[...]As long as China remains stable as a whole, the specific problems in the border areas can be kept under control. We should have faith in this.

We should also avoid being impatient. It is not us, but people like the aging Dalai Lama who should worry.

As long as we accept the reality that some incidents are inevitable in parts of Chinese society, including Tibet and Xinjiang, much of the air attached to the Dalai Lama’s political power will be squeezed out.

[...]The unrest that the world usually sees hides the firm foundation of stability in Chinese society.

About 80 percent of urban households own their houses, and the social security system is expanding to rural areas. All these are foundations for national stability.

Regardless of the Global Times article’s tranquil tone and characterization of “minor unrest” as inevitable, state-owned media has been pointing fingers in the usual direction to explain the situation. AFP offers summary and commentary on a recent China Daily report:

China has blamed “trained separatists” for a wave of unrest in Tibetan-inhabited areas last week that left at least two people dead and dozens injured, state press reported Wednesday.

[...]“Initial evidence showed that the riots and assaults were well planned beforehand and instigated by trained separatists against the country,” the official China Daily newspaper said, citing the Sichuan government.

It said protesters attacked police stations with stones and molotov cocktails, prompting the police to take action and “defend themselves”.

[...]Tibetans have long chafed under Chinese rule, saying they suffer religious repression and government surveillance, and that their culture is gradually being eroded by an influx of majority Han Chinese into the areas they live in.

Beijing, though, insists that Tibetans enjoy freedom of religious belief and says their lives have been made better by huge ongoing investment into Tibetan-inhabited areas.

An editorial in China Daily accuses the Tibetan Government-in-Exile and the West for exaggerating recent incidents in Sichuan, and suggests that the West should shoulder some of the blame for the unrest:

It is not uncommon for some Western governments and the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile to play up and distort incidents, such as the one last week between the law enforcement forces and local residents in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province.

[...]“Overseas forces promoting ‘independence for Tibet’ have always fabricated rumors and distorted the truth to discredit the Chinese government with issues involving Tibet,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei.

[...]It is always easier to destroy than to maintain order and build. In today’s world, a handful of extremists have the ability to cause havoc to a region or even a country, never mind the Dalai Lama clique, which cloaks its real agenda behind religion and which is financed and supported by some Western governments and media with their own agenda against China. It is obvious that they are capable of causing trouble now and then in the Tibetan-inhabited regions.

Also see coverage of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile’s response to the unrest in Tibet, and of a school in Qinghai province working to preserve Tibetan language and culture, both via CDT.

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: police violence, Tibet protests
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The Dalai Lama, 69, has lived in exile in China since a failed uprising against the Chinese government in Tibet in 1959. Mexico said it welcomed the Buddhist leader as a religious leader, not a political one, in keeping with its tradition of political neutrality and hopes of expanding trade with China.

The Dalai Lama met with presidents of several countries, including Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala, but will not meet with Mexican president Vicente Fox.

Bejing responded to the visit with an angry letter, and China’s Mexican ambassador said Mexico should not allow the Nobel Peace laureate to spread revolutionary messages on Mexican soil.

© Jenn Buck for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: nuclear tibet
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© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: terrorism, Tibet
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Tensions have been high in Tibet and Tibetan regions of Sichuan with numerous self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Beijing’s policies and an ongoing crackdown by security forces. Students for a Free Tibet have obtained an audio file that is reportedly a final statement by Lama Soepa, a spiritual teacher and community leader from Golok in the Kham region of Tibet, who died after setting himself on fire on January 8. Listen to the recording here. From SFFT’s translation:

This is the twenty-first century, and this is the year in which so many Tibetan heroes have died. I am sacrificing my body both to stand in solidarity with them in flesh and blood, and to seek repentance through this highest tantric honor of offering one’s body. This is not to seek personal fame or glory.



I am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering, and to lead them – each of whom has been our mother in the past and yet has been led by ignorance to commit immoral acts – to the Amitabha, the Buddha of infinite light. My offering of light is for all living beings, even as insignificant as lice and nits, to dispel their pain and to guide them to the state of enlightenment. I offer this sacrifice as a token of long-life offering to our root guru His Holiness the Dalai Lama and all other spiritual teachers and lamas.



Meanwhile the official Global Times has said in an editorial that there is “no need to sweat over minor unrest” while other official media reports have condemned Western media for “distorting” recent incidents. China Media Project reports that officials have undertaken a “thankfulness education campaign” in Tibet during which local households are provided posters of Communist Party leaders.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Tibet protests
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The banner reads “Tibetans and Han are One Family”. Shanghaiist’s Kenneth Tan points out a satirically photoshopped image of an identical vehicle outside Hong Kong’s Sogo department store in, supposedly, 2015, its banner reading “China and Hong Kong are One Family”.

If a declaration of fraternity hanging from the side of an armoured vehicle isn’t ironic enough, the blog Mountain Phoenix over Tibet notes (in a different context) the historical background of the name “Kangding” 康定. It replaced “Dajianlu” 打箭炉 (based on the Tibetan “Dartsedo”) in the early twentieth century, and is widely held to refer to the stabilisation or pacification of Kham (eastern Tibet).

A friend, who hails from Kardze town, tells me the name is a contraction of the Tibetan karpo (“white”) and dzebo (“graceful”) – actually a rather unlikely and funny name for a macho Khampa place. It sounds more like a name for a Tibetan cosmetics line: “Fair & Lovely”!

The town Kardze, however, is not the capital of the Prefecture Kardze. That privilege goes to Dartse(m)do, a formerly important trading-town on the old Sino-Tibetan border. But in present-day Tibet, folks who hail from Dartsedo would tell you they are from Kangding.

How Dartsedowas can be so brainless and voluntarily use that dreadful Chinese name is a mystery only they are able to penetrate. Doesn’t it mean “subjugation of Kham”? Arrog Khampa, what happened to your famous pride? Linguistics is a political battlefield, if you still haven’t noticed. Why do you shoot yourself in the foot?

The BBC’s Michael Bristow describes the extensive security operation currently in place in the area, following a series of self-immolations:

A BBC team was stopped and held at the roadblock [on the way to Kangding]. “Foreigners are not allowed into Tibetan areas,” said one security man.

We were then escorted back into Ya’an, where we were questioned at government offices by an official, surnamed Ma, who veered from friendly to threatening.

“You need to make a confession and sign a statement saying you will not go back into Tibetan areas,” he barked at one point ….

Robert Barnett, of New York’s Columbia University, said this region of western Sichuan, historically known to Tibetans as Kham, was relatively peaceful until a few years ago.

“We are talking about an area where China had a working relationship with Tibetans,” said Mr Barnett.

But he said trust started to disappear just over a decade ago when the central government began introducing hardline policies that were already in place in Tibet proper.

Kristin Jones at the Committee to Protect Journalists suggests that the policy of denying media access may be counterproductive:

Placing travel restrictions on journalists may have one unintended effect. It means that when it comes to unofficial news from China, activists and advocacy groups play a vital role in collecting and disseminating information.

Chinese authorities are hard on activists–even harder than they are on journalists. But by preventing reporters from doing their jobs, Chinese officials all but guarantee that activists are the ones reporting the news.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: history, language, media conditions, Robert Barnett, Sichuan, Tibet coverage
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Against a backdrop of rapid socio-economic change and modernization, China continues to be an authoritarian one-party state that imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures.

The government also censors the internet; maintains highly repressive policies in ethnic minority areas such as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia; systematically condones—with rare exceptions—abuses of power in the name of “social stability” ; and rejects domestic and international scrutiny of its human rights record as attempts to destabilize and impose “Western values” on the country. The security apparatus—hostile to liberalization and legal reform—seems to have steadily increased its power since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China’s “social stability maintenance” expenses are now larger than its defense budget.

At the same time Chinese citizens are increasingly rights-conscious and challenging the authorities over livelihood issues, land seizures, forced evictions, abuses of power by corrupt cadres, discrimination, and economic inequalities. Official and scholarly statistics estimate that 250-500 protests occur per day; participants number from ten to tens of thousands. Internet users and reform-oriented media are aggressively pushing the boundaries of censorship, despite the risks of doing so, by advocating for the rule of law and transparency, exposing official wrong-doing, and calling for reforms.

China’s state media has responded to the report with a flurry of indignation, as HRW’s Nicholas Bequelin noted:

此地无银三百两： People’s Daily and China Daily have published a total of 10 (!) articles on Human Rights Watch (@hrw) in one week.

— Nicholas Bequelin 林伟 (@Bequelin) January 31, 2012

(“此地无银三百两”: “No 300 taels of silver here”; to draw attention to something by denying it.)

People’s Daily, for example, suggested that criticism of China’s rights record arose from Western insecurity:

It seems that some Western countries and NGOs have set out to attack China over its human rights issues. They first assume that human rights are being ignored, then seek evidence from rumors, and make speculations to blindly accuse China of violating human rights with the real purpose of distorting China’s international image ….

Why does the West still hold a prejudice against China’s human rights? The only reason is that the Cold War mentality and ideological hegemony still prevails. As long as China is a socialist country, the West will insist on distorting its image and see China as a threat to the Western system.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been too boastful of its political system, believing it is the only system that has universal value in the world.

China’s significant economic progress has stirred Western anxieties. Distorting China’s human rights becomes the only political choice.

Elsewhere, People’s Daily also criticised the report for failing to acknowledge China’s progress in legal reform. From Xinhua:

The World Report “gave no word on the great progress in terms of China’s judicial reforms that have been demonstrated in the Criminal Procedural Law draft amendment,” the article said.

Legal experts say the draft amendment will help improve the protection of criminal suspects’ human rights, by preventing judges from accepting confessions from tortured suspects and giving these suspects more defense options.

In fact, the report does acknowledge the amendment, but reiterates concern at the prospect of legalised enforced disappearances:

In August 2011, in an effort to … improve the administration of justice, the government published new rules to eliminate unlawfully obtained evidence and strengthened the procedural rights of the defense in its draft revisions to the Criminal Procedure Law. It is likely it will be adopted in March 2012.

However, the draft revisions also introduced an alarming provision that would effectively legalize enforced disappearances by allowing police to secretly detain suspects for up to six months at a location of their choice in “state security, terrorism and major corruption cases.” The measure would put suspects at great risk of torture while giving the government justification for the “disappearance” of dissidents and activists in the future. Adoption of this measure—which is hotly criticized in Chinese media by human rights lawyers, activists, and part of the legal community—would significantly deviate from China’s previous stance of gradual convergence with international norms on administering justice, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1997 but has yet to ratify.

See more on CDT.

People’s Daily also objected to the report’s claim that “the government continues to build a ‘new socialist countryside’ [in Tibet] by relocating and rehousing up to 80 percent of the TAR population, including all pastoralists and nomads.” From Xinhua:

The People’s Daily article, jointly published by two Tibet experts, said the HRW’s conclusion was groundless and contradictory to basic facts.

The two authors, Zhang Ming, or Lorong Dramadul, with the China Tibetology Research Center, and Professor Yang Minghong with Sichuan University, hoped that their experiences and observations from over 20 years of field research in Tibet could help clarify the misunderstandings.

They cited official statistics and said that in 2011, 1.85 million Tibetans, or 61 percent of the total population, had settled in permanent residences.

“No more than 150,000 people, or less than 5 percent of the Tibetan population, had left their original residence,” the experts wrote.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Pan Xizhe’s op-ed at China Daily accused Human Rights Watch of sloppy methodology and political motivations:

At first glance, Human Rights Watch appears to be keen on the protection of international human rights. But it actually carries out its work with double standards and bias. Its observations lack political neutrality and its research methods are questionable. The organization’s employment of unqualified workers has also hurt the credibility of its report. Human Rights Watch should reflect inward before passing on judgment to others.

The media and international observers have long criticized Human Rights Watch for passing judgment of human rights conditions of a country or region through tinted lens. It turns a blind eye to human rights issues in some countries while criticizing others vehemently. The Sunday Times quoted a human rights insider in the United States as saying that the organization caters its reports to the US government, which greatly affects its objectivity ….

In the China portion of its report, Human Rights Watch used expressions such as “estimate”, “possibly”, and “probably”. It criticized China’s judiciary system, religious institutions, regional autonomy by ethnic groups, family planning policy as well as foreign and economic policies.

The US section of the report, which criticises the Obama White House’s failure to pursue Bush administration officials for approving the use of torture and decries America’s “abusive” counterterrorism policies, growing poverty and world-leading prison population, can be read here.

While the World Report looked back at 2011, at The Diplomat, HRW’s Phelim Kine looks ahead to 2012:

These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013 ….

The government’s overriding obsession with maintaining its monopoly on power make it likely that these abuses will continue under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Foreign governments could help reverse this trend and give support to Chinese who want a more accountable government by more vigorously engaging the government on such violations. Thirty years since the launch of China’s economic reform and opening, a decade after China entered the World Trade Organization, and five years since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the deterioration in respect for human rights and rule of law in China should be of serious concern for all countries seeking long-term, sustainable and mutually-beneficial bilateral relations with China.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: censorship, criminal procedure law, disabled, human rights watch, industrial pollution, leadership transition, legal reform, Li Keqiang, migrants, minorities, press freedom, religious freedom, Tibet, women, Xi Jinping
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(...)
Read the rest of Dalai Lama Leads Prayers in South Russia (656 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:
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When Baimadanzen was growing up in Beijing at the height of the Cultural Revolution, his Buddhist father sometimes played records of monks chanting. But he knew nothing about the religion until he moved in 1989 to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the remote western Sichuan region of Sertar to study with a master of the ancient Chinese art of qigong. He lived among thousands of monks and soon became infatuated with their religion. “Their teachings showed me how to live a full life,” says Baimadanzen, now a 42-year-old travel agent who goes by his Tibetan name. The experience also changed his view of Tibet. “My parents’ generation wanted to liberate and reform Tibet,” he says. “But now younger Chinese go to Tibet to learn.”

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Tibet
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Read the rest of China Visit of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detension (1,557 words)

© Li Xiaorong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arbitrary detention, UN
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Owned by Tencent, QQ is China’s most popular Instant Messenger service. On a regular basis, tens of millions of users use their service. On one day, March 13 , there were more than six million users online using QQ at the same time. Because of its high traffic volume, it is technically much harder to build in the key word filtering mechanism on the server’s end. Instead, Tencent sneaked in a filtering program file in their installation package at the client end. When a client installs the QQ2003 software on their own computer desktop, a program file, called COMToolKit.dll, is automatically included. This file contains all the forbidden keywords, which will be automatically blocked when the client runs QQ. The full list is below.

Recently, some Chinese hackers located this file and released it on the Internet. The censored key words list is commonly used not just for QQ, but also for all websites, BBS and text messaging services. One Internet user did a rough breakdown of the list: About 15% of the words are sex related, the rest are all related to politics. About 20% of the words are Falungong related, including “师父”(master) and “弟子” (disciple); about 15% are names of current officials and their relatives; about 10% are words used in the liberal political discourse such as “democracy”, “freedom”, and “dictatorship”; and about 5% are related to certain nationalistic issues, such as“保钓”(defend Diaoyu Island),“中俄边界” (Sino-Russian Border) ,“卖国”(selling out the country) etc. About 15% of the forbidden words are related to anti-corruption, such as ，“走私”（smuggling） ,“公款”（public funds） etc. Other censored words include names of dissidents, writers, and intellectuals, and names of certain foreign publications. Please find the entire list attached here:

From Program Files\Tencent\QQGame\COMToolKit.dll:

falun???
sex??
tianwang???
cdjp
av
bignews
boxun
chinaliberal?????
chinamz
chinesenewsnet??????
cnd
creaders
dafa???
dajiyuan????
dfdz
dpp
falu
falun???
falundafa?????
flg????
freechina?????
freedom???
freenet????
fuck??
GCD????
gcd????
hongzhi???
hrichina
huanet
hypermart
incest???
jiangdongriji
lihongzhi????
making??
minghui????
minghuinews?????
nacb
na_ve???
nmis
paper???
peacehall????
playboy?????
renminbao????
renmingbao????
rfa
safeweb????
sex??
simple???
svdc
taip
tibetalk
triangle???
triangleboy
UltraSurf
unixbox
ustibet?????
voa?????
voachinese???????
wangce
wstaiji
xinsheng???
yuming???
zhengjian???
zhengjianwang????
zhenshanren????
zhuanfalun????
bitch???
fuck??
shit??
????|? three represents theory
??|? one party| party
??|? multiple parties | party
??|? democracy|people
??|? |politics
??|? dafa|fa
??|? diciple|di
???|? dajiyuan|yuan
???|? truthful,kind and tolerant|tolarant
??|? minghui|hui
??|? dafa|fa
??|? hongzhi|zhi
??|? hongzhi|zhi
??|? hongzhi|zhi
??|? hongzhi|zhi
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? falun|lun
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? lungong|gong
??|? beat down|down
??|? democratic movement|movement
??|? june forth|forth
??|? Taiwan independence|independence
??|? wang dan|dan
??|? chai ling|chai
??|? li peng|peng
???|? tiananmen|an
???|? jiang zemin|ze
???|? zhu rongji|ji
?_?|? zhu rongji|zhu
???|? li changchun |chun
???|? li ruihuan|rui
???|? hu jintao|jin
???|? wei jingsheng|wei
????|? Taiwan independence|wan
??|? |Tibetan independence|tibet
????|? Tibetan independence|tibet
??|? jiang independence|jiang
????|? xinjiang independence|jiang
??|? police|cha
??|? people°Øs police|jing
??|? gong°Øan|gong
???|? deng xiaoping|deng
?|? go whoring|go whoring
???|? |
??|? revolution|ming
??|? military police|jing
???|? gangsterdom|she
??|? transportation police|jing
???|? fire department|xiao
??|? operative|torture
???|? night club|night
??|? mage|ge
??|? public funds|funds
??|? paramount|shou
??|? secratary|ji
(...)
Read the rest of A List of Censored Words in Chinese Cyberspace (2,209 words)

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2004. | Permalink | 25 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blocking, Internet control, keyword blocking, keyword filtering, QQ
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