AFP quoted the Tibetan spiritual leader as saying that President Obama shared “genuine concerns” about human rights in Tibet.

“(Obama) is president of the greatest democratic country, so naturally he is showing concern about basic human values, human rights, religious freedom,” the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying.

A brief statement from the White House following the meeting said that President Obama “underscored the importance of the protection of human rights of Tibetans in China”.

“The President reiterated his strong support for the preservation of the unique religious, cultural, and linguistic traditions of Tibet and the Tibetan people throughout the world”, the statement said.

While reiterating U.S. policy accepting People’s Republic Of China’s rule over Tibet, the statement said that President Obama “commended the Dalai Lama’s commitment to nonviolence and dialogue with China and his pursuit of the “Middle Way” approach”.

“The President stressed that he encourages direct dialogue to resolve long-standing differences and that a dialogue that produces results would be positive for China and Tibetans”, the statement noted.

The White House statement also carried a mention on His Holiness the Dalai Lama expressing his hopes to President Obama that “dialogue between his representatives and the Chinese government can soon resume”.

The meeting comes less than 10 days before US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to visit the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Vice President Joseph Biden is also scheduled to visit China this summer, followed by a trip to Washington by China’s heir apparent, Xi Jinping.

Obama last met the Dalai Lama in February 2010.

(Source: Phayul.  Photo: Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD (New York Times)
Published: October 8, 2010

BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his activism, has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”

Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing.

He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991, and the German pacifist, Carl von Ossietzky, in 1935.

By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.

In a move that in retrospect appears to have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official had warned the Norwegian committee’s secretary that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries.

The committee, in announcing the prize Friday, noted that China, the world’s second biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

But it chastised the government for ignoring basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and in the international conventions to which Beijing is a party. “In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China’s citizens,” committee members said, adding, “China’s new status must entail increased responsibility.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the Peace Prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations.

“The Nobel Committee giving the Peace Prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”

Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Show Boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.

But on government-monitored microblogs like Sina.com, which regularly blocks searches for his name, the news still generated nearly 6,000 comments within an hour of the announcement.

Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr. Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Liu Xia, said. On Friday night, dozens of foreign reporters gathered outside the couple’s building in Beijing but they were prevented from entering by the police, who posted a sign saying the complex residents “politely refused” to be interviewed. His wife was also barred from leaving her apartment.

Given his imprisonment, Mr. Liu is not expected to accept the prize in person. The award includes a gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.5 million dollars.

The prize is an enormous psychological boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Community Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles drawn.

“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.

His most recent arrest in December 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped craft began circulating on the Internet. The petition, Charter ’08, demanded that China’s rulers guarantee civil liberties, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

“For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom,” his wife said in an interview on Wednesday.

An inexhaustible writer, poet and piquant social commentator, Mr. Liu was among the first of his generation to return to college after Culture Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when schools were shuttered and intellectuals were banished to the countryside. In a book of dialogues he published under a pseudonym with the popular writer Wang Shuo, Mr. Liu later described those years as a “temporary emancipation from the education process,” but ultimately found them deeply disturbing for the cruelty they inspired. In one passage, he recalled taunting an old man suspected of sympathizing with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had been defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist rebels. The abuse, he said, brought the man to tears. “In that era, when people were not treated as human, we were all guilty,” Mr. Liu said.

After graduating from the Chinese department at Jilin University, Mr. Liu enrolled at Beijing Normal University, where he was first a doctoral student and then a teacher. It was in the mid-1980s that he burst to fame for rousing lectures and incisive works of literary criticism that demanded an honest reckoning of the historical excesses under Mao. His writings were so bracing that school officials nearly denied him his doctoral degree.

In 1988, he left China for a series of speaking engagements in Norway, Hawaii and New York. It was in the spring of 1989, while a visiting scholar at Columbia University, that thousands of students began occupying Tiananmen Square, the ceremonial heart of the nation, with their calls for democracy and an end to official corruption. Mr. Liu later says he hesitated — he almost turned back during a change of planes in Tokyo — but returned to Beijing that May as demonstrations spread across the country, paralyzing the leadership in Beijing.

In early June, as it became apparent the military would clear the square by force, Mr. Liu and three other well-known intellectuals staged a 72-hour hunger strike as a show of solidarity that he later said was necessary to earn their trust as the movement lurched toward a violent end. In the early morning hours of June 4, as the army closed in, the men pried a stolen rifle from the hands of a distraught student and negotiated with military commissars to allow the protesters to safely exit the square.

Over the next few days as the crackdown began in earnest and many protest organizers fled China, Mr. Liu was arrested and later castigated in the state press as a traitorous “black hand” who had helped orchestrate what the government termed a counter-revolutionary rebellion.

After his release in 1991, Mr. Liu was stripped of his teaching job but he continued to gather petitions pressing for democracy, human rights and the reassessment of the government’s verdict on the Tiananmen protests. In 1995, his unbowed activism brought another arrest leading to another eight-month detention and in 1996, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp for a series of essays that criticized the government and called for an end to official corruption.

In those days, Mr. Liu bicycled across the city to the compounds where foreigners worked and lived to fax off his writings to overseas journals.

Zhang Zuhua, a former Communist Youth League member who later played a pivotal role in drafting Charter ’08, said Mr. Liu was a solitary advocate in the 1990s, when fear, exile and the pursuit of self-enrichment silenced most Chinese intellectuals.

“While others were researching the same problems from a theoretical or policy standpoint, he was actively protesting and actually doing things,” Mr. Zhang said.

When he emerged from prison in 1999, the Internet had taken hold in China and was beginning to transform the nature of public discourse. At first reluctant to use a computer, Mr. Liu quickly became a prolific commentator on overseas Web sites, later calling the Internet “God’s gift to China.” Over the years, he published more than 1,000 articles.

Inspired by a number of documents, including the United States Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Charter ‘08 was in some ways a culmination of Mr. Liu’s search for pragmatic ways to push for political reform in China. Although he initially heeded his wife’s pleas not to join the drafting, he later immersed himself in the three-year effort, revising it numerous times and working to convince more than 300 people — intellectuals, workers and party members — to add their names.

In its brief life on the Internet, the petition gathered some 10,000 signatures before censors stymied its spread. In the Internet crackdown that followed, scores of blogs were shut down, the initial 300 signatories were interrogated and Mr. Liu was taken to an undisclosed location, where he spent nearly a year cut off from his wife and lawyer.

At a two-hour trial last December, the government cited Charter ‘08 and six essays he had written to argue that Mr. Liu had exceeded the right to free expression by “openly slandering and inciting others to overthrow our country’s state power,” according to the verdict. Mr. Liu countered that he had simply advocated the gradual and nonviolent change in governance.

In a statement he gave to the court before his sentencing on Christmas Day, he said he held no grudge against those who sought to silence him and he even thanked his captors for treating him with dignity.

“I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom,” he said. “China will eventually become a country of rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict — one that can stand the test of history.”

PRESS STATEMENT OF HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA

Related Story:
Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize: A Victory for Tibet

Tibetan businessman gets life in prison
By CARA ANNA (AP) – 8/12/2010

BEIJING — One of Tibet’s richest businessmen has been sentenced to life in prison for helping Tibetan exile groups, a human rights organization said Thursday.

Dorje Tashi was sentenced on June 26 in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, said Urgen Tenzin, director of the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Dorje Tashi, believed to be in his mid-30s, is the operator of the Yak Hotel, the most famous hotel in Lhasa.

China has not reported the sentence, which comes amid increased repression of Tibetan intellectuals after rioting in Lhasa in 2008 in which at least 22 people died.

A duty officer at the Lhasa Intermediate People’s Court, reached by phone Thursday, said staff were out on holiday.

The general manager of the Yak Hotel, Wang Jiu, confirmed that Dorje Tashi was sentenced but would not comment further.

The recent crackdown has surprised Tibetan supporters because it includes high-profile Tibetans who were known for working within the system instead of opposing it. Dorje Tashi joined the ruling Communist Party in 2003, the state-run China Ethnic Press reported in March 2009.

“People who work within the system in China and Tibet, it would make no sense for them to risk everything to get involved in politics,” said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet scholar at Columbia University.

“Tibetans like him, they are the super elite,” Barnett said. “The severity of the sentence and the exceptional importance of the prisoner are unprecedented.”

According to a Lhasa-based website, Tibet Commercial Web, Dorje Tashi has been a delegate to the national Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to the government, and was named one of “10 outstanding youth of Tibet.”

With no word from the Chinese government, the exact charge against Dorje Tashi was not known. “He was charged with funding some outside Tibetan groups,” Urgen Tenzin said.

He said he didn’t know Dorje Tashi personally. “Before, we had no contact with him. He’s just a businessman.”

It was not clear if Dorje Tashi, who was detained in 2008, has a lawyer, and his family could not be reached Thursday.

In another high-profile case in June, a Tibetan environmentalist, Karma Samdrup, once praised by the government as a model philanthropist, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of grave robbing and dealing in looted antiquities. His supporters said he was actually being punished for his activism.

In May, the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet published a report saying 31 Tibetans are now in prison “after reporting or expressing views, writing poetry or prose, or simply sharing information about Chinese government policies and their impact in Tibet today.”

The report said it was the first time since the end of China’s chaotic Cultural Revolution in 1976 that there has been such a targeted campaign against Tibetan singers, artists and writers who peacefully express their views.

Associated Press Writer Isolda Morillo contributed to this report.

Tibetan PM and Uyghur’s Rebiya Exhort Uncompromising Truth

iReport — May 28, 2010
by P H Yang Photography (phyang.org)

Click here for more images.

“Our commitment to Non-Violence under the leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is quite sincere,” said Professor Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche (and to Tibetans as the 5th Samdhong Rinpoche), Prime Minister of the Tibetan Government-in-exile from the hilltops of Dharamsala.

The eminent scholar, philosopher and author of the 2006 book  “Uncompromising Truth for a Compromised World” then discussed the conditions in Tibet since the 1950’s when he went into exile in India along with the 14th Dalai Lama. The importance of continued non-violence or peaceful resistance was underscored.

The Panel on Non-Violence was organized by Friends of Tibet and the  event was hosted by the Co-Presidents of the Stanford Chapter, Tenzin Seldon and Joshua Fouse on campus.

Besides the Tibetan Prime Minister, the panelists included Rebiya  Kadeer, a prominent political activist and President of the World Uyghur Congress since 2006, as well as Stanford history professor and scholar Clayborne Carson, who is also Director of the Martin Luther King  Institute.

Kadeer has been active in defending the rights of the largely Muslim  Uyghur minority, who she says has been subject to systematic oppression by the Chinese government. Kadeer is currently living in exile in the United States.

Professor Carson briefly retraced the non-violent civil rights movement led by Dr Martin Luther King.

The panelists discussed the different types of nonviolent approaches to resolving an issue and why nonviolent direct action is useful and necessary in the context of the political movements. Each panelist gave an insightful history pertaining to their struggle.

The speakers exemplify diversity not only experience and identity but also diversity in thought and approaches to nonviolent activism.

The event was well attended by Stanford students and attracted activists from the community. Quite a few Tibetans and Uyghurs including 3 year-old Rabia and her sister Afeila (14) came all the way from Concord.

A lively questions and answers period followed with some pointed questions from the audience. George Qiao, a PhD candidate in History questioned whether the presentation from Kadeer was balanced. The panelists stayed behind to have a dialogue with the attendees.

Hopefully, such exchanges will improve the understanding of different enthic groups in China and the world.

Tibetan PM and Uyghur’s Rebiya Exhort Uncompromising Truth
May 28, 2010 (Friday) 2:45-4:30 pm
Cubberley Auditorium | Stanford University

Organized by Stanford Friends of Tibet

Aiming for the Highest Office of the Tibetan Government in Exile

London, 29 May 2010: When an email circular came through my inbox last week, I became quite eager to meet and hear from the man himself – many regard him as a serious and popular candidate to the office of Kalon Tripa. The Election of the 3rd Kalon Tripa is due to held in the spring of 2011.

Thanks to the early initiative of www.KalonTripa.org many Tibetans today know the names of over 20 potential candidates for the office of Kalon Tripa, otherwise known as the Prime Minster of Tibetan Government in Exile.

Kasur Tenzin Namgyal Tethong, who I believe is a serious leadership contender for the office of Kalon Tripa, with a wealth of experience and sound intellect in addition to the good connection that he enjoys both within and beyond the Tibetan Community, chose to stop-over in London on his way from Romania to the States, where he resides. He explained that the London stop-over was to meet his old friends including Mr Thubten Samdup, Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama based at The Office of Tibet, in addition to his planned engagement in Manchester, which is home to one of the world’s biggest football clubs, Manchester United.

Tethong, a household name in the Tibetan Community, has a very impressive C.V. in his favour if he decides to stand for the Kalon Tripa post, having already rendered his professional service to the Tibetan people and for the cause of Tibet in Dharamsala since 1960s. Fifteen years ago, he moved to the US, where he still continues to contribute untiringly in support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s various initiatives, through non-governmental organisations based there.

In the Tibetan Government in Exile he served as Chairman of the Kashag (Tibetan Cabinet) and Foreign Minister among other important positions he held. Tethong was The Dalai Lama’s Representative in the US, based in New York, and later as His Holiness’ Special Representative to Washington in 1970s and ‘80s. He was a founder member of the Tibet Fund and the International Campaign for Tibet, and also played a key role in the resettlement programme of one thousand Tibetan refugees from the Indian sub-continent to the US in the early 1990s. Under the directive of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in 1980 Tethong led the Second Delegation to Tibet on a fact-finding mission, as part of the first phase of China-Tibet Dialogue. Among other pioneering initiatives, he co-founded Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) and Sheja (Tibetan Language Newspaper).

This week, when he met with the small Tibetan gathering at The Office of Tibet in London, convened at short notice on 26th May by Tibetan Community in Britain, Kasur Tenzin Namgyal Tethong didn’t talk about general Tibetan politics. Instead, he passionately shared insights into the charitable work of The Dalai Lama Foundation, for which he is currently serving as the President. Despite spending just over half an hour listening to him talking about the work of The Dalai Lama Foundation and its initiatives such as ‘The Missing Peace’, ‘Tibet in Exile – Fifty Years’ and ‘Tibet Exile Lens’ projects, as soon as Q &A session began the restless Tibetans in London jumped straight to the inevitable question i.e. his candidacy for the office of Kalon Tripa.

There was no shortage of questions from the floor. A Tibetan graduate and a compatriot from Tibet expressed directly to Tethong that his candidacy to the office of Kalon Tripa would make a real difference and urged him to consider joining the leadership contest. Aware that his name is listed as a candidate on www.KalonTripa.org, a private initiative of Representative Thubten Samdup, campaigned for by his supporters, Tethong said that he would respond to the support calls from the Tibetan people in due course.

Personally, I wish that the former Kalon announces his candidacy for the office of Kalon Tripa upfront and takes part in the leadership contest proudly, as this could also add to the embracing of Tibetan democracy, but subtle as any Tibetan politician can be, Tethong carefully chose his words and said, “The Kalon Tripa has very big responsibilities,” and then added, “If there is overwhelming public support from the Tibetan people in the primary election, wanting me to serve as the Kalon Tripa, then I’ve to consider my position seriously.” Tethong quickly emphasised that the leadership is “two-ways”, meaning that public support would be so important if he were to commit himself to the five-year term.

Tethong was asked about his approach towards the resolution of Sino-Tibetan issue and also whether he could work with Harvard graduate Dr Lobsang Sangay, another strong and younger contender, in the same government (as Kalon Tripa and Deputy Kalon Tripa), should the situation arise, in order to bring the Tibetan Movement to the next level. Whilst not answering directly to the possibility of working together in the same government, Tethong expressed his high regard for Dr Sangay and said that he knew him well.

On the question of finding a solution to the ‘revitalisation of large Tibetan settlement camps and reversing the current trend of many young Tibetans leaving their communities in order to find employment elsewhere’, Tethong lauded the current Kalon Tripa and Representative Thubten Samdup’s plans to try some new initiatives towards this end. He pointed out, though, that it would be “unsustainable” and added, “Thousands of young talented Tibetans graduate each year with good qualifications and it’s not really practical to make them stay in the settlements, where jobs are scarce. Young people like to go to the towns and cities and this is inevitable, especially in our situation, and we cannot stop them leaving the settlements. It would be more practical if we try to find ways to match their skills and send them to countries where they would be welcomed and eventually this would help them in their professional development and to the Tibetan cause”. This was a good campaign pitch to win votes from the younger generations, I thought. It is certainly a different approach to the one already being explored and undertaken by the current Kalon Tripa Prof. Samdhong Rinpoche.

Recalling his previous public statements, Tethong said, “Rangzen (Tibetan Independence) and Ume-Lam (Middle-Way Approach) followers should not criticize each others. Instead we should work together for the main issue i.e. Tibet and Tibetan people”. He said that the ‘Middle-Way Approach’, which is the official stance of the current Kalon Tripa, can be changed if the next Kalon Tripa’s proposal for any possible new solution to the Sino-Tibetan issue receives strong backing from the Tibetan Parliament in Exile (TPiE).

With a small hint of possibly raising the prospects of changing the current course of action for Tibet’s future towards more internationally acceptable term of ‘self-determination’ for the Tibetan people, Tethong clarified and added, “The Tibetan Parliament has supported ‘whatever means’ The Dalai Lama chooses towards the resolution of the Tibetan issue. The Parliament has not specifically adopted the ‘Middle-Way Approach’ as the legally binding policy, rather it has supported His Holiness’s position.”

Whilst asking my own questions I raised that Tethong la was engaging in “side campaigning” rather than emerging forthrightly and campaign for the office of Kalon Tripa. To this, in a light hearted manner, the former Minister sort of agreed by responding, “I suppose you could say that but as I said before, I’m primarily here because of the planned engagement in Manchester and since I’m passing through London, I felt that meeting my old friends and Tibetans in London would be a good thing.”

Tibetans in London have been talking about the Tibetan Leaders’ Debate, having recently witnessed the UK General Election, and they are now looking forward to hearing from other Tibetan Kalon Tripa ‘candidates’. So, why not stop-over in London to meet your old friends?

Tethong’s stop-over in London certainly sparked the subtle Tibetan election campaign for the Kalon Tripa’s seat.

(Note: This report by Tsering Passang for Tsampa Forum is part of Embracing Tibetan Democracy in Exile.)

DISCLAIMER: TANC is not promoting any one candidate for the KT2011. Posting of articles regarding potential or self-identified candidates for the 2011 Elections is to provide objective information and not to advocate any particular candidate.

Tibetan leader appeals to Bay Area Asian community for support

Exiled government hopes to reach Chinese in China and elsewhere to promote Tibet’s independence

By Doug Oakley, Berkeley Voice
Posted: 05/27/2010 10:31:46 AM PDT

El Cerrito City Councilwoman Ann Cheng is just the kind of local Chinese-American politician the Dalai Lama wants to win over in his struggle for an autonomous Tibetan region within China.
That’s according to the prime minister and speaker of the Tibetan parliament in exile who gave a wide ranging talk about Tibet issues in a city of Berkeley conference room on Tuesday.

In addition to continuing dialogue with the Chinese government, Tibetan officials are turning to Chinese people inside and outside of China to press their case, the two leaders said.

Cheng, who attended the meeting with a number of city, state and federal politicians or their representatives and members of Amnesty International from San Francisco, said she is open to that idea.

“As a Chinese American, I’m very sensitive to the struggles of the Tibetan people,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about bringing people together.”

Tibet was invaded by the Chinese army in 1950. After the Tibetan army was defeated, both sides signed a 17-point agreement in 1951 recognizing China’s sovereignty over Tibet.

The Dalai Lama fled the county in 1959 and established up the Tibetan government in exile at Dharamsala India.

Since 2002, the Tibetan government in exile has had nine rounds of talks with China seeking a “middle way” of autonomy within the Chinese system with constitutional safeguards, said Prime Minister Samdhong Rinpoche, who was elected by Tibetans outside China in 2001 and 2006.

Those talks have largely failed, but through the Internet, the Tibetans have discovered that “Chinese in China are supportive of the Tibetan cause,” Rinpoche said.

“That’s why we are trying to reach out to the Chinese in Diaspora as well.” An official at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco did not return calls seeking comment for this article

Penpa Tsering, the speaker of the Tibetan parliament who appeared with Rinpoche, said the strategy of winning over ordinary Chinese around the world may be easier than getting governments to back the Tibetan cause.

“Sometimes when leaders meet with the Dalai Lama, it backfires on them and they end up bending over backward to please China,” he said. “For many politicians it’s difficult to support Tibet politically, but not culturally.”

Rinpoche said the Dalai Lama is “now seeing Chinese visitors” and earlier in the week he met with Chinese students in New York.

The two men are in the U.S. as part of a trip to reach out to both Tibetan and Chinese communities here, they said.

Tsering said Chinese from China are now coming to Dharamsala “for Tibetan teachings, so there are rays of hope.” Rinpoche said after nine trips to meet Chinese officials in the last eight years, with each fruitless meeting lasting about 13 hours, the only thing he can surmise is that Chinese leaders are afraid.

“We feel the present leadership is lacking courage,” Rinpoche said. “They suffer from the fear that they might lose power (if they offer concessions).”

The reporter, Doug Oakley, attended a special luncheon co-sponsored by City of Berkeley and TANC in honor of the Tibetan dignitaries visiting the Bay Area this week.

A Tibetan Student From Northern California Awarded Keasbey Scholarship For Oxford Study

May 12, 2010

Tenzing Tashi, biochemistry major at Bowdoin College in Maine, is one of only two students in the U.S. selected to receive a Keasbey Scholarship to study at Oxford University.

In fact, Tenzing is also awarded the Fulbright Research Grant Fellowship to do research in France. But, he declined it to accept the Keasbey scholarship.

Tenzing’s parents, Wangchuk and Sonam Chozom, live in Vacaville, California.  His younger brother, Tsering Tashi, who attended last year’s TCV Summer Camp, studies at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Tenzing is planning to pursue a Master of Science degree in pathology, researching the molecular biology and biochemistry of parasites.

While speaking to the Bowdoin College Campus Newspaper, Tenzing said, “I will be working on a parasite called Trypanosoma brucei, which causes the African sleeping sickness and claims up to half a million lives annually”.

He added that:  “No safe and effective drugs exist for the treatment of this neglected disease; treatments currently involve an arsenic and anti-freeze compound, which needs to be injected daily and literally burns through your veins. The development of an effective drug therapy for trypanosomiasis will depend on a broader understanding of T. brucei at a molecular and cellular level. In simple terms, I will try to understand how a family of cytoskeleton-associated proteins called Cap5.5 function. This is important because if one were to knockdown a form of this protein, it becomes rapidly lethal. Therefore, Cap5.5 is an excellent target for an anti-trypanosome drug development.”

After completing his two years’ study at Oxford, Tenzing plans to return to the United States and enroll himself in M.D./Ph.D. program with a focus on infectious diseases.

Tenzin was also a recipient of TANC’s Betsy Gordon Foundation Scholarship in 2008. TANC is pleased to have contributed in a small in Tenzin’s education.

Tenzing’s long time goal is to become a physician-scientist.

About the Keasbey Scholarship

Marguerite Keasbey established the Griffith Keasbey and Anna Griffith Keasbey Memorial Foundation in 1953 to honor her parents. The Foundation awards the scholarships to support two years of study at selected British universities in the interest of promoting Anglo-American relations and providing Americans with an opportunity to experience the British educational system.

Keasbey Scholars are selected based on academic excellence, active participation in extracurricular activities, leadership abilities and personal promise.

Keasbey Scholarships are available on a rotating basis to students from only 12 of the top colleges and universities in the United States: Amherst, Bowdoin, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Haverford, Middlebury, Princeton, Swarthmore, Wesleyan and Yale. The award supports two years of study at one of four British Universities: Oxford, Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, or University College of Wales at Aberystwyth.

by Rebecca Novick, Huffington Post May 4, 2010

Amidst the accusations of China’s belated response to the devastating earthquake that hit Yushu county in Eastern Tibet in the early hours of April 14, the downplaying in the Chinese media of the key role that Tibetan monks played in the rescue efforts and mourning ceremonies, alongside reports of Chinese rescue workers who seemed more interested in posing for cameras than in saving lives, there is a small story that transcends it all.

There are few outside of China and Tibet who have heard of Tsering Dhondup, a ten-year-old Tibetan boy who saw his home and the homes of all his neighbors completely flattened in the 6.9 quake. Since then, he’s been living with his family in a temporary shelter in the local stadium in Jyekundo, the town most affected by the disaster, where 85% of the mud-brick houses like Tsering’s were destroyed.

Tsering volunteered to work as a translator for a Chinese medical team that was treating Tibetan survivors. The state-controlled national news channel CCTV, Chinese Central Television, aired a report about him that on April 17, three days after the earthquake.

Wearing a backwards baseball cap and a blue surgical mask, we see the perky-faced Tsering moving around the medical tent with a jaunty confidence, looking perfectly at ease in his new role. He speaks first with an elderly Tibetan woman.

“Where do you hurt?” he asks her in Tibetan, then turns to the Chinese doctor and says that she is experiencing pain in her eyes and chest. He then moves to another bed to translate
for a small child. Through the Chinese nurse, Tsering explains the child’s condition and
treatment to the mother, who listens to him with rapt attention.

The Chinese nurse tells the reporter that while the team was setting up, Tsering had come over and asked them if they were cold. “We said that we weren’t, and then he started helping us to unpack our supplies. Then he came to help us with translation. He’s a really nice kid.”

The reporter asks Tsering some questions.

Reporter: It looks like you know all the doctors here.

Tsering: Yes.

Reporter: Do you like them?

Tsering: Yes.

Reporter: Do they like you?

Tsering: Yes.

Reporter: How do you know they like you?

Tsering: Ummm, when I’m hungry they give me instant noodles, and when I’m thirsty they give me mineral water. So I know they must love me.

Reporter: Yes, I like you too. I can see there’s a red ribbon in front of your chest. What does it mean?

Tsering: It means that I’m a volunteer.

Reporter: What does being a volunteer mean to you?

Tsering: Well, it’s like when the elders are helping people who have problems, we kids
can’t do much to help with that. So we pick up bits of garbage on the ground of the stadium, and we collect wood so people can boil water.

(The population of Jyekundo is almost entirely Tibetan, and questions posed to Tibetans there about their Chinese neighbors, such as ‘Do they like you?’ and ‘Are you getting along?’ were popular with Chinese journalists operating in the quake zone. The answers–at least the ones that were aired–were always positive.)

After the interview, the reporter pats the boy affectionately on the head. Tsering is then shown handing out bottles of water to Tibetan patients, and performing his tasks as if he’s been doing it all for years.

Towards the end of the news segment the reporter asks Tsering to sing something. The boy begins to sing a song that is known and loved by Tibetans everywhere. The words were written by the Sixth Dalai Lama 300 years ago when he was being forcibly taken away from his people to China by Mongol soldiers. He died shortly afterwards, and his reincarnation was discovered in the Tibetan region of Lithang in Kham, the same region where the earthquake hit.

“White crane! Lend me your wings
I will not fly far.
From Lithang, I shall return”.

At this point, the boy bursts into tears, unable to sing any more. The segment abruptly cuts out with the reporter awkwardly trying to comfort him.

There were some notable contrasts in the reporting from Tibetan-language stations such as Qinghai TV and Chinese-language television. Qinghai TV (the Chinese name for the region where the quake hit) carried on the spot reports with journalists interviewing stunned Tibetan survivors among the rubble. The images shown were destroyed houses, collapsed school buildings. There were hardly any rescue teams, soldiers, or medical workers, only stunned survivors sitting among the ruins or monks who had come from other regions to help.

By contrast, CCTV news almost exclusively showed images of soldiers digging in the rubble, planes being loaded with supplies, leaders visiting the survivors, and Chinese journalists interviewing survivors in the tents. In one shot, four determined looking young medical technicians are carrying a gurney. But the shot is framed in such a way that you can’t actually see anyone on the gurney.

With fears that the situation in the earthquake affected area might turn political, Chinese state media spared no time in co-opting Tsering’s natural appeal to put a positive face on the Chinese/Tibetan relationship. He was a guest of honor at CCTV’s earthquake appeal show that raised an impressive 2.175 billion yuan.

On stage, the host asked Tsering why he had cried when he sang the song. He then made the rather peculiar aside that backstage Tsering had asked if he was allowed respond in any way he wanted. The host had assured him that he could. With his head down, the boy answered the question without a trace of his earlier buoyant innocence, as if he’d been coached. “Because people of the whole nation support us,” he said stiffly. It seems more likely that the song, so achingly familiar, reminded him of what he and his family had lost, and the horror of what he had gone through.

There are already plenty of skeptics who are questioning how many of the quake survivors will actually benefit from relief funds like those raised at the CCTV event. But expressing such skepticism openly is a risky move. The Associated Press reports that a Tibetan writer, named Tagyal, signed a letter along with a number of Tibetan intellectuals asking for donations for the quake victims and warning people not to trust their donations to the Chinese government. Although AP were unable to independently verify the story, according to a family friend, Tagyal was arrested on April 23rd, the day after the letter was published for “inciting subversion of the state”.

The letter reads: “It is best to deliver donations with your own trusted personnel because no one knows for sure if there’s any place free of corruption or embezzlement.” Concerns over how the Chinese government will distribute relief funds are not unfounded after reports of corrupt officials appropriating funds intended for the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

However the propagandists might like to spin the story, little Tsering Dhondup is the genuine article, and his relationship with the Chinese medics and the reporter on the ground in the quake zone was one of sincere affection and appreciation. It is neither essentially Chinese nor Tibetan, but simply–human. The comments beneath the YouTube link reach beyond the jingoistic and vitriolic messages that so often plague postings about Tibet.

But he is probably learning, too fast for a boy of his age, that when it comes to Tibet, for China there is nothing that is not political.

Translation provided by Tenzin Losel.

After the earthquake in Kyegu

By Tsering Wangmo, San Francisco, CA

The young as well as the elderly know their dialect in Kyegu. It is a town where people end their conversations with traditional blessings, “Tse Ring,” May you live long, “Ga Sho,” May you be happy, “Lo Ja,” May you live a hundred years.

Even now, or perhaps now, the words are necessary.

I have often described Kyegu as an old American western frontier town to friends in San Francisco, an association as arbitrary as the names given to Kyegu by the media in the days since the earthquake in Tibet. On the morning of April 14, 2010 major newspapers ran the story of an earthquake in “Western China,” and referred to its inhabitants sometimes as “ethnic Tibetans,” living in a region “bordering Tibet.” Days after the quake, I am still getting emails and phone calls from close friends, even Tibetans, who are wounded they did not realize the earthquake had taken place in Tibet and that the people dead and dying are almost all Tibetans.

“Western China,” “Jyekundo,” “Qinghai Province” and “Yushu Prefecture” are still unfamiliar names to Tibetans in exile because these names and regions did not exist for them before the Chinese invasion in 1959. The new Sino-map of Tibet replaces the traditional grouping of Chol-kha-sum or the three regions: Dotod (Kham or East Tibet), Domed (Amdo and Golog) and Utsang (Central Tibet). Now, Amdo, Golog and some old chiefdoms of Kham are pasted together into Qinghai Province, as Kyegu is, while other Kham tribes are scattered in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Kyegu, sometimes translated by locals as “nine lives or rebirth,” or called Kyegu – do (the do, or intersection, refers to its role as a trading town like the other Do in East Tibet – Chamdo and Dartsedo) has been a political, commercial and cultural nexus for nomadic villages of the area for a long time. Kyegu was one of 25 chiefdoms of Nangchen under the guardianship of the King of Nangchen.

The kingdom of Nangchen – the first king of Nangchen, Driwa Alok reigned in the 1250’s and the 26^th King, Se Achung passed away in 2008 in Kyegu – along with five other kingdoms made up the grouping of Kham. These are territories designed with geographical cunning of such formidable rivers, mountains, belligerent kingdoms and chieftains that for much of its history it managed to eschew a fixed political or administrative center.

Last year I asked Rinchen Tsering Drawutsang or Drawu Pon to those of us from the region, if he remembered the population of his area when he was the young chief of Kyegu (he escaped to exile in 1959 and lives in India with his family). He guessed a total of 650 families in the town: 400 families who paid taxes and about 250 poor families who did not pay any form of tax. Official documents in the town of Kyegu state there were 2092 families or 9,591 people under the chief in the towns of Kyegu, Parthang and Shinze before/when the region fell under full Chinese occupation.

Most people in Kyegu today claim a nomadic herding ancestry and have family members who continue to live in isolated nomadic villages in Nangchen, Kyegu, Dritou, Zatou, Trindu and Chumaleb (the six regions that today make up the post 1959 Yushu Prefecture). Out in the streets of Kyegu the dialects are discernible, all fairly similar but for slight regional quirks. A significant portion of this population is made up of nomads who were resettled from their herding lands.

My aunt has tried several times to describe Kyegu since the earthquake tore it apart on the morning of April 14, 2010. Last night, (her morning), standing in the yard of her collapsed house, she said scraggly beams and crumpled mud and wood cover the street she has lived on for over fifteen years. The elders of her street are camped with her in her yard and all day people come and go collecting water from the well in her house. The traditional wooden gate to her house that I had painted in green, red and yellow in October 2009 is in a heap beside the outhouse; three friends in the neighboring houses were found dead under the rubble.

“Tsering Wangmo, Kyegu is gone,” she said in a quavering voice. “Everything is gone and I am still here.”

Some of my relatives are camped in tents along with an estimated 10,000 people in the field known as Tajug thang, the field where horses race, a few miles out of the town’s center. Ordinarily associated with picnics and merry-making, and the popular annual horse festival which showcases the prowess of the Khampa in horse racing, singing, and gun-manship, Tajug thang is brilliant through the months of June through September with grass of such green delight and flowers that drive you silly with happiness. These days the field is dotted with tents. Last night my family had instant noodles and hot water for dinner, courtesy of the army who is serving food to people living in the camp.

My aunt says thousands have died. I do not ask my aunt if she is “ok.” I ask if she has had sleep and if she is keeping her blood pressure in check. I know from spending so much time with her over fifteen years that the present dispossession must bring up memories of decades of strife.

As I write this piece, the sick are still being air lifted out of Kyegu’s small airport in Parthang to be treated in hospitals in Chengdu, Xining, Lhanzou and other cities; thousands of homeless Tibetans and a small population of migrant Chinese are having a bowl of noodle soup as meal; many people are still looking for their missing family members under the rubble of buildings. This is just the beginning of a long and difficult journey for a community that has gone through so much. It is my hope we can help them get through the immediate crisis and be there to help them rebuild the town and their lives.

We can also help the people of Kyegu by remembering them by their real names. Before we said Tse ring, Ga sho to each other last night, I reminded my aunt Kyegu has nine lives. She was quiet for a moment and then she broke into her happy laugh.

Please consider your support to organizations of local origin who have begun working to bring food, clothes, sanitation, water and other emergency essentials to the earthquake victims:
Jinpa Project: www.jinpa.org

Machik: www.machik.org

Rokpa: www.rokpausa.org

Tibetan Village Project: www.tibetanvillageproject.org

Tsering Wangmo is a Tibetan poet and writer living in San Francisco, CA.

When China’s government is nowhere to be found, its Buddhist monks rise to the occasion.

BERKELEY, Cali. — In a sign that the Chinese government is threatened by the central role Buddhist monks have played in rescue and recovery efforts in eastern Tibet’s Kyegundo, the site of a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on April 14, they have ordered the Tibetan monks out of the disaster zone. Beijing’s nervousness in acknowledging the heroism of the monks, and its rejection of request to visit the quake site by the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, have deepened tensions with the region’s predominantly-Tibetan population.

Locals say the government has underestimated the number of dead, ninety percent of which are Tibetans, to avoid scrutiny of its shoddy housing arrangements for Tibetan nomads whose poorly-built hovels had been the first to collapse. Also, many of the school buildings that have crumbled were reportedly built by the same government-contracted builders who are blamed for the deaths of the tens of thousands of school children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Xinhua, the government mouthpiece, reports 2,039 dead; Tibetans say the number could be well over 10,000. Over a hundred thousand have been left homeless.

For two full days after the earthquake, the worst to have hit Tibet, when government relief was nowhere to be found, it was thousands of monks from neighboring monasteries who rushed to the disaster site, bringing aid, blankets, tents and food supplies. With bare hands and pick axes, they dug survivors out from the rubble, and comforted those who had lost family and friends.

When Chinese soldiers finally arrived, elbowing monks out of rescue operations so they could capitalize on the media spotlight, monks stayed behind to provide proper rites of passage to the dead, as would have befitted the Buddhist faith of their living incarnations. They offered prayers while thousands of corpses were consigned en-masse into raging pyres. Traditionally, after their death, the bodies of Tibetans are cut up and fed to vultures, in what is known as “Sky Burial;” this time around, as the locals found, there just weren’t enough birds to feed on the dead.

Post-earthquake pictures of Kyegundo show most buildings left standing are those of government offices or Chinese businesses. Almost all battered structures were Tibetan homes. These mud-and-timber tenement style houses had sprouted up in the late ’90s after the government forced local nomads and herdsman to resettle. The resettlement program was prompted by government paranoia that a free-roaming people could easily revolt. The newly-displaced Tibetans were given little help in the way of rehabilitation, to exacerbate which problem was the influx of Chinese immigrant workers. Pushed to utter impoverishment, these Tibetans put up numerous protests but were largely left with little resources with which to cope.

The Chinese government cited grass preservation as reasons for the resettlement project, but Tibetans say it was also the region’s gold mining prospects, in addition to its dam-building plans, that attributed to their dislocation from their grasslands. Days after the earthquake struck, rescue efforts were carried out amid fears of bursting of a big dam, which had been built further up in the mountains at the confluence of three major rivers.

Tibetan survivors complained that state workers tended first to victims with work unit affiliations, constituting mostly Chinese migrant workers, which left them with no choice but to turn for help to crimson-robed monks. Malcolm Moore, a reporter for Telegraph, quoted a Tibetan monk on April 18 as remarking about the Chinese army, “They staged a show with the aid trucks, pretending to deliver food, but actually driving past us. Look around you, the Tibetan families here have no food, water or medicine.”
Tibetan monks, though vowed to lives away from social hubbub, have been at the forefront of the Tibetan freedom movement, both inside Tibet and in exile, as symbolized best by the Dalai Lama who lives in India. The protests that erupted in Lhasa in 1987, which resulted in imposition of martial law in 1989, were led by monks from monasteries in and around Lhasa. The 2008 uprising that swept through the whole of Tibet began with a sit-in on March 10 in the Tibetan capital by monks from Drepung monastery who were demanding the release of fellow-monks who had been arrested the previous year for celebrating the Dalai Lama’s winning of the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.

The Kyegundo earthquake foisted a new relationship with Buddhist monks for the Chinese government which has traditionally viewed with paranoia the Tibetan clergy for their independence aspirations. The Chinese soldiers whose vocation it had been to arrest and beat Tibetan monks, for once, found themselves on the same side, as co-helpers in digging out survivors and saving lives.

However, as the recovery process began centering around the monks, with survivors flocking to them for spiritual relief, old paranoia has crept up on the Chinese authorities. Many monasteries, anticipating backlash, have started pulling out monks. Hundreds of monks however have opted to stay, sparking fear of stand-off with Chinese soldiers in this fractured township where frigid temperature has impeded rescue operations in recent days. Locals have accused Chinese soldiers for shortchanging them for their ethnicity; recently reports have surfaced of Chinese soldiers stealing Tibetan pet dogs.

Though maps of Chinese-controlled Tibet show Kyegundo as being in Qinghai, it is traditionally in Kham province of Tibet, where China first invaded in 1950. Its inhabitants, famous for their fierce warrior nature, engaged Chinese soldiers in a protracted guerrilla-style resistance well into the early ’70s — almost a decade after China occupied Tibet and forced into exile its leader, the Dalai Lama.

In 1965, China incorporated Kham and Amdo, where the Dalai Lama was born, into its provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu, leaving central Tibet as “Tibet Autonomous Region” or “TAR.”

Kyegundo was also the site of several protests in the wake of the March 2008 uprising. One revolt in Kyegundo involved hundreds of young herdsmen on horsebacks laying siege to a Chinese police station, before raising a Tibetan flag amid bursts of their traditional war cry, Kyi hi hi!
In the ensuing crackdown, hundreds of Tibetans were executed and thousands were taken into custody. There were signs of an international outcry, until a massive earthquake rocked Sichuan in May, killing more than 70,000 people. The Chinese government’s image as a bloody oppressor was softened into a quick-acting, humanitarian front.

To the larger population, Chinese government propaganda peddles two polarizing images of Tibetans. One is the ungrateful rioter, whose image circulated after the 2008 uprising. The other is the grateful subject, who smiles feverishly while shaking the hands of government officials, their clothes as new as the housing appliances surrounding them.

A third image is now being beamed out in the quake’s aftermath: one of the impoverished Tibetan whose destitution is as stark on the dead as it is on the living. Ironically, censorship of this image is made impossible by the temptation to glorify the army’s humanitarian efforts.

The Chinese President Hu Jintao was gracious enough to visit Kyegundo after the quake. But judging by a letter the locals have written to the Chinese leader, available on few websites, it is the Dalai Lama they want in their midst.
The Dalai Lama, who leads an exile Tibetan government in Dharamsala in India, has eschewed Tibetan independence, seeking only a meaningful autonomy within China. The Beijing leadership has time and again snubbed his reconciliatory overtures, calling him “a wolf in sheepskin.”

For the thousands of dead, their only solace comes from religious customs otherwise banned in most of Tibet. For those who remain, their best healing lies in the Dalai Lama, who has not stepped foot in his country for more 50 years.

The Chinese leadership has, as expected, rejected the Tibetan leader’s request to be allowed to visit the quake site. It is such insensitivity as this which will have further alienated a people who have little left to lose.

Topden Tsering is a Tibetan writer based in Berkeley.