Campaigning for Justice by Becker Jo

Author:Becker, Jo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

PART IV

New Media and New Alliances

Chapter 9

Using New Technologies in the Campaign to Free Tibet

The 2008 Beijing Olympics

The Olympics and the uprising showed us and showed Tibet and the world that not only are we alive and kicking, but we can do things. We are sure of our own power and sense of unity from the uprising. Tibetans are more united now than ever in our history. We have a new-found unity, sense of purpose, pride, and anger.

—Lhadon Thethong, Students for a Free Tibet1

In 1950, soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese military forces entered Tibet, beginning more than sixty years of human rights violations by the Chinese government against the Tibetan people. The Chinese government imposed strict prohibitions on Tibetans’ freedom of speech, religion, and assembly; destroyed almost all of Tibet’s six thousand monasteries; and brutally suppressed protests. Chinese troops crushed a 1959 Tibetan uprising, driving the Tibetans’ political and spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, into exile. According to Tibetan groups, an estimated eighty-six thousand Tibetans were killed.2

The government subjected thousands of Tibetans to arbitrary arrest and detention.3 UN sources cite torture, beatings, shackling, and other abusive treatment of Tibetans, in particular Tibetan monks and nuns, by public officials and security forces.4 The Chinese government forced monks and nuns to undergo compulsory political indoctrination and enacted policies to suppress Tibet’s language and culture. Under a policy of “segregation and assimilation,” it encouraged millions of Han Chinese to migrate to Tibet, offering them higher wages and other inducements. By the 1980s, an estimated 7.5 million Han Chinese had settled in Tibet, outnumbering the 6 million resident ethnic Tibetans, and enjoyed higher life expectancy, literacy rates, and per capita incomes than ethnic Tibetans.5

The Dalai Lama characterized China’s economic and social policies in Tibet as “Chinese apartheid,” stating, “Tibet is being colonized by waves of Chinese immigrants. We are becoming a minority in our own country. The new Chinese settlers have created an alternate society: a Chinese apartheid which, denying Tibetans equal social and economic status in our own land, threatens to finally overwhelm and absorb us.”6 The Chinese government invested millions of dollars building infrastructure in Tibet, including roads, buildings, power plants, and the China-Tibet railway. As part of a “Western Development” campaign, it confiscated land and forcibly resettled large numbers of Tibetan herders to make way for mining, infrastructure projects, and urban development. According to Chinese government authorities, seven hundred thousand people were resettled in Western China between 2000 and 2005.7

In 2000, China announced its bid to hold the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. In seeking to host the games, the Chinese government claimed that its human rights record had improved and that it would provide journalists with unrestricted access to cover the games. Just before Beijing was awarded the Olympics in July 2001, the vice president of the Beijing Olympic Games Bid Committee stated, “The human rights conditions in China have improved during the last 50 years, especially in the 1990s with the reform and opening policies.

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