Countdown Beijing : Crisis in Tibet

Sharon Stone's Fatal Retraction

Melinda Liu — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:46:15 GMT

What made actress Sharon Stone apologize? Many assume she was compelled by her five-year cosmetics advertising contract with Dior, or her desire to sell more "Casino" cinema tickets to a population totally enamored of Los Vegas. Market forces -- and the risk-averse nature of many top brands -- were undoubtedly a factor.

But, hey, everyone knows Chinese cinemas only show a very small number of foreign films anyway; "Basic Instinct" isn't one of them. Stone's name is known on the mainland mainly through pirated DVD's of her movies, which earn her some fame but no revenue.

What really happened is simple: Stone made some insensitive remarks, in the wake of a massive natural disaster that has left more than 68,000 confirmed dead and another 20,000 some missing. Flippancy in the face of so much suffering is bad PR and both Stone and Dior (which removed her from its mainland ad campaign) know it.

This is the first time a major Hollywood celebrity has said sorry to Beijing, though those who've criticized Chinese human rights abuses in the past make for a star-studded cast. There's Mia Farrow, who's campaigning for a boycott of the "Genocide Olympics" due to atrocities in Darfur and China's support. of the Khartoum regime. There's Steven Spielberg, who stepped down as artistic director of the Beijing Games opening ceremonies, also over Darfur. There's Richard Gere, who says "cultural genocide" is taking place in Tibet and is a devotee of the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.

But the qualitative difference here is that Stone's comments came just as the Chinese population is rallying behind the quake relief effort and grieving over the victims, displaying a unity of purpose between grassroots citizens and officialdom that never seemed so closeknit before. In other words, Stone may really have come close to "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," as the cliched saying goes. (When we foreign media write something the government doesn't like, that's traditionally the charge leveled against us). Chinese bloggers have called her "dirty swine" and Xinhua news agency dubbed her the "public enemy of all mankind."

For the record, Stone's original comment -- suggesting that what goes around had come around for Chinese authorities -- was made during a brief red-carpet interview at the Cannes Film Festival (and it was somewhat tempered by additional statements). Asked about her Buddhist faith, she said "I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans...I've been concerned about how should we deal with the [Beijing] Olympics, because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened. And then I thought, 'is that karma, when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?'"

Indeed. Let's go to the videotape:

Everest Torch: The Price of the Peak

Mary Hennock — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:49:20 GMT

So they've done it. Chinese mountaineers finally raised the Olympic torch on top of Everest this morning. To get there they overcame difficulties that threatened to derail the ascent, or delay it beyond China's weather-related May 10 deadline. They sat out high winds and snowstorms that buried or destroyed their camps and rope-routes. Then they dug through fresh snow to repair equipment. This morning, they headed for the summit against a backdrop of steely clouds and blowing snow, though mercifully the wind had dropped.

Once they reached the peak, they behaved like any other summit party, though perhaps a little more solemnly, as they slapped each other on the back, and passed the torch from hand to hand. Official congratulations on state television all emphasized how they'd conquered their difficulties.

They deserve their success, but in one sense they were beaten before they started. Olympic organizers had visualized the Everest ascent as the high point of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay. It was meant to provide the most dramatic images in a relay chock-full of superlatives--the longest, the highest, the largest number of countries, runners etc.

This hasn't happened. The defining moments of the Beijing 2008 Torch Relay will forever be from London and Paris, where 'Free Tibet' protesters jostled torch bearers and police tackled demonstrators to the ground. Those pictures triggered an international online slanging match about China's place in the world. Angry young Chinese netizens bubbled with fury at what they saw as a deliberate slight to newly-confident China, while Western human rights activists jabbed away at China's short-comings.

The sight of the torch on top of Everest cannot override these events.

The staggering financial cost of the ascent will probably never be known. China has built a road to the mountain and a media center at its base, and kept at least 50 mountaineers there for two months. It has paid Nepal compensation for lost climbing revenue after persuading its tiny neighbor to close the south side of the mountain till May 10.

Happily for them, China's summiteers met their deadline. The costs to China's image have been high, though. Activists in the Tibetan Youth Congress have made clear that they viewed the Olympic preparations as a unique chance to publicize the Tibetan cause. While the riots in Lhasa no doubt had many local triggers, it's hard to believe the Olympic spotlight played no part in the initial monks' protests.

Mountaineers waiting on the Nepalese side of the mountain can now start their own ascents, but they face difficult decisions. They've already spent much of the climbing season corralled inside Everest Base Camp by the Nepalese army and police. It's not certain they'll still have enough time to get to the top before the summer monsoon arrives at the end of May, bringing heavy snow, thunder and a greater risk of avalanches. With so many teams rushing for the summit at once, the dangers are magnified.

Although the torch's Everest ascent hasn't provided the most dramatic images of China's Olympics so far, it may be the most fitting symbol. The climb epitomises the spirit of Beijing's Olympic preparations - take on a massive task, (like modernizing one's capital city), benchmark oneself as publicly as possible, and succeed at all costs. It's breathtakingly bold, maybe even admirable, to take on such a difficult task and complicate it with so much publicity. But the resultant inflexibility carries a price.

Insecurity Checks

Jonathan Ansfield — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:28:59 GMT

China’s so tough on terrorism, we often question its claims thereof. Events earlier this week were symptomatic of the government's credibility gap on that score. On Monday, flames engulfed a public bus in Shanghai on Monday, killing three people and injuring twelve.

The initial read from Shanghai authorities became a red herring for terrorist involvement. First the Xinhua news agency, in a short-winded dispatch, said an “explosion” started the fire. Soon Shanghai residents buzzed with speculation that Muslim Uighur “splittists” lurked behind the incident.

Many foreign media were also led to posit the worst, making prominent mention of alleged Uighur plots to undermine the Olympics that Chinese authorities say they’ve recently thwarted. Within hours, though, witnesses told outlets like the AP and LA Times they never heard the boom of a blast. The media blitz might have made a difference. By the end of the day Xinhua had revised its story to say “a fire” broke out after a passenger brought aboard unspecified “inflammable material”, thought to have been gasoline. Based on what we know now, this was just an unfortunate accident.

False alarms like this one have become commonplace the world over. But they do nothing to help the government's reputation for caginess as far as alleged terror threats are concerned. Since the 1990’s, the Uighur homeland of Xinjiang has been shaken by sporadic bombings, arson, attacks on officials, and shootouts between Chinese security forces and Uighur militants. There is evidence of Uighur guerrillas have been in cahoots with an alphabet soup of foreign-based Islamic and Uighur groups, Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda among them.

But all along, security analysts and Uighur exiles contend, China’s been padding a very thin case of organized militancy, and using it to justify heavy-duty security and religious clamps on the Uighur population. Sure, the Communist Party doesn’t catch nearly the same amount of flak internationally for its policies in Xinjiang that it does for its campaign in Tibetan regions. That’s largely because the U.S. and its allies have been bogged down in their own shadowy, assymetric battles against Islamic elements at home and abroad – and to some extent have backed Beijing’s.

Still, China has a nervous habit of sending out smoke signals of foul play without delivering much proof. The pre-Olympic rumblings in Xinjiang have cast this P.R. problem in stark relief. In the absence of verifiable accounts of raids, confessions or arrests, the most compelling proof of the threat China faces has come in the backhanded form of its countermeasures.

Analysts took note last month, for example, when a Chinese court charged that Uighur separatists from one blacklisted terrorist group had trained in camps on Pakistani soil, the first time China has so implicated its “all-weather” ally. One week later, neighboring countries announced Pakistan would buy Chinese military aid to combat terrorist activity.

The most visible move, for anyone living here, came in mid-March. Aviation authorities outlawed air travelers from carrying most any liquids or aerosols onto domestic flights, and ordered airports to tighten searches of passengers and bags. The new regulations came just a few days after word emerged that an air crew had busted Muslim Uighur passengers fixing to set an airplane ablaze.

Xinjiang's top two honchos unveiled news of the March 7 ploy two days later, at the annual National People's Congress in Beijing. They offered few details, but made the sweeping accusation that one alleged Uighur terrorist group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, was scheming against the Olympics. Official media took a traditionally cautious approach, soft-peddling the news at face value.

Over the next couple days, The New York Times and others leaked online accounts of passengers (The Opposite End of China blogger provides a spirited roundup). In turn, Communist Party media amplified slightly. The accused Uighurs had diddled security, the Global Times reported, by emptying several soda cans and using syringes to refill them with petrol, diluting the nauseous scent with perfume. On March 7, it asserted, a 19-year old Uighur woman sneaked the cans aboard a China Southern Airlines flight from Urumqi to Beijing. She headed to the lavatory in the back of the craft, intending to set the contents of the cans aflame. But one of the stewardesses picked up the scent. The Uighur teen was subdued along with a man suspected of being her accomplice, and the plane made an emergency landing in Lanzhou.

According to what China Southern boss Liu Shaoyong told Phoenix TV a couple days later, the flight attendant found the container of flammable liquid in the trash receptacle of the bathroom. He did not explain why the Uighur girl might have left it there, whether intentionally or not (a riddle that the Telegraph's Richard Spencer soon took up on his blog).

Still, Liu saw fit to conclude, in contrast to past hijacking attempts aimed at diverting flights to Taiwan or achieving other individual motives, this incident was "obviously organized", with "political purposes, aimed at the Olympics". The Global Times - a hawkish vehicle of China's foreign policy and military establishment, published by the Communist Party flagship People's Daily - stayed on-message with the official statements to that point. It branded the incident “a well-prepared, meticulously planned, tightly coordinated, terror attack activity."

But how well-conceived could this botched ploy have been? Details trickled out piecemeal, and skepticism soon arose over how the news was first handled. Why did top Xinjiang apparatchiks who first revealed the averted "air disaster" give such vague accounts? Why did Xinhua pull its initial English-language story? Why did the plane continue on after stopping in Lanzhou? In the early going, there was an independent probe by a respected Chinese newspaper, Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend. But it appears that propaganda authorities put the kibosh on the story before the presses rolled.

The Southern Weekend report slipped out online anyway. It was promptly translated by Roland Soong, the acclaimed Hong Kong-based blogger at EastSouthWestNorth, who keeps a very reliable bead on newsrooms in Guangzhou. In the report, the Southern Weekend reporter recounted pursuing a passenger over the Internet, who gave him the following account by phone:

"After flying for about an hour, a passenger remarked that there was the smell of gasoline. The attendant also smelled it because it was too strong.

"We were flying on a Boeing 757 that day. The plane was not big, and the rest rooms were located between the first-class cabin and the economy cabin. There were more than 200 passengers. The airplane was not full, because there were two vacant rows of seats in the rear.

"I was seated towards the back, and I heard a quarrel. An Uyghur woman about 20 years old was on her feet. This Uyghur woman was seated towards the front to my right. She was probably in the fourth or fifth row of the economy-class cabin.

"A man went over there. My guess was that he was the security guard. He held the woman down and found a bottle. He removed the bottle and then escorted her to the restroom. We had no idea what was happening. There was no announcement. During the entire process, there was no chaos. It was very calm. At least I felt very calm. Someone in the rear slept through the whole thing without being aware at all.

"After noon, we began to feel that the airplane was descending. An announcement came that there was an emergency situation and the airplane was going to land at Zhongchuan Airport in the city of Lanzhou. A few minutes after that announcement, the airplane touched ground."

Incidentally, his suppressed account tracked with the second-hand version I’d heard that same week. At a dinner, by chance, I met a Han Chinese woman living in Urumqi. She had taken the identical flight to Beijing one day later, on March 8. When it was delayed from taking off without explanation, she rang a friend working as an airport official to ask what was up. Thus she was informed about the incident one day before Xinjiang bosses spoke out about it.

The Uighur teen, by her account, was an amateur. The young woman made her way to the W.C. clutching the soda cans in full view, which looked sketchy. "Who takes soda cans to the washroom?" Her accomplices were two Uighur men who started an argument in order to divert attention.

March 7 happened to be the eleventh anniversary of the bombing of a bus traveling past the leadership compound in Beijing, which was blamed on Uighur separatists. Did this source think the "terrorist" plot on the plane was as serious as the government said? "You have to understand China," she replied. “Before the Olympics, there’s no way the government would admit to this if it didn’t happen.”

The gravity of the matter was manifested most clearly in the new airport security ground rules. In April, officials followed up by prohibiting lighters and matches on planes and cracking down on liquids in express mail cargo as well. The initial ban was promulgated on March 13. There was just two days’ advance notice before it went into effect.

The haste showed. Lack of notice triggered scenes of chaos at airport security lines -- exacerbated by the fact that Tibetan rioting and protests had broken out that same weekend, propelling many foreign correspondents to Beijing's airport in a breathless rush. I wound up having two encounters with the new rules -- war against terror, Chinese-style -- in a short span of time. That's a blog for a later time.

Why China-based Journalists Carry Diamox

Melinda Liu — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:04:04 GMT

Reading my colleague Mary's blog posting yesterday made me wonder: how many media assembled on Everest to cover the Olympic torch relay to the top are taking Diamox? On more than one occasion those little white pills have allowed me to hit the ground running (okay, maybe just walking purposefully) in Lhasa in recent years -- as opposed to setting aside at least a day, unable to work, getting used to the high altitude (okay, make that lying in bed with splitting headaches and nausea).

On my first trip to Tibet, in July 1980, I'd never heard of Diamox. And I wasn't ready to "rest for the first afternoon without leaving the hotel", as my group's official Foreign Ministry handlers advised. I was on one of the post-Mao government's first independent press tours of Tibet. We were terrifically excited to be allowed to report on the roof of the world. We'd even pitched in to pay for the transport and lodging of our own translator, Mr. Wang, the Chicago Tribune office assistant.

Instead of resting in our rooms that first day, we clamored to be allowed into the center of town, the fabled Barkhor area where the Jokhang temple is located. The officials accompanying our group refused. But they did agree to sit down at the hotel to discuss with us the following week's itinerary. We had a decidedly unappetizing lunch -- I recall that the butter had sprouted green mold, and I mistakenly thought it was blue cheese at first -- and then gathered around a coffee table to hash out the itinerary.

By this time Mr. Wang was looking a bit pale; he clutched a rubber oxygen-filled bag with the end of an attached tube stuck into one nostril. He gamely tried to keep up with his translation, but clearly felt worse and worse as the negotiations went on. He began fiddling anxiously with the oxygen tube. I thought "Hmm, he really looks green around the gills" -- at which point he vomited his lunch all over the coffee table.

The meeting ended abruptly. By this time I was feeling pretty bad myself. Head pounding, I retreated to my hotel room, dozed for the rest of the afternoon, and even slept through dinner (yup, our handlers got their wish after all). By early evening I felt fine. Turns out that by skipping dinner I had done my oxygen-starved brain a favor, since eating food draws blood to the stomach (and away from the brain), exacerbating headaches and nausea.

At very least, carrying Diamox can help a journalist make the most of his or her trip to Tibet, by reducing the "down time" required for acclimatization. Then again, the foreign correspondents on Everest have been waiting quite a while for the weather to clear so that the torch can ascend -- the one thing they have had on their hands, paradoxically, is time.

Everest Torch: Battling against Peak of Embarrassment

Mary Hennock — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:19:36 GMT

The Olympic flame returned to mainland China over the weekend amid the sort of carnival mood that Beijing has been longing for. Although the globe-trotting torch was borne aloft in the seaside resort of Sanya by athletes, celebrities, and the CEO of trendy Nasdaq-listed website Sohu.com, however, its sister flame in Tibet seems to be going nowhere.

The torch in Tibet remains stranded on the slopes of Everest, its exact whereabouts a mystery. Bad weather over the weekend scuppered the torch team's training ascents to adjust to the altitude, and now threatens their chances of getting to the top inside China's original May 10 deadline.

High winds last week, and then heavy snow over the weekend have pinned down Chinese mountaineers for six days now, NEWSWEEK has learned. Last Tuesday, Chinese climbers who had passed the 7,000 meter-mark were forced back down to lower ground by dangerously strong winds. Then on Friday to Sunday, the mountain was pummeled by a snowstorm, causing further delays. Should the storms clear, the climbers (now waiting at 6,500 meters) will have to plough their way through fresh snow on the upper slopes, the so-called "one meter a minute" zone where every footstep demands willpower.

Torch relay organizers have acknowledged there's a problem, and are putting a brave face on it. Shao Shiwei, deputy director of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games' media department, said on Sunday the timing of the ascent looked "uncertain", according to Reuters. "It's hard to say if there will be a long delay or not, I don't have any information," he told a news conference, promising more details once the the team gets a clearer weather forecast. That seems fair enough. Less convincingly, he suggested that any setback caused by the storms was insignificant because the torch team's preparations for an ascent were still incomplete.

"Since the training, adjustments and the route fixing are integral parts of the overall mountaineering event, I think the weather conditions will not have a great effect on the final ascent," said Shao.

This is more debatable, as the mountain's weather patterns offer only a brief chance to conquer it each year. China originally asked neighboring Nepal, to close its side of Everest to other expeditions till May 10. If that deadline is missed, it will have to persuade Nepal to extend it. This may not be the toughest diplomatic challenge as Nepal has already taken extraordinary measures to assist its economically powerful neighbour. Kathmandu has closed the Nepalese side of the mountain above 6,500 meters, impounded mountaineers' satellite phones in a tent to prevent unmonitored communications, expelled journalists and sent troops and police to patrol Everest base camp. Nepalese security personnel reportedly have orders to use lethal force against protesters, according to local media.

Even if China buys more time from Nepal, time is not limitless. Everything depends on whether the summer monsoon holds off till June or arrives early. It brings massive thunderstorms and heavy snows that "will put the mountain off-limits till autumn", according to high-altitude climatologist Dr Javier Corripio from the University of Innsbruck who forecasts the weather on the major Himalayan peaks. http://www.meteoexploration.com/mountain/forecasts.htm . Nonetheless, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest on May 29 1953, so late ascents are possible.

Dr Corripio is cautiously optimistic, saying the torch bearers have a "a good chance of reaching the summit by May 10". He's predicting calmer winds, and thinks brewing thunderstorms will remain off to the south. If China's team is not fully acclimatized they may have to go slowly, in which case dangerous 50 kilometer-an -hour winds on Wednesday could prove a problem, breaking up an ascent which generally takes a fit, well-positioned team two days in good weather.

Whatever dangers the torch bearers face, mountaineers are predicting even greater risks for the expeditions stalled in their tents on the Nepalese South Face. Once the torch summits - if it summits - they will rush for the top in the few remaining climbing days. With scant chance to acclimatize, and a traffic jam at the top, there's a high risk of casualties. "It is a recipe for disaster", says Dr Corripio.

There are several hundred climbers stuck in Nepal's Everest Base Camp, and a further 200 tents altogether at Camps One and Two (the latter at 6,400 meters), according to MountEverest.net, a community site for mountaineers. It reports a Nepali police post has been set up at Camp Two, and says there's a soldier "doing the rounds each day with a sniper rifle" to keep potential protesters off China's side of the mountain. Last week, an American mountaineer was deported from Nepal after a Tibetan flag was found in his backpack. Even the Italian flag is banned, according to Silvio Mondinelli whose expedition was ordered to remove it from the top of their tents.

Journalists who visited the Nepalese Everest Base Camp have reported sightings of Chinese military in Nepalese villages lower down the Everest trail, and a recent airborne inspection by senior Chinese military guests in a Nepalese army helicopter. If true, then China has leaned heavily into Nepal's internal affairs to protect its Olympic pride and its sovereignty over Tibet from attention-grabbing stunts by protesters.

Meanwhile, China sought to placate international criticism of its handling of the March riots in Tibet by holding talks with envoys of Dalai Lama on Sunday. The talks sputtered to a halt after one day, rather than the original three days, but both sides have agreed to talk again. Neither see these discussions as more than exploratory, and many Western commentators doubt whether China has any serious intentions. The talks were preceded by more sharply critical editorials on the Dalai Lama in the Chinese media, but they took place, which is more than seemed possible a month ago. If they fail, the Dalai Lama's weakening hold over militants in the Tibetan Youth Congress is likely to slip further.

UPDATE: Prospects for an ascent continue to look grim. Chinese officials gave an upbeat press conference on Monday, but the weather does not yet appear to be lifting. Late on Monday the BBC's Jonah Fisher, one of the journalists at the Chinese base camp reported in his diary that "It is obvious from the snow and high winds we have been experiencing that it is unlikely that the climbers will be making an attempt on the summit anytime soon." There are signs, however, of cameras and extra climbing equipment being moved up the mountain.

Western Media Getting Death Threats

Melinda Liu — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:25:54 GMT

I just heard about another journalist colleague who received an anonymous warning online which threatened not just him but also his kids. Creepy. With just 100 days to go before the 2008 Games, some Western journalists don't exactly feel welcome in the face of death threats, shrill and sometimes obscene name-calling, and criticisms of purported "bias" in Western media reporting of Tibet.

The interesting thing is this: when I tell Chinese friends that foreign reporters are getting death threats, some don't believe it and others just shrug as if to say "what can anyone do?" Even if I point out that issuing a death threat violates Chinese law, few seem to think this law needs to be enforced.

Don't get me wrong: China remains a relatively safe country to work in as a foreign reporter. That's precisely what makes the present nastiness so noticeable.

he Foreign Correspondents Club of China -- of which I'm president -- released a statement about such concerns. Here's the text:

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN:

100 Days Ahead of the Beijing Olympics, Foreign Correspondents Club of China Concerned about Deteriorating Reporting Conditions

April 30, 2008 -- One hundred days before the Olympics, death threats against foreign correspondents and official statements demonizing Western media risk creating a hostile environment for foreign journalists based in China and for tens of thousands of additional media planning to cover the Games, says the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC).

At least ten foreign correspondents in China have received anonymous death threats during a campaign, on the Web and in state-run media, against alleged bias in Western media coverage of the Tibetan unrest and its aftermath.

The introduction of Olympics regulations allowing free travel and interviewing in China by foreign media between January 2007 and October 2008 represented an improvement in reporting conditions. However since March 14, the FCCC has learned of more than 50 incidents of interference in the work of international media trying to report in Tibetan communities. Foreign correspondents have been detained, prevented from conducting interviews, searched, and subjected to the confiscation or destruction of reporting materials. Authorities have intimidated Chinese sources and staff, and in some cases ordered them to inform on foreign correspondents’ activities.

“If allowed to continue, the reporting interference and hate campaigns targeting international media may poison the pre-Games atmosphere for foreign journalists,” says FCCC President Melinda Liu. “We urge government authorities to investigate the death threats, which violate Chinese law, and otherwise help create an environment in keeping with their Olympic promises.”

It’s not too late to improve conditions. The FCCC also urges:

n Nationwide implementation of the Olympic reporting regulations, including full media access to Tibet and Tibetan areas in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan.

n Investigation of reports of official harassment of foreign media.

n Timely issuance of press visas to foreign media planning to report in China during the Olympics period.

n Improved government transparency, especially in Olympics-related departments*.

n Guarantees that Chinese nationals who speak to foreign media will not be punished or intimidated.

n An early pledge to extend the current foreign media reporting regulations after they expire on Oct. 17, 2008.

The FCCC fully supports Beijing’s Olympics action plan, made public in 2002, to “be open in every aspect to the rest of the country and the whole world” and to “follow international standards and criteria” in the period before and during the 2008 Games. We urge Beijing to make good on these commitments at the earliest possible date.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China

April 30, 2008

The FCCC is an independent Beijing-based organization for professional journalists, with more than 325 foreign correspondent members. For more information see http://www.fccchina.org. If you have questions, please e-mail fcccadmin@gmail.com

*APPENDIX ON OLYMPICS REPORTING CONDITIONS: Views from six sports journalists

The FCCC asked six veteran sports correspondents from six countries to comment on their experiences covering Beijing’s preparations for the Olympics. All have covered previous Games, and are currently stationed in Beijing. The reporters said that, overall, BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games) propaganda officials are relatively progressive and open compared to those in most other Chinese government agencies. However, the reporters found that access to spokespersons and newsmakers remains a major obstacle. Even when authorities speak on the record, the quality of statements and data is inadequate. Compared to previous Olympics, the biggest difference is access to athletes and training camps, which some journalists said seem to be cloaked in secrecy.

OVERALL:

"Working on the Olympics is very much like doing everything else as a journalist in China. [Authorities] are suspicious about you. But I think BOCOG officials are quite progressive in some ways, and I think that some people in the foreign ministry are progressive. They want to give you as much information as possible but they can't give you enough. My general impression is: frustrating but positive." -- A reporter for a French media organization.

"In some cases, I don't think BOCOG is trying to restrict information. I think they just don't understand the process of how journalism works, and how quickly responses are needed on news stories.” -- A sports reporter who’s been in Beijing for more than a year.

"There is an ingrained suspicion of foreigners. The old view still persists: 'why should we talk to the media?'” -- A European news agency reporter.

ON ACCESS TO ATHLETES:

"Athletes are not available to the media. I have requested visits to training camps several times but have always been turned down." -- Francesco Liello, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy.

"I’ve had more access to American athletes here [in China] than to Chinese athletes." -- A reporter for a French media organization.

"Getting hold of a Liu Xiang [China’s champion hurdler] would be difficult anywhere in the world. But even if you want to talk to…a weightlifter, you have to call the sports ministry. An official passes you on to the weight-lifting department, which requests a fax, which often leads to a reply that an interview is 'not convenient.' " -- A European news agency reporter.

ON ACCESS TO OFFICIALS:

"I know who to call, but I don't get any answers." -- A European sports reporter.

"There are an adequate number of press conferences, but no valuable information is given, ever." -- Francesco Liello, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy.

"Even for casual inquiries, such as how many seats in a stadium, you have to go through a huge rigmarole. Very straightforward information -- like how much are they spending on the Olympics -- is almost impossible to find out.” -- A European news agency reporter.

"In Athens it was the case, too, that there were a lot of questions but not many answers. But here the information barrier is bigger and stronger. They are not used to dealing with the foreign media…They don't really have the feeling that they have to answer questions." -- A reporter for a French media organization.

ON THE QUALITY AND RELIABILITY OF DATA:

"Data varies according to department. [Some officials] mix apples and pears. BOCOG often just picks up Xinhua News Agency reports, which are unreliable. They throw around estimates. Nailing down a figure doesn't seem to be remotely important." -- A European news agency reporter.

“Veracity is very low... I don’t believe the statistics…BOCOG’s spokesmen just don’t have much credibility. I can’t verify anything.” – A sports reporter who’s been in Beijing for more than a year.

Pilgrims Progress: Khotan's New Game

Jonathan Ansfield — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:03:36 GMT

Uighur jade peddlers at the bazaar in Khotan....

Before tensions imploded in Tibetan areas, Chinese officials thought the chief domestic security threat to the 2008 Summer Games would come from Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Many officials still think that. My recent journey to one traditional redoubt of Uighur unrest revealed growing polarization of the religious and cultural landscape, as both the economy and Islam begin to flourish. Whether the situation might devolve into the extremism Beijing evokes is another question however. Herewith some field notes I made while reporting an earlier magazine piece:

Sunday’s “big bazaar” day in Khotan, on China’s northwest frontier, where the big money’s tied up in Khotanese jade. Prices for pure nephrite from the local “White Jade River” have shot up ten-fold in just two to three years, helping this desert junction on the storied Silk Road – in the late 1990’s, a poor, dusty seedbed of violent outbursts by Muslim Uighur separatists – recoup some of its ancient luster as a nexus of trade. On a recent Sunday in April, along an arcade lined by dozens of jade shops and a vast mosque, Uighur men in skullcaps shuffled about in scrums, palms extended like beggars. They held pebbles with black beauty marks, sunbursts of orange, and creme de mint-colored ripples. The precious stones fetched offers in the hundreds of dollars from Han Chinese collectors from as far east as Suzhou.

These were only the smalltime hawkers. The leading Uighur stone merchants, who sell to Han Chinese connoisseurs, fellow Uighur compradores, and migrant lapidarists from wealthier inland regions, are amassing once-unimaginable fortunes. But to cement their status and wealth, they invest in travel in the opposite direction: to Mecca. Along the bazaar is a little Islamic bookshop built into the side of the mosque between jade shops, where the lone frill on the walls is a blown-up photo of the throngs at Mecca. The young woman behind the counter, whose parents joined in on the journey four years ago, raved that as of just the past few years, there were "so many wealthy Uighurs" in Khotan. “All the rich want to go on Haj, to become ‘Hajji’,” said Adelet, adding: “All the Hajji end up the richest.”

In the past decade, Beijing has made substantial inroads in extending trade, transport and technology links to the eight million-plus Uighurs in Xinjiang. This has been part of the government’s strategy to convert an alienated minority, who are mostly Muslim and speak a Turkic dialect, to the national faith in the Chinese market. For six decades, Uighurs by and large have considered themselves a subjugated caste – overrun politically by the Communist Party, territorially by the People’s Liberation Army army, and economically by waves of Han Chinese settlers and state companies moving in on the region’s lode of oil and minerals. Uighurs have seen their communities colonized by Chinese schools, civil service quotas, changes to the official written script and the “patriotic” religious (or not-so-religious) regime restricted to state-approved mosques, imams, and copies of the Qu’ran. Economic progress has furnished newfound opportunity and greater personal leeway. But one unintended side effect in this Central Asian outback is Beijing's contest against Islam for influence .

Islam has in fact prevailed in Khotan, the region’s most densely Uighur-populated prefecture, for nearly a millennium. Effectively purged from Uighur lives during the Cultural Revolution, when mosques were desecrated and imams denounced, the religion now marks one of two very disparate paths to success.

In Khotan, the way of the “Hajji”, as veterans of the Haj to Mecca are called, promises big dividends in terms of local commerce, community clout, and personal space to speak Uighur and practice Islam. But it comes at the expense of many job and educational opportunities, tight controls on everyday ritual, and the increasing risk of state scrutiny. Meanwhile the state-approved path offers improving education, job and welfare incentives – but at the expense of everyday Islamic practices and the mother tongue, not to mention the growing risk of being ostracized by more devout fellow Uighurs. Neither road is easy. Most Uighurs still don’t “make it” either way.

The two spheres are bound by common interests in business, stability and guanxi. But they also appear bound to clash. As Islam spreads, Communist Party authorities in China, officially godless, are working nervously to contain it.

Religious and socioeconomic frictions ignited suddenly in late March, following the mysterious death of one of the foremost Hajji jade men in Khotan. Mutallip Hajim, 38, was a jade aficionado with a network of Chinese clients nationwide, and a major patron of his Muslim Uighur community. But his dealings led to run-ins with Chinese authorities, say peddlers at the bazaar.

Two to three years ago, recounted one friend of Hajim’s family, a top communist party cadre in the prefecture fancied a jade nugget in Hajim’s shop; it's value was then appraised at around one million yuan ($125,000). The official expected a healthy discount, but Hajim informed him he would have to pay top dollar, since, as the friend put it, “the government has money”. The party boss was incensed, and snapped back: “’There’s something wrong with your head.'" Later, for reasons not fully clear, police searched Hajim's house and accused him of possessing “anti-government” Islamic texts. During his latest spell in police detention, Hajim unexpectedly died. Police told his family he'd suffered a heart attack.

In response, on March 23, women from Hajim’s home in nearby Qaraqash county spearheaded two separate demonstrations. At least 200 people descended on the Sunday bazaar in central Khotan, according to witnesses, many veiled in black boshiya in the style of devout Hajji women. Some distributed flyers advocating independence and protesting a ban on female head scarves in certain state workplaces, particularly schools. Chinese security forces, whose garrisons corner Khotan, cordoned off the area swiftly enough: two weeks later, many traders in the sprawling bazaar said they hadn’t even seen the gathering. Others were too nervous or “busy” to broach the subject. Radio Free Asia broke the news only ten days later. A Uighur exile group later reported that at least 70 women had been arrested in the protests.

While the gloves have come off in the struggle over Tibet, Chinese authorities have been shadow-boxing in recent weeks with alleged Islamic separatists in Xinjiang. Not long ago police officials announced they'd arrested 35 people accused of plotting to bomb hotels in Beijing and Shanghai; poison meat supplies; and kidnap Olympic athletes, foreign journalists, and other visitors during the Aug. 8-23 Games. This followed media reports in early March that authorities had foiled two other plots -- one to blow up an aircraft, botched by a Uighur woman now thought to have been carrying a Pakistani passport.

At an international security cooperation conference Friday in Beijing, Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble said there was a "real possibility" the Games could be targeted by terrorists, or that anti-China groups might attack athletes. "Recent Tibet-related protests have introduced significant additional complications to the normal security considerations for a major international event like these Olympics," he said.

In Khotan, officials have alleged that “splittist elements” there had tried to “trick the masses into an uprising.” The demonstrations, one Xinjiang goverrnment official told the China News Service, were part of a coordinated campaign of protests planned by Hizb ut-Tahrir, a religious organization that aims to create a pan-Islamic state, or caliphate. The group is banned in Russia and some Central Asian nations.

Critics say Beijing has manipulated the U.S.-led “war on terror” and grossly inflated accounts of “movements” and militancy to justify its relentless crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang; the sweeping charges and in turn only makes Beijing’s claims harder to assess. In the late 1990’s, Khotan was racked by incidents of arson and attacks on officials directed by ringleaders allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden. But the fleeting March protests amounted to the most visible instance of unrest in years, citizens there said. Many Uighurs interviewed said they only heard of the accused plotters of “Hizb ut”, as they termed the group, in the months before or weeks afterward, most of them via channels linked directly to the state, such as “political education” classes, warnings from state employers, or idle chatter at military bases or security companies. “If they really do exist here, you can’t see them,” commented one teacher at a Khotan technical college.

By the same token, both officials and Uighur exile leaders, in interviews, speculated that demonstrators might have been inspired by the unrest in Tibet to bring attention to their cause ahead of the Olympics. In Khotan, some Han Chinese and Uighur state employees had heard that theory or thought it plausible. But most Uighurs flatly refuted the Tibetan connection. It was also a subject they were anxious not to discuss.

Uighurs and Tibetans do however share a complex list of grievances against Beijing, including a severe ontological disconnect over their religious faith. Party and police authorities have long been quick to peg unsanctioned Islamic texts, schools, or dress, and even non-violent dissent as “religious extremism” and conflate it with terrorism and separatism – together dubbed the three “evil forces”.

Though Beijing lacks evidence of organized extremism, there is “increased religious conservatism” in pockets of Uighur society, notes Dru Gladney, an authority on China’s Muslims at Pomona College in California. The religious revival has coincided with growing numbers of well-off Uighurs going on the Haj – considered a rite every Muslim should perform at least once in life. Nationwide, a total of 10,700 Muslims belonging to the Hui and Uighur Musliim minorities made the trip in 2007, 900 more than in 2006 -- though Party authorities have maintained strict caps on the numbers since opening passage to Mecca in the 1980’s.

In Saudi Arabia, pilgrims are exposed to “new waves of Islamic thinking and teaching from the Middle East” and come back with “greatly enhanced authority," says Gladney. On their return, families and neighbors can be seen gathering roadside to honor Hajji's with a heroes’ reception. Hajjis become the equivalent of made men in the community, by the account of locals in Khotan, gracing weddings and other life-cycle events as honored guests. Although they’re not clerics, some are also treated to banquets and speaking engagements, where they disseminate sharpened political and religious views.

Historically, Uighurs have practiced a relatively temperate amalgam of Sunni Islam and Sufi mysticism imbued in folk entertainments like the twelve Muqam, a suite of epic song cycles. Notwithstanding a distinct increase in bearded men, veiled women and religious fervor, many Khotan residents contend most Hajji businessmen appear to remain just that – businessman. They know better than to dabble in politics or radical Islam. “Maybe some of the Hajji think about those things, but most are more about business,” observed Abdul, a non-religious businessman in Khotan. “Our government is always accusing people of separatism and terrorism,” echoed the Hajim family friend. “But most people are not about this at all. Most are still moderate Muslims.”

Officials are careful not to implicate the Hajji in their crackdown on the “three evil forces”. But as the ranks of Hajji and their "wannabe's" have mushroomed, Uighurs also widely contend, authorities have quietly pinched at ties to Mecca.

To start, passport controls have tightened. In some villages in Khotan, Uighurs from the prefecture say, only one or two passports are being issued a year now, often to the highest bidder.

Paying for passage to Mecca is another challenge entirely. As of 2004, the state has restricted pilgrimages by offering only expensive, officially escorted tours to Mecca—at $5,000 or more each. Authorities also have required exhaustive background checks. Starting this year, the state also extended the rule to block Uighurs who receive a government salary from going at all. Of the 10,700 pilgrims from China in 2007, only around 3,400 were from Xinjiang.

State employees were already prevented from fasting on the job during Ramadan and are strongly discouraged – if not outright forbidden, as some locals claim - from praying at mosques. As Khotan develops, the young increasingly go to state schools, where they are directed to eat during Ramadan and face Chinese language requirements that, while still considered too low to ensure proficiency, are getting tougher. Young men are not allowed into mosques before they reach the age of eighteen, an age barrier some said was enforced more consistently of late (as with young lamas in Tibetan monasteries). Young people in their twenties are also ineligible for trips to Mecca.

In the past year, returning Hajjis also have been asked to hand over passports, report Uighur activists abroad. Exiled dissident Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Congress, says some have seen the edges of their passports shorn by authorities, making them unusable.

In the city of Khotan, whose official population was 114,000 in 2006, there are 3,000 to 5,000 veterans of the Haj, locals estimate. The city’s name in Uighur means a “place that abounds in jade”; in addition, Hajjis trade in carpets, silk, sheepskin, dried fruit and nuts -- and, increasingly, property development. They own their own buildings and factories, multiple homes and some malls, including at least one giant mosque-like structure capped by golden domes.

Hajji also support Uighur schools, mosques, orphanages, and hospitals. Non-drinking, non-smoking and comparably non-philandering, they cut a contrast not only with many Han Chinese fat cats but also with secular young Uighur dropouts, stereotypically portrayed as wasting away their days drinking, smoking hash and hustling at billiards halls. Compared to most Chinese towns, Khotan nightlife still features fewer karaoke bars and bathhouses that double as bordellos, despite an influx of Han Chinese entrepreneurs from Zhejiang and other gold-coast provinces who’ve set up grocery stores, hotels and clothing chains.

The Hajji up-and-comers are thus seen as prime catches by young Uighur women. Amangul, a long-lashed 23-year-old from a non-Hajji family, is dead-set on marrying into one. She currently sells perfumes and cosmetics at a department store stall, making no more than $275 a month. Some day soon she seeks to get hitched to a Hajji, she told me blushing, for two reasons. “It will cleanse my mind,” she said, adding, “If I become a Hajji, I’ll have money and be taken care of. If someone gets sick, I won’t have to worry, either.” Amangul pulled out a plush prayer mat that she keeps in her store, like most stall vendors around the Khotan bazaar. There she prays on the job each day.

Authorities typically keep close tabs on the more prominent Hajjis, says Gladney, though any connections to active Uighur dissidents and militants are little understood and hard to establish. In Khotan, Uighurs are generally reluctant to talk politics, period. “They will never really tell you what they have in their hearts” acknowledged the Hajim family friend. “They just tell you what they have to tell you.” Broadly speaking, those who make it to Mecca from more traditional rural areas tend to become “more deeply religious and ethnically-oriented,” explained another local Uighur businessman. The city set he knew were considerably more pragmatic, cosmopolitan, and socially engaged. One morning, descending the steps into a subterranean mall, I spied a woman in a tropically hued head scarf slipping a bill to a bearded old beggar man, a deed not so readily seen in Beijing.

The travels of Hajji even lead some rebrand their businesses. One is “Jilili Hajji Jewelry”, in Khotan’s upstart gold exchange, where chic customers in velvet burqa and polka-dotted silk headscarves hovered over counter after counter of yellow gold bling. Mr. Jilili’s wife boasted that he’s been on Haj five times (she once). Asked if it’s been good for business, she nodded with a grin and said “yes”. The question of whether Xinjiang should split was more of a challenge, as Jilili’s wife bobbed her head non-committally in response. “It’s hard to say if that would be good or bad.”

Hajji grievances are more palpable in the business of religion itself. Within the mosque bordering jade-sellers’ row is a huge open-air expanse, with knee-room enough for many hundreds of Muslim men to prostrate in prayer. At the Islamic bookshop just outside, men in cropped beards and pressed robes perused copies of the Qu’ran. Since her parents made the pilgrimage in 2004, the principle benefit to the family has been added “respect”, said Adelet. She punctuated the point with a proud flick of the chin. Her Qu’ran selection comprised pocket-size and bilingual Uighur-Arabic editions. She said that ninety percent of editions sold are in Arabic script, which is what Uighur pilgrims on the Haj would read. All had to come from state publishers, of course. Adelet said her family's store is but one of four licensed Islamic bookshops in Khotan city, and ten in the entire prefecture of two million people.

She had felt the strain of other sanctions on her faith. Adelet graduated from technical college in Chinese with plans to get into teaching. But any state school would require a younger teacher like her to shed her headscarf in class. Instead she’s determined to pursue private trade until she marries. “[The headscarf ban] is not the only reason, but you could say it’s one of them.” The increasing difficulty in getting a passport was another bone of contention. “Where you’re from, you can travel anywhere in the world you want,” Adelet complained. “We can’t go anywhere all.”

Religious barriers, some prohibitively costly, have only driven deeper the wedge in lifestyles between Hajji or wannabe Hajji and other Uighurs more assimilated into the Chinese mainstream -- and exacerbated tensions between them. “A lot of other Uighurs don’t take kindly to me just because I speak good Chinese,” said one 30-year-old Uighur woman at the gold exchange, who was looking to replace for a stud earring she’d lost. The woman stood out from the the stylishly covered shoppers at the jewelry bazaar because of the military fatigues she wore. She explained that she trains Uighur sharpshooters in the Chinese military. “‘You’re Uighur. You should be speaking Uighur,’” other Uighurs have often told her. “I say China is developing fast, so we have to speak Chinese.”

The woman works another part of her days as a clerk at a megamart recently opened by a Zhejiang grocery mogul. She takes her training orders from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the military offshoot responsible for erecting highways and other basic infrastructure and settling several million Han Chinese in Xinjiang since the dawn of the Mao era, when the population was 90 percent Uighur (now it’s 45 percent). Many shoppers in the supermarket were Han soldiers in military fatigues, as is she half the day. Her mom had been a devout Muslim, she said, “but never a separtist.” She herself was not believer, and she disparaged those who were: “Those separatists are terribly strong in Khotan right now. The Muslim extremists are getting stronger and stronger.”

One evening several weeks ago, aboard a public bus taking passengers home from work, a Uighur housewife, a teacher, and other state employees got into a heated conversation about the trouble at the bazaar several days earlier in March. Later one young woman who took part summarized the discussion for me: “’If we have a strong government then we can have a good salary and a good life and travel around the world. But if our country is not peaceful then we’ll have the same life as people from Pakistan and Iraq.’ That’s basically what they said. I also think that way.”

The young woman asked to be identified by her online alias, Music Girl. She had studied English and Chinese at a top local university, and on graduating landed a job at a state bank. The path to her courtyard home led down a sandy alley where women from a neighboring household, shrouded in black burqa and boshiya, packed into the family touring sedan. Music Girl noted the freedom to which she clung as a woman from lay family in China – again, “not like women in Pakistan”.

The Internet only came to Khotan circa 2000. Music Girl’s middle school years in the late 1990’s were marred by separatist violence and tight controls. Now her main joy in life was nights spent online, where she gabbed with “ordinary young Uighurs” like herself and tracked the latest peccadilloes of stars like Britney Spears. In her view, yes, her people remained a disadvantaged minority, "like blacks in America". But ultimately, she says, "It is just no use to complain about the government.. Only a tiny fraction of Uighurs agitated against officialdom, she maintained, and those who did were partly to blame for bringing hardship upon the rest. She blamed Hajji activities for the harsher curbs. "All the Hajji want to go to Saudi Arabia to get to Mecca. We just want to go to Europe or the United States to study more or do more business. But their every little move can impact us."

Politically, one thing Beijing and Islam share vis a vis the Uighurs is heightened support for their world views with respect to the bloody U.S.-led war in Iraq, which has been dramatized to tragic effect on Chinese Central Television. I visited another far southwestern desert outpost of Xinjiang a little over five years ago. This was after accused Uighur militants captured in Afghanistan were shipped to Guantanamo, but before “Shock and Awe”. Uighur villagers voiced there overwhelming admiration for American freedoms, and sympathy for the “war on terror” . But this time in Khotan, several of those I asked said the Iraq campaign had tilted their views against the United States. “I feel that most Uighurs’ impression of America right now is not good,” commented a twenty-something teacher named Arzigul. “They are always fighting in other places and in all these countries a lot of people are dying and their children are becoming orphans. People don’t like that.”

Both Beijing and Islam have benefited from trade contacts with the Arab world as well. At Arzigul’s school, a private vocational training center for Uighurs, the course offerings include computers, English, Chinese and math. But when I visited, the best-attended classes by far taught Arabic. There are tens of thousands of Arab businessmen based in coastal manufacturing towns like Yiwu, and “they need translators and tour guides,” said Arzigul. She wore a blue-and-brown plaid headscarve that presumably would have been forbidden at a Chinese state school. A male colleague of hers joined us in the headmaster’s office and, when prompted, recited a sample sentence from his Arabic lessons: “Khotan jade is famous the world over and has made a major contribution to Khotan’s development.”

Since the 1980’s, illegal Islamic madrassas have popped up here and there in Xinjiang’s deeply Uighur South, some propped up by Saudi funding, only to be shut down and have students rounded up. But the Arabic teacher at the training center said no religious texts could possibly be approved, and the school principal was any political or religious motives. The Arabic teacher did admit, “Every student has a different aim.” That was evidenced by a couple rows of fully veiled women in two crammed classrooms. Some do study Arabic in preparation for Haj trips.

Even as the cultural polarization grows, many educated Uighurs seem to consciously straddle two worlds as they leave Khotan for bigger Chinese cities to the east. As Hajim’s family friend, a teacher, neatly put it: “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. But I also don’t pray.” The young man and his family recently vetoed his father’s plans to go on the Haj; he said he’d rather invest any extra savings directly on social causes than in religious attainments. But he lamented that his people as a whole are “losing our culture”, “becoming Westernized and Sinicized.” So he and his friends have grown anxious to protect the “way of our grandfathers, not religiously but culturally.” They hash over such issues on Minkaohan, a Chinese-language web forum popular with young Uighurs steeped in identity politics.

At times, flareups of dissent or violence in Xinjiang have been partly manifestations of “internal society splits” within the Uighur community or “internal debates among Muslims,” notes Gladney. Meaning they’re not solely motivated by underlying angst over Chinese rule or Han Chinese neighbors.

Five years ago or so, a generational rift started to emerge among some of the more conservative Muslims in Khotan. Young men chafed at established ways of practicing Islam, preferring a more visceral form of prayer, the family friend recounted. “For example, in the Koran, when it comes to saying ‘Amen’, the younger wanted to say it more loudly. But the older only say it inwardly.” As a result of the discord, he said, the elders started deriding the younger men as “Wahhabi.” The pejorative refers nominally to devotees of the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam, which Muslim Uighurs traditionally follow; here it was used as slang to brand the young as reprobates.

More recently, though, the older and younger generations seemed to respect and understand one another better, in this young man's view. “We are going in different directions. But we all pray to one god.”

Mutallip Hajim, the family friend went on, was a “moderate Muslim” like most - “not someone to pay lip service to Mr. Bin Laden,” he says. But with all the ethnic and religious cracks embedded in the jade market, it’s natural terrain for conflict -- especially as alluvial deposits of pure jade are diminishing fast due to overzealous mining. The Khotan government inaugurated a jade festival in 2005, which primed the price pump. Now it's struggling to protect the local

Jade is very much a Chinese obsession; most Uighurs are just the delivery men. Virtually all the collectors are Han Chinese, as are skilled engravers who’ve migrated from provinces like Henan. The average Uighur hawkers are still untrained bottom feeders, and only a small minority ascend to Hajim’s stature as a top gemstone broker. “They’re big people and we’re little little people," says Abdo, a non-Hajji shopowner on the arcade. "With those I know the relations are good. With those I don’t know, relations are bad.”

The Khotan protests were not China’s only disturbance linked to the Uighur jade trade. Also in late March, unrest reportedly broke out in the Henan province town of Shifosi, where a significant number of Uighur jade traders reside. But the circumstances remain even less clear than they were in Khotan. Paramilitary poured in by the hundreds, sealed off the town, and arrested several dozen Uighurs, the Wall Street Journal confirmed.

Even among top Uighur merchants, Hajim’s level of knowledge and clientele distinguished him within the trade. His demise was a signal to other local traders of just how ruthlessly the chips can fall when a Uighur attempts to dictate the terms of the trade. Just one day after the protests, Chinese and Uighurs say, the streets of Khotan were effectively back to normal -- except for Han-owned shops off the jade bazaar, which remain closed for fear being looted.

But two weeks later, traders gathered around the strip were still on edge. Outside the mosque, one of the largest jade shops in the bazaar was padlocked shut and sealed with police tape, which stated that it was closed down by authorities in mid-2007. The reason for the closure phantom. On being asked about it and the recent protests, a Uighur man on the sidewalk tugged at me by the sleeve, leading the way into the dark, quiet confines of his store. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m not able to speak about the protest, and I’m not able to speak about why the shop was closed, either.” He launched into a long explanation of the precariousness of the situation, which ended: “Here we do business, not politics.”

A few minutes later, he unlocked his showcase, pulled out a small jade talisman, and motioned for me to come in closer for a peek. “Just now when we were talking out there, there were secret agents,” he claimed in a whisper. “In the bazaar, there are lots of them.” His allegations were such that they could not be confirmed.

Hello, Dalai: Talking Again

Melinda Liu — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:16:23 GMT

Chinese authorities and representatives of the exiled Dalai Lama will meet in "coming days," says the state-run Xinhua News Agency. This is a potential breakthrough. Chinese officials blame the "splittist Dalai clique" for violent riots that erupted in Lhasa March 14, followed by brushfire protests in other Tibetan communities, and have demonized the Tibetan spiritual leader as a "jackal wrapped in monk's robes," as one put it.

But the Dalai Lama has denied Beijing's accusations, and has kept the door open to high-level negotiations. Contacts between the two sides have taken place sporadically for decades -- I remember making my first trip to Lhasa, in July 1980, and being startled to see dozens of emotional Tibetans crying and prostrating on the ground in a courtyard beside the guesthouse where I was staying as part of a government-organized media tour. Turns out a visiting envoy of the Dalai Lama was over-nighting in the guesthouse right next door. Foreign correspondents on that trip got our story simply by interviewing people across the courtyard wall.

But institutionalized talks between the two sides, which began in 2002, broke down after the sixth round in the summer of 2007. When my colleague Sudip Mazumdar and I interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala in March, less than a week after the Lhasa violence, he said he'd received private messages of sympathy from ordinary citizens, and even some officials, in China. And he expressed willingness to talk with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, for whom he professed "great respect".

Just before our interview, we glimpsed the Dalai Lama through a window saying farewell to a delegation of Buddhist believers of Asian descent. One of his aides said that they were from mainland China, and that if their identities were made public they "could be executed" simply for visiting Dharmsala. The Dalai Lama said that "hundreds if not thousands" of ordinary Buddhist devotees from China had requested audiences with him over the years (he fled from Lhasa into exile in 1959, after an abortive Tibetan uprising). Even some officials considered to be upright communist party loyalists had sent him private expressions of support.

Xinhua quoted an anonymous Chinese official saying that authorities had taken into account "requests repeatedly made by the Dalai side for resuming talks", and that "the relevant department of the central government will have contact and consultation with Dalai's private representative in the coming days." Let's hope that both sides can get beyond "talking about talking" to make some real progress -- not just for the sake of the Olympics, but for the sake of healthier relations between Tibetans and Chinese.

Beijing Rock Fest 'Harmonized'

Jonathan Ansfield — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:16:24 GMT

Greg Baker / AP

The Party's Over: Chinese music fans rocked out last year's Midi festival, but authorities have canceled the 2008 event

To Chinese authorities, the prospect of a cheeky European rocker yelling "Free Tibet!" must be frightening enough right now -- and that of thousands of Chinese rock kids reacting emotionally to it, scarier still. No shocker, then, that Beijing police are scuttling the May installment of the Midi Fest, China's only legitimate annual Rock festival, out of concerns over "security". Police won't provide it, and without them the show can't go on.

Now nine years old, this year's Midi was supposed to be the biggest on record, comprising 100 local bands and 30 visiting acts. Just last week, all 30 got their performance permits from the local culture bureau. But on Tuesday, Midi came unraveled. Several of the headline acts from Europe, just having processed their visas, got word that the upcoming Midi is off for now, according to two Beijing-based promoters working with them.

Our phone calls to Zhang Fan, founder of the festival and the independent music school that organizes it, went unanswered. But on Monday, Zhang strongly indicated to a Chinese blogger associated with the festival, Qi Youyi, that it might have to be "postponed" from the appointed dates of May 1-4 due to the Tibet conflagration. Qi quoted Zhang as saying:

"Most recently, many aspects of the domestic and international situation have been exceedingly sensitive and complicated, and it's necessary for us all to safeguard the Olympic situation overall, so if the relevant departments require it, ultimately we may very well have to put the overall situation first."

In other words, Beijing's tuning out the rockers to help restore Olympic harmony.

Now the Midi will have to shoot for the National Day holiday, Oct. 1, after the tense period of the Olympics and Paralympics has passed. With the fest "postponed" indefinitely, it joins the pileup of performances to be derailed in the wake of clashes over Tibet -- particularly events involving foreigners. The list includes pre-game festivities before a Major League Baseball exhibition game in Beijing; an expat-produced play in Chengdu; and a concert in the Chinese capital by Celine Dion – the last reportedly due to the promoter's failure to land Culture Ministry approval before selling thousands of tickets.

But officials perennially give their final sign-off on approvals late in the game in China -- one reason so many shows end up undersold. More to the point, they've been feeling the heat since being burned by another major concert (organized by the same concert promoters, no less) the month before. In early March, Icelandic songstress Bjork ended on an unauthorized song entitled "Independence", and ad-libbed "Tibet! Tibet!" into it.
Foreign concert goers spread the word. Shamed by press reports, Chinese culture czars warned of harsher vetting of foreign performers thereafter. Chinese following the incident got their "feelings hurt", according to the state news agency Xinhua -- reserved choice words for Bjork online.

If Public Security was not prepared to allow Boy Scouts (part of the planned MLB pre-game) in front of a crowd dominated by expats such as their own dads, try 30 foreign Indie outfits in front of hordes of young Chinese high on patriotic pride (and maybe other substances). Already Shanghai had denied Midi’s application for a spin-off fest the same week in May. There, the culture aparatchiks (like the locals) have weaker stomachs for rock, and expats dominate the audiences at those prohibitively expensive concerts that are approved.

Perhaps the biggest difference now is the grim specter of foreign-Chinese confrontation that looms. Flag-bearing Chinese got in the faces of pro-Tibetan protesters out to upstage the Torch Relay in Canberra and Kuala Lampur, while angry demonstrators around China converged by the thousands on locations of the French hypermart Carrefour.

At one outlet in Changsha, a young American teacher mistaken for a Frenchman was snarled in the mob; he caught a few glancing blows, and nearly had his cab tipped over, before police whisked him to safety, reports the Shanghaiist blog.

In recent days, Party propaganda authorities have ordered up a new media campaign to cut the patriotic buzz with a dose of "rationality". But it's been slow to break the fever.

In the clubs of Beijing, where the Chinese rock scene has (rather quietly) proliferated for a decade and a half, punks and their ilk have on occasion injected nationalist adrenaline into the mosh-pit -- with a shot at Taiwan independence advocates, neo-nationalist Japanese right-wingers or U.S. fast-food chains. At one heavy-metal gig in the university quarter of Beijing this month, says a foreigner who observed it, a heavy metal band's front-man spouted Chinese indignation at international treatment of events in Tibet. Head-bangers in the crowd, overwhelmingly Chinese, roared in support.

Five years ago, a notorious spasm of jingoism did occur at the Midi Fest. Student rowdies greeted a group from Japan with a shower of bottles, debris and name-calling, the latest national "humiliation" at the hands of the Japanese apparently still fresh on their minds. Two weeks earlier, news had broken of a sex romp involving 400 Japanese male tourists and local prostitutes at a hotel down in Guangdong. The reaction at the Midi prompted the lead singer of Chinese headliners Thin Man (an ethnic Mongolian, incidentally) to bolt to the Japanese band's defense in a hapless effort to tame the crowd.

Two of the foreign bands who were scheduled to play this year's Midi happen to be French, while most of the others are from Western or Northern European countries where citizens are very much partial to the Dalai Lama.

Bands recruited to play the Midi, however, have always been schooled to rock clean of bratty antics or sensitive causes. And for the most part they've obliged. As a scene, Chinese rock is now often more politicized than it is political. Musicians still put up with the persistent headaches of censorship, piracy and popular and media biases, but they've truly capitalized on the alternative youth market for counterculture, i.e., anything not pop. Sticking to the music, and rebelling without too much of a cause, has helped the Midi grow and expand in its formative years: from a single-stage setup on the school grounds in the boondocks to a public park featuring six different stages, food stalls, and 75-cent cups of beer.

In between, officials have forced postponement from May to October twice before, both times ostensibly for reasons related to crowd-control: in 2003, due to the SARS contagion, and in 2004 following massively deadly accidents, including a stampede on a bridge and a gas leak. But Midi has made the necessary concessions, ushering in mag-and-bagging at the gates, a phalanx of police on the grounds, and lessons from Europe in walling off the stage. In return, Midi has gained a seemingly permanent home and in Myspace band circles, a budding global presence. And it's gone green. The entire 2007 festival was sponsored by Greenpeace, which was to sponsor its own eponymous stage in 2008. The "environmental protection policy" makes up a key part of the Midi code of conduct.

How much better have relations got? Well, Communist Party cadres sure don't view Rock as a Western agent of "bourgeois liberalization" anymore. Ideally, it's a Western agent of making money. The government of Haidian District, where the park is located, was even invested in Midi 2008. Despite speculation that clamps on non-Olympic events pre-Olympics would do in the rockfest, Haidian District was kicking in 500,000 yuan, according to Chinese reports.

But rock shows are still among the higher-risk investments in Beijing. It would take a lot more than money right now for Midi to enlist the commitment from the police, who are already required to provide relatively heavy security for the fest to get their go-ahead. No security means no permit, either.

The problem's not that the cops don't have the manpower to handle the crowds, of course. It's that they don't want to end up in that position. Even under routine circumstances, Chinese public security bureaus can make concert organizers sweat it out to the end before bestowing approvals. For the government, it’s a built-in (and technically, legal) contingency plan, should something like a Tibet crisis arise. Maven of the local music scene Jon Campbell, of YGTwo Productions, is one of the battle-weary concert promoters and musicians who has braved the bureaucracy of organizing a Midifest. "There are speed bumps in non-Olympic years," he says. "So it's not a surprise this year."

India passes the Olympic torch

Newsweek — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:38:42 GMT

By Jeremy Kahn

Indian police were ready for protesters

As the day drew near for the Olympic torch to be carried through the heart of India's capital, New Delhi, Indian government officials had grown apprehensive. India is home to the world’s largest number of Tibetan exiles, including Tibetan Buddhism’s most revered figure, the Dalai Lama, and it has also sought to avoid antagonizing its big neighbor to the north. Indian officials feared the worst--including the prospect that Tibetan monks might immolate themselves in protest on the city’s streets. In the end, however, the torch relay here went off without disruption, thanks to the extraordinary security measures the Indian government laid on for the event.

Officials left nothing to chance. The run was shortened to just two kilometers along the city’s central vista – the Rajpath -- meaning that each of the 70 torch bearers held the flame for just seconds before handing off to the next runner. (A few prominent Indian athletes refused to participate in the torch relay out of sympathy for the Tibetan cause.) All the streets leading into the area were closed, as were two major subway stops near relay route. Government offices that occupy this central zone were shuttered in the afternoon as well. In contrast to its normal weekday bustle, the center of the city took on the deserted feel it often has at weekends.

The government deployed 15,000 police officers, many clad in riot gear and carrying long bamboo poles, to deter any disruption. Throughout the run, the torch bearers were surrounded by a Chinese security team, which itself was guarded by an Indian security team. Security was so tight that even people holding passes issued by Olympic sponsors – such as the computer company Lenova – were turned away at the police barricades erected to control access to the torch run. In a city of 15 million, only a couple hundred people, most affiliated with Olympic sponsor companies, were able to witness the relay. The rest had to settle for TV.

There were a few tense moments: early in the day, a small group of Tibetan exiles attempted to storm the luxury hotel where the Olympic flame had been sequestered under guard since arriving in India last night. But they were quickly arrested. Later, about 30 protestors tried to breach a police barricade near the relay route, but they were turned back with truncheon blows and arrested too. At one point plumes of black smoke rose from behind a group of protestors, causing a stir among the police and the assembled media hordes: were protesting monks setting themselves alight? No, it turned out just to be an unrelated firefighting demonstration being held as part of New Delhi’s “Firefighter Appreciation Week.”

For the most part, New Delhi witnessed only peaceful and lawful protests. A few streets north of the relay route, several hundred people, including monks in saffron robes and others wearing white “Torch 4 Tibet” T-shirts, peacefully paraded continuously around a city block shouting “Free Tibet, Free Tibet,” and “Who is the butcher? Who is the killer? China, China, China.” The demonstrators made little attempt to confront the almost equal number of police officers who blocked them from getting anywhere close to the Rajpath. Elsewhere, a few thousand people, including several Indian celebrities and members of a Hindu-nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has generally been more supportive of the Tibetan exile’s cause than the current Congress Party-led government, held other pro-Tibet rallies.

Indian government officials will no doubt be patting themselves on the back tomorrow. They have done their part to protect the Olympic flame. But the question remains: what have they done to protect democracy?

Online Call to Boycott Carrefours

Melinda Liu — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:07:02 GMT

It was probably just a matter of time before anti-Western protests materialized. Such is the intensity of Chinese resentment -- over perceived "bias" in Western media coverage of Tibet, over humiliating protest scenes during the Olympic torch relay in London and Paris, even over age-old grievances such as the Opium Wars -- that many expatriates have been bracing for the possibility of anti-Western demonstrations.

Over the weekend Chinese Netizens began responding to an online call to boycott supermarket chain Carrefours -- and to rally outside its branches on May 1 -- because of the chain's alleged support of the exiled Dalai Lama. In the past, nationalistic youth bent on "punishing" foreign targets trashed Western and Japanese diplomatic facilities and commercial establishments. It's not clear how many people will join the boycott; the overwhelming Chinese crowds in Carrefours branches on weekends are proof of the retail chain's local appeal. And if authorities really wanted to head off protests, they could put out the word to webmasters and Internet police that such talk is not "appropriate".

On a tangential note: over the weekend I happened to be driving past the spacious and well-manicured Police Academy north of Beijing. By chance, just as I passed the entrance gate two gigantic brand-new black Hummers with prominent police markings pulled out. Now, these are vehicles so wide they won't fit down many Beijing alleys, or hutongs.

What is it the police know that the rest of us don't? Lots, I presume. Or maybe they've just been watching too many episodes of "CSI Miami"....

New Terror Plot, Visa Clampdown

Mary Hennock — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:29:43 GMT

Just after the discombobulated San Francisco torch relay concluded, a new threat hit the headlines: Beijing said it had thwarted a Muslim terror plot in which terrorists planned to kidnap Olympic athletes, foreign journalists and other visitors during the August Games. And China's attempts to police its borders are getting media attention too; the visa clampdown that we'd blogged and written about earlier is really beginning to bite.

Today in a Beijing press conference Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping said 35 people had been arrested, and bomb-making materials discovered, between March 26 and April 6 in the far Western region of Xinjiang, home to some 8 million Uighur Muslims. Militant Uighurs have long been accused of "religious extremism, separatism and terrorism", by the government, though there's alot of disagreement over whether the intensity of the threat has been hyped.

Xinjiang was home to a brief-lived East Turkestan Republic in the 1930's and 40's. Today's East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is recognized by both Beijing and Washington D.C. as a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda. In an earlier plot revealed in March, Wu said, ETIM extremists had plotted to attack hotels, government offices and military targets in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities with poison, poison gas and remotely controlled bombs.

So, about those border controls. If it isn't the threat posed by alleged Muslim extremists, it might be foreign protestors out to disrupt the torch relay, as they'd done in London, Paris and San Francisco. The torch is due back in China on May 4 to tour every province (including Tibet) on its way to the Olympic stadium for the Aug 8 opening ceremony.

China's Foreign Ministry has denied changing its visa rules. But travel agents in Hong Kong say, in most cases, they can no longer supply visas for longer than 30 days, according to local media reports and the Associated Press (AP). A few travel agents who were reluctant to be identified are still offering to supply three month visas. However, multiple entry visas are no longer available, only single and double-entry ones.

The Hong Kong Association of Travel Agents has also highlighted another rule change: a ban on short-stay Mainland visas issued at the border crossing, which had allowed foreign passport-holders in Hong Kong to nip conveniently across to the mainland. The travel industry body says short-stay visas are now being processed centrally by the city's Commissioner of the Foreign Ministry, and could take several days to obtain.

In reality, the slow-motion tightening of visa rules began a full year ahead of the Games when one-year multi-entry work visas (known as F and Z visas) became mysteriously unobtainable from most visa agents in Aug 2007. As NEWSWEEK reported in February, a police crackdown on visa agents was accompanied by a rise in deportations, and ever-shorter validity periods. There were even rumours that no visas would be issued past Aug 1. Read more about that here.

The one-month visa policy is just too difficult for some. "I've got absolutely no intention of making return trips outside the country all the time," says Mariana, a Paris-based media-business consultant whose visa expires in mid-May. "I will not will be coming back to China again until everything calms down, most probably in September or October." She's already decided to give up her Beijing apartment: "It’s really not worth the hassle for me."

Anger and anxiety among long-stay or frequent business visitors who depend on multi-entry visas is growing. It's fueled by anecdotal evidence that even some holders of unexpired multi-entry visas are finding their right to re-enter the country being questioned by airport authorities.

Would any of this keep out determined protestors? Much will likely depend on the mood closer to August. China's failing PR efforts have not been impressive in recent days. The besieged torch relay was swarmed by protestors in London, cut short due to chaotic scrums in Paris, and compelled to play hide-and-seek with the public in San Francisco in order not to be overwhelmed (which sort of misses the whole point).

Meanwhile, representatives of all 205 national Olympics committees are meeting in Beijing to discuss preparations for the Games. Their draft statement circulated on Wednesday appealed to China to find "a fair and reasonable solution to the internal conflict that affects the Tibet region". Within hours the reference to Tibet had been pruned, according to a version seen by AP. The new draft resolution expresses "confidence" that China "will strive through dialogue and understanding, to find a fair and reasonable solution to the internal conflict for the benefit of the games and the athletes".

Then there's the hissy fit between Beijing officials and IOC head Jacques Rogge over his comments suggesting that improved human rights were part of the "moral engagement" expected of China as an Olympic host. No doubt Beijing wishes heightened border controls could keep out all that unsolicited advice from pesky foreigners, as well as the trouble-makers themselves.

Monks Protest Before Media, Again

Jonathan Ansfield — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:47:54 GMT

Mark Ralston / AFP-Getty Images
Protest scene: Labrang's historic monastery

Here we go again. More than a dozen monks staged an unexpected protest, interrupting a government-organized media tour to the famous Tibetan Buddhist Labrang monastery in Gansu province, a scene of unrest in March. "They said in Chinese, 'We want more freedom, more human rights, and we want to see the Dalai Lama,'" reported Caroline Puel of Le Point, who was invited on the trip. Their outburst lasted about 10 minutes, during which time government officials didn't try to silence them. Then the foreign media were urged to leave, and the unscripted moment was over.

Later a senior monk told journalists the monks would not be punished but faced sanctions if authorities found that they had broken the law. A similar scene had taken place March 27, when monks in Jokhang temple disrupted an official briefing for more than two dozen international and domestic journalists invited by the government on a brief trip to Lhasa. In both cases, the fates of the monks remain unknown. (Foreign media are still barred from making independent reporting trips to Lhasa and many other Tibetan areas affected by violent protests; there have been two tightly managed press tours to such areas arranged by authorities since March 14.)

There are many paradoxes at work here. One of the most fundamental is this: Chinese constantly wonder why Tibetan monks, urban youth and town folks who in some cases have benefited so much from China's economic largesse are nonetheless so persistent about biting the hand that feeds them? The perception that Tibetans are perversely ungrateful is prevalent among Han Chinese. One bartender in Beijing, Xiao Wang, put it this way, "Without the People’s Republic they’d be primitives living under the feudal nobility of monks. What do they want?”

It's hard to know where to begin to answer that question. The factors involved range from the Communist Party's record of religious harassment and oppression, to an influx of Chinese migrants and enterprise, to the rapturous appeal of the Dalai Lama. Issues of national sovereignty and unity -- such as Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang -- are basically no-brainers for the respective sides. In other words, they cloud people’s brains, and swell their hearts.

But it's not purely about freedom and outrage. One of the simper ways to explain Tibetan motives is not unlike answering why urban Chinese who’ve “made it” are precisely the ones leading the charge to clean up the dreadful air, protest rampant consumer fraud, and assert their NIMBY rights. They're got enough to know things could always be better -- alot better. And they're fed up.

Many Tibetan clergy and other upwardly mobile devotees, likewise, have become much-better positioned --both financially and technologically -- to push to protect their unique culture, to practice their religion uninhibited, to gain a fairer share of the economic boom, and ultimately, to rule themselves.

Take for instance the driver who toted me and another journalist around a Tibetan area of Qinghai province on a recent trip to investigate the trouble spots, fully knowing the potential consequences he faced. The guy was a well-integrated Chinese-speaker from a Tibetan family whose members worked in state jobs and small businesses. He had a well-crafted retort to every Chinese defense of its Tibet policy. I started thinking of him as the rent-a-quote driver:

"The government wants to 'liberate' our culture. What they don't understand is that this is what we most detest."

"Sure, the government has built up the region. But if we really got independence, Tibetans could be the richest people [per capita] in the world...Think about it. We'd get all those oilfields in Gomud and salt flats in Qinghai."

"So the government says the Dalai Lama plotted this? Actually, there is a bit of logic to their theory. This is the Information Age. So when the Dalai Lama says something or meets someone from another country, all of us know about it...But to say that it's an organized plot is rubbish. How do I know? Because if there did come a day when he [the Dalai Lama] himself said that we had to abandon non-violence and rise up and unite our people and liberate our land, then Tibetans would all rise up and fight."

The flip side of this paradox is that many Tibetans who are in dire economic straits have been relatively calm in recent weeks -- though granted, there are a lot of reasons for that too. If you're too poor to own a cellphone, it probably took you longer to learn about the unrest elsewhere, or to be inspired by it, than if you were more tech-savvy like the lamas of Labrang. Or the monks I hung out with in Rebkong who became even more upset about the virtual lockdown imposed on them when authorities cut off their broadband connection once the Lhasa riots broke out.

In late March I visited a little countryside school, 3800 meters up in Qinghai province, in the same general area as the prestigious Labrang monastery -- but in a much poorer area. This school didn't even have enough notebooks and pens to go around. Kids’ cheeks were caked with dirt. The students began to learn about electricity in class in March, when for the first time electricity reached the village. And it just so happened that, the day before we stopped by, the school's power had gone down.

This elementary school was built nine years ago with support from an organization based in Hong Kong, but it's maintained by the Chinese government. There were 80 pupils, taught by an affable bunch of twenty- and thirty-something Tibetan men. They'd trained within the state system down in the county town of Tongren, and were assigned to this school up on the plateau. They taught three tracks of language and culture: Tibetan, Han and English. They said all three disciplines suffered from the division of labor.

Their job wasn't getting any easier, either. Just that week, new requirements for teaching ethnic minorities had come down from the Ministry of Education. Now their first graders and sixth graders have to take special Chinese and English exams in order to advance to the next level. Minority teachers themselves also have to pass new tests. Said the headmaster: “This puts a lot of added pressure on the students… and on us."

Inside the teachers’ office, there was evidence that the school was belatedly entering the tech age. They had a huge television set and a desktop computer. Nailed high on the wall above was a picture of the previous incarnation of the Panchen Lama, whom teachers described as one of their “gods.” He died in 1989 under suspicious circumstances and, at least during his earlier years, was considered by many Tibetans to have been something of a pro-Beijing traitor.

The same could be said of the teachers, of course. After a little persuading, they agreed to answer some questions. Their minds were clear, but it was hard for me to tell where their hearts lay. They were audibly nervous, and the headmaster's comments (below) could be read as either diplomatic or conflicted, pragmatic or idealistic. While some Tibetans their age have grown into angry young monks, these guys represent the “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along?" camp. Alternatively, you might classify them as scared loyalists, apologists for the regime, or just plain country bumpkins.

In any case, during a grassroots trip through Tibetan communities in Gansu and Qinghai I didn’t meet many Tibetans who seemed interested in distinguishing politics from religion and reconciling Chinese government interests with those of ordinary Tibetan folks. In fact these schoolteachers were the only ones.

Here’s an excerpt from my exchange with the headmaster:

Q: What changes have you seen here in the past nine years?

A: Well, originally the roads were really really bad. Then in 2001 they started building this new road…

Q: So how long does it take now to drive to Lanzhou (the nearest provincial capital, in Gansu, several hours away)?

A: [Looks around at colleagues]. I don’t know. We’ve never been to Lanzhou.

Q: I see you have new power lines?

A: They just turned on the electricity, on the 25^th of the lunar year (March 3).

Q: So how will that change things?

A: Everything will be more convenient. Now the teachers can watch television and be better informed. We can use the computer to prepare our lessons. There’s no Internet here. We cannot go online. But before, all we had was candlelight. We could barely work at night.

Q: So are you satisfied with the level of development?

A: People’s ambitions can never be satisfied completely. This here is our fate. But overall, we’re very satisfied. The government has done a good deal.

Q: You know about the trouble in Lhasa and Xiahe and other places right now?

A: Yes, we watched the news on CCTV (China Central Television).

Q: Did you hear about it through other sources?

A: Yes, people are talking about it, over the phone and so on. Because of the pace of development, news travels quickly now.

Q: How do you view your role as Tibetan men teaching Tibetan children in a Chinese country?

A: Teaching is our job. We are both the people’s teachers (renmin laoshi), and our people’s teachers (minzu laoshi).

Q: Do you identify more strongly with your people or with the state?

A: [sighs] Tibetan people cannot be separated from China and China cannot be separated from Tibetans. They’re like mother and daughter.

Q: So what’s your opinion of the clashes between Tibetans and Chinese?

A: To be honest, I don’t even really want to hear about these things…But we are all Tibetans, after all. So when I saw the news, I was extremely hurt. I cried, not in my eyes but my heart. Do you understand what I mean?

Q: What about the Dalai Lama. What is his role in your lives?

A: [pauses] The Dalai Lama is my god (shen), my religious god. The rest I don’t care about.

Q: Do you think Tibet should be independent from China to one degree or another?

A: Because I never studied politics, I do not know.

Q: What’s your feeling about other Tibetans who are protesting right now?

A: It’s not easy for us to talk about these things. [Another teacher interjects:] When you ask about these things, our hearts feel very hurt.

Q: But how do you think they will affect you?

A: Even if the skies come crashing down, I’ll still be a teacher.

Q: What’s the next step? How would you like to see hostilities be resolved?

A: It’s harmful to Tibetans. It’s harmful to the country. We’re all people. We need peace.

Q: Some of the young kids here have older brothers in monasteries and could even end up as monks themselves. What do you think of children being schooled in monasteries and the teachings they receive?

A: The state has one way of teaching and the Tibetan Buddhist religion another way. They both have their place. Only the form is different.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge to your form of teaching?

A: There was this professor from Harvard who came here once. He asked about that. I told him we have three tracks of teaching: Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Right now, the kids just use Tibetan. But when they grow up, they need Chinese and even English. So we have to teach all three. But the result is that they’re not very good at any of them. Neither are we. So that is a source of pain for me.

Q: Do think that system should be changed then?

A: No. In reality, it’s necessary. My principle is: ‘For Chinese people you must write Chinese. For Tibetans you must write Tibetan.’

Protests: Torch of Shame

Melinda Liu — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:13:43 GMT

Using words like "sabotage," "despicable" and "disgusting," Chinese authorities reacted in hurt and angry tones to the torch relay debacle of recent days. It isn't the "Journey of Harmony" they'd hoped for. Police phalanxes in London all but obscured the flame from public view; protestors were tackled and handcuffed.

In Paris 3,000 police on foot; riding bikes and motorcycles; mounted on horseback; aboard boats, wearing roller-blades, and even aloft in choppers failed to maintain order. After the flame was extinguished several times due to the crush of protestors, French torchbearers abandoned the route halfway. To the extreme embarrassment of of Beijing Games' organizers, the Olympic flame finished its French journey by bus.

It isn't over yet. Next stop: San Francisco. The flame arrives imminently in the only North American city on the relay route. Already pro-Tibet activists have draped huge banners off the Golden Gate Bridge, proclaiming "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet '08" -- a take-off on the Olympics slogan "One World, One Dream".

For now, the situation is more like one world, one nightmare -- of bad PR. International Olympic Committee head Jacques Rogge in Beijng expressed "serious concern" about recent unrest in Tibet and "deeply saddened" by the torch relay pandemonium. The Chinese government crackdown on Tibetan communities, which began March 14 in Lhasa, is just one of a number of human rights abuses being highlighted by China's international critics.

Rogge is meeting in Beijing with representatives of National Olympic Committees, some of whom are so appalled at the televised scenes of chaos that they want to scrap the international segment of torch relays in future Games. (Even China's relentless TV censors haven't blacked out all the protest scenes in news footage from London and Paris.) Already, relay routes in San Francisco and New Delhi have been shortened by authorities jittery about their ability to contain the demonstrations.

In particular, China's critics oppose plans to parade the Olympic torch through Tibetan cities -- and up Mt. Everest in early May -- despite the recent crackdown and continuing bloodshed in Tibetan communities. It looks increasingly like Tibet will have to be locked down totally to ensure safe passage for the flame. (From the start, the Everest leg of the relay was slated to be a highly restricted, invitees-only affair, due to limited facilities and the dizzying altitude).

But Chinese authorities seem determined to keep Tibet within the torch's orb. "The torch relay is a grand sporting and cultural event approved by the IOC. We want all people around the world to share it with us," said Wang Hui, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Games organizing committee (BOCOG), "We will not change our plans."

Beijing authorities blamed the protests on a small number of malcontents. And for the most part Chinese citizens were offended and hurt by the storm of criticism and protest that seemed to take relay organizers and police by surprise; the danger now is that angry Chinese may blame the torch fiasco on the West, further inflaming xenophobic sentiment. Wang Hui said "We strongly condemn the few separatists....They will be condemned by people all over the world and are doomed to failure."

The gathering storm in San Francisco didn't look so easily dismissed. The city has seen four prominent groups of activists converging in one place to denounce Beijing's human rights violations. Darfur lobby groups oppose China's support for the Khartoum regime, which is stained by the genocide in Darfur.

Newly emboldened by their successful attempts to disrupt the London and Paris relays, Reporters Without Borders activists are rallying around their iconic black banners which show the Olympics rings transformed into handcuffs. They're protesting the imprisonment of more than 100 Chinese journalists, cyber-dissidents and Netizens.

Relative neophytes on the scene are Turkic-speaking Uighurs, representing restive Muslim communities in China's remote Central Asian hinterland of Xinjiang, which has also experienced unrest in recent weeks. Exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, now based in the U.S. after spending years in a Chinese prison, is slated to join the demonstrations in San Francisco. Not long ago she told Newsweek that Uighurs were mobilizing in sympathy with their Tibetan counterparts -- apparently in a bid to hitch Uighur protestors' wagon to the better-known cause of Tibet.

The most high-profile players are Free Tibet activists, who've now added the Golden Gate Bridge to their resume of iconic protest sites. Last year they startled Chinese authorities by abseiling off the Great Wall with a huge banner, and mounting a high-altitude demonstration at the Mt. Everest base camp. While many wish to see Tibet as an independent nation, they also hold in deep esteem the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who insists he wants autonomy --not independence -- and protection for Tibetan culture, religion and environment.

IOC and national Olympics committees' representatives are wrestling with the mounting recognition that bringing the torch to Tibet would simply fan the flames of unrest. In order to guarantee a submissive population, authorities reportedly have intensified their strident "patriotic education" campaigns in Buddhist monasteries, requiring monks to publicly denounce the exiled Dalai Lama and even stomp on his photograph. In other words, authorities' obsession with securing the torch relay route is actually increasing their repression.

For the moment, Beijing appears to be digging in its heels and refusing to contemplate the huge loss of face it would mean for China to trim the 58-day, 137,000-mile relay through 21 countries. Like the Games themselves, the torch's odyssey was slated to symbolize Beijing's achievement of big-power status in the world, not to mention the vast reach of its latter-day empire.

Some friends thought I was over-stating the case when, just a day after violent riots in Lhasa were supressed on March 14, I posted a blog predicting the torch relay would become a huge magnet for protest. That prophecy has come true -- and the maelstrom is even worse than I'd imagined. Those desperate scenes surrounding the torch relay have besmirched not only China's international image, but that of the Olympics brand itself.

Pressuring Olympic Sponsors

Keith Naughton — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:58:53 GMT

With the Olympic countdown ticking, human rights activists are turning up the pressure on Olympic sponsors. There are mounting calls to boycott the August opening ceremonies, publicly condemn the violence in Tibet and Darfur, and reroute the Olympic torch relay which is scheduled to run through Tibet – including all the way to the summit of Mount Everest in early May.

Activists calling for press and religious freedoms in China have re-doubled efforts to protest during the relay, in the wake of Beijing's crackdown on Tibetan unrest beginning March 14. They've marred the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Athens; tangled with security along the relay route in Istanbul (where activists of China's Turkic-speaking Uighur Muslim minority denounced a recent clampdown in their communities back home); and planned demonstrations when the torch passes through London, Paris and San Francisco in coming days. Pro-Tibet activists abseiled off Westminster Bridge with a giant protest banner, in anticipation of the torch's arrival in London (which is happening about now).

Actress Mia Farrow, who along with her organization Dream for Darfur has met with nine Olympic sponsors, is calling for consumers to switch off televised commercials during the Games and watch her live on the Internet from a Sudanese refugee camp. "There is one thing China now holds more dear than unfettered access to Sudanese oil and that's the successful staging of the 2008 Olympic Games," Farrow says in a new video posted on YouTube and subtitled in Chinese. "This desire has proven to be the lone point of leverage to a country that has proven to be impervious to all criticism."

Activists hope corporate sponsors -- big names like Coke, McDonald's, Kodak and GE – are more receptive. But they're growing increasingly frustrated. Tibetan activists say they are considering staging protests outside the offices of Olympic sponsors if the firms won't help reroute the torch relay away from Tibet. "We feel it would be an abhorrent sight to have the torch paraded by the Chinese government before a cowed and beaten population," says Matt Whitticase, a spokesman for the U.K.-based Free Tibet Campaign. "China has hijacked the torch for its own propaganda purposes and we're calling on the sponsors to defend the Olympic torch."

But Coke, one of three primary sponsors of the torch relay, turned down the Tibetan activists in an April 2 letter from CEO E. Neville Isdell, portions of which were obtained by Newsweek. "It would be an inappropriate role for a sponsor to comment on the political situation of individual nations," Isdell wrote, adding that the Beijing Games organizers and the International Olympic Committee selected the torch route, not the sponsors. "We believe dropping out of the torch relay or using the event to put political pressure on China would erode the ability of the Olympic Games to make a contribution to lasting change in China and its relationship to the rest of the world." The Tibetan activists' response: "He's obviously ducking responsibility," says Whitticase.

Mia Farrow also is unhappy with Coke. This week Dream for Darfur plans to issue a report card on individual Olympic sponsors’ responses to their campaign. Farrow has already signaled her assessment, however, after a meeting with Coke executives. On her personal web site, under the headline "Coke the Cowards,” she wrote an April 2 posting that said, "Shame on Coca Cola…the biggest brand on the planet has made it sickeningly clear that selling sugar water is more important than saving lives. Friends, hit them where it hurts - drink Pepsi!!"

Coke declined comment on Farrow's criticism, but noted that it has pledged $5 million over the next three years to help rebuild communities in Sudan; commited to reinvest profits earned there; and is giving $750,000 in Darfur relief aid to the International Red Cross. Other Olympic sponsors also are highlighting their humanitarian aid to Darfur. GE has pledged $4 million to groups like UNICEF and CARE. After talking with Farrow's group, UPS funded a $100,000 sustainable agriculture project in Chad, home to many Darfur refugees. The sponsors also met with China's special envoy to Sudan in a March 7 meeting arranged by the Beijing Games organizing committee. Sponsors say they are sharing concerns about Darfur with Beijing and the IOC.

Such efforts have yet to influence changes in sponsors’ elaborate and costly Olympic promotions, however. Marketing sources estimate that sponsors have paid up to $120 million each to underwrite the games. "We do not believe the Olympic Games should be politicized and used as a platform to influence the policies of sovereign governments," says Deirdre Latour, a spokeswoman for General Electric, which owns NBC, which will televise the games. GE also provided the solar lights for the softball fields and the rainwater recycling system for the Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium. "The Olympics are really the only platform we have left where all these countries walk in side-by-side. We believe the Olympics are a force for good."

Sponsors point to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the organization where protestors should take their concerns. "We believe any issues regarding the Olympics should be left to the governing bodies," says Lynnette McIntire, a spokeswoman for UPS, which provides logistics for the Games.

That’s not enough for activists who believe they will get farther with high-profile companies that are beholden to the whims of consumers than they will with the IOC. "The sense that I get from the corporate sponsors is that the IOC has not taken a leadership role and I agree," says Jill Savitt, executive director of Dream for Darfur. "I'm not sure who told China that shooting monks is a good PR strategy... The IOC is threatening to turn the brand of the Olympics into something as hollow as the rings."

Tibetan activists have already transformed the Olympic rings into a gruesome protest statement. A flash video on www.studentsforafreetibet.org opens with the official "Share the Dream" logo of the torch relay, featuring two silhouetted runners jointly holding the torch aloft beneath a red, swirling sky while jogging atop the rings. Suddenly, one of the runners dons a police cap and uses the torch to club the other runner - complete with grisly sound effects - into a bloody pulp. A stream of blood oozes out of the prone runner and drenches the rings in red. The swirling sky twists into a question mark: "Do you share this dream?" it asks. "We don't." Images like that are just the kind of counter-programming that give Olympic sponsors nightmares.

The reporting above was conducted by Keith Naughton and Joan Raymond in Newsweek's Detroit Bureau