This is absolutely chilling.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/05/AR2008050502218_
pf.html
A Lone Tibetan Voice, Intent on Speaking Out
Writer Seeks to Chronicle Events in Areas Hit by Crackdown
By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; A10
BEIJING -- Each morning, it is the same. She rises and heads to her computer
to write, to pierce the silence that otherwise shrouds events these days in
Tibet, her homeland.
Woeser, a 41-year-old writer who uses only one name in the Tibetan
tradition, knows she risks arrest. Hers is one of the only Tibetan voices
within China that still reaches the outside world, now that the Chinese
government has arrested hundreds and essentially blacked out most
communication from Tibetan-inhabited areas.
Though she lives in Beijing, Woeser still has contacts across the Tibetan
plateau, and she has been using them to funnel information onto her blog
since the deadly March 14 riots in the region's capital, Lhasa. The
government has said that the riots and the unrest that followed were caused
by violent separatists. Woeser is constructing an alternative narrative --
one of protest sparked by long-festering resentments against Chinese
repression of Tibetan culture and the Buddhist religion.
It has not been easy. Late last month, hackers attacked Woeser's site and
locked her out. Previously, security officials had put her under house
arrest. A policeman had warned her to stop writing about Tibet.
"I told him, 'Apart from Tibet, I have no interest in writing,' " said
Woeser, the world's best-known contemporary Tibetan writer. "I want to
record all of the history and be a witness to what is happening now."
Government Control
As Olympic torchbearers prepare to scale the Tibetan side of Mount Everest
and envoys of the Dalai Lama have begun informal talks with their Chinese
counterparts over the current crisis in Tibet, a global battle rages over
how to interpret what is happening in the remote Himalayan region. But
almost entirely absent from the discussion are voices of Tibetans living
within Tibet, the people who can describe everyday life and let others judge
whether they are being wronged.
"The main voice is hers," said Robbie Barnett, director of modern
Tibetan
studies at Columbia University in New York. "She is one of the very, very
few Tibetans who have been able to put their name to the discussion and have
managed to stay afloat."
Woeser's writing finds no favor in the Chinese government. Her books are
banned here and three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have
been shut down in the past two years -- on government orders, a friend at
one of the Internet companies told her. Her current blog,
http://woeser.middle-way.net, is hosted on a computer server in the United
States, but even that one temporarily succumbed to an attack April 26.
"It's not only me. Many scholars do not have freedom of speech. Their blogs
and Web sites are also blocked," Woeser said in a telephone interview from
her 20th-floor apartment in China's capital. Although her house arrest has
been lifted, officials from the local security bureau keep watch at her
building, and she says she is often followed.
"This reflects the Chinese government's strict control over speech,"
she
said. "They don't want me to leave this kind of record, to talk about what
happened in Tibet in a real way. This voice is what the government does not
want to hear."
Another Tibetan writer and researcher, Jamyang Kyi, was arrested April 1 at
her office in the state-owned television station in Xining, capital of
Qinghai province. A well-known singer and television presenter, Jamyang Kyi
wrote about women's rights. She once wrote a poem to Woeser, praising her
for her work.
With the living words spread forth from your heart
I see the footprint of our ancestors in the mountains of the Plateau.
An Unlikely Dissident
In many ways, Woeser is an unlikely dissident. She was born in Lhasa to
members of the Communist Party. Her father was a deputy commander of a local
unit of the People's Liberation Army, making his family well-positioned to
benefit from China's control of the region.
"I used to believe the army came to Tibet to set Tibetans free,"
Woeser
said.
When she was 4 years old, her family moved to a Tibetan area of Sichuan
province. After the worst ravages of China's Cultural Revolution had passed
and schools reopened, Woeser and her friends were educated in Chinese. No
studies were offered in the Tibetan language. Although she can speak
Tibetan, Woeser, like many of her generation, never learned to read or write
her native tongue.
She returned to Lhasa after getting her college degree in Chinese
literature. "My way of thinking was not based on reality," she said.
"All I
wanted to do was write poems."
She had not thought much about Buddhism before returning to Lhasa; as party
members, her parents practiced no religion. But once she was back in Tibet,
Woeser said, she was drawn to the teachings of Buddhism and began to cherish
its culture.
Her politics, too, began to change. After a friend returned from Hong Kong
with an autobiography of the Dalai Lama, Woeser devoured it. When China
intervened in the selection of the 11th Panchen Lama and named its own
candidate as the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Woeser felt the
same insult as her Tibetan friends. "China controlled the monks so
strictly," she explained. "When you live in Tibet and you hear and see
these
things every day, you will change."
In 1999, Woeser published her first poetry collection, which explored
Tibetan identity and dealt with sensitive issues indirectly, using lyricism
and metaphor. Her next book, a compilation of prose essays, was direct, and
it did not take long for authorities to ban it. Woeser was told to leave her
job at a state-supported literary journal, unless she repented for her
political mistakes. She lost her income, her pension, her security.
"My writing became very obvious," she said. "My father always
taught me that
I have to listen to the Communist Party when it talks, and that when I
write, I have to balance between what I feel and what the party says. But
I've found that that's impossible to do."
She moved to Beijing and, the following year, married dissident writer Wang
Lixiong, who supported her through what she sees as the turning point in her
life. She would not admit political mistakes, but rather would give voice to
truths about Tibet. If she couldn't publish in China, she would publish in
Hong Kong or Taiwan. If China would not listen, maybe the outside world
would.
By the time Woeser left Lhasa, she was already well into another sensitive
topic -- an account of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet,
based on interviews with 70 participants. The work, which became the topic
of two books she published in Taiwan, was actually inspired by photographs
her father had taken of temples being smashed and people targeted as class
enemies being beaten and humiliated in public struggle sessions. Little has
been recorded about the experiences of Tibetans during that time, and
scholars are eager to translate her books into English. One volume has
already been translated into French.
Woeser has applied many times for a passport, but has always been denied the
right to travel overseas. Until now, it has not really mattered, she said.
Her small apartment in Beijing is a warm place, decorated in Tibetan style,
and she feels comfortable there, spending her days in front of her computer
except when she travels to Tibetan areas on reporting trips.
But since March 14, she said, life in Beijing has become very hard. "There
are so many extreme nationalists who know so little about Tibet, who are so
shallow about a lot of things," she said. "I really resent it."
When she's inspired, she writes a little poetry. But mostly she is
documenting as best she can the situation inside Tibet. According to her
reporting, at least 150 Tibetans were killed in the Lhasa riot, not just the
22 mostly Han Chinese deaths the government has acknowledged.
"Sometimes I'm scared, especially when I hear my friends have been beaten
up," she said. "But I feel I have a responsibility to do this. Some
things
are really hard to know now, but if I know something, I will write it."
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