In today’s New York Times, Howard French reports:
A group of prominent Chinese intellectuals has circulated a petition urging the government to stop what it calls a “one sided” propaganda campaign about Tibet and initiate direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
The petition, which was signed by more than two dozen writers, journalists and scholars, contains 12 recommendations. Taken together, they represent a sharp break from the government’s response to the wave of demonstrations that swept Tibetan areas of the country in recent weeks.
Most of the signers are Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group. Their petition accused the government of “fanning racial hatred” in China by blaming ethnic Tibetans for the violence and seeking to inflame passions among the Han to support the crackdown.
Also on the Washington Post:
Dissident author Wang Lixiong is the first name on the petition. He and his wife, Tibetan poet and essayist Tsering Woeser, have been under house arrest in Beijing since the protests began, Wang told Radio Free Asia on Friday.
The Chinese government-controlled media, after initial silence on the protests, has provided extensive coverage focusing on a March 14 riot in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
For more Chinese voices from bloggers, please read Tibet: Her Pain, My Shame by Tang Danhong and Tibet Information Theory by Lian Yue.
More on Tibet, please also watch following AP video: A Glimpse at Life of Tibetan Monks in China and CNN’s clip on free-speech activists staged a protest during the Olympic torch lighting ceremony:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9XIA-UEkHo&eurl=http://news.google.com/news?client=safari&rls=en&q=lixiong&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wn]
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=t4ISwCeJTMw]
And Times Online reports:Ethnic repression in Tibet masterminded by faceless trio.
The architects of Chinese repression in Tibet are three senior bureaucrats little known to the outside world but destined to be the focus of condemnation from human rights groups in the months ahead.
China preserves the facade of an autonomous regional government and has paraded its ethnic Tibetan figureheads over the past week. Chinese researchers say they are political nonentities.
The real mastermind of Chinese policy towards the restive ethnic minorities is a 67-year-old lifetime communist functionary named Wang Lequan.
