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Saturday 17 May 2008

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Reporting from Tibet's cocoon

Isaac Beech on how freedom for Tibetans must come with freedom for journalists

On March 14th, a Tibetan friend emailed me with this inscrutable message: “Here I meet many problem. Maybe you hear that. I can’t say for you in the mail.” March 14th seems to have been the most furious day of protests in Lhasa. That I had heard, but couldn’t be sure it was the ‘that’ my friend was talking about.

A long silence, then I heard from him again: “Everywhere kill many Tibet here … Kill me no problem. I am not afraid anymore.” When I finally spoke to him on the phone, I asked him if it was safe to talk about what was happening: “at this time I think that is dangerous” he muttered. Another ‘that’.

I suspect it won’t be until I see him in person that his evasive pronoun will ever become anything more. Nor can he be more than a pronoun himself in this article – not until the Chinese regime stops imprisoning outspoken Tibetans. Before that time (which will come, perhaps, in the Year of the Flying Pig) phones will be tapped, emails will be intercepted, and articles on the web will be filtered for mention of Tibet, or indeed T!bet.

The metamorphosis of my friend’s voice from a guarded assurance he’s OK to the attributed story of his experiences will have to wait. Tibet is in a news cocoon, impenetrable in many respects to journalists. It’s a cocoon with an unhappy butterfly inside: the stories of Tibetan grievances which illustrate in human detail why protests erupted now as in 1989 and ’59.

My friend lives in an ethnically Tibetan part of Qinghai, where I lived last summer. Qinghai is one of the four Chinese provinces (the others are Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan) outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region which together hold roughly half of Tibet’s population, and the historical Tibetan regions of Amdo and Kham.

I’ve since learnt that his home area, which has been a hot spot of rioting, is under close surveillance. Its Tibetan population is forbidden to form large groups – quite the dampener on religious ceremonies. He himself is no stranger to oppression. In Sichuan he was arrested for a ‘crime’ which highlighted Tibet’s historical independence from China: to specify might risk his being identified. In prison, he told me, he was fed tsampa (roasted barley flour, a Tibetan staple) with mouse droppings inside, and nearly died.

We travelled together to Labrang monastery in Gansu, where I spoke with a monk friend of his. “Without Tibet nationality, there is no religious freedom”, this monk told me, describing the incognito police who live in his monastery as Chinese monks. These, surely, are ‘jackals in monk’s robes’, to use the Communist Party’s pet phrase to describe the Dalai Lama, under whose illegal portrait we sat. When UN inspectors visited the monastery once, he claimed, Chinese officials actually did the rounds of monks’ rooms putting up portraits of the Dalai Lama – only to take them down as soon as they had left.

Up the mountainside from Labrang are the Sangke grasslands. Here we met a nomad who – judging by his unfurnished home and hard floor – was clearly not benefiting from the stream of tourists who pass through. That money goes to the Chinese: a familiar story for many Tibetans. And now my friend faces hospital bills running over 35 000 RMB (£2 500) for a relative of his with organ failure from nomadic living conditions. A tall order considering his monthly salary of 1 200 RMB (£90). These stories are all part of the narrative of Tibet which runs deeper than the headlines of both Chinese and Western newspapers.

“The Chinese government”, one Tibetan living in London said to me recently, “thought they could pacify Tibetans with economic development or military force. Neither worked … China has to admit it’s not winning the hearts and minds of Tibetan people.” But the mouths of many Tibetans who could go into the details are closed for fear of reprisals, and the journalists who would ask the questions often can’t because they are not allowed close enough.

A pack of international journalists did get close enough on March 27th – but only when thirty odd Tibetan monks broke into the room of Lhasa’s Jokhang temple where they were being addressed by their Chinese government guides, and only for fifteen minutes. Then the journalists were dragged back to their babysat tour. Physically dragged, Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times reports.

My own visit to Lhasa was escorted too – by a Chinese tour guide, exotically named Lulu. My notes from the time describe a “despotically selective vision of Tibet”. For twenty six journalists to be shown the ‘aftermath’ of riots in Lhasa by a government Lulu is a tokenistic concession to free movement of the press.

Melinda Liu, President of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, notes “FCCC board members do not think the brief and highly managed press tour of Lhasa satisfies Beijing Olympics’ promise to allow free media reporting by foreign correspondents.”

This promise – a regulation announced 1st January 2007 allowing greater freedom of movement for the foreign press in China until the Olympics – had been broken before. 180 times, according to the 2008 annual report of media rights watchdog Reporters Sans Frontières, from surveillance of journalists to arrests.

I asked a senior reporter on an official Chinese newspaper what he thought: “I don’t agree with those who don’t hope that journalists like you or me will cover the news in Tibet. If we let all journalists – both Chinese and foreign – cover what is happening, I think it’s a good way to reduce misunderstandings.”

His call was echoed the next day with the release of a petition signed by twenty nine Chinese intellectuals, urging the Communist Party “to allow credible national and international media to go into Tibet … Only by adopting an open attitude can we turn around the international community’s distrust of our government.”

“Distrust” and “misunderstandings” are mild words compared to how the Chinese-run site www.anti-cnn.com puts it (“the lies and distorted facts of the western media”). Well, they do point out a BBC website picture of a Chinese ambulance captioned “heavy military presence in Lhasa”. But on the website of China Daily, China’s English language newspaper, you can read Wu Jiao describing “wild ducks swimming around leisurely” in a Lhasa returned to “normalcy”. Which do you find more embarrassing?

If wild ducks have a higher billing than angry monks, these protests run the risk of being brushed under the carpet – like the cursory sentence on the 1959 riots in the book ‘China’s Tibet’ I read in Beijing. I chatted online to a Chinese friend in Beijing, who typed “it seems a bit strange. I think people on one side don’t know about [the riots] and on the other side don’t think it’s going to be a huge problem. The only news I can obtain is from China Daily, which you know…”

For China Daily to run headlines like “Media must be objective” next to “Dalai Lama not an honest man” hardly puts them in a credible position to follow up with “Bold hypocrisy of the Western world”. Melinda Liu comments “the recent allegations of Western media conspiracies to tarnish China are a reflection of growing nationalism among Chinese … unaccustomed to hearing international criticism of the Chinese government. That’s partly because of the filtered nature of information flow, due to censored traditional media, imprisonment of cyber-dissidents, and sophisticated Internet policing technologies.”

At the same time, Western calls for Tibetan independence (rather than autonomy) play right into the Chinese government’s hands: they can be dismissed as ‘splittist’ to this generation of nationalistic young Chinese. Nor should Tibetan violence against Han Chinese and Hui Muslim be glossed over by the international media in favour of the more sellable red face of Chinese oppression (www.ourvoice.de is a less shouty attack on Western coverage).

A Tibet open to Chinese journalists will increase international respect for China’s Communist Party and educate a lot of Chinese about truths withheld from them. A Tibet open to foreign journalists will bring stories from the attic of the world out from under the rafters and lend nuance to the reporting of crisis in Shangri la.

And if Tibet remains tightly closed? As the Beijing correspondent of a US newspaper told me, “when you bar reporters from an area, we are constitutionally created to find out why … It would be a sad abdication of our responsibilities if we didn’t. If China begins the Olympics from a defensive crouch,” he said, “I will not write of it as a brilliant debut.”

More articles from: Isaac Beech | this section

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