In Bloom

Article from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Many will scoff at this Olympic ideal and I understand why. As a longtime advocate of social justice, I'm familiar with the long list of failings attributed to the People's Republic of China from the days of its founding in 1949, including the simmering tensions in Tibet - especially because I just spent five months in Shanghai as a Fulbright scholar conducting research on the mass exodus that took place at the time of the Communist revolution.

I grew up hearing constant critiques of the terrible Communist dictatorship. And because I am an open lesbian, my stay in China felt tenuous because, unlike America, which has anti-gay laws, China doesn't even recognize that we exist. Any of these might be reason enough to run as far from the Olympics as my middle-aged body can carry me.

But my time in China gave me another perspective. I observed firsthand the wide-ranging diversity and openness of viewpoints and cultural expression that now exists among China's 1.4 billion people. I met with hundreds of Chinese for my research and was struck by how outspoken and opinionated they are and, yes, even critical of their government.

Up until I left China just before the uprisings in Tibet, the Chinese government was heavily promoting the Olympic spirit and teaching Olympic values of friendship, understanding and fair play in the schools. China is not a democracy, but its people - whether Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uighers or its other many minorities - are becoming more vocal because of its increasing openness to the world.

Unfortunately, the calls to boycott the Olympics and to label everything about China as evil can only serve to isolate China and the United States from each other. China is not a monolith, and blanket condemnations of China and its people are as simplistic as blaming all Americans for the U.S. human-rights violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Such rhetoric, however, is driving many Chinese bloggers into a nationalistic response.

Read more here.

According to the April 3 BBC report, Indian police found a large amount of explosives and detonators on site after an explosion killed 3 people. Timers were also found. The house was rented by Tibetan exiles.

BBC correspondent also said that the town "has been used as a base or transit point for a number of rebel groups".

In the mean time, Chinese police also found different kinds of weapons in different monasteries in Tibet, including "3504 kilograms of explosives, 19630 pieces of detonators, and 2 grenades", says Xinhua.

Dawa Tsering, the Tibetan 'government-in-exile' representative to the U.S., had an interview with a French radio, Groupe Radio France Internationale, or Groupe RFI, on April 2nd. During the interview, he claimed:

(translated from sound recording)
"Tibetans were non violent from the beginning to the end (during the Lhasa turbulence). From the Tibetan point of view, violence means endangerments to life. In the video we can see them beating Han ethnics, but only beating and that's it. Hans would run away after being beaten, so it's only beating, not endangerments to life."

"They (Hans) all hid upstairs when Tibetans smashed the doors, so that when Tibetans set the places on fire they were burnt to death accidentally."

"So all these were all some kind of accident, not killing".

Dawa Tsering's definition of violence is certainly unique.

Dalai Lama the holiness and the leader of Tibetan government-in-exile, is now appealing to international communities and especially the Chinese government, calling for a peaceful solution to the Tibetan issue. I hope he also spend some time to look into the explosive issue, and also set a formal definition for "non violent".

I came across this blog article, an academic research on the Tibetan social/religious system when it was ruled by Lama's. It's astonishing to see how cruel the monasteries mistreated serfs, who consisted of 90% of Tibetan population.

Tibetan government in exile, mostly Lama's and their offspring, are now linking human rights with Tibetan issue. Things can really be ironic sometimes.

It’s glad to know that CNN has realized the tremendously negative publicity it had earned itself over the Internet recently, and it has abandoned its usual “keep silent” way of dealing with credibility charges by putting out a statement clearing itself on its Tibet coverage, which had been criticized for distorting facts and taking side by many bloggers and news agencies all over the world. The pressure must have been huge that CNN the experienced defendant against credibility accusations (number speaks, googling “CNN lies” returns 653,000 results, more than double of the 305,000 results for “Spitzer prostitution”, the hottest news this year) has to respond.

As a witness of the false reports from CNN, I recognize the effort CNN makes to polish its tainted image, however, I can only find the statement in whole an evasive piece trying to make excuses, and I feel pity for CNN again being such a dishonest and unapologetic agency.

Taking a quick look at what CNN has to say, one will find CNN's excuse for cropping picture laughable. Web based publication has great deal of freedom in presenting multimedia materials including pictures. CNN could have posted the picture in its entirety while moving text to the rest of the area without any trouble at all. Web pages are not printed materials, resizing and reframing paragraphs are virtually costless and effortless. In fact, after being attacked for cropping the picture, CNN modified the page to put a zoomed out version of the entire original photo, without having to move text format at all. Then why did CNN need to crop it in the first place? Also, CNN argues in the statement that the picture was captioned “Tibetans throw stones”, then by what motive would a rational editor crop out the exact part of people throwing stones? No excuse can possibly be found to justify the discrepancy between what CNN did and what CNN claims.

Besides, CNN's factual mistakes are not limited to the picture or calling Tibet as a country. During its TV airing until as late as March 21st, when multiple sources had confirmed Tibet riot violent and deadly, CNN anchors repeated called Tibetan turbulence a “peaceful protest”. It was exceptionally misleading and was a major distortion of fact. Even after www.anti-CNN.com had published the mistakes of CNN and other news outlets, Lou Dobbs of CNN continued to use the same wrong descriptions in his TV program. Even an unprofessional team would not be a strong excuse to make up for this.

CNN also repetitively refused to identify the dead as victims of the riot, and in their context spread the impression that they were protesters left dead by government actions, while in fact, they were murdered by those CNN-called "peaceful protesters".

CNN's distortions and lies are not sparse editorial or technical mistakes. They are consistent and still on-going, in favor of one side of the story.

In addition, CNN has in its reports repetitively excluded Tibetan ethnics from the Chinese. This is unacceptable. It is just similar to calling African American and Caucasian American as Blacks and American.

While the German news agency RTL had quickly acknowledged and apologized for its mistake after www.anti-cnn.com pointed it out, professionals in journalism at CNN still refuse to acknowledge mistakes and redeem trust. I have to say, the denial issued today was just a weak and pathetic attempt to weasle away from the systematic lying campaign CNN had conducted in the past weeks.

This blog gives a good compilation of how major media around the world misled the crowd by using pictures of violences occurred at other places/times, in their articles about the Tibetan riot took place last week. This list includes CNN, Washington Post in the U.S., BILD, N-TV, Spiegel, RTL TV in Germany.

It seems WordPress doesn't allow linking pictures from Blogger, so please click the links above for the original post, or links below for some sample pictures. More pictures available from the original blog.
http://bp2.blogger.com/_jSTjX1OQZp4/R-AbQTu_rZI/AAAAAAAAADg/Ah5b4YGMZ9I/s1600-h/002.JPG
http://bp0.blogger.com/_jSTjX1OQZp4/R-AbPzu_rYI/AAAAAAAAADY/4YAY1bf2TnQ/s320/001.JPG
http://bp1.blogger.com/_jSTjX1OQZp4/R-AbRDu_rbI/AAAAAAAAADw/IewgMRM9ITY/s1600-h/004.JPG
http://bp2.blogger.com/_jSTjX1OQZp4/R-AblTu_rdI/AAAAAAAAAEA/b3VwWDn8QPM/s1600-h/006.JPG

One can only believe that:
1) Either these media don't have a qualified internal examination/inspection system,
2) Or, they were deliberately lying, trying to fool their audiences.

In either case, these media are NOT reliable sources of news. Shame on them.

Some more words, in response to a comment, added 03/24:

First of all I wasn’t saying “all Western media is lying on purpose”, the Economist, for one, did an objective report, which I linked in my previous post. But some, if not most, did lie on this. I have lived in the U.S. for a couple of years, and by comparing with the way they report their domestic issues, I wouldn’t believe all of them simply made technical mistakes. Reading their headline assertions that a government is “clashing”, “suppressing”, “violating” a “peaceful protest” without any confirmed source, I could sense the media’s remote hostility and obvious eagerness to take a side. That’s not the right way for doing news.

Personally I don’t believe the government did anything out of line in this incident. (gunshots were fired as you said, but for the purpose of warning instead of shooting, or in life threatening conditions, confirmed by different sources).

I do know (and witness) there has been “repression from Chinese government”. Until 1980’s the majority of the officials of Chinese government were under-educated and thus lacked the virtue of respecting cultures, including their own Chinese traditional. Combined with the Communists’ tradition of believing in violence, they did a lot of “prison, torture, destruction of culture” to all Chinese people, including but not especially toward the Tibetan ethnic. The good thing is, they have been quickly changing and learning from 1990’s. For Tibet, huge budgets were set to rebuild temples (the roof of one temple would cost hundreds kilograms of gold), to fund monks, and to build local economy. The claim that the government IS doing cultural genocide is groundless, even if it is claimed by the big shot Dalai Lama. I hope and support the government to make more progress on improving the condition in Tibet, culturally and all.

http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/tibetanSociety/history.htm contains a lot of 3rd-party academic research articles regarding how Tibet was and is like. I recommend it to anyone who wants to know more truth about Tibet.

According to yet another U.S. blogger who is "a faculty member of Tibet House New York, the National Press Club of Washington, the California Authors Association, on the Advisory Board of Pacifica Public Radio's 'The Tibet Connection' ", eyewitnesses have reported to him that massive riots and violences are being done by Tibetan ethnics living in Lhasa and even Nepal.

Please refer to his post for the whole story. Here are some tag lines. You don't need to be too wise to see how these mobs are attacking civilians, looting goods, setting fires, and spreading rumors. If this is what Free Tibet groups want, I think they have to realize they are not allowed to violate the very human rights they are claiming of having been taken away, and it is absolutely UNLAWFUL AND EVIL to use violence against Han and Muslim civilians for their own protests.

"The rioting, however, has been ALL over Lhasa (unlike 1989), with Chinese & Muslim (Hui) shops (Ge Ti Hu) being targeted and completely destroyed - probably over 1,000 Chinese owned shops all over Lhasa. It's really a massive riot, with cars & motorbikes turned over then burned all over town, Chinese shops' contents splayed out onto the streets, and Han Chinese being literally hunted down, beat up, and sometimes killed with large traditional Tibetan knives."

"yesterday's riots were all over the entire city and undertaken by all kinds of Tibetans"

"There are so called "massacres" over by the Great Mosque, with intense fighting between Muslims & Tibetans"

"It was just 15 young police with their riot shields face a group fof 500-1000 Tibetans. The Tibetans were armed with iron bars and rocks and chunks of conrete…I don't know where they got all this stuff from. They then charged at the plice/army pelting them with objects. Some of their sheilds broke and some fell, obviously injured"

"a Tibetan out on Friday or Saturday told us another Tibtean told him he saw 50 Tibetans and a child get gunned down by soldiers on Ramoche street. [obviously this is not confirm(ed)"

From Internet, a Han civilian beaten injured (possibly dead) on Lhasa street.

From other Internet websites, here are some pictures of Tibetan mob conducting violences in streets.