Eric posted "Boy Oh Boy - Boycotting the Boycott" on February 29, and that spawned a good discussion about boycotts of countries, the criteria for boycotts, and the value of boycotts.
But I think the situation with China has taken a turn that can't be ignored.
From Toronto's
Globe and Mail March 18:
BEIJING — Chinese officials have declared a "people's war" of security and propaganda against support for the Dalai Lama in Tibet after riots racked the regional capital Lhasa, and some sources claimed the turmoil killed dozens.
Residents of the remote city high in the Himalayas said on Sunday that anti-riot troops controlled the streets and were closely checking Tibetan homes after protests and looting shook the heavily Buddhist region.
Two days ago Tibetan protesters, some in Buddhist monks' robes and some yelling pro-independence slogans, trashed shops, attacked banks and government offices and wielded stones and knives against police. ...
The convulsion of Tibetan anger at the Chinese presence in the region came after days of peaceful protests by monks and was a sharp blow to Beijing's preparations for the Olympic Games in August, when China wants to showcase prosperity and unity.
The monks took to the streets on Monday to mark the 49th anniversary of an earlier uprising.
The protest later spread to Chinese areas inhabited by Tibetans. Xiahe in Gansu province saw hundreds of monks and lay residents march in peaceful defiance, to judge from pictures sent to reporters.
Chinese authorities have now signalled a sweeping campaign to redouble security in the region and attack public support for the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in 1959 after that year's failed uprising.
http://www.theglobeandmai.../home?cid=al_gam_mostviewThe Chinese retaliation against the Tibetans who staged these protests has been out of proportion to any threat from the protesters, in my opinion. The protests, however, have been incredibly restrained when seen in perspective. Again from
The Globe and Mail, March 21:
More than 100 armed soldiers are camped out in military vehicles in the parking lot of the hotel where Luorang works. His town is locked down, its people trapped inside their homes, ordered to stay off the streets.
But when The Globe and Mail reaches him by telephone, the 35-year-old Tibetan ignores the nearby soldiers and agrees to talk. He is eager to explain why people in his community are angry enough to join the fiercest wave of Tibetan protests in almost 20 years.
His words tumble out. He talks of a sacred mountain, holy to the Tibetans, the site of a Tibetan festival, where Chinese mining companies are blasting for gold and silver mines. He talks of the disappearing forests and how there is nothing left for traditional Tibetan medicine. He describes how China prohibited his town from receiving a group of monks from Lhasa last year, and how the monks of his town were banned from travelling to other monasteries.
"If they take away the water and the soil and the resources, how will our people continue to live here?" he asks.
"If our people did not believe in Buddhism, they would have rioted a long time ago. We endured and endured. But now finally it is difficult to endure any more." ...
The scale of the uprising, and the violence on both sides, has shocked the world. But for those who were paying attention, the signs of revolt had been visible for months, if not years. ...
Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile [said], "The Tibetan people have deep-seated resentments. They feel marginalized and isolated from economic development in Tibet. They feel that they're being reduced to a minority in their own land. They feel very fearful about the survival of their culture and their identity. These are the underlying roots, the sense of despair that they feel. The Olympics may have been a factor, but they were not the major factor." ... [my emphasis]
Many analysts say the current wave of protests can be traced back to two key events in 2006: the completion of the new railway to Lhasa, which has brought millions of Chinese tourists and migrants to Tibet, and the appointment of a tough new Communist regional boss, Zhang Qingli, who announced a "life or death" battle against the Dalai Lama.
Mr. Zhang is a member of China's ethnic Han majority, and in an interview in August of 2006, he admitted that he spoke "just a few words" of the Tibetan language. He regarded the Tibetans as children who must be indoctrinated with a love of China, rather than a love of Buddhism.
"Those who do not love their country are not qualified to be human beings," Mr. Zhang said in one interview. [my emphasis]
"The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need," he said on another occasion. "The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans."
Under Mr. Zhang's hard-line rule, Tibetans were forced to endure a near-constant diet of mandatory "patriotic education" sessions, along with a host of other restrictive measures, including bans on religious activity by Tibetan students and officials. Arrests of Tibetan dissidents increased threefold in 2007, compared with the previous year. The crackdown was "extraordinarily vigorous" and triggered massive discontent in Tibet, said Prof. Barnett, the Columbia University scholar.
"There was a whittling down of the Tibetan culture," he said. "There was no security threat from Tibet, so why did China's policies need to turn so hard-line in the past two years? All of this really exacerbated the situation in Tibet."
The "patriotic education" campaigns, which forced monks to denounce the Dalai Lama and declare allegiance to China, had previously been held once or twice a year. But after Mr. Zhang's arrival, some monasteries began receiving education campaigns for up to 18 days a month. Some monks refused to sign formal statements denouncing the Dalai Lama, and one monk reportedly committed suicide rather than sign the statement.
http://www.theglobeandmai...ry/Front/?pageRequested=1This is all bad stuff. And the bad stuff goes back 58 years, as those Tibetans who survived Chinese imprisonment can attest. There are also some "outsiders" who have seen what has happened to Tibet, and at least one believes that Tibetans do not expect to win back their country but are instead very aware that the results of these protests will be the same as they were in the past: death and imprisonment.
From Garbriel Lafitte, adviser to the Tibet Government-in-exile, on March 17:
The Tibetan revolt, like those of two and five decades ago, will be crushed by the overwhelming might of the Chinese military. No match could be more unequal: maroon-clad nuns and monks versus the machinery of oppression of the global rising power. In recent months, fast-response mobile tactical squads whose sole purpose is to quell the masses have been overtly rehearsing on the streets of Tibetan towns for just what they are now doing.
What is the point of revolt if it is almost certainly suicidal?
This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet rolls - hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25 per cent of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken scarf khadags with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: Victory to the gods!
That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more. The white scarves also protected Tibetan shopkeepers from attack as the streets filled, for a short and costly moment of freedom, with Tibetans smashing the businesses of immigrant Chinese traders.
Even in the most intoxicating moment of reclaiming the streets no Tibetan could have forgotten the ever present security cameras, and the network of informers penetrating deeply into urban Tibetan private lives. No Tibetan could have been unmindful that the full repressive power of a modernised, high-tech tyranny would hunt them down, and show no mercy. All Tibetans know of former friends who, on release from prison and torture, now shun old acquaintances because they are under such intense pressure by their torturers to regularly name names of those who privately voice thoughts that do not conform to the Party line. These informers live in fear of being hauled in again, for further torture, and of betraying their friends. [my emphasis]
That is what makes this revolt uniquely Tibetan. It is no accident that from the outset the protests were led by those who have already renounced all ties to kin, dedicating their lives to serve all of humanity, unconditionally. The nuns and monks of Tibet have taken vows to work for the liberation of all sentient beings from all sources of suffering - in the mind and in the external world. From the Dalai Lama through to the newest novice, they train in meditation to cut attachment to existence, to the existence of me ahead of all others.
They know they will die, and are ready for it. Just as in the great Tibetan revolts of 1959 and 1987, many will die in secret prison cells, after torture. When the world is no longer watching, or able to see, Tibetans who risked all so as to focus the world - in this Olympic year - on China's shame, will die.
What do Tibetans find so objectionable about today's China? Why is it that Tibetans and Chinese, neighbours for thousands of years, cannot get on? ...
The latest threat to Tibetan ways of life comes wrapped in an ideology of environmentalism. In the name of protecting the Tibetan upper reaches of China's great rivers - both the Yangtze and the Yellow - thousands of Tibetan nomads are being forced off their land, and resettled in miserable new towns in the middle of nowhere. Instantly, their livelihoods and intimate knowledge of the land and sustainable management, are useless - but they are seldom given training in new skills or even compensation beyond a grain survival ration.
Now the nomads, in a huge and rapidly expanding area, are ecological refugees, on the mistaken assumption that they are ignorantly and carelessly to blame for degradation of a vast grassland second in size only to Australia's pastoral inland. The nomads, compulsorily voiceless, not allowed to form any NGOs of their own, have no opportunity to show how deeply they care for the land, having sustained its productivity and its wildlife over millennia. China's urban-based Party elite regards nomads as stupid, uneducated, unscientific, greedy and destructive - everything China is trying to get away from. There is no partnership between authority and those on the land, because they are of different races, with very different worldviews.
This is the bedrock of the revolt. The Chinese authorities hold rural Tibetans in contempt, while urban educated Tibetans are viewed with suspicion, their exclusive loyalty to China and the Party forever tested by extreme "patriotic education" campaigns that make it compulsory to denounce the most revered lamas.
To be a Tibetan in Tibet is a lot like being black in Mississippi 50 years ago. Travel within Tibet, migration from country to city, number of livestock permitted, number of children permitted, all are rigidly and oppressively controlled by an invasive bureaucracy. [my emphasis] ...
As the Dalai Lama has always said: Tibetans and Chinese have gotten on well in the past, and can do so again, but only if there is mutual respect for fellow human beings who differ in their sources of happiness.
Tibetan monks and nuns are now dying, usually with equanimity and no hatred, in order to maintain that difference.
http://newmatilda.com/200.../03/17/reclaiming-streetsMy opinion is that only a coordinated boycott of the Olympics in China—if not of Chinese products—can have any effect at all, but not for the reason you might think I have. China has expelled the international press from Tibet, so any news we get now will have to be sneaked out. But the news that the Chinese themselves get is restricted beyond Western comprehension.
PRI's
The World had a report on March 17 about how the Chinese in China view the situation in Tibet
http://www.theworld.org/?...xonomy_by_date/1/20080317. If they had heard about the protests and government response at all, they had only heard the Chinese government's official line.
One woman, when asked about the protests, didn't understand what Tibet had to be unhappy about. After all, the Chinese government "has been supporting them a lot. And especially about the development in the west. I think in the future Tibet will be more developed and I think they will be happier; their life will be better." It will be better than now, because she's heard that Tibetans are "really poor." She said that Tibetans don't wash themselves, except for once before they get married.Mary Kay Magistad, the reporter for the story, told the woman interviewed that Tibetans wanted "greater independence to protect their culture and religion," she responded that every country, ethnicity, and individual wants independence, but that it is better for Tibet to be part of China, because Tibet is in China's territory. It's better for Tibet's development.
Magistad said that this is a fairly typical opinion about Tibet, because this is what they're taught in school and what they hear from their government on the state-run media*. The news that day had only a short report about Tibet at the end of the broadcast, and that was to say that everything was returning to normal there.
Most people Magistad approached hadn't even heard about the events in Tibet, but one man, a bicycle repairman, had heard and had an opinion about it, which he related. China, he said, is a very stable country in which only a few people "want to make a fuss. And it is the Dalai Lama who is playing the tricks in Tibet. And some other countries are trying to make it worse. So that's why there's been chaos in Tibet. That's the right perspective."
And that's exactly what the Chinese government has told its citizens: that the Dalai Lama is trying to split the country and the Chinese forces used "maximum restraint." When Magistad tells the repairman that, by the government's account, 16 people have died and other sources report many more, he is genuinely surprised. He admits that he hasn't heard this on the government's news broadcasts, but he is sure that the government will take care of the situation "fairly enough." Magistad ends her report by noting that the confident tone the repairman used just moments before has been replaced with some doubt.
The Chinese news service isn't suddenly going to present unvarnished facts to its citizenry. Nor can Mary Kay Magistad (whose safety I started to worry about, after this report) interview enough of the billions of Chinese people to make a dent in their credulity.
However, an Olympic boycott—which couldn't be hidden from those millions of Chinese people enlisted to run the games' infrastructure—would start enough people asking questions that even the Chinese government might have trouble with it. There's only so far that propaganda can go.I suppose I'm trying to shove China into the light and make its people see it for what it actually is, not for what it says it is. We lived in our relative ignorance until Watergate shoved reality into our faces, and while it hasn't been a steady voyage to open government, a vigilant press, and an aware populace, I think—ugly as things are—it's better than ignorance.
A resurgence of protest in Tibet and a 2008 Olympics boycott provide the perfect opportunities to wake Chinese people up. They are two self-contained entities, difficult to rationalize once out in the open. Maybe the citizenry of other countries—including the US—will wake up at the same time.
*If you've never listened to a Chinese news broadcast, try and listen to one soon. The World Radio Network
http://www.wrn.org/ is broadcast on my local NPR station late at night. I've listened with some amusement at the reports on Chinese events and culture that portray life in China and its relations with the rest of the world as upbeat and cooperative. It always reminds me of the throwaway news report just before the "Every Sperm Is Sacred" number in
The Meaning of Life: "This is the BBC home service. Here is the news: The British invasion of Russia ended quietly yesterday with the unconditional surrender of Moscow to Lieutenant Simon Pring. In Düsseldorf, the British pair Nanet and Napoleon Hardcastle have won everything they possibly could have entered for. And British weather has been named by Climate Magazine as the best in the world."
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