinese government. That is why Tibetans can symbolise different things to different people. For conservative commentators, the Tibetans are warriors for freedom against a Stalinist monolith; their protests are a replay of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 (12). For greener, more liberal campaigners, Tibetans are symbols of natural and mystical purity in contrast to rampant Western and Chinese consumerism. As one author puts it, Tibetan culture offers 'powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to Western egotistical lifestyles [and] our gradually more pointless pursuit of material interests' (13). Various political factions in the West are using Tibetans as ventriloquist dummies in order to mouth their own complaints against modern China. They are promoting Tibetan unrest not to liberate Tibetans but in the hope that the protests will represent their own personal disgust for China in a real-world, physical manner.

There is a long history of Western politicians and activists using Tibet as a stick with which to beat China. In his fascinating book Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald S Lopez Jnr shows how, in the Western imagination, 'the invasion of Tibet by [China] was and still is represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits… Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman.' (14) Today, too, pro-Tibetan activism often disguises a view of the Chinese as subhuman. Indeed, in the current, all-encompassing right/left consensus about China, even left-leaning campaigns can employ old right tactics of demonising the Chinese. A poster for the trendy campaign group Free Tibet shows Tibetans as serene and peaceful and the Chinese as smog-producing modernisers with distinctly slitty eyes and goofy teeth (15).

spiked is no friend of the Chinese regime. Yet those promoting self-serving internal unrest in the run-up to the Olympics, encouraging Tibetans and others to bash China for real where the West only does it with words and propaganda, are playing a dangerous game indeed. Such a strategy of cynical destabilisation could unleash yet more violence in China, and have repercussions around the world. And the biggest losers, at least in the short term, are likely to be Tibetans themselves: they will not win liberty or equality by being transformed into performing protesters for the benefit of Chinaphobic Westerners.