The Tibetans' Secret Weapon: Openness

I came across this fascinating piece about how the Tibetan exile community not only keeps going in the face of China's unbending occupation of their homeland, but even manages to maintain some optimism. Here's a particularly heartwarming passage:

In the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and elsewhere in China, the views of exiled Tibetans and portraits of the Dalai Lama are political taboos. But in Dharamsala everything from the "other side" is available: TV news and propaganda on several different Tibetan-language Chinese channels, dramas and (again) propaganda programmes dubbed into Tibetan. Their original target audience is ethnic Tibetans living in the TAR and in neighbouring regions of the PRC where many Tibetans live (Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan - or in Tibetan, U-Tsang, Amdo and Kham).

Tibetan government-in-exile officials express confidence that Tibetans in Dharamsala won't be brainwashed by these Chinese TV channels, even that it is good for Tibetan communities to encounter Chinese arguments. Indeed, some young Tibetans in Dharamsala laughingly pointed out to me some absurdities in the propaganda TV programmes. The Tibetan officials, asked how they are going to deal with the Chinese government's heightened international PR offensive, expressed the belief that being open and honest is all they need to do.

While China clamps down on Tibetan culture, and blocks sites dealing with "forbidden" subjects like the Dalai Lama, the Tibetans in exile allow anyone to hear the Chinese side. Why? Because openness makes them stronger, and better able to counter Chinese arguments.

Moreover, the Tibetans have no fear of their people hearing the truth, unlike the fearsome and yet fearful Chinese leadership - a mighty dragon strangely afraid of the sunlight.

Source Code for Civilisation

Simon Phipps points out the centrality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

This document is one of the most important documents created in the 20th century, delimiting the unarguable rights of every person, and doing it in in cool, clear prose. Flowing out of revulsion at the excesses of the Second World War, it sets a benchmark that is still vibrantly relevant to world society. For example, it makes clear that the Guantanamo concentration camp that the US is still running is abhorrent (see articles 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - even arguing articles 3 and 28 implicitly allow it is dealt with in article 30). It casts light on the US wiretaps and the UK's surveillance society (article 12 supported by articles 7 and 11), on the TSA (article 13), on internet filtering (articles 18 & 19) and on so many more issues.

The more I look at it, the more convinced I am that this visionary document, born from the lessons humanity wanted to learn after the horrors of 1939-45, is a source text that can guide so much we're all trying to achieve. As we're working on the future, be it Web 2.0, rebuilding our political life in the west or freedom for Tibet, I'm struck that the Declaration is a primary source document against which to measure our intent and action.

Nice to see that Tibet is not forgotten.

After the Games Have Ended...

...real life goes on.

Oh, Tell Me the Truth About...Tibet

Amidst the sound and fury of the current standoff between China and the West over Tibet, this National Geographic Magazine feature - presumably written before current events - is about the most balanced that I've read anywhere. Here's a sample:

Tibetans I met acknowledged that along with oppression China has brought a standard of living far higher than that of their parents under the Dalai Lama's rule. The Chinese have built hundreds of schools, where until the 1950s there had been just a handful of nonreligious schools. They've built hospitals. Everywhere I traveled, they'd halted deforestation and are replanting trees, having learned through bitter experience in the summer of 1998 that the denuding of Tibet caused the Yangtze to flood, drowning 4,000 people. They've built airports and are beginning the first Tibetan railroad. They've also installed a telecommunications network, one that enabled me to dial directly to the U.S. Despite having a phone line to India, the best the Dalai Lama could do to send word across Lhasa from the dim recesses of the Potala Palace was to dispatch a runner.

Yet Tibetans almost invariably also said that China was implementing development solely to help exploit Tibet's natural resources. "Their goal is to extract all our treasures—timber, wildlife, gold, uranium—"and to make China rich and powerful," said a man in his late 20s in Chamdo, a town on the banks of the Mekong River.

Chinese Whispers

One of my hobbies is to try to spot the emergence of unintended consequences of major events. The classic, perhaps, is the fall of the Communism, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, which was supposed to be a victory that showed the West's strength, but turned out instead to make our lives hugely less safe. Here's another - and a profound one at that:

Just as damaging for China in the long run, however, may be the effect on ordinary citizens. One place the Tibetan flag no longer flies is in the window of a bed shop in the English city of Sheffield. Its owner is a Tibetan sympathiser, who displayed the flag last month. Two young Chinese, apparently students, visited and made threats. That night his windows were smashed. A celebration supposed to mark China's emergence as a friendly global power has made some people think for the first time that its rise is something to fear.

Only a whisper at the moment, but I predict it will become a fearsome - and fearful - roar before long.

Riding the Dragon

If you want to understand the role of the Internet in the development of the current situation in China, this is the best article I've read on the subject:

In the weeks since the protests, riots, and government crackdown in Tibet hit the headlines, Chinese coverage of the events has gone through several incarnations. It began life as a terse state press-release, then refashioned itself into a front-page struggle between embattled civilians and scheming "splittists", before arriving at its current manifestation: the public shaming of the purportedly anti-Chinese western media.

On the face of it, these changes have been mandated from the top down. But behind the curtains of China's official media, networks of active internet users have played a key role in shaping the course of the reporting of Tibet.

It includes this fascinating nugget:

"In the beginning, the government had been hoping to keep things quiet", my friend Bei Feng, an editor of a major Chinese web portal whose blog was chosen in 2007 as one of China's ten most influential, told me. "But the actions of netizens forced them to widen their coverage." He himself was an example of this sort of net activism. When news of Tibet broke, he employed a strategy he says he commonly uses for sensitive issues, posting a story about it on his blog and then taking it off after only a few hours to avoid being shut down by censors. The window of time is narrow, but gives readers ample opportunity to copy and paste his story into chatrooms and bulletin-board systems.

And concludes with this interesting thought:

As he offers rice wine to those seated near him, Bei Feng pointed out a failing in the government's favoured method of co-opting anti-foreign sentiment. "What the authorities don't realise is that the people who are using these standards of objectivity to criticise CNN will eventually apply them to Xinhua and CCTV."

"Yes", a listener chimed in. "The common people are very smart. Sooner or later they'll expect more."

Update: Looks like it's started...

Uighur Splittists?

Where will it all end?

Like Tibetans in Tibet, Uighurs have historically been the predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, which is officially known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In both Tibet and Xinjiang, indigenous groups have chafed at the arrival of large numbers Han Chinese, the country’s predominant ethnic groups, who have migrated to western regions with strong government support.

Uighurs, like Tibetans, have complained that recent Han arrivals now dominate their local economies, even as the Han-run local governments insert themselves deeper into schools and religious practices to weed out cultural practices that officials fear might reinforce a separate ethnic or religious identity. In telephone interviews, Han residents of Khotan and nearby areas said there was a long history of distrust and tension between Han and Uighur communities. Some Han migrants insisted the atmosphere remained volatile, and said that the Uighurs had been inspired by the recent Tibetan unrest.

Since you ask, the Uighurs actually speak a Turkic language, which means that they have even less to do with the Chinese than the Tibetans, who at least once probably spoke the same language (a few thousands years ago, that is).

A Splittist War of Words

As I've noted before, the Chinese position on the events in Tibet is seriously undermined by the fact that it won't allow observers in to see for themselves. If it were confident of its position, it would welcome such reporting.

Instead, we have reporting in the West that is seriously hampered, and thus inevitably inaccurate at times, simply because of those difficulties. Meanwhile, the Chinese news agencies are putting out rather different versions. Take the following, for example:

"Many reports were not accurate," said Tony Gleason, field director of Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund, an American organization which helps poor Tibetans through skill training and small sum of financing.

OK, that sounds interesting: a Western eye-witness. So let's hear what he has to say:

"I never saw police open fire to the mobsters," he added.

Er, come again?

"Open fire to"? Sorry, me old china, that ain't English. And "mobsters"??? Nobody uses the word "mobsters" these days. In fact "mobsters" clearly belongs to that select vocabulary that includes "capitalist roaders" and "splittists" that no native English speaker would be caught putting their chops around.

Bit of a giveaway, that....

Update: Interesting development, here: I wonder what it means....

Tibet, Cyberattacks and Open Source

There's nothing like a mature response to criticism, and this is nothing like a mature response:

Human rights and pro-democracy groups sympathetic to anti-China demonstrators in Tibet are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks designed to disrupt their work and steal information on their members and activities.

But what really caught my attention was the following:

Van Horenbeeck said the danger with the e-mail viruses involved in the attacks is that they are so hand-crafted and new that they usually go undetected by dozens of commercial anti-virus scanners on the market today.

"Last week, I had two of these samples that were detected by two out of 32 different anti-virus scanners, and another that was completely undetected," he said.

The specificity of information sought in the targeted attacks also suggests the attackers are searching for intelligence that might be useful or valuable to a group that wants to keep tabs on human rights groups, said Nathan Dorjee, a graduate student who provides technology support to Students for a Free Tibet.

Dorjee said one recent e-mail attack targeted at the group's members included a virus designed to search victim's computers for encryption keys used to mask online communications. The attackers in this case were searching for PGP keys, a specific technology that group members routinely use to prevent outsiders or eavesdroppers from reading any intercepted messages.

Dorjee said the attacks have been unsettling but ineffective, as the Students for a Free Tibet network mostly operates on more secure platforms, such as Apple computers and machines powered by open source operating systems.

If you're talking viruses, you're essentially talking Windows (at the moment, at least). So as Students for a Free Tibet is finding, open source is doubly your friend: it's low cost and high security in the face of this kind of mature discussion.

Yahoo and MSN Help Root Out Tibetan Rioters

Yahoo China pasted a "most wanted" poster across its homepage today in aid of the police's witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn't go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.

With business morals like that, Yahoo and Microsoft are obviously made for each other. (Via RConversation.)

Closed Tibet => Boycott Beijing 2008

It's hard to know how to respond to the events unfolding in Tibet. And it's hard on two levels. First, as an outsider anything I do or say is pretty much irrelevant anyway, but that doesn't justify walking on the other side of the street with eyes averted.

But more directly it's hard because of the attempt by the Chinese authorities to lock down every possible information source. It will come as no surprise that I don't think closing Tibet off from the rest of the world is a good idea - or indeed a good sign.

If the Chinese authorities were telling the truth about the violence allegedly carried out by Tibetans, then having external and independent observers is precisely what they would want. The fact that they don't means that their own stories must be viewed with suspicion, especially since they flatly contradict videos and images that have been smuggled out. Moreover, the fact that it won't even trust its own people - who seem inclined to condemn the Tibetans as "ungrateful" anyway - to judge events, and has blocked practically all external news sources, is yet more evidence that there is a massive coverup underway.

The question then is: What can be done? On a personal level, I think the least those of us with bits at our disposal can do is keep spreading the message that all is not as the Chinese authorities would have us believe and that there is likely to be violent repression going on behind that news blackout. The more outlets that point to independent news stories on the subject, and the more blog posts that restate these issues, the greater the likelhood that the Great Firewall of China will just buckle under the strain (or that China will just cut itself off from the rest of the world).

In terms of the bigger picture, I find pleas that the Olympics must go ahead regardless because politics and sport must be kept separate, or that otherwise the poor athletes will be penalised, rather naive. Sport is all about politics - about which nation is "better" than the others. If athletes really cared about sport for sport's sake, for the sake of achieving their best, they wouldn't go to such politicised occasions in the first place, but would be content with the million other sporting opportunities where they could excel.

So the question then becomes what good a boycott would do for Tibet. In direct terms, I think it would do very little, but indirectly it would show one thing above all: that somebody out there cares enough to say "enough is enough, let us at least do something, however symbolic." Maybe the threat of that will help concentrate the minds of the Chinese leadership; maybe it won't. But the more times the phrase "Boycott Beijing 2008" turns up on Google, and the higher in ranking that term occurs in searches for "Beijing 2008", the more they will at least think about it.

Update 1: Shortly after posting this, I've just come across this brilliant analysis of what the Tibetans are fighting for - and why they are fighting, even though it's hopeless.

Update 2: Typically sharp analysis on the same topic from Salon's Andrew Leonard here.

More on Dzonghka: Microsoft's Morals

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for Bhutan's Dzonghkha language and its use in free software, so I was naturally intrigued by Andrew Leonard's recent post on the subject. This led me to the following, which somehow I had missed when it first came out:

Microsoft has barred the use of the Bhutanese government’s official term for the Bhutanese language, Dzongkha, in any of its products, citing that the term had affiliations with the Dalai Lama. In an internal memorandum, Microsoft employees were told not to use the term Dzongkha in any Microsoft software, language lists or promotional materials since “Doing so implies affiliation with the Dalai Lama, which is not acceptable to the government of China. In this instance, replace “Dzongkha” with ‘Tibetan - Bhutan’.”

How's that for a perfect confluence: Dzongkha-Tibetan-Chinese repression-Microsoft-free software? Nothing like a little moral prostitution to boost that bottom line, eh Microsoft?

GiveMeaning? - Give Me a Break

I wrote recently about the plight of the Tibetan people. One of the problems is that it is hard for an average non-Tibetan to do much to help the situation. So I was pleased that Boing Boing pointed me to what sounded a worthy cause that might, even if in a small way, help preserve Tibetan culture:

The Tibetan Endangered Music Project has so far recorded about 400 endangered traditional Tibetan songs. We now have the opportunity to make these songs available online, at a leading Tibetan language website (www.tibettl.com). However, this volunteer run website is unable to fund hosting for our material. The cost of hosting space is 1.5 RMB (less than 20 US cents) for every MB. One song in mp3 format is approximately 1.5 MB. 1900 USD would allow us to buy 10 GB of hosting space, which will take care of all our needs for the forseeable future (allowing 6700 1.5 MB songs to be uploaded). It would also allow us to expand to video hosting in the future, or to provide high quality (.wav) formats instead of only compressed mp3 format.

Wow - preserving the Tibetan musical commons for the Tibetans: sign me up, I thought.

So I did sign up. But that's where the problem began.

Despite being signed up and in, I could not - can not - find anywhere to give money to this lot. Now, naively, I would have thought that a site called GiveMeaning, expressly designed to help people give money to worthy causes, would, er, you know, help people give money, maybe with a big button saying "GIVE NOW". But what do I know? I've only been using the Web for about 14 years, so maybe I'm still a little wet behind the ears.

On the other hand, it could just be that this is one of the most stupid sites in the known universe, designed to drive altruists mad as a punishment for wanting to help others. Either way, it looks like the Tibetan musical commons is going to have to do without my support, which is a pity.

The (Female) RMS of Tibet?

As a big fan of both freedom and Tibet, it seems only right that I should point to the Students for a Free Tibet site. Against a background of increasing repression and cultural genocide by the Chinese authorities in Tibet, it will be interesting to see what happens during the run-up to the 2008 Olympics and the games themselves. On the one hand, China would clearly love to portray itself as one big happy multi-ethnic family; on the other, it is unlikely to brook public reminders about its shameful invasion and occupation of Tibet.

I can only admire those Tibetans who speak up about this, and even daring to challenge, publicly, the Chinese authorities, even within China itself. One of the highest-profile - and hence most courageous - of these is Lhadon Tethong:

A Tibetan woman born and raised in Canada, Lhadon Tethong has traveled the world, working to build a powerful youth movement for Tibetan independence. She has spoken to countless groups about the situation in Tibet, most notably to a crowd of 66,000 at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, D.C. She first became involved with Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) in 1996, when she founded a chapter at University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since then, Lhadon has been a leading force in many strategic campaigns, including the unprecedented victory against China’s World Bank project in 2000.

Lhadon is a frequent spokesperson for the Tibetan independence movement, and serves as co-chair of the Olympics Campaign Working Group of the International Tibet Support Network. She has worked for SFT since March 1999 and currently serves as the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet International.

She has a blog, called Beijing Wide Open, stuffed full of Tibetan Web 2.0 goodness. I'm sure RMS would approve. (Via Boing Boing.)

Update: Sigh: bad news already....

Learning from the Encyclopedia of Life

One of the great trends online is to pool data to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. The Encyclopedia of Life is one example, but on a splendidly ambitious scale:

an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Highly laudable, not least the last part. But I can't help feeling that something has gone wrong in the realisation of this grand project.

The opening page of the website is a huge image that takes a while to load even with a decent broadband connection, and which conveys absolutely nothing (it's a nice picture taken from space of the Earth from mesopotamia to poor oppressed Tibet: and?). The home page has a video on it (why?), and all the demo pages are PDFs (er, isn't this supposed to be a website - you know, groovy HTML stuff?). slow to load, presumably because they are over-coded.

All-in-all, then, a superb idea, but one that clearly needs a lot of tweaking - to say nothing of slimming down - if it is to be really useful.

Google and Cultural Genocide

A suprising post from Cult of the Dead Cow about Google and its role in the cultural genocide of the Tibetans:

Ever since Google announced that it would deploy its emasculated server farms into Mainland China, the search giant's collaboration with Chinese censors has been widely criticized by the human rights community, free speech advocates, and the United States Congress. Although Google claims to have consulted with many nameless NGOs before deciding to export its censorship technology to China, it failed to take anyone's advice not to proceed. Google apparently knew better than its critics. Google even took the step of hiring someone from the Council on Foreign Relations to improve its public image with respect to corporate responsibility and geo-strategy. Regardless, Google's arguments for continuing to capitulate to Chinese demands are misplaced, self-serving, and uninformed. They are also a threat to Western security
interests.

Pity about that typeface. (Via Boing Boing.)

Digital Memories of the Tibetan Uprising

I've written before about how digital technology can be applied by the oppressed and disenfranchised to help preserve their identity. It's good therefore to see new-ish technologies like YouTube being pressed into similar service for a mass online protest focussing on March 10:

On March 10, 1959, Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to actively resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tens of thousands of Tibetans risked their lives to protect their nation and their beloved leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They gave of themselves so that future generations could live to continue the fight and regain the freedom of Tibet.

This March 10, we will honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Free Tibet, Free Tibetan Typeface

I came across this worthy project through an article about Tibet by Paul Jones:

The Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library project at the University of Virginia is pleased to make available the alpha release of the Unicode character based Tibetan Machine Uni OpenType font for writing Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi in dbu can script with full support for the Sanskrit combinations found in chos skad texts.

Alpha release here, people: could all Tibetan hackers please hammer the code.

Crimes in High Places

The ability of blogs to pick up on stories that the mainstream media miss or choose to ignore is by now well known; less remarked upon is the fluidity of the blogging world - the fact that a blog can comment on anything, even apparently far beyond its area of specialism.

A case in point is this post on Get Outdoors - "Everything you need to GetOutdoors". Hardly the place where you'd expect to find material headed "Chinese Troops Gun Down Tibetan Refugees". What's even more remarkable, though, is that this story, of international importance given China's continuing denial of human rights abuses in Tibet, is only now being picked up by the traditional outlets, who somehow overlooked it the first time around.

All power to the blogging elbow.

Update: The BBC has now picked up on the story, and is running a video showing the events. Interestingly, the clip was first shown on a small video sharing site in Romania - further proof that Web 2.0 is starting to trump MSM 1.0 these days.

Unhappy New Year, Tibet

Although open access usually refers to journal papers, there are an increasing number of books freely available too, as a previous post noted. One I came across recently is a good example, because it lies at the opposite end of the open access spectrum from the latest research reports.

As its title - "Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction" - suggests, this is one of those "work of lifetime" books that both sums up what is currently known, and also provides as starting-poing for future directions.

It is really quite extraordinary - even for someone like me who has no Tibetan or Burman. In fact the book, which is a svelte 3.2 Mb PDF file, can be appreciated by anyone simply as a hermetic artefact. Scrolling through the 805 pages (yes, you read correctly - it really is one of those awe-inspiring tomes) you encounter a cloud of almost completely-inscrutable signs.

It can also be appreciated as poetry, dealing as it does with the relationships between several hundred languages in the Tibeto-Burman family with names like Bal-brang, Jingpho-Nung-Luish, Khualsim, Loloish, Nruanghmei, Ugong and Yakkhaba.

And anyone can appreciate the importance of this book, laid out in its introduction:

The great Sino-Tibetan language family, comprising Chinese on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to Indo-European, and equally important in the context of world civilization. The overwhelming cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250-300) in the TB branch.

But as well as providing clues to the origins of Chinese, whose "cultural predominance" grows by the day, this wonderful e-book is also a major contribution to the understanding of the Tibetan language, almost totally ignored in the West, along with its people.

This fact is particularly regrettable at the moment. It appears that China has decided to crackdown on monks in Lhasa who remain steadfast in their allegiance to the exiled Dalai Lama. This is but the latest episode in China's appalling treatment of Tibet after its invasion of that country in 1949. In addition to its continuing abuse of human rights, Chinese authorities have embarked on what the Government of Tibet in Exile terms "ecocide": the reckless and systematic destruction of Tibet's environment. One of the ironies of this is that China too is suffering the consequences of this.

The only consolation is that however brutal China's treatment of Tibet itself becomes, Tibetan culture will live on. As well as a considerable number of Tibetans living in exile around the world (chiefly in India) who keep the flame alive, there are now a number of projects, some major international collaborations, to digitise the unique Tibetan cultural heritage.

Once again, the world of bits offers a partial counterbalance to some of the terrible losses taking place in the world of atoms.