It’s bad karma: Sharon Stone links quake to China’s treatment of Tibet

“I am not happy about the way the Chinese were treating the Tibetans,” says Sharon Stone on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival. Watch the video on YouTube.

A new torch controversy: the battle for Everest

As the Olympic flame makes its way to the top of the world’s highest mountain, China’s repressive tactics have sparked fresh criticism. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent, UK:

William Holland was only thinking of the photograph. When he got to the top of Everest he planned to take the rolled-up flag saying “Free Tibet” from his rucksack, pose for posterity with the banner as a backdrop and then roll it away again before starting back down. He was not looking to make a scene.

But that is exactly what transpired. Someone in the group he was climbing with informed the Nepalese authorities of Mr Holland’s flag. When he reached Everest Base Camp he was ordered from the mountain and told to go straight to Kathmandu. From there he was deported from Nepal with an order not to return for two years.

The 26-year-old US climber’s treatment at the hands of the Nepalese authorities is just one indication of how the world’s highest mountain has in recent days become engulfed by the politics and controversy surrounding China and its relationship with Tibet.

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Everest Olympic torch diary - 5

BBC’s Jonah Fisher joins the Olympic torch for the high point of its trip - on Mount Everest. In the fifth of his diary instalments, he takes a tour of Everest base camp.

On Wednesday we had a treat. After lengthy negotiations with the border police our minders secured us permission to visit Everest base camp 5km from our media village.

With strict instructions not to film the numerous military trucks on the way, we were driven to the tented camp that forms the command centre for both the climbing team as well as the official Chinese media.

Click here for more and for his previous instalments:

Everest Olympic torch diary

As the Olympic torch makes its way around the world before arriving in Beijing for the games in August, the BBC’s Jonah Fisher joins it for the high point of its trip - on Mount Everest. In the third of his diary instalments, he arrives at Mount Everest national park.

The first part of our high speed - even more highly managed - tour of Tibet is nearing its end. Everest is at last in sight, and we should reach it sometime on Monday.

The smiles on the faces of the Beijing Olympic Committee representatives say it all.

Despite the best efforts of us international journalists to find someone to express a slightly pro-Tibetan thought, we have not found anybody.

Having been blocked from going to the capital Lhasa, we have been forced into a strict routine of brisk starts in the morning followed by a long day of driving, with pauses for “attractions” en route.

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Click here for the second instalment of the diary:

A flashpoint called Tibet

What India is passing off as a moderate China policy is actually aberrant behaviour, writes Bharat Karnad, professor at the Centre for Policy Research, in Mint.

The barbed wire barricade outside the Chinese embassy ought to become a permanent fixture of New Delhi’s landscape. It will remind the Indian people and their government about what it is that, at the core, separates India from China: freedom.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, however, has prostrated himself in a kow-tow to the zhung guo (”the central kingdom”) - calling China India’s “greatest neighbour”, deliberately leaving Tawang out of his official visit to Arunachal Pradesh and, as if to confirm this country’s tributary status, preventing anti-China protests in Arunachal Pradesh, hounding and gagging the poor Tibetan community in exile and, after declaring India would not tolerate Chinese minders, allowing Chinese cops to trot alongside the Olympics torch carriers and the contingent of army commandos for the short stretch the “flame” of fair play was exposed to the Indian “public”.

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My life in forbidden Lhasa

Austrian soldier Heinrich Harrer escaped from a British POW camp in India in World War II and ended up as the young Dalai Lama’s tutor in Tibet. His story was published in the July 1955 edition of National Geographic. The magazine has republished the story in its May special issue on China.

The rocky trail led into the broad valley of the Kyi River. Exhausted, our shoes in tatters and our feet bleeding and blistered, we rounded a little hill. Before us lay the Potala, winter palace of Tibet’s Dalai Lama, its golden roofs ablaze in the January sun.

Lhasa was only eight miles away!

I felt a sudden compulsion to sink to my knees and offer a prayer of thanksgiving, even as did the Buddhist pilgrims who were our companions. It seemed impossible that we had reached safety, that our agony of cold and hunger and danger lay behind us. We had walked more than 1,500 miles across the most forbidding terrain in the world and had climbed 62 mountain passes, some as high as 20,000 feet.

It is just as well, I have since felt, that no man can foretell the future. What would Peter Aufschnaiter and I have thought, when we left our native Austria in 1939 as members of the German Nanga Parbat Expedition, had we known we faced long imprisonment and a desperate escape into Tibet, where we were to roam fabled Lhasa with a color camera?

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China launches ‘education drive’ in Lhasa

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Chinese officials have launched an education drive, reports Chris Buckley for Reuters

China’s Communist Party has launched a political education drive in Tibet’s restive capital, Lhasa, vowing a long campaign to attack pro-independence sentiment and support for the Dalai Lama.

China has blamed recent unrest in Tibetan areas on a “clique” of the Dalai’s followers pressing for independence and seeking to upset Beijing’s preparations for the August Olympics. Over a month has passed since monk-led protests against government control gave way to deadly anti-Chinese rioting in Lhasa on March 14, but security forces have wrestled with continued unrest there and across other Tibetan areas. 

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

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Tibet’s new warriors

A new generation of Tibetan leaders is overturning every stereotpye, writes Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:

Jantar Mantar in Delhi - unique site of struggle, open air podium for the distressed, a kind of safety valve for India’s myriad pressure cookers - is awash with colour. Five thousand Tibetans from across the country are camping on the street. Every few minutes, a new procession is launched, renting the air with slogans in Hindi and English and Tibetan. Occasionally, the mood is deepened by sonorous chants. The fervour is unmistakable; it seeks release. Beneath the surface, deeper currents are gathering.

For five decades — ever since his historic flight from his homeland in 1959 — only one face has symbolised the Tibetan community for the world: the kindly, almost childlike face of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, resolutely speaking of non-violence and absolute compassion. It is a face that has evoked global warmth and admiration, a face that has kept the Tibetan issue kindling on the international stage, a face that has commanded absolute reverence from its own people. For five decades, His Holiness has been the unchallenged star of his people: he has won the Nobel Prize for Peace, he has enlisted glamorous ambassadors, he has kept his scattered tribe together with a wise sense of tradition. But curiously, at the same time, he has leached the Tibetan predicament from hope of any resolution. Unlike the canny apostle of non-violence he is commonly compared to, he has failed to convert his ideal of nonviolence into effective political action.

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For an interview with Tenzin Tsundue click here

A city under siege

AW has the news from New Delhi:

Nobody knew what time the event would begin, or even how many would be taking part in it. Barring some 500 ‘dignatories’ invited for the event and hordes of schoolchildren pressganged into service, nobody seemed to know what the hell was going on as the Capital of India turned into a virtual fortress in order to protect the Olympic Torch here on its latest leg of its troubled world tour.

Some 15,000 policemen and commandoes have been pressed into service to protect the flame on its brief 2.3 km route from Rajpath to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Meanwhile, Tibetan protestors held an alternative torch run that started from Raj Ghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, dubbing their torch the ‘people’s torch’. Those who participated and spoke included novelist and thinker Arundhati Roy and senior politician George Fernandes. At least 50 protestors were detained.

The official torch reportedly resulted in a spate of traffic jams as the entire route was sealed off and all roads and Metro stations in the area were shut down. The relay finally started shortly after 4 pm, and was shown live on television as startled viewers saw runners — many of them clearly out of shape, some waving feebly – jog along for some 10-12 steps (given the shortness of the route), surrounded by officials and a ring of securitymen.

Earlier in the day, Hindustan Times had a report that claimed that the reason why actors Aamir Khan and Saif Ali Khan had agreed to participate in the run was because of commercial consideration to the brands, Coca-Cola and Lenovo, that they respectively endorse.

[Pic: BBC News]

Undercover in Tibet

In the news for his biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French, who is also the author of Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, writes for The Daily Mail on his personal experience of travelling through Tibet to research his book

The Chinese men in blue tracksuits were horribly familiar. Although they were dressed like athletes, their robotic movements, blank faces, swivel eyes and rough, menacing style reminded me of the secret policemen I had to avoid when I was in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, some years ago.

Last Sunday, they surrounded Konnie Huq as she ran with the Olympic flame through the streets of London, ordering her to hold the torch higher and shoving protesters and British policemen out of the way.

Lord Coe, the London Olympics chief, was overheard describing the so-called “torch attendants” as “thugs”.

He said: “They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible.”

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[Pic: Konnie Huq is surrounded by 'thugs' as she carries the Olympic Torch in London last week]

Tibetan Buddhism’s next leader?

In the IHT, former New York Times Asia correspondent and author of So Close to Heaven, Barbara Crossette profiles the Karmapa, the man who could succeed the Dalai Lama, on the eve of his first trip to the United States

The recent outburst of Tibetan rage against the Chinese government not only demonstrated once again the fear and anger among Himalayan Buddhists living under the cultural insensitivity of Beijing, it also illuminated the crucial role of the Dalai Lama, navigating skillfully between restive Tibetan exiles and an Indian government under Chinese pressures to stifle their protests. What will happen when he is gone?

The West is about to get its first glimpse of that possible future.

In mid-May, a serious young man of 22 who is revered as the 17th Karmapa - now the second-most-important figure in Tibetan Buddhism - will make his first visit to the United States. The trip comes eight years after his dramatic flight to India from a monastery near Lhasa at the end of 1999, when he was just 14 years old. This is the first time that a skittish India has allowed him permission to travel abroad. His flight from Tibet was a considerable embarrassment to China.

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Searching for the Dalai Lama

In The New York Times, Holly Morris, the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine,” reviews “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” by Pico Iyer.

Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?” a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he’s getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.

In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize - a man who embodies a “simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.”

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Previously on AW:

• Pico Iyer: On ‘The Open Road’ and 30 years With the Dalai Lama
• A Monk’s struggle

Turning point for Tibet

President Hu Jintao has an opportunity to transform China’s policy on Tibet, says Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, the Dalai Lama’s chief representative in talks with Beijing, in International Herald Tribune:

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed an uprising against the Chinese authorities’ repressive policies on the Tibetan plateau the likes of which we have not seen in a generation. Beijing has responded with a crackdown on a scale never seen before in Tibet, all just months before the Olympics are to open in Beijing.

As the representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in talks with the Chinese leadership since 2002, I have been deeply fearful that such events would come to pass. But none of us imagined the scale of the protests, given China’s tight control in Tibet.

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Personal journey: Caught between a crackdown and a Tibetan welcome

One writer’s peaceful experience in Western Sichuan during the riots left him yearning to return. Michael Benanav in The New York Times:

The ride in the Chinese minivan had taken 11 hours. After enduring multiple delays, the crossing of a treacherous 16,000-foot mountain pass and a seatmate who chain-smoked the entire way, casually flicking the ashes into his lap, I had arrived in Dege. I was in the culturally Tibetan area of western Sichuan Province, practically on the border of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. I had come to Dege to visit the sacred Bakong monastery, which is both the world’s largest library of ancient Tibetan Buddhist texts and a printing house where monks hand-ink thousands of pieces of religious paraphernalia every day.

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Tibet isn’t a Buddhist litmus test

Deepak Chopra at The Huffington Post:

As the violence in Tibet has continued, the Dalai Lama issued a stern statement that he could not align himself with insurrection in his home country. Buddhism rests on several pillars, one of which is nonviolence. Tibet quickly became a kind of Buddhist litmus test. How much pain and oppression can you stand and still exhibit loving kindness and compassion? I wonder if that’s really fair. The Tibetans face a political crisis that should be met with political action. Whatever that action turns out to be, nobody should be seen as a good or bad Buddhist, anymore than defending your house from an intruder tests whether a Christian is living by the precepts of Jesus.

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On this day April 1, 1959

The Times, UK, reports on Peking’s drive to cut off the Dalai Lama’s escape routes:

There is growing concern here at the continuing absence of news about the progress of the Dalai Lama and his party. It is claimed that even on muleback he should by now have had time to reach Bhutan or the Indian border, but there is still no indication of his whereabouts.

Reports from Lhasa speak of energetic and increasing efforts by the Chinese to intercept the fugitives.

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What Tibetans want

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

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

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

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

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I’m proud to carry the Olympic torch despite Tibet

Duncan Mackay in The Observor, UK:

A few weeks ago, when my friends and colleagues found out I had been the only newspaper journalist to be asked to carry the Olympic torch when it comes to London on 6 April (a traditional treat for a writer), they were all pleased for me. Now the same people are asking me if I am going to pull out in protest at China’s human-rights record and the recent events in Tibet.

While I am appalled at the oppression imposed on Tibet by China, its support of the regime in Darfur and its sickening record on human rights, the answer is no. I respect people’s rights to protest peacefully along the route and I sincerely hope their valiant efforts pay off in forcing the Chinese government to change. But it is not the Olympics that have let them down - it is the world’s politicians.

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To be great, China needs to uphold Tibet’s culture

Manoj Joshi on China’s cynical game in Tibet

After being overwhelmed by the People’s Liberation Army in 1950, the Tibetans have broken out in open revolt thrice —in 1959, 1989 and now in 2008. Considering the herculean efforts that have been made by China to control the Tibetans, this is remarkable, and ought to serve as a warning of sorts to Beijing. The Chinese have played a cynical game in Tibet. They claimed that they entered it to liberate its people from serfdom and to protect its special status, but in fact they split Tibet into several provinces and what we call Tibet today comprises just half its traditional territory. Despite professing atheism, the Chinese have blatantly interfered in the religious practices of Tibet, including taking decisions on who is an incarnate lama.
No country in the world supports an independent Tibet. Yet, among the people in democratic countries, Chinese sovereignty over Tibet is only reluctantly conceded. Most Indians, barring the Communists, believe that Tibet is a colonial possession of China, held down by the force of the People’s Liberation Army. The reality is, of course, partly true though more complex.

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Growing gulf divides China and Dalai Lama

Howard W. French in The New York Times:

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.

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Putting faces on 5 victims of Tibetan riots

From The New York Times:

Shanghai: In life, the five young women who burned to death in a Chinese clothing store during rioting in Tibet on March 14 were not the types who would make headlines.

One received permission from her family to follow her fiancé to Lhasa; another sent home most of her wages to support 13 relatives; several sent text messages in the minutes before they died warning loved ones to stay indoors as violence erupted.

In death, though, the women are being treated as martyrs. The Chinese government has been using their deaths to support its version of what happened on “3/14,” when Tibet saw its worst day of violence in 20 years. In that version, broadcast by state-controlled media, ethnic Tibetans took to Lhasa’s streets, unprovoked, burning and looting shops that were owned by Han Chinese.

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Human Rights Watch speaks up for Tibet

Human Rights Watch has asked the government of Nepal to stop its arbitrary detention and ‘intimidation tactics’ against peaceful Tibetan protestors, including threats to deport them to China. Read that report here.

Meanwhile, a note circulated by ’some Chinese intellectuals’, including dissidents and writers, has called for an independent United Nations investigation into Tibet. The note supports the Dalai Lama’s appeal for peace and includes 11 other suggestions for solving the Tibet situation.

Finally, HRW has called upon China to investigate its crackdown before the Olympic torch passes through Tibet. It has asked the government to account for those dead or missing and it wants Lhasa to be reopened to media and to monitors.

The Olympic torch, which was lit today in Olympia, Greece, should not go through Tibet unless the Chinese government agrees to an independent investigation into the recent unrest in Tibetan areas, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Olympic torch is set to pass through the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on June 20-21. Chinese government officials have confirmed their plans to continue despite the ongoing protests and crackdown across ethnic Tibetan areas.

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For a backgrounder and a complete HRW list of Tibet reports, go here.

[PIC: Monks and protestors rally on a street in Labrang, Gansu province, March 14. Reuters]

China and Tibet: The spin campaign

From TIME:

Cyberspace in China is a rough-and-tumble place, where mobs of virtual vigilantes can single out an innocent victim for public humiliation in a way that isn’t common in other parts of the world. But in recent days the sights of China’s netizens have been trained not on a person but on an institution: the Western media, which is being vilified as unfair, uninformed and incompetent in its coverage of the uprisings over Chinese rule in Tibet. In blogs, chatrooms, bulletin boards and even by instant message, ordinary Chinese are excoriating the international press. There’s even a special website that has been launched to attack perceived media bias. Among other transgressions, the site’s home page displays mistakes by German TV stations in which Nepalese police, shown in videos rounding up Tibetan protesters in Kathmandu are identified as Chinese.

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China needs the Dalai Lama

Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and President of Tibet House US, in the ‘On Faith’ section of The Washington Post:

If there ever was a social and political movement based on faith, on spirituality, it is the 50-year campaign of the Dalai Lama for the freedom of his people, and the present spontaneous uprising of the Tibetan people who want to be free to restore their spiritual life, in the closer presence of their spiritual and political leader. These acts of truth-the Dalai Lama’s long insistence on nonviolence and dialogue in responding to the genocidal acts of one of the world’s largest military powers, and the Tibetan people’s resistance in the face of overwhelming odds-may yet produce miraculous results, as one of the world’s greatest “lost causes” becomes a possible success.

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Missing: monks who defied Beijing

From The Independent, UK:

They were the 15 youthful Tibetan monks - three still in their teens - who sparked a rebellion by daring to speak out against China’s repression of their homeland.

The group paraded peacefully down Barkhor Street in Lhasa old town on 10 March handing out leaflets, chanting pro-independence slogans and carrying the banned Tibetan flag. Their demand was that the Chinese government that has ruled Tibet since 1951 should ease a “patriotic re-education” campaign which forced them to denounce the Dalai Lama and subjected them to government propaganda.

The reaction of the authorities, desperate to snuff out the most serious uprising against Chinese rule for almost half a century, was rapid and brutal. The group was detained on the spot, with eyewitnesses reporting that several of the monks suffered severe beatings as they were arrested and taken away. They have not been seen since.

[Photo: Page 1, The Independent]

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In previous posts: Holy Man

As Tibet erupted China wavered

Inside the court of the Tibetan god-king

Making Tibet Tibetan once more

Tibet’s young and restless

The Tibetan backlash

Tibet and technology

Dalai Lama’s BBC interview

Stopping the monks

As Tibet erupted, China wavered

Witnesses say Chinese security forces melted away as unrest boiled over in the Tibetan capital on March 14. Jim Yardley from Beijing in The New York Times:

In the chaotic hours after Lhasa erupted March 14, Tibetans rampaged through the city’s old quarter, waving steel scabbards and burning or looting Chinese shops. Clothes, souvenirs and other tourist trinkets were dumped outside and set afire as thick gray smoke darkened the midday sky. Tibetan fury, uncorked, boiled over.

Foreigners and Lhasa residents who witnessed the violence were stunned by what they saw, and by what they did not see: the police. Riot police officers fled after an initial skirmish and then were often nowhere to be found. Some Chinese shopkeepers begged for protection.

“The whole day I didn’t see a single police officer or soldier,” said an American woman who spent hours navigating the riot scene. “The Tibetans were just running free.”

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And in Nepal…

From Nepali Times:

In scenes not witnessed since April 2006, police brutally put down rallies and candlelit vigils by monks in Kathmandu. This young monk (above) was hit on his head with a bamboo stick wielded by riot police outside the United Nations office in Pulchok on Monday.

The UN’s human rights office in Kathmandu condemned what it said was the “excessive use of force” by Nepal’s police to disperse the demonstrations.

The protests have been part of an international campaign by Tibetans in exile and their supporters to highlight Chinese crackdowns in Lhasa and elsewhere. The rallies came in the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing in August. The unrest in Tibet has already hurt Nepal’s tourism industry since Kathmandu is the jump off point for Lhasa. Hundreds of Sherpas are also employed by expeditions climbing the Himalaya from the north.

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The revolt is about making Tibet Tibetan once more

Gabriel Lafitte, adviser to the Tibetan government-in-exile, in openDemocracy:

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% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf 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.

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In Tibetan areas, parallel worlds now collide

From International Herald Tribune:

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.”

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Tibet’s young and restless itch for fight

From Mint, India:

The hum of prayer reverberates through this settlement of 22,000, across its monasteries and the palace. Some 250km west of Bangalore, Bylakuppe holds the distinction of being the biggest Tibetan settlement outside Tibet, bigger even than Dharamsala.
But confusion is beginning to creep into this peaceful town that lies amid fields of maize, ginger and chillies, as Tibetan youth find themselves battling over how to battle.

The youth have been divided over their future course of action by a despairing threat from the Dalai Lama to resign if violence in Tibet continued or escalated. On Tuesday, the Dalai Lama called Tibetan violence “suicidal” and expressed his reservations about batches of protest marches from Dharamsala to Lhasa. “Don’t commit violence, it is not good,” he said at a news conference. “Violence is against human nature, violence is almost suicide. Even if 1,000 Tibetans sacrifice their lives, it will not help.”

But, while one small segment seeks to accede to the Dalai Lama’s plea, a larger section still calls for meeting fire with fire.

[Photo: Tibetans hold candles during a prayer march in Bylakuppe, India]

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China’s patchy Tibet blackout

Edward Cody from Beijing in The Washington Post:

As news reverberated around the world that bloody disturbances had erupted in Tibet, a star journalist for a leading Chinese newsmagazine was asked if he had any good sources in the remote mountain region. “Why?” he asked, unaware that anything was going on.

The reporter’s reaction was not unusual. When rioting by outraged Tibetans shook Lhasa last Friday, the Communist Party’s censorship apparatus tamped down news of the rampage, leaving most of China’s 1.3 billion people in the dark. Government-controlled television news ignored the crisis for the first few days, and Chinese newspapers were restricted to skeleton dispatches from the official New China News Agency.

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It’s the Tibetan economy, stupid

Lack of economic opportunity fueled the riots in Tibet, says Abrahm Lustgarten, author of the upcoming “China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet,” in The Washington Post:

On a winter night not long ago, I walked through the glowing doorway of Lhasa’s newest nightclub, Babila, for an interview with its owner, a Chinese entrepreneur. Disco balls spun from the ceiling. Fiber-optic strands of plastic beads drizzled down like rain to a long, sleek stainless steel bar. On the stage, dancers in stiletto heels and lingerie gyrated to thumping music.

“Tibetan culture is so deeply rooted here,” the owner told me. “I don’t think it will be diluted — it’s important for business.” Yet looking around, I saw no Tibetan employees, and Tibetans represented only a smattering of customers. The bar served mostly Chinese businessmen and army officers, whose tabs could run as high as $2,000, several times the per capita income in Tibet.

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What led to Tibetan backlash?

Jim Yardley from Beijing in The New York Times:

Chinese leaders have blamed “splittists” led by the exiled Dalai Lama for spurring violent protests in Tibet and orchestrating a public relations sneak attack on the Communist Party, as they gear up to play host to the Olympics Games this summer.

But to many Tibetans and their sympathizers, the weeklong uprising against Chinese rule in Lhasa reflects years of simmering resentment over Beijing’s interference in Buddhist religious rites, its tightened political control and the destruction of the environment across the Himalayan territory the Tibetans consider sacred. If there is a surprise, it may be that Beijing has managed to keep things stable for so long.

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In this video, the Dalai Lama tells a group of international journalists he would resign as Tibetan leader if the situation veers out of control in Tibet. Speaking in Dharamsala in northern India where has been in exile since 1959, he denied accusations from China that he was inciting riots.

Can the Dalai Lama resign?

From BBC: While denying accusations of inciting violence in Tibet, the Dalai Lama - who endorses non-violent protest - has gone so far as threatening to “completely resign” if the situation veers out of control. But can the man many Tibetans consider as their leader just throw in the towel?

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Tibet and technology

In Slate, Anne Applebaum says shaky cell-phone videos from Tibet foretell doom for the Chinese empire

Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China’s Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?

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In Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin on blogger reaction and growing protests even as China blocks YouTube. Read that post here.

Finally, Kadfly is a tourist currently in Lhasa and has been posting despite problems with the Internet

Today people returned to the streets of Lhasa in droves. There are tons of Chinese police and army in the city but they are letting people wander without too much difficulty. Schools were also open today - hopefully all this means that there will not be any further escalation of the situation. Since the 14th things have quieted down dramatically - aside from a few booms and bangs we haven’t been able to hear much from where we are.

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Dalai Lama fears bloodshed in Tibet

In an interview with the BBC, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, said he feared there would be more deaths unless Beijing changed its policies towards Tibet, which it has ruled since invading in 1950. “It has become really very, very tense. Now today and yesterday, the Tibetan side is determined. The Chinese side also equally determined. So that means, the result: killing, more suffering,” he said.

An Associated Press report from Beijing says China blocked access to YouTube.com on Sunday after dozens of videos of recent protests in Tibet appeared on the popular U.S. video Web site.

“Cultural genocide”

Reuters reports from Dharamsala:

The Dalai Lama called on Sunday for an investigation into China’s tough response to protests in Tibet, and whether it was deliberate “cultural genocide”. The comments from Tibet’s spiritual leader came as police and troops locked down Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, two days after street protests against Chinese rule that the region’s government-in-exile said had killed 80 people.

“Whether the Chinese government admits or not, there is a problem. The problem is the nation with ancient cultural heritage is actually facing serious dangers,” he told a news conference at his base of Dharamsala in northern India.

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China shuts down Mount Everest

Jane Macartney reports from Beijing in The Times, UK:

China has closed Mount Everest to climbers amid fears that activists could disrupt the Olympic torch ascent of the world’s highest peak. The announcement that Chinese authorities had halted access to its side of the mountain that straddles the border between Tibet and Nepal came amid reports of a third day of protests by Tibetan monks around Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

In a letter to expedition companies, the China Tibet Mountaineering Association said: “Concern over climbing activities, crowded climbing routes and increasing environmental pressures will cause potential safety problems in Qomalangma \ areas.” It added: “We are not able to accept your expedition, so please postpone your climbing.”

Carrying the Olympic torch to the 29,035ft (8,840m) summit has been hailed by the Games host city, Beijing, as one of the grandest feats of the event. Running the relay through one of China’s most restive regions, where many Tibetans chafe under Beijing’s rule, also risks politicising the Games.

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Closing Everest - what China fears most

From the Website, mounteverest.net:

China’s worst nightmare for the Olympic torch event is not crowding or safety - the mountain will after all re-open after the torch. China’s worst nightmare is a picture of the flame on Everest summit, alongside a climber holding up a “Free Tibet” sign.

This explains why the officials have tried to convince Nepal to close the peak also from the south side during the Chinese Everest climb. But why would such a sign be dangerous? Why fear the two words “free Tibet” so much?

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Nepal, too, puts Everest off limits

From The New York Times:

Come early May, the darkness and the hurricane-force winds will fade and in the lambent daylight a calm will fall on the highest place in the world. Mountain climbers await this interlude, the Everest weather window, when nature leaves its great summit open for a two-week spell before the monsoons come.

Those who aspire to the 29,028-foot peak of Mount Everest, who have their flights arranged and their guides paid, sought to salvage their plans Friday as international politics began to intrude on the yearly ritual.

The government of Nepal, gatekeeper of the mountain’s popular southern face, has disclosed plans to block climbers’ ascents for the first 10 days of May, at the request of China.

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Stopping the monks

In India, 100 exiled Tibetans are stopped from marching to Tibet from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama. Undeterred, they say they will continue. In Kathmandu, police lob tear gas shells, baton-charge protestors outside the Chinese embassy and arrest 130 activists. And in Lhasa, dozens of monks are arrested for protesting peacefully. Nirmala Carvalho in Asianews.it reports.

On the Tibetan question, diplomacy is once again winning out over respect for human rights. Peaceful demonstrations organised yesterday by Tibetans in exile and in their home country have been blocked, and have led to the arrest of dozens of monks. The demonstrators wanted, in various ways, to commemorate the anniversary of the repression of the Tibetan revolt against the occupying Chinese army in 1959.

In Dharamsala in northern India, agents blocked hundreds of Tibetans who had set out on a “return march” to Tibet. They intended to arrive in early August, in protest against the Chinese occupation of the Himalayan region and against the holding of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.

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In BBC News, Tim Luard takes a look at Tibet’s political future

Many Tibetans believe that only the Dalai Lama can save Tibet from extinction.

But even a Dalai Lama is mortal. And they are deeply anxious about what will happen when the present one dies. For Tibetans, he is not just a Buddhist monk, a god and a king - the latest in a centuries’-long line of spiritual and temporal rulers - but a larger-than-life symbol of their unique civilisation.

For the past 50 years, from his sanctuary on the other side of the Himalayas, the 14th Dalai Lama has kept alive their dreams of survival as a separate people.

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Bjork’s cry for Tibet

Foreign Policy on the Icelandic pop singer’s rallying cry at a concert in Shanghai

Give Björk points for chutzpah. At the end of her song, “Declare Independence,” the iconoclastic Icelandic pop singer shouted, “Tibet! Tibet!” The incident would be unremarkable were she not in Shanghai at the time. Naturally, her outburst wasn’t reported in China’s rigidly state-controlled press, but it has stirred up nationalist anger online. And it made the closing moments of her concert a little awkward.

“The atmosphere was very strange, uncomfortable compared to the rest of the concert,” said audience member Stephen Gow, a British teacher who lives in Shanghai. People didn’t boo, Gow said, but they left the Shanghai International Gymnastic Center hurriedly.

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Urban Tibet?

From Jim McGill’s blog, photo444.wordpress.com, a haunting picture of a ‘re-settlement village’ in Tibet

The government is building 10’s of 1000’s of these homes for the Nomad Tibetans because it has been deemed that the Nomadic Herdsman and their Yaks are impacting the environment, causing desertification and in need of a more stable lifestyle.

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Tackling Tibet

China’s leaders need to realize that it is in their nation’s self-interest to engage the Dalai Lama, writes Thomas Laird in Time.

Since 2002, a little-known academic ritual has taken place each year at Harvard University. Academics of every stripe, from historians to constitutional lawyers, gather to discuss Tibet’s past, present and future. Uniquely, these intellectual debates have brought together Chinese and exiled Tibetan scholars. In the real world, the simplest facts about Tibet are so divisive that dialogue is impossible.

Chinese speak of the 1950 peaceful liberation of the Chinese province of Tibet, and of its subsequent modernization; Tibetans speak of the invasion of an independent nation, and the suppression of its religious and cultural traditions. The polite rules established at Harvard, however, at least allow the two sides to exchange views. In fact, a senior Chinese scholar attending the first Harvard event met with the Dalai Lama’s envoy. That secret meeting birthed the official Sino-Tibetan dialogue between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and the Chinese government, which still takes place annually in Beijing.

[Journalist Thomas Laird's latest book is The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama]

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