The Agonist - Olympics 2008

Lhasa's monks all but vanish in Chinese crackdown

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:53:10 -0700

Geoffrey York | Lhasa | June 23

Globe & Mail - Severe restrictions, including checkpoints and surveillance, imposed since wave of anti-government protests in March, exiles say.

The pilgrims returned to the Potala Palace yesterday, spinning their prayer wheels and prostrating themselves in front of the Dalai Lama's ancient palace on a mountaintop in Lhasa.

For two days, the Buddhist pilgrims had been pushed to the sidelines to make room for the Olympic torch relay in Lhasa. The traditional pilgrimage route at the Potala Palace was unceremoniously shut down, in one of many security measures by Chinese authorities, even though a month-long Buddhist festival has drawn thousands of pilgrims to the Tibetan capital.

Resistance snuffed out as Olympic torch tours Tibet

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 07:06:33 -0700

Clifford Coonan | Beijing | June 23

Independent - China paraded the Olympic torch through the streets of Lhasa at the weekend in a blaze of red flags, eager to present a picture of national unity and domestic harmony just three months after the Tibetan provincial capital was rocked by anti-Chinese riots.

With the Olympic Games to begin in Beijing on 8 August, senior Chinese Communist Party officials in charge of the restive province used the opportunity of the torch relay to denounce the Dalai Lama and underline China's tight grip on the Himalayan region. "Tibet's sky will never change and the red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above it," said Zhang Qingli, the hardliner who heads Tibet's Communist Party. "It is certain we will be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama's clique."

Students for a Free Tibet: Announcement

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:05:15 -0700

Subject: FreeTibet2008.org: SFT Launches New Olympics Website /Video

With the start of the Beijing Olympics only 49 days away, SFT HQ is stepping up our Olympic campaign efforts. To ensure that you are kept up to date with news, analysis, and ways to participate in creative, strategic and effective actions for Tibet leading up to and during the Games, we are excited to launch SFT's Olympics website: http://www.FreeTibet2008.org.

Visit http://www.FreeTibet2008.org now and watch our new SFT Olympics Campaign video, a moving account of what is at stake inside Tibet and the power we have – as Tibetans, supporters, and people of conscience – to make history for Tibet at this crucial time.

Security, choreography mark Silk Road torch relay

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:42:20 -0700

Ben Blanchard | Kashgar, China | June 17

Reuters - The Olympic torch was paraded on Wednesday through the sensitive former Silk Road city of Kashgar, home to ethnic-minority Muslim Uighurs, under the scrutiny of Chinese soldiers and choreographed cheering crowds.

China has accused Uighur separatists in oil-rich Xinjiang of plotting attacks with al Qaeda's support to help achieve their goal of establishing an independent country called East Turkestan.

The government banned all but carefully chosen members of the public, including Islamic leaders in head dresses and children in traditional attire, from the relay route and ordered everyone else to stay at home and watch on television.

For Talks to Succeed, China Must Admit to a Tibet Problem

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:28:28 -0700

YaleGlobal
Sunday, June 01, 2008 15:47

China’s hard-line policy towards Tibet creates more problems than it solves. Beijing’s recent crackdown on Tibetan protesters has attracted condemnation from around the world, but did nothing to address the underlying problems in Tibet itself. If Beijing is serious about securing Tibet’s long-term future as part of China, it needs to put aside its past enmity towards the Dalai Lama – and Michael Davis, law professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong, offers a strategy for China to pursue. Only by acknowledging that the human-rights issue cannot be separated from the country’s unity and negotiating with the Dalai Lama will Beijing achieve the goal that both Beijing and the Dalai Lama claim to share: an autonomous Tibet that remains part of China while retaining its own Tibetan identity. - YaleGlobal

Tibet could be 'swamped' by mass Chinese settlement after Olympics, says Dalai Lama

Fri, 23 May 2008 19:14:55 -0700

Julian Borger | May 24

Guardian - Buddhist leader fears attempt to dilute identity; Meeting with Brown helpful despite problems.

The Dalai Lama claimed yesterday that Beijing was planning the mass settlement of 1 million ethnic Chinese people in Tibet after the Olympics with the aim of diluting Tibetan culture and identity.

Tibet's exiled spiritual leader also claimed that some of Asia's most important rivers which flow from the Tibetan plateau are being polluted and diminished by careless industrialisation and unplanned irrigation.

The Dalai Lama made the claims in an interview with the Guardian after a meeting yesterday with Gordon Brown at Lambeth Palace. He said the talks had been detailed and the prime minister had been helpful "in spite of his difficulties". The Dalai Lama said: "He met me and he showed genuine concern and he wants to help."

China's next-generation nationalists

Fri, 16 May 2008 23:08:34 -0700

Joshua Kurlantzick | May 6

LAT - They're educated, richer and more aggressive toward the West. As human rights protesters dogged the Beijing Olympics' torch relay around the world, as supporters of Tibet condemned the violent crackdown in Lhasa, and as Darfur activists demanded change in China's Sudan policy, Chinese young people worked themselves into a different form of righteous anger. In online forums and chat rooms, they blasted Beijing's leaders for not being tougher in Tibet. They agitated for boycotts against Western businesses based in nations that object to Beijing's policies, and they directed venomous fury against anyone critical of China.

China floats inviting Dalai Lama to Olympics:Tibet MP

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:30:11 -0700

Ralph Jennings | Taipei | May 12

Reuters - A senior Chinese official has asked whether Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama would agree to attend the Beijing Olympics to ease recent tensions, a Tibet government-in-exile legislator said on Monday.

The Dalai Lama would consider going, the law maker said.

Khedroob Thondup, a Taipei-based member of Tibet's parliament-in-exile, said a senior leader in Beijing had called him about two weeks ago to "sound out" the Olympic visit idea. He did not identify the leader.

China has blamed the Dalai Lama for unrest in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China since mid-March.

The gesture suggest that Beijing seeks to show the world that it can get along with Tibetan leaders following a world opinion backlash over China's handling of the Tibet violence.

Pico Iyer on Tibet, China and the Dalai Lama

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:29:51 -0700

Truthdig

Posted on May 10, 2008

By Jon Wiener

As opening day of the Beijing Olympics approaches, the Chinese government and official media have intensified their attacks on Tibet’s Dalai Lama, blaming him for the recent violent demonstrations in Lhasa, where Tibetans have been protesting against China’s restrictions on their religion and culture. The Tibetan government in exile, based in India, says the Chinese have killed more than 200 people in these protests, which started in March. Pico Iyer has been following the story—his new book is “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” He spoke recently with Truthdig’s Jon Wiener.

Dalai Lama envoys to go to China

Sun, 04 May 2008 03:43:49 -0700

May 3

BBC - Envoys of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, are due to hold talks with officials in China, the Dalai Lama's office says.

Two Tibetan envoys are expected to arrive on Saturday for talks on ending the crisis in Tibetan areas of China.

This would be the first contact between the two sides since anti-China protests in Tibet in March turned violent.

Chinese state media has renewed its criticism of the Dalai Lama, who it blames for masterminding the protests.

This is a charge the Dalai Lama has always denied.

He and the Tibetan government-in-exile have been based in India since fleeing Tibet in 1959.

Beijing marks 100-day countdown to Games

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:29:35 -0700

April 30

ABC.net.au - China has marked the start of the 100-day countdown to the Beijing Olympics with songs, a mass run and even prayers, hoping to put behind it the tumultuous events of the past month which have taken much of the gloss off preparations.

Unlike run-ups to recent Olympics, Beijing's preparations have kept to plan and some stadiums and infrastructure have even been completed ahead of schedule.

The city has spent $US35 - $US40 billion on improving infrastructure, including a new airport terminal and subway lines, as well as $US2.1 billion to cover the cost of running the Games.

But the city's smooth preparations have been overshadowed 100 days out by the torch relay's troubled journey around the globe, with protesters targeting China's human rights record, in particular its policies on Tibet.

Human Rights and China

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:20:22 -0700

(huliq.com) Human Rights Watch . . . reminds us that China ‘remains a one-party state that does not hold national elections, has no independent judiciary, leads the world in executions, aggressively censors the Internet, bans independent trade unions, and represses minorities such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians’. Social unrest arising from distress about housing, migration, political freedoms, poverty and other domestic issues is dealt with severely.

www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/18/china12270.htm

Moreover, in asserting that a country’s domestic politics are its own affair alone, China aims to prevent the international community from scrutinising its interactions abroad. But in joining the global community, China must realise that this is not how the world works today. We have moved beyond the 1950s. Decades of marching against the Bomb, of anti-colonialist and anti-apartheid campaigning, a string of anti-poverty events linked up across the globe, the coming together of civil activists from all over the world to work on poverty, the emergence of an international climate-change coalition, the wide-spread revulsion of the American invasion of Iraq, the creation of international agreements on blood diamonds and corporate corruption – these and other global movements demonstrate that citizens and states increasingly see events, wherever they take place, as interconnected.

A Conversation On Tibet

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:35:14 -0700

George over at Electric Politics has a post up addressed to me about Tibet. Give it a read. Suffice it to say, I think our major disagreement right now, although I will comment in detail later, is that I think Bush, if problems continue in Tibet through the Olympics, should sit out the opening ceremonies. But, more on Tibet, China and the US later, first give George a read.

Olympic Torch Makes Lonely Progress Through Delhi

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 08:43:07 -0700

Amanda Gentleman & Hari Kumar | New Delhi | April 17

NYT - The Olympic torch made a strange and lonely procession through central Delhi on Thursday, with the event so overshadowed by fears of the anti-Chinese protests that marred its appearances in other cities that no members of the public were allowed close enough to witness it.

The 70-odd Indian athletes and celebrities who carried the torch down Delhi’s widest avenue were outnumbered by thousands of watchful members of India’s security forces, who managed to stamp out any pomp and excitement, transforming the occasion into a tense security operation.

India has the world’s largest population of exiled Tibetans, about 100,000, who fled their homeland after China crushed an uprising there in the 1950s, and their presence had made Olympic organizers particularly anxious about this stage of the torch’s journey to Beijing, where the Games will begin on Aug. 8.

Chinese Geopolitics and the Significance of Tibet

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:26:03 -0700

George Friedman | April 15

Stratfor - China is an island. We do not mean it is surrounded by water; we mean China is surrounded by territory that is difficult to traverse. Therefore, China is hard to invade; given its size and population, it is even harder to occupy. This also makes it hard for the Chinese to invade others; not utterly impossible, but quite difficult. Containing a fifth of the world’s population, China can wall itself off from the world, as it did prior to the United Kingdom’s forced entry in the 19th century and under Mao Zedong. All of this means China is a great power, but one that has to behave very differently than other great powers.