Tibet: May 2010 Archives

By Radio Free Asia
May 21, 2010

Authorities in Tibet ban popular ringtones characterized as 'separatist.'

Students and teachers at a high school near the Tibetan city of Shigatse have been told to delete certain popular Tibetan-language songs from their cell phones after they were designated "unhealthy" by local education officials, according to its Web site.

The school announced recently that owing to the "increasing complexity of separatism," a list of 27 popular Tibetan-language tracks had been banned, whether in audio or video disk format, or as digital media files on people's cell phones.

"Staff and students must not have any of the above songs as their mobile phone ringtone," an April 21 statement posted on the school's Web site, but since removed, said.

"If you have any of these songs as your ringtone, please will you delete them; if you own any of the above discs, please will you destroy them by melting or burning them," it added.

It said the school's Communist Party committee, the education and politics department and the Youth League branch would be carrying out clean-up campaigns targeting the banned songs.

"Anyone possessing the illegal music or videos will be severely dealt with," it warned.

It listed the 27 songs, which appeared mostly to be in the Tibetan language, and included titles like "Happy Shambala," "The Hope of the Son of the Snow-City," "The Five-Colored Prayer Flags (Tibetan-language version)," "Snow-Mountain Folk (Tibetan)" and "The Awaited Hope."

The order was posted by Beijing-based Tibetan writer and blogger Woeser, who also detailed further restrictions on the cultural lives of Tibetans in their capital Lhasa, which was rocked by widespread protests and rioting in March 2008.

Copy shops affected

An employee who answered the phone at a photocopy shop in Lhasa said the new rules applied to materials written in Tibetan.

"Basically it's to do with the Dalai Lama. You can't copy stuff about him in Tibetan," she said.

"Most of us can't read Tibetan. The Dalai Lama has to do with separatists, that's the main thing...a lot of our customers think it's a real pain, having to register."

Sources in Lhasa said that most copy shops in the city were run by Han Chinese, who have poured into the Himalayan region in recent years on a new railroad line.

"They say it's very hard to get a license [to run a copy shop] nowadays," the employee said. "We got ours a while back, but I heard it's much more difficult now."

The proprietor of a second print services shop in Lhasa confirmed that customers wanting to make photocopies had to produce their identity cards.

"It's [effective] from this month," he said. "It's better this way. It's a bit safer. It is good for everyone."

Woeser said that regulations of a similar sort had been in existence for a while, but had never been strictly enforced.

"It's a way of cowing people," she said. "But it'll probably rebound on them, making people very uncomfortable, micromanaging them to this extent."

Cultural contributors targeted

China has jailed scores of Tibetan writers, artists, singers, and educators for asserting Tibetan national identity and civil rights in the two years since widespread protests swept the region, according to the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT).

The report said some 31 writers, bloggers and intellectuals had been jailed for expressing unwelcome views since the March 2008 violence and demonstrations, which spread across Tibetan regions of China in the months that followed.

ICT released "A 'Raging Storm:' The Crackdown on Tibetan Writers & Artists after Tibet's Spring 2008 Protests" on May 18, saying that Tibetans had continued to write down and publish their own accounts of what had happened during the protests.

While initial writing efforts were published unofficially and quickly suppressed, they have been followed by a boom in Tibetan fiction and essay writing, with younger, tech-savvy Tibetans playing a key role, the group said.

Original reporting in Mandarin by Ding Xiao. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

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By Radio Free Asia
07 May 2010

Tibetans say mining at a sacred site prompted a major earthquake.

Tibetan herders in the remote western Chinese province of Qinghai have hit out at a mining company after it sank deep shafts into two sacred mountains in the area.

Four weeks before a devastating 6.9 degree earthquake hit the Yushu Tibetan region of Qinghai on April 14, local villagers have already taken their complaint about the Qinghai Xinyu Mining Co. as far as China's cabinet, the State Council, villagers and bloggers said.

"The earthquake happened on the day after they opened the seam," said Dhonwang, a Tibetan resident of Gyegu [in Chinese, Jiegu] township in Qinghai's Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

He said said local people were saying that diggers had reached the belly of the sacred mountain in Shanglaxiu village on the day before the earthquake, and that the two events were connected.

A second Tibetan resident of Gyegu, Tsering, also said nomadic herders from Shanlaxiu, Batang, and Xiaosumang villages in the Sanjiangyuan district were linking the earthquake to mining activites under two sacred mountains in the region.

"After the earthquake happened on [April] 14, a lot of the local people were threatening to kill the people who had taken part in the digging of the mine because they said they had now stirred up the sacred mountain and that this had caused the earthquake," he said.

"By the third or fourth day after the earthquake, most of the people in charge of the mine had fled."

Ecological damage from the mining operation had sparked complaints and petitions from local residents on several occasions, Tsering said.

Photos censored

Beijing-based Tibetan blogger and writer Woeser said a post reporting their petition in Beijing had been removed from a Tibet-related blog, blog.tibetcul.com, by censors.

In the blog post illustrated by more than 20 photos, the site detailed how a group of Tibetans from Xiaosumang had filed a petition with the State Council complaints office in Beijing, calling for an investigation into the company's operations.

They were complaining that the mining company was operating within an area that was supposed to be under environmental protection, and yet it was failing to take into account the personal safety or the property of local people, and that they were harming the fragile local ecosystem.

In their report, the villagers said that unrestricted mining activities in the region since 2003 had led to maternal and infant health problems, which they blamed on chemical pollutants allowed into the local environment.

Local young women had been unable to give birth naturally, and 90 percent of babies had been stillborn or born with deformities, they claimed.

They called on the central government to launch an investigation under China's environmental protection law into the activities of the Qinghai Xinyu Mining Co. and into unnamed mining executives from Putian city in the southeastern province of Fujian.

Questions raised

Sichuan-based government seismologist Fan Xiao said that mine shafts didn't go deep enough to have a direct effect on the faultline along which the Qinghai earthquake occurred.

"Sometimes, very sudden events, or man-made activity, can be linked [to earthquakes]," said Fan, who has argued that China's extensive hydroelectric dam-building program could have triggered the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

"But it's not very easy to provide a scientific explanation for the sort of links you are talking about, although it seems that they are linked in some way," he said.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Hai Nan. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated from  the Chinese and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han

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