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

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.

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.

Tibetan Americans Critical of China’s Quake Response

New America Media, News Report, Sandip Roy, Posted: Apr 23, 2010

It’s not just the devastation from the Qinghai earthquake that shocked Dechen Tsering.

The Bay Area resident and president of the Tibetan Association of Northern California (TANC) remembered watching the disaster on television. “CNN seemed to forget what even China’s CCTV acknowledged -– that this is a Tibetan area,” said Tsering. The Tibetan community refers to the main city in the area as Kyegundo. The Chinese government calls it Yushu. Both sides realize when a natural disaster hits a politically sensitive area, relief cannot be separated from politics.

The Chinese government is going out of its way to prove to the world that China does not treat its minorities as second-class citizens. “It’s been a very strong rescue effort,” admitted Tsering. But she says the altitude can work against good intentions. “Not just the rescue teams but even the sniffing dogs are getting sick,” says Tsering.

After the unrest and demonstrations during the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, China is acutely aware that all eyes are on its every move in Tibet. The government has announced it does not need external funding for the relief stage of the operation.

It has also published a list of 15 authorized non-profits that are approved to receive donations.
“There was not such a list during the Sichuan earthquake (in 2008),” said Birger Stamperdahl, senior program officer of Give2Asia, which connects donors in the United States with Asia. Stampdahl said Give2Asia has already partnered with eight of those organizations and they are “reputable organizations of national scope.”

Stamperdahl said Give2Asia is just focusing on the long-term recovery for the region instead of getting involved in the politics.

Tsering worrried that China will rebuild Kyegundo as “a showcase to the world.”

“Will Tibetan stakeholders have a real say?” she asked. TANC is figuring out its own list of organizations where they are encouraging their members to send donations. These organizations work both with Tibetan and Chinese populations and, Tsering says, have a real track record in Eastern Tibet.

There are already signals that some influential figures in China are pressing Beijing to make some conciliatory moves. Jia Qinghai, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, called on Chinese embassies abroad to warmly receive all overseas Tibetans who wanted to donate to the quake-hit areas or come back to China for funeral affairs.

But that message of cooperation has yet to percolate to the diaspora. The China Mutual Aid Network (CMAIN) in the Silicon Valley launched an appeal among its members, as soon as they got news of the earthquake.

“We had done the same for the Sichuan earthquake,” said CMAIN volunteer Dan Cao. “The reaction is pretty comparable.” But when asked if the earthquake had brought CMAIN’s members together with the Tibetans in the Bay Area, Cao said, “We don’t really know the Tibetans. They have never got in touch with us.”

“No one from the Chinese community has approached us yet,” said TANC’s Tsering. She said her group is more focused now on mobilizing their own community rather than reaching out to the Chinese. She said community members have heard from relatives who lost their homes and are living in their yards in tents. Without electricity, many are afraid they will stop getting updates as cell phones die out.

Tsering said many of the Tibetans living in Kyegundo were former nomads who had been “forcibly resettled” there by the Chinese government as part of its grasslands preservation policy. “People sold their yaks and settled in a city with few job prospects,” said Tsering. “Now they are completely destitute.”

The larger Chinese diaspora has been less personally affected by this disaster compared to the 2008 Sichuan quake. Sichuan is much more densely populated. As a result, the devastation resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, compared to just over 2,000 in this month’s quake in Eastern Tibet.

Cindy Yip, who hosts a popular call-in program on Sing Tao radio, hosted shows about the Sichuan earthquake two years ago. This time, she has not done any special segments. “We have promos running all day instead, and have encouraged our listeners to donate money to the Red Cross,” she said. The Sing Tao newspaper, she said, has had extensive coverage. “Of course the Chinese community is upset by the earthquake,” said Yip, but she added that her listeners have been more preoccupied with the assault on a Chinese immigrant and his son in Oakland which eventually resulted in the man’s death.

Tsering said she is still not ruling out cooperation with the Chinese community. Her own organization has set up a Friends of TANC that has a couple of Chinese members. But, she said, the first step has to be understanding on the part of the Chinese that this is a Tibetan area. Survivors from the earthquake sent a letter asking for the Dalai Lama to be allowed to visit the area. “Now that would be the ultimate spiritual blessing for the people who have been injured or died,” said Tsering.
_______________________________________________

BY HILARY STONE — FEBRUARY 19, 2010 — WORLD — VOLUME XLIV, ISSUE 4
This October, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, will visit the Farm in order to facilitate discussions on compassion and what a meaningful life entails. The Dalai Lama will be promoting the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) within the School of Medicine, the latter acting as his host in conjunction with the Office of Religious Life. This will be the Dalai Lama’s third visit to Stanford since 1994.
On October 14, the Dalai Lama will hold a public speech in Maples Pavilion addressing his teachings on compassion and the relationship these beliefs have with CCARE. Tickets for this event have not yet been made available. Later that afternoon, the Dalai Lama will host a talk in Memorial Church addressing students on what it means to live a meaningful life as part of the Rathbun Visiting Fellow program. The next day will be dedicated entirely to a scholastic conference in Memorial Auditorium focusing on CCARE.
Ticket information for both of these events will be released this summer. In addition to these talks, the Dalai Lama will meet with Stanford’s Ho Center for Buddhism. Though the Dalai Lama intends to spend most of his time on campus, he will also make trips to neighboring venues, including East Palo Alto’s Costano School. Stanford is in the process of developing a website devoted to the Dalai Lama’s visit and hopes to launch it by the end of February.
The Dalai Lama’s enthusiasm for this event is highlighted by his $150,000 donation to CCARE. This donation is the largest sum the Dalai Lama has ever given to a scientific study or center. McLennan attributes this to the Dalai Lama’s belief that technology will be able to transcend cultural and religious differences.
“He thinks science is the way for all 6 billion people on the face of the Earth to become more connected to compassion and altruism,” said McLennan. CCARE hopes to utilize science and technology to understand the dynamics of empathy and the responses people have to the suffering of others. Under the direction of Dr. James Doty, a clinical professor of neurosurgery, the center hopes to study whether a set of mental exercises can be developed that would encourage and teach compassion.
Tenzin Seldon ‘12, regional director for Students for a Free Tibet, expressed great excitement about the Dalai Lama’s visit. “I was extremely excited and in disbelief at first…this figure is not only my spiritual leader but also the primary political figure of Tibet. He is the reason why I was able to have an education in India.”
Seldon does admit that international students and faculty from China may be ambivalent to the Dalai Lama’s message. “When you have a political figure come to any sort of institution, the reaction is going to be political. However, the Dalai Lama transcends political genres because His Holiness represents more than the political situation in Tibet.”
Overall, campus reaction has been extremely positive and supportive of the Dalai Lama’s visit. McLennan described himself as “ecstatic” and thrilled to welcome the Dalai Lama to campus. “The work that Dr. Doty and CCARE are doing is really important and really exciting,” McLennan said.

Stanford student was targeted in Google cyberattack
When Tenzin Seldon, a 20-year-old sophomore at Stanford, logged onto her Gmail account from New York over winter break, she may have helped Google understand the widespread penetration of its network by unidentified hackers in China.

Unknown to Seldon, a regional coordinator of Students for a Free Tibet, at the same moment she was reading her e-mail in Queens, someone in China was logged into her account as well. Top Google officials, including chief legal officer David Drummond, later told Seldon that the suspicious situation alerted them that she was one of the human rights activists whose electronic mail was routinely being spied upon by someone in China.

“That the long arm of Chinese security could reach all the way to my home here at Stanford is something I never would have suspected,” said Seldon, the first activist targeted in the cyberattack to be identified. “It’s very disturbing when your Gmail account, which is as personal as it gets, can be hacked into and breached.”

Following the company’s detection of widespread cyberspying on the Gmail accounts of human rights activists in the United States, China and Europe, Google said this week that it will consider closing its operations in China, unless the government stops forcing Google to censor its search engine.
While Google has acquiesced at filtering its search results on Google.cn, the attack on activists such as Seldon appears to have precipitated the company’s bombshell declaration. According to Google officials, her black Hewlett-Packard laptop with the red Stanford “S” sticker on the outside was one of perhaps two machines Google examined for signs of malicious software, or “malware,” that would have allowed cyberspies entry to her Gmail account.

Despite spending six days going through her laptop in early January, Google was unable to find any signs of malware on it. An industry source familiar with the case said her laptop may have been infected with a sophisticated form of malware programmed to harvest and relay back Gmail passwords, before erasing itself from her hard drive.

Seldon says she never remembers opening any suspicious e-mail attachments, and that she has never shared her password with anyone. Most recently, she has been involved with the case of Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan filmmaker who she said was imprisoned by the government after making a documentary about the frustration of Tibetans living under Chinese rule.

Seldon’s parents were Tibetan farmers who fled to India about 1960 to remain close to the Dalai Lama, after China’s annexation of Tibet. She grew up in India and attended high school in the Bay Area. Biking through campus with a black pony tail, a large backpack stuffed with her laptop and a red plastic water bottle, Seldon looked like a typical undergraduate Thursday, rather than an international activist. But she speaks four languages fluently and is among a very few members of the Tibetan exile community in India who have made it to Stanford.

“The fact that the Chinese government is intimidated by a 20-year-old is kind of sad,” she said in a conversation on campus.

Underlying the gravity of the situation for Google, Marty Lev, the company’s director of safety and security, showed up at her dorm to pick up her laptop. A Google spokesman confirmed Seldon’s account of her conversations with Drummond and Lev.

She plans to go into politics later in life — perhaps in Tibet, perhaps in the United States. She said she is thrilled about the censorship stance Google is taking, because she believes the Chinese government will relent and allow Tibetans in China to see photos of the Dalai Lama on the Internet.

And Seldon plans to continue her activism.
“I’m a Tibetan person. If I don’t speak on their behalf, who will?”

Article written by Mike Swift, Reporter for Mercury News

mswift@mercurynews.com Posted: 01/14/2010