...in Lhasa |
Angry Chinese Blogger sheds some light on why young Chinese people feel the way they do about Tibet.
I promise, at some point I’ll start talking about my actual memories again instead of hopping on my soapbox every few minutes. It’s just very difficult to do so after reading the news.
If you’ve been following the recent news, you know that Tibet is having a terrible time right now. (If you don’t, the BBC has a good rundown.)
I’ve been trying to find the words to express how angry and sad and frustrated I have been since this violence started. It is a very strange feeling to look at pictures coming out of Lhasa and recognize in the burnt-out shells places I and my classmates passed every day for three weeks. Yahoo has an extensive photo gallery of Lhasa and Tibetan protests. In the rubble, so far I’ve recognized a teashop in which I got a wonderful cup of tea, a little Chinese dumpling shop that would belch out the noxious fumes of cooking cabbage and unidentifiable meat, and various shops near the Barkhor. Of course, we can’t contact any of the people we met in Tibet, so we don’t know if they are safe or not.
Well, Bjork sure has riled up Beijing. I knew I liked her. ^_^
You can see the video by going to YouTube and searching for “bjork tibet”. (For some reason, embedding the video here broke everything else.) I recommend not reading the comments unless you enjoy being angry.
This from the Telegraph, via World Tibet Network News:
The Prince of Wales has snubbed the Chinese government by refusing to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer.
China gets its way once again: Team Tibet will not be allowed to participate in the Olympics, since Tibet is not recognized as a sovereign state. The team is apparently still in good spirits, and hopes to try again in 2012. Perhaps they’ll have better luck when the games aren’t hosted by their oppressors.
It has taken a full week for Xinhua, the Chinese national news agency, to release this report of unrest in Tibet. Why? See title. They needed time to spin the event to make it look like everything is just peachy. And forget the idea that government workers “persuaded” rioters to go home. Two women on our trip witnessed firsthand what happens when the Chinese government “persuades” people. They watched three police gang up on a middle-aged women and knock her to the ground and kick around her groceries. Hmph.
Lhasa sits on a plain over 13,000 feet above sea level. The sun is bright, the views are sweeping, and the air…well, the air is thin. For many lower-altitude people, this means altitude sickness.
Here in Mississippi we’re only a few feet above sea level, and on the coast, many folks are below sea level. The atmospheric density is far above Tibet’s, and the humidity is much higher. Moving quickly from this low altitude to the high one–as we did–can produce symptoms in some people. (It’s not so much the altitude itself as it is the speed at which you move to it.) However, even this doesn’t always determine whether you will get sick–some people just seem to be more susceptible than others.
Yesterday the Dalai Lama accepted the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor Congress can give to a civilian.
His speech and the speeches of others at the ceremony reemphasize that he is not a “splittist,” as Beijing claims, but simply a crusader for peace. He restated that it is not independence he is after, but actual autonomy, something the “Tibet Autonomous Region” utterly lacks. He thanks the American people for their support, and is rather politic in thanking the Bushies for their “support of religious freedom” (heehee, I don’t think he’s been reading the US news much…).
One of the first field trips we took on our study-abroad trip to Tibet was to the Jokhang Temple, situated in the heart of Lhasa–and at the heart of Tibetan Buddhism. It is one of the most important temples in Tibet, from which the Dalai Lama often gave addresses to his people from a special balcony.
Today on Phayul: China blatantly defends its record on religious freedom. And again with the “why can’t you mean old foreigners stay out of our internal affairs?”
Any claim China makes that its citizens have full religious freedom is patently false. We have seen this with our own eyes.
1 Comment »