Tibet Through Chinese Eyes

The Atlantic ^ | 02/99 | Peter Hessler

[Enemy Of The State]

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[FreepForever]

Wow! This is really something, EOTS. Thanks for posting it. Stuff like this is worth downloading and save for future reference.

[Enemy Of The State]

Interesting read!

[tallhappy]

Thanks for the ping.

The essential issue of freedom always seems to get lost in discussions about Tibet obscured in the fog of assimilation vs traditional culture etc...

Genrally as well, scholarship is stitlted toward ChiCom view which is reflected in journalistic articles on Tiebt.

[HighRoadToChina]

Thanks for posting this excellent propaganda piece.

As a Han Chinese born in Shanghai, let me speak my piece.

What Communist China did and is doing to Tibet and the Tibetan people is a disgrace to human civilization.

How the West including America are reacting or not reacting to the holocaust happening in Tibet since 1950 reminds me of what happened to Czechoslovakia before WWII: So-called Allies let Hilter rape Czechoslovakia with impunity.

There are at least 2 major reasons why Communist China needs to occupy Tibet.

One is spiritual and I don't have the time to go into the specifics, except to say that Tibet and the Tibetan people have kept the spiritual Light for the world for centuries.

To let the Communist Chinese snuff out the Light of Tibet as they are doing today is a crime against humanity of the first degree.

The second is purely military. Tibet serves as an important and strategically vital military base for Communist China, i.e., ICBM bases, buffer zone between Communist China and its perennial enemy, democratic India, etc.

As I said in my recent speech on why we must boycott all products Made in China, the following facts need to be considered when reading these propaganda pieces:

TIBETAN HOLOCAUST

Perhaps the greatest evil perpetrated by Communist China-besides the Laogai concentration camps, slave labor and Christian persecution-is the Tibetan Holocaust being waged by the Communist Chinese against Tibet and Tibetans today.

In 1950, Communist China invaded Tibet in their so-called peaceful liberation of Tibet. Since that time, over 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Communist Chinese-this is over 1/4 of the entire Tibetan population. Some 6,200 Tibetan monasteries have been destroyed. These monasteries served as the centers for Tibetan cultural, educational and religious life. The number of Tibetan monks-over 100,000 in 1957-has been reduced to less than less than 4,000 today. Sacred art and statuary have been melted into bullion or sold for foreign exchange by the Communist Chinese. An estimated 60 percent of Tibet's religious and historical literature has been burned or destroyed. The Tibetan culture has being systematically wiped out by the Communist Chinese.

Today, Communist China uses forced abortions and forced sterilizations on Tibetan women-even though the Tibetans do not have a population problem. Estimates of Tibetan political prisoners range anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000. Northeast Tibet has the largest prison camp complex in the world called the Amdo Gulag, capable of holding 10 million prisoners.

Today, Communist China uses the political tool of massive population transfer of Chinese people into Occupied Tibet. In 1986, the Tibetan Government in exile compiled a report showing that a total of 6.2 million Chinese civilians had been moved into Occupied Tibet in addition to some 500,000 Communist Chinese troops. This population transfer campaign is used to force the Tibetans into becoming second citizens in their own land because there are now more Chinese people in Occupied Tibet than Tibetans.

This is the Tibetan Holocaust-happening today.

Never again!

____________

Let me conclude my post with a recent email that I got describing a woman of tremendous courage and a great hope for the rest of us: [I am too ashamed to be a Chinese when I read this.]

Ngawang Sangdrol was ready to die to liberate Tibet (TO)

---

The Observer - London
29 June 2003

For half her young life, nun Ngawang Sangdrol has been jailed and tortured for defying Chinese occupation. Now she's free, and pleading for help for her homeland, writes Edward Douglas.

As a beacon of resistance, she could not look more vulnerable. Ngawang Sangdrol is just over 5ft tall and very slight. It is hard to imagine how a man armed with an iron bar could attack her, let alone a whole mob.

But until her release in March, she had defied that and worse while serving 11 years of a 21-year sentence for protesting against the Chinese occupation of her homeland. She is still only 25.

At the little house in Wapping where she is staying while in London, it is obvious that prison and beatings have taken their toll. She walks stiffly, with a bow in her legs. She suffers pain in her kidneys and while we talk unconsciously massages her head, as near-constant headaches are the legacy of a savage attack by guards in 1998.

Ngawang has become a relentless traveller since being allowed to leave Tibet for medical treatment, meeting politicians and human rights groups who worked for her release. But the kind of peaceful resistance advocated by the Dalai Lama doesn't get the attention it used to in a world where people blow themselves up in crowded streets.

She was first arrested, aged 13, in 1990 - one of a handful of young women from Garu nunnery near Lhasa who demonstrated for a free Tibet at a festival near the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's old summer palace. 'Police grabbed us and started beating us,' she said. 'Then they threw us in a truck. At the prison there was a mob waiting and they immediately started beating us.'

Ngawang was beginning 11 years of imprisonment and torture, which made a mockery of China's judicial commitment to respect the rights of children. Offered a document to sign renouncing her support for the Dalai Lama, she refused and served nine months in Lhasa's notorious Drapchi jail.

Guards beat her with iron pipes and stuck electric batons in her mouth, even taping electric wires to her tongue. Her hands were tied behind her back and she was hung by her wrists from the ceiling.

She was released in 1991 to find herself alone. Her father and one of her brothers remained in Drapchi as political prisoners and her mother had died. Ngawang earned a little money running an illegal stall in a Lhasa market. As a former political prisoner, she was not entitled to a work permit, neither could she return to her nunnery.

With three monks and another nun, she went to the Barkhor, a street by the Jokhang temple, Tibetan Buddhism's spiritual centre. They chanted slogans demanding independence. This time she was sentenced to three years. She was 15.

The nuns imprisoned at Drapchi, most little more than children, have become legends of resistance to the Tibetans. By the mid-1990s, at the height of a renewed period of repression, the Lhasa authorities had locked up 163 nuns. Ngawang, particularly defiant, became a focus for opposition and she was singled out for even more abuse than the other nuns. With a half-smile she says: 'Maybe they didn't like me.'

Now she is again using her freedom to draw attention to the plight of Tibetans. State control is absolute; if Tibetans protest, the right to work, freedom of association and the right to practise religion are taken away. To stop political activists from becoming nuns or monks, the authorities now issue permits to those seeking to join religious institutions. 'As soon as you are politically involved, you don't have any rights,' says Ngawang.

The guard running Ngawang's unit was a Tibetan called Pema Butri. She would call the nuns 'evil spirits' and saw herself as a spiritual woman, demanding respect from the nuns as though a great lama herself.

Despite such tight control, a tape recorder was smuggled into the prison. A group of 13 nuns recorded protest songs which were later released on an album by human rights organisations. For her part in the enterprise, Ngawang was given an extra six years and put in solitary confinement. Denied food and blankets, she was kept awake at night.

She recited long prayers she had memorised, and made a rosary from the threads in her shirt, which she hid from the guards. Other prisoners went on hunger strike to protest against her treatment. 'When they attacked me, of course I was afraid. They wanted to make me say the things they wanted to hear. But I was ready to die. They will never take my heart.'

Twice more the authorities increased her sentence, in 1996 for eight years after she defied a programme of 'patriotic' education. In 1998, after a demonstration against the raising of the Chinese flag over the prison, five nuns died from wounds sustained in the rioting or, as the Chinese claim, at their own hands.

Kate Saunders, an independent Tibet analyst, told The Observer : 'Ngawang's release demonstrates China's concern for the "face" it presents to the world under the presidency of Hu Jintao. Beijing wants to consolidate and develop relations with the US. But policy on Tibet remains unchanged. There's still an intense focus on suppressing dissent while promoting fast-track economic development to accelerate the assimilation of Tibet into the motherland.'

Few Western governments will condemn the Chinese, for fear of antagonising them. On Wednesday, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, met his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing.

On Thursday, Straw publicly launched a government handbook, Combating Torture, to mark UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture and signed new protocols to the UN Convention Against Torture. That day, junior Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell was meeting Ngawang in private - to avoid embarrassing Li Zhaoxing.
____________

[Bonaparte]

A very informative post, HRTC! Thanks. Tracing Chinese history back throught he millenia, the Tibetan episode is far from the first outrage of this kind.

[PhilDragoo]

"The Dream of a Unified Motherland"?

No.

A bunch of motherf-----s.

All the anacephalic yuppies with Free Tibet on the bumpers of their Range Rovers.

Oh, and Richard Gere.

All these fools reelected the Clintons who have made China a nuclear threat to the entire world.

Herein revealed China's soullessness.

Its blackholeness, Mao's barrel of a gun.

As Truman said, "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one."

China tears down a temple and builds an outhouse.

China the Great Hegemon, destroyer of cultures--

As with the poet e. e. cummings, I react to China's transparent explanations with:

there is some sh!t i will not eat

[Enemy Of The State]

Bump!

Thanks for sharing your piece.
Regrettably, Tibet is one area that I do not have much knowledge about other than the tid-bits that I pick up here and there or movies such as 7 years in Tibet which try to portray some aspects of what has happened to these poor people.

Inside, I hold hope that one day Tibet will again be free but as a realist, I think there is no chance of that ever happening. The communists will never give up Tibet and sadly enough, they will never stop with the repopulation of the area until there is nothing left of the precious Tibetan Culture.

Regards!

EOTS

[Victoria Delsoul]

I think this article agrees with you here:

the overthrow of the monasteries and the violent redistribution of land, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, and the restriction of intellectual and religious freedom that continues to this day. And as in any form of imperialism, much of the damage has been done in the name of duty. When the Chinese speak of pre-1951 Tibet, they emphasize the shortcomings of the region's feudal-theocratic government: life expectancy was thirty-six years; 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate; 95 percent of the population was hereditary serfs and slaves owned by monasteries and nobles. The sense is that the Tibetans suffered under a bad system, and the Chinese had a moral obligation to liberate them.

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

Bump 4 later

[Enemy Of The State]

I was somewhat surprised by the traces of favoritism by the Author towars Beijing. I actually just finished reading the authors first book "River Town" and in no way did he ever show any respect or admiration for the communists. In fact, during his 2 years of teaching through the peace corps in Fuling, he was often articulately critical with his students of the communist government.

Perhaps he has spent too much time there and it has in some way, warped his view of reality.

[D-fendr]

Perhaps… it has in some way, warped his view of reality."

Nah, ya think?

Something damn sure has when he puts this happy face on barbaric genocide. Perhaps his next article can be on the great improvements in public housing by the Nazis in Warsaw.

This piece reeks; it belongs over at antiwar.com with the rest of the ChiCom apologetics.

[HighRoadToChina]

Even there, the author just couldn't keep the Communist propaganda trash out:

"When the Chinese speak of pre-1951 Tibet, they emphasize the shortcomings of the region's feudal-theocratic government: life expectancy was thirty-six years; 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate; 95 percent of the population was hereditary serfs and slaves owned by monasteries and nobles. The sense is that the Tibetans suffered under a bad system, and the Chinese had a moral obligation to liberate them."

Wonder what is the expectancy post-1950 with the murder of 1/4 of the Tibetan population.

95% "slaves" pre-1950. 100% slaves to Communist China post-1950.

The sense is that the genocide system currently in Occuppied Tibet is a really bad and evil system should led America and the West to libertate them!

"the overthrow of the monasteries and the violent redistribution of land, the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, and the restriction of intellectual and religious freedom that continues to this day."

The overthrow of the monasteries?!?

The violent redistribution of land to whom? To Communists?

This article is ALL bull.

[HighRoadToChina]

The useful idiots are useful in the case of Tibet.

[HighRoadToChina]

I regretably agree with your assessment. I believe that as long as there is a Communist China, Tibet will never be free.

[tet68]

Another leftist agitprop heard from.

[Quix]

It's always been amazing to me . . .

The Chinese are soooooooooooooooooo effective at

SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER

over hints of slights to the pride of the gnats on their collars

that they skate freely on greater crimes almost totally almost all the time.

They are artists at making their responses to microscopic insults sound like they are ready to go to war that they keep the fuss minimized over serious crimes.

Soooooooooo crafty.

The West soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo stupid.

And the Chinese laugh and think worse of us for letting them get away with it. It just serves to prove to them all the more that we are the barbarians and they are the clever, brilliant, cultured, educated ones.

For them, power, conquest, might, winning warrants all measures.

. . . except for the authentic Christians and even some authentic Buddhists among them.