Tibet: July 2009 Archives
By PRWeb
July 29, 2009
China's Communist Party attacks "Dalai Lama Renaissance" (www.DalaiLamaFilm.com), a documentary film about the Dalai Lama narrated by Harrison Ford, after the film premieres in Taiwan and receives front page positive Taiwanese press. China's response likely an attempt to counteract the Chinese language Taiwanese press which is often read in China. Film to be released in China, under the radar of the Chinese government.
The Chinese government often has the clout and muscle to prevent Hollywood films from being released in Asia, and can even discourage films from having an extended release in the West if they are perceived to threaten Chinese policy.
Films starring such big name stars as Richard Gere and Sharon Stone were boycotted by China after the actors expressed support for the Tibet Independence Movement. After Disney released "Kundun," Martin Scorsese's 1997 feature film about the Dalai Lama, the studio incurred the wrath of the Chinese government, and Disney films were banned for an indefinite period of time.
Recently, after a theatrical documentary film about the Dalai Lama and narrated by Harrison Ford entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance (www.DalaiLamaFilm.com) was released in theaters in Taiwan this summer and received front page positive press in the Chinese language Taiwanese newspapers, the Chinese government took keen notice.
The People's Daily, a daily newspaper and media arm of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, quickly and sharply criticized "Dalai Lama Renaissance" in an article in its online edition.
The article, posted July 14th in the People's Daily Online entitled "Western Movies Build Grand and Perfect Image of Dalai Lama," argues that "in recent years, a wave of 'Dalai Lama fever' has appeared in the Western movie industry... describing the Chinese government's peaceful liberation of Tibet as 'cruel oppression,' and depicting the Dalai Lama's life in India as difficult... Some movies even advocate the Dalai Lama's concept of [Tibetan 'independence.'"
Although the title of the article refers to "Movies," the article exclusively focuses on "Dalai Lama Renaissance." Referring to the film, which has been distributed in cinemas around the world, the article criticizes that "the part of the movie related to the peaceful liberation of Tibet was filled with political bias, reflecting the director's ignorance and misunderstanding of Tibet's history... The movie transforms the Dalai Lama into an omniscient sage, reflecting a 'misunderstanding' of the Dalai Lama's image in the West... In fact, what these movies depict is just the 'anesthesia' given by the Dalai Lama to the West."
The fact that the Chinese Communist Party's main media organization has chosen to criticize the film may be a defensive reaction to the very positive press that Dalaki Lama Renaissance received in the Chinese language media in Taiwan, where it premiered in front of sold-out audiences on June 1. And it may be an attempt to counteract any effect on readers in mainland China, who often have access to Chinese language news from Taiwan.
Taiwan's best-selling weekly newspaper, E Weekly, gave the film a rating of 82, which is one of the highest ratings that a film has received in the past year in Taiwan. According to its Taiwanese theatrical distributor, Blockbuster of Taiwan (no relation to Blockbuster video in the United States), E Weekly regularly gives films far lower ratings. FTV, a television station in Taiwan, also reported that that the premiere of the film in Taiwan was very successful, with not an empty seat in the cinema, and that "many people were touched after watching the film." The Taipei Times wrote that "the film rapidly grabs hold of you... an insightful documentary."
Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party may feel most threatened by the idea brought up in the film regarding economic sanctions against China from the West. But despite this being a near unanimous suggestion by the Westerners in a scene in "Dalai Lama Renaissance," the Dalai Lama discouraged the proposal.
The Taiwanese newspaper The Liberty Times points out that, in the film, "the Dalai Lama thinks that humanity is the most important thing in the world and economic sanctions might affect many Chinese citizens, thus he is hesitant whether such an approach is right."
The People's Daily also tries to discredit the producer-director of the film, Khashyar Darvich. In its article, the newspaper claims that the director is a "follower" of the Dalai Lama, and supports this assertion by referring to an interview where Darvich mentioned that he produced the film party for the opportunity to spend time with the exiled Tibetan leader.
"It's interesting that the Chinese Communist Party refers to me as a follower of the Dalai Lama," Darvich responded. "Although I respect the Dalai Lama as a man of peace, just as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee did by awarding him the Nobel Peace prize, and as do most governments around the world, I am not a Dalai Lama groupie. When I began the film, I was not very familiar with the Dalai Lama's ideas. I think that his actions, and the respect that he garners around the world, speaks for itself."
Despite the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to discredit the film, Producer-Director Khashyar Darvich states that his production company, Wakan Films, has just signed an agreement to release "Dalai Lama Renaissance" unofficially into China itself, under the radar of the Chinese Government.
"My hope," says Darvich, "is that the film will open a dialog between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama, and that the average Chinese citizen will be able to see that the Dalai Lama is not such a bad guy and is interested in a solution to the Tibet issue that serves the highest good and benefits both the Chinese and Tibetans. I would be happy to attend a screening of the film in China and conduct a Q&A with Chinese audiences as a way to contribute to positive dialog."
For more information on "Dalai Lama Renaissance," go to www.DalaiLamaFilm.com.
By BBC World News
July 29, 2009
The visit of exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer to Japan has provoked a storm of criticism in China's press, with commentators warning that it will be seen as a hostile act towards Beijing.
China accuses Mrs Kadeer, the leader of the US-based Uighur World Congress, of inciting violent clashes in China's Xinjiang province between the Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese in early July.
There is also anger in the mainland Chinese press about the decision by an Australian film festival to invite Mrs Kadeer to appear at the event.
Beyond China, meanwhile, Beijing's attempt to use its diplomatic muscle to prevent countries from hosting the Uighur dissident has earned it accusations of "bullying" and "thuggishness".
'Extremely unfriendly'
Writing in China's official English-language China Daily, commentator Jin Canrong says that Japan's decision to grant Kadeer a visa represents an "extremely unfriendly" move.
In a dig at the political troubles of embattled Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, an editorial in Beijing-based Huanqiu Shibao says the invitation is "obviously not unrelated to the current political chaos in Japan", and concluded that "1.3 billion Chinese can only have contempt towards [the people of Japan]".
The Japanese authorities are using Kadeer to "vilify" China in order to maintain Japan's pre-eminent status in Asia, says a special report in Hong Kong-based news agency Zhongguo Tongxun She.
An editorial in the Beijing-backed Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po says this "seriously unfriendly act" has exposed Japan's double standards towards "violent terrorist forces".
An unattributed commentary in Hong Kong's Oriental Daily News accuses the Japanese government of "taking advantage" of China's ethnic problems to undermine the country's stability.
"Malicious provocation"
An editorial in mainland China's Huanqiu Shibao focuses its anger on Australia's invitation to Kadeer to attend a screening in Melbourne of a documentary about her life, "10 Conditions of Love", condemning it as a "malicious provocation".
Two Chinese film directors, Jia Zhangke and Zhao Liang, withdrew their films from the festival in protest. Writing in Guangzhou's Nanfang Ribao, Bi Wenzhang is moved to "heartily admire and applaud this ... act of patriotism".
Chen Shan, of the Beijing Film Academy, also praises the directors' "patriotic protest" in the English-language China Daily.
Lan Xi, writing in Huanqiu, suggests that the Australian government should not do "foolish things that harm the overall situation of Sino-Australian relations".
'PR disaster'
Elsewhere, China's tough approach to Mrs Kadeer's visits to Japan and Australia is perceived as heavy-handed.
Chinese authorities have "learned nothing" from their experience of dealing with the Dalai Lama, says the editorial in Taiwan's Taipei Times.
The campaign against Kadeer is a comparable "public relations disaster", serving only to underscore China's "thuggishness" and alienate it further from the human rights agendas of Western countries, the daily says.
China has "miscalculated the extent of its reach" by seeking to have the documentary on Kadeer pulled from the festival's programme, Christopher Scanlon in Australia's Melbourne-based daily The Age says.
Its efforts have succeeded only in providing the film with "an avalanche of publicity", he adds.
In the same newspaper, Bruce Jacobs contends that the Chinese government was behind the two Chinese filmmakers' withdrawal from the festival.
He says that the move represents part of a concerted "bullying" campaign by Beijing, arguing the objections of the Chinese authorities "need to be faced down" because "you don't give in to bullies".
By Brian Womack - Bloomberg.com
21 July 2009
The Chinese government restricted access to more social-networking sites in the past few days, escalating a clampdown that started about six months ago, said Xia Qiang, director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.
The sites that are inaccessible or aren't working properly include Fanfou, Digu, Zuosa and Jiwai, said Qiang, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley in California. Those sites work like Twitter, allowing users to post information quickly before editors can review their submissions, Qiang said.
"It turns out one of the very interesting functions of those sites is the news and opinions is getting circulated very quickly," Qiang said. That makes it much harder for authorities to keep control, he said.
Internet users in China had difficulty logging on to Facebook and other social-networking sites earlier this month following ethnic clashes in western China that left more than 150 people dead. Access to Google Inc.'s YouTube, a video- sharing site, and the Twitter messaging service also has been limited.
When accessed from San Francisco, the Digu and Zuosa Web sites said they were closed for maintenance today, according to postings on their home pages. Fanfou wasn't available as of 11 a.m. San Francisco time. The Web site of Jiwai appeared to be working.
Bing, Twitter
Twitter and Microsoft Corp.'s new Bing.com search engine were inaccessible in Beijing in June, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Facebook, the most visited social-networking site, continues to receive reports of users having problems accessing the site in China, Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, said today.
By Dru Gladney for BBC World News
09 July 2009
The recent Urumqi and Lhasa riots have shattered the myth of a monolithic China, writes China and Uighur expert Professor Dru Gladney.
Foreigners and the Chinese themselves typically picture China's population as a vast homogeneous Han majority with a sprinkling of exotic minorities living along the country's borders.
This understates China's tremendous cultural, geographic, and linguistic diversity - in particular the important cultural differences within the Han population. More importantly, recent events suggest that China may well be increasingly insecure regarding not only these nationalities, but also its own national integration.
The unprecedented early departure of President Hu Jintao from the G8 meetings in Italy to attend to the ethnic problems in Xinjiang is an indication of the seriousness with which China regards this issue.
Across the country, China is seeing a resurgence of local ethnicity and culture, most notably among southerners such as the Cantonese and Hakka, who are now classified as Han.
For centuries, China has held together a vast multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation despite alternating periods of political centralization and fragmentation. But cultural and linguistic cleavages could worsen in a China weakened by internal strife, an economic downturn, uneven growth, or a struggle over future political succession.
The initial brawl between workers in a Guangdong toy factory, which left at least two Uighur dead on 25 June, prompted the mass unrest in Xinjiang on 5 July, which ended with 156 dead, thousands injured, and 1500 arrested, with on-going violence spreading throughout the region.
The National Day celebrations scheduled for October 2009, seeks to highlight 60 years of the "harmonious" leadership of the Communist Party in China, and like the 2008 Olympics, its enormous success. The rioting threatens to de-rail these celebrations.
Officially, China is made up of 56 nationalities: one majority nationality, the Han, and 55 minority groups. The 2000 census revealed a total official minority population of nearly 104m, or approximately 9% of the total population.
The peoples identified as Han comprise 91% of the population from Beijing in the north to Canton in the south, and include the Hakka, Fujianese, Cantonese, and other groups. These Han are thought to be united by a common history, culture, and written language; differences in language, dress, diet, and customs are regarded as minor and superficial. An active state-sponsored programme assists these official minority cultures and promotes their economic development (with mixed results).
The recognition of minorities, however, also helped the Communists' long-term goal of forging a united Chinese nation by solidifying the recognition of the Han as a unified "majority". Emphasizing the difference between Han and minorities helped to de-emphasize the differences within the Han community.
The Communists incorporated the idea of Han unity into a Marxist ideology of progress, with the Han in the forefront of development and civilization. The more "backward" or "primitive" the minorities were, the more "advanced" and "civilized" the so-called Han seemed, and the greater the need for a unified national identity.
Minorities who do not support development policies are thought to be "backward" and anti-modern, holding themselves and the country back.
The supposedly homogenous Han speak eight mutually unintelligible languages. Even these sub-groups show marked linguistic and cultural diversity.
China's policy toward minorities involves official recognition, limited autonomy, and unofficial efforts at control. Although totalling only 9% of the population, they are concentrated in resource-rich areas spanning nearly 60% of the country's landmass and exceed 90% of the population in counties and villages along many border areas of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan.
Xinjiang occupies one-sixth of China's landmass, with Tibet the second-largest province.
Indeed, one might even say it has become popular to be "ethnic" in today's China. Mongolian hot pot, Muslim noodle, and Korean barbecue restaurants proliferate in every city, while minority clothing, artistic motifs, and cultural styles adorn Chinese bodies and private homes.
This rise of "ethnic chic" is in dramatic contrast to the anti-ethnic homogenizing policies of the late 1950s anti-Rightist period, the Cultural Revolution, the late-1980s "spiritual pollution" campaigns, and now the ethnic riots in the west.
While ethnic separatism on its own will never be a serious threat to a strong China, a China weakened by internal strife, inflation, uneven economic growth, or the struggle for political succession could become further divided along cultural and linguistic lines.
China's separatists, such as they are, could never mount such a co-ordinated attack as was seen on 11 September, 2001 in the United States, and China's more closed society lacks the openness that has allowed terrorists to move so freely in the West.
China's threats will most likely come from civil unrest, and perhaps internal ethnic unrest from within the so-called Han majority. We should recall that it was a southerner, born and educated abroad, who led the revolution that ended China's last dynasty.
Moreover, the Taiping Rebellion that nearly brought down the Qing dynasty also had its origins in the southern border region of Guangxi among so-called marginal Yao and Hakka peoples.
These events are being remembered as the generally well-hidden and overlooked "Others" within Chinese society begin to reassert their own identities, in addition to the official nationalities.
Dru Gladney is a China expert and president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California.
By Simon Elegant | TIME Magazine in Partnership with CNN
Monday, July 06, 2009
Chinese authorities announced today that some 140 people had been killed and over 800 wounded in protests that roiled Urumqi, the capital of China's far western Xinjiang province, on Sunday. According to the official news agency Xinhua, Urumqi police chief Liu Yaohua told a press conference that the number of dead was still rising and that there had also been extensive damage to property.
The enormous loss of life marked a bloody milestone in Beijing's administration of the troubled zone, in which Muslim Uighurs make up the majority of the population. It also presages a severe tightening of the already vise-like grip the authorities maintain on the semiautonomous region, one that could be even harsher than the crackdown that followed the violent suppression of protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa in March of 2008. Officials said that several hundred protesters had already been arrested and some 90 more were still being sought on Monday afternoon. "I fear for what is to come," said Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. "China has a very poor record of accountability when it comes to those arrested for protesting. In Tibet, for example, there are still hundreds unaccounted for by the government's own admission." (See pictures of the March 2008 riots in Tibet.)
Liu told the official news agency that rioters burned 261 motor vehicles and around 200 shops yesterday in violence that was, according to an earlier Xinhua report, "masterminded from overseas by the separatist World Uighur Congress (WUC) led by Rebiya Kadeer." Sections of the city populated by concentrations of ethnic Uighurs, who make up only around 10% of Urumqi's population, were reportedly under curfew Monday.
Alim Seytoff, a spokesman for the WUC, a Washington, D.C.-based Uighur exile group founded by Rebiya Kadeer, denied it had had any role organizing the protests. "It is shocking to see the extent of the lethal force the Chinese government used against peaceful, unarmed protesters," Alim said in a telephone interview. "This is the darkest day in recent Uighur history."
Alim said the demonstrations were a reaction to a June 26 incident at a factory in Guangdong province, when two Uighur workers were beaten to death by Han Chinese colleagues. "The mob in Guangdong beat and killed Uighurs with immunity," Alim says. "The security forces didn't arrest anyone and did absolutely nothing. The protesters were very angry and disappointed." Alim added that the WUC believed that more than two Uighurs may have died in the Guangdong incident.
By Sally Sara | ABC - Australian Broadcasting Corporation
July 03, 2009
The Chinese Government has reacted angrily to an Australian parliamentary delegation's visit to meet Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India.
It is the first time a group of Australian MPs and senators has travelled to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.
The Chinese Embassy in Canberra says the visit constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.
The Dalai Lama says Tibet has been given a death sentence by the Chinese Government.
"No freedom of speech, no freedom of press. Their own people put in dark. It is, I think, immoral," he said.
The Dalai Lama spent more than an hour meeting with members of the first Australian parliamentary delegation to visit him in Dharamsala.
He thanked the all party group of MPs and senators for their support.
"Usually I describe our supporters not like pro-Tibetan, but rather pro-justice," he said.
Labor MP Michael Danby says several members of the delegation are hoping to travel to Tibet later in the year during an official visit to China.
"If the Parliament asks the Chinese Government to allow this group to go, I don't see why they shouldn't be," he said.
"They would be breaking their word and I'm sure the Chinese Government wouldn't like to be seen to be doing that."
The delegation expressed its support for the Dalai Lama's middle way approach of autonomy rather than independence for Tibet.
The Chinese Embassy in Canberra has condemned the Australian visit, saying it constitutes interference in China's internal affairs.
Fifty years after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, more activists are continuing to arrive in Dharamsala.
The Australian delegation visited a new arrivals centre and met one man who says he was shot by Chinese forces during a protest in March last year.
He told the delegation he thought he was going to die because he was bleeding so heavily.
On Monday, the Dalai Lama will celebrate his 74th birthday and he remains hopeful of returning home.
"Even some of my friends, Tibetan, are now 90 years old. Some, even [though] they [are] also still waiting, one day [will] go back," he said.
"So then I compare them who [are] already in [their] 90s. So I am a bit younger."
Search
The purpose of the website is to publish articles by journalists about a variety of topics concerning the People’s Republic of China. All journalists and the publications that publish their writings are clearly identified. All copyrights belong exclusively to the identified sources of these articles. | Powered by
Information + More