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.

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.

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.

TIBETAN WRITER DETAINED AFTER QUAKE CRITIQUE

Associated Press / Beijing, April 26, 2010

BEIJING (AP) — A Tibetan writer who had signed an open letter critical of the Chinese government’s quake relief efforts in western Qinghai province has been detained by police, according to a family friend.

The writer, who publishes under the name Zhogs Dung but whose real name is Tagyal, was among eight authors and intellectuals who signed a letter dated April 17 that expressed sorrow for the disaster that left more than 2,000 people dead — most of them Tibetan — but also urged wariness of Chinese government relief efforts.

Last Friday, a half dozen police officers showed up at the Qinghai Nationalities Publishing House in the regional capital of Xining, where he worked, and escorted him away, according to a blog post written by a friend. They searched his home and library, confiscating his computers.

Afterward, they showed his arrest warrant to his wife, and asked her to bring bedding for him. When his two daughters went to the police station they were not allowed to meet with him, the posting said.

There was no way to independently confirm the account. On Monday, the Xining Police Department refused to answer questions regarding his whereabouts, saying it had no comment. The police referred questions to the Ministry of Public Security.

The letter urged people to help victims by offering food, clothes and medicine but warned them not to donate funds to relief organizations, warning of possible corruption.

“Better to send (money) to the disaster zone with people you trust, because nobody can say there is no corruption,” said the letter, which was posted on several websites, including the overseas Boxun.com, which is critical of the Chinese government.

“Just as the news from the mouthpiece for the (communist) party organizations cannot be believed, we dare not believe in the party organization, which issued the order stopping people from going to the disaster zone for political reasons,” it said.

It’s unclear whether the open letter was directly connected to his detention. The Chinese government has been at pains to quash any criticism of its relief efforts in the Tibetan region, where a total of 2,220 people were killed, according to the latest government figures.

Beijing has sought to take credit for much of the rescue work, portraying relief efforts as a government undertaking in this remote Tibetan region where residents have frequently chafed under Chinese rule. Tibetan resentment over political and religious restrictions and economic exploitation by majority Han Chinese have sometimes erupted in violence.

State media largely played down the role of thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks who worked alongside soldiers to rescue survivors and dig out the dead.

On April 19, the Qinghai provincial government had issued a ban against pornography and what it called “illegal publications.” According to state media, Zhang Chengwei, head of the anti-pornography and illegal publications office, said that pressure must be used to “prevent unlawful elements from using illegal publications to disturb social stability and to disturb and sabotage disaster relief.”

Zhogs Dung, 45, is considered a leading intellectual and thinker who in the past has written books that largely aligned with the Chinese government’s views on modernization, religion and culture in Tibet. However, he published a book this year that was far more critical of the government in the wake of anti-government riots in Tibet in 2008.

Robbie Barnett, director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, said the book may have been another reason for the government to target him.

Zhogs Dung was seen by fellow Tibetans as an “official intellectual” who took the Communist Party’s view, for which he was widely criticized. But a few months ago, he quietly published a book called “Distinguishing Sky from Earth,” in which he said the March 2008 riots, the largest anti-government protests in Tibet in decades, were a turning point for Tibetans and their national spirit.

In the book, he advocated “non-violent resistance” to obtain greater rights for Tibetans, Barnett said. He seemed to sense he was crossing a dangerous line, saying he expected to be arrested for his views.

“Here was someone who had supported the government. Now he himself is being detained by the state. This will be understood as China losing even those it could have allied with,” Barnett said.

China is hugely sensitive to issues regarding ethnic rights. A Mongolian rights activist who had been invited to speak before the United Nations in New York was arrested on April 18 at the Beijing airport, according to a U.S.-based rights group.

A Tibetan Tragedy

The earthquake that struck the Tibetan plateau is only the latest calamity to befall the region.The earthquake that struck the Tibetan plateau is only the latest calamity to befall the region.

April 22, 2010 by David Kilgour, Chair, Latin America and Caribbean policy, Canadian International Council.

Truth appears to have been a collateral victim of the 6.9 level magnitude earthquake that struck Jyekundo on the Tibetan plateau on April 14 last week.

The vast majority of the thousands of dead were proud Tibetans and deserved to be mourned as such. Yet most of the world governments, including Canada’s, unfortunately made no mention of the Tibetans in their condolence messages to China. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton omitted the word “Tibet” from her statement, saying instead: “Our thoughts and prayers are with those injured or displaced, and all the people of China on this difficult day.”

The media everywhere should have located the tragedy in Tibet’s historic Kham province. Coverage of the quake on CNN and the BBC however made little or no mention of the victims as Tibetan.

There are credible reports as well that the final death toll could reach over 10,000 with 100,000 left homeless. The survivors also need international help, which has been offered but which Beijing is refusing.
This lack of acknowledgment is sadly typical of how the world tiptoes around the issue of Tibet so as not to risk angering China. The harsh reality is too often ignored.

On the other hand, photos from the Boston Globe’s website and an account in the New York Times constitute independent journalism at its best.

A Painful Past
For context, there are the harsh facts of Chinese colonization over five decades. Tens of thousands of Tibetans have been killed during the five decades of colonization with hundreds of thousands more imprisoned. Over 6,000 monasteries, nunneries, and temples have been, pillaged and destroyed. Thousands more Tibetans have disappeared in recent times or were imprisoned.

In Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday detail Beijing’s treatment of the Tibetan people. In 1959, Mao wrote about the uprising then underway in Tibet, caused in part by drastically increased food requisitions there because of the famine conditions created across China by his catastrophic “Great Leap Forward.” “This [rebellion] is … a good thing. Because this makes it possible to solve our problems through war,” Mao said.
When word later spread later in Tibet that Mao planned to kidnap the then very young Dalai Lama, thousands of Tibetans protested in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, shouting “Chinese get out.” Mao cabled that the Dalai Lama should be allowed to escape because he feared his death would “inflame world opinion,” particularly in the Buddhist countries and India. Once he had escaped, Mao told his men: “Do all you can to hold the enemies in Lhasa … so when our main force arrives we can surround them and wipe them out.”

The Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibet, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a honourary citizen of Canada, and, according to a 2008 opinion survey in six European countries, he is the most respected world leader. Yet Beijing will not even allow him to visit the quake site.
The Chinese party-state has unfairly accused him of fomenting violence in Tibet. The truth is that the Dalai Lama advocates Tibetan autonomy under Chinese rule, but strongly disavows violence and does not favour secession.
Peaceful demonstrations do not disturb stability. It is the presence of thousands of armed military and police that provoke disturbances.
The Dalai Lama is, in fact, Beijing’s best chance for a peaceful resolution of the Tibet Issue. Some Tibetan groups in exile seek complete independence, rejecting his middle approach. Indeed, the Dalai Lama has expressed fears of greater violence after his death.
Jean-Louis Roy, a former president of the Canadian NGO Rights and Democracy, noted on the eve of the Dalai Lama’s visit to Ottawa six years ago that:
Silence in response to any abuse of human rights is unacceptable and it is especially objectionable in response to abuses that amount to cultural genocide as in Tibet. These abuses continue to taint Canada’s flourishing economic relationship with China, not to mention our reputation as a defender of human rights and democratic freedoms.

Who could disagree? All Canadian MPs should speak out now about the latest tragedy in Tibet.

Hu Flies to Quake Area as China Steps Up Propaganda Efforts
April 17, 2010, 11:22 PM EDT

Business Week included some remarks by Li Changchun, China’s propaganda chief – as reported by Xinhua.

‘China’s ruling nine-man Politburo Standing Committee met late yesterday in Beijing to map out strategy for relief efforts, and the group’s propaganda chief, Li Changchun, called the quake’s aftermath an opportunity for the Communist Party to burnish its reputation. “We should vigorously publicize the work of the People’s Liberation Army, the armed police, the police officers, firemen and medical personnel to save lives and make outstanding contributions,” Li told China’s top media executives in Beijing yesterday evening, according to a Xinhua report.Li also said the media should publicize decisions made on the earthquake by the Communist Party and central government, Xinhua reported.’

After Quake, Tibetans Distrust China’s Help
By ANDREW JACOBS

JIEGU [Kyegundo in Tibetan], China – The Buddhist monks stood atop the jagged remains of a vocational school, struggling to move concrete slabs with pickax shovels and bare hands. Suddenly a cry went out: An arm, clearly lifeless, was poking through the debris.

But before the monks could finish their task, a group of Chinese soldiers who had been relaxing on the school grounds sprang to action. They put on their army caps, waved the monks away, and with a video camera for their unit rolling, quickly extricated the body of a young girl.

The monks stifled their rage and stood below, mumbling a Tibetan prayer for the dead.

“You won’t see the cameras while we are working,” said one of the monks, Ga Tsai [Gyamtso?], who with 200 others, had driven from their lamasery in Sichuan Province as soon as they heard about the quake.

“We want to save lives. They see this tragedy as an opportunity to make propaganda.”

Since a deadly earthquake nearly flattened this predominantly Tibetan city early Wednesday, killing at least 1,400 people, China’s leadership has treated the quake as a dual emergency – a humanitarian crisis almost three miles above sea level in remote Qinghai Province [Kham in Eastern Tibet], and a fresh test of the Communist Party’s ability to keep a lid on dissent among restive Tibetans.

President Hu Jintao cut short a state visit to Brazil to fly home and supervise relief efforts, while Prime Minister Wen Jiabao postponed his own planned visit to Indonesia and came to the quake site promising that China’s Han majority would do whatever it could to aid the Tibetans.

The official state media prominently featured stories of grateful Tibetans receiving food and tents, and search and rescue specialists toiling to reach survivors even as they cope with altitude sickness.

The relief effort has indeed been impressive. With thousands of soldiers and truckloads of food clogging Jiegu’s [Kyegundo] streets on Saturday, earth-moving equipment started clearing away toppled buildings from the downtown. More than 600 of the seriously injured have been taken to hospitals in the provincial capital 500 miles away. In recent days, blue tents bearing the Civil Affairs Ministry logo have popped up across the city.

But despite outward signs of government largess and ethnic unity, the earthquake has exposed stubborn tensions between Beijing and Tibetans, many of whom have long struggled to maintain their autonomy and cultural identity amid a Han-dominated country. Widespread Tibetan rioting against Han rule severely disrupted Beijing’s planning to host the Summer Olympics in 2008, and China has kept Tibet and predominantly ethnically Tibetan regions of China under tight police and military control since then.

The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader who has not set foot in China since 1959, has issued a formal request to visit the disaster zone. It will most surely be denied.

Since the quake hit early Wednesday morning, thousands of monks have come to the city, some making a two-day drive from distant corners of a largely Tibetan region that spreads across three adjoining provinces.

It was the burgundy-robed monks who were among the first to pull people from collapsed buildings. On Saturday at dusk, long after the rescue experts had called it quits, they could be still be seen working the rubble.

“They are everything to us,” said Oh Zhu Tsai Jia [Tibetan name completely twisted into Chinese; hard to tell what's the original!], 57, opening the trunk of his car so a group of young monks could pray over the body of his wife.

On Saturday morning, the monks ferried 1,400 bodies from the city’s main monastery to a dusty rise overlooking the city.

There, in two long trenches filled with salvaged wood, they dumped the dead and set cremation pyres ablaze.

As the fires burned for much of the day, hundreds of mourners sat mutely on a hillside next to the monks, who chanted aloud or quietly counted prayer beads of red coral and turquoise.

The police and Han officials were conspicuously absent.

The monastery’s leaders said no one from the local government had included their dead in the official tally although they were careful not to voice any criticism. Many of the younger monks, however, were not as reticent.

At the No. 3 Primary School, the monks said they had pulled 50 students from collapsed classrooms but when an official came by to ask how many had died, the police offered half that number. “I think they’re afraid to let the world know how bad this earthquake is,” said Gen Ga Ja Ba [Genpa Jampa?], a 23-year-old monk.

One of the most persistent complaints, however, was that many of the official rescue efforts have focused on the city’s larger structures and ignored the mud-brick homes that, with few exceptions, collapsed by the hundreds. Others spoke of skirmishes with the police over bodies, although such accounts could not be verified.

The other more incendiary criticism heard wherever monks gathered was that soldiers had prevented them from helping in rescue efforts during the first few days after the earthquake.

Tsairen [Tsering], a monk, spoke about how he and scores of other monks tussled with soldiers at a collapsed hotel that first night. “We asked why they wouldn’t let us help, and they just ignored us,” said Tsairen [Tsering], who like some Tibetans, uses only one name.

Later, he and more than 100 others headed to the vocational school, where the voices of trapped girls could still be heard in the rubble of a collapsed dormitory.

They said the soldiers blocked them from the pile and later, the chief of their monastery, Ga Tsai, scuffled with a man they described as the county chief.

“He grabbed me by my robe and dragged me out to the street,” Ga Tsai said.

In the evening after the soldiers had left the scene, they went to work, eventually pulling out more than a dozen bodies.

Even if exaggerated, such stories can only work against the government’s efforts to win over Tibetans.

In recent days, the government has vowed to rebuild Jiegu, which is also known by its Chinese name Yushu, promising to spare no expense. But while many Tibetans expressed gratitude for the relief efforts and the official outpouring of concern, others were less appreciative.

As an excavator and a bulldozer sifted through the remains of the vocational school dormitory on Saturday, Gong Jin Ba Ji, a 16-year-old student, stood watching.

A day earlier, she said, the machinery inadvertently tore apart the body of a classmate. She was still waiting for them to recover the body of her older sister.

“I wish they would work more carefully,” she said numbly. “Maybe they don’t care so much because we are only Tibetans.”

Ziang Jiang contributed research.