National Public Radio’s Anthony Kuhn has an interview with the founder of anti-cnn.com, 23 year old Rao Jin.   Rao and the hundreds of volunteers who have joined his cause maintain the website to counteract what they see as bias in Western media coverage of China and its policies in Tibet.  Interesting story with interesting perspectives.

In the latest round of reaction to international criticism of Chinese policies, anti-French demonstrations sprouted up in cities including Beijing, Kunming, Wuhan, and Qingdao, often targeting the French line of grocery stores, Carrefour.  The outbursts were a reaction to the Paris protests against Chinese human rights abuses that coincided with the passage of the Olympic torch through the city.  More specifically, they were driven by rumors that the owners of Carrefour had endorsed Tibetan independence.  (Finally, the U.S. and China have found some common ground…hating the French.)

Such protests have not been uncommon in recent weeks and they are often accompanied by Internet attacks against Western media outlets, governments, and even individuals, as the case of Duke Student Grace Wang demonstrated.  All this has prompted the Chinese government to issue a statement through Xinhua urging its citizens to ease off of the online ire.  The government has also reportedly instructed its small army of Internet police to begin blocking access to certain inflammatory websites and to delete particularly hostile posts.

Meanwhile, China’s position is further complicated by the controversy over a shipment of arms to the embattled government of Robert Mugabe, which is currently being held by union dock workers in South Africa.  The arms were purchased before the recent election debacle in Zimbabwe, but they nonetheless highlight China’s relations with certain unsavory international actors who supply it with critical natural resources.  (Wow, America and China should really hang out more often, we have a lot of similar interests.)

All this leaves Beijing fighting on two fronts to control its international image ahead of the 2008 Olympics.  On the one hand, it must dampen global criticism of its human rights policies generally and toward Tibet in particular, while on the other, it must try to control its own increasingly nationalistic citizens as they lash out against perceived foreign slanders leveled at their homeland.

This was, perhaps, the inevitable result of a desire to put China in the international spotlight, but one wonders if the central government overestimated its ability to manage its own image.  Indeed, it may have painted itself into a corner by using traditional nationalism to fill the void left by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought.  After all, how can it criticize its citizens for acting on the same values it has so vociferously advocated for the last decade?

The New York Times published a disturbing article about the online backlash faced by a Chinese student at Duke University who tried to mediate between pro-China and pro-Tibet demonstrators. The student, Grace Wang, reportedly tired without success to start talks between rival protest groups on the day the Olympic Torch passed through San Francisco. Afterwards, things turned ugly:

The next day, a photo appeared on an Internet forum for Chinese students with a photo of Ms. Wang and the words “traitor to your country” emblazoned in Chinese across her forehead. Ms. Wang’s Chinese name, identification number and contact information were posted, along with directions to her parents’ apartment in Qingdao, a Chinese port city.

Salted with ugly rumors and manipulated photographs, the story of the young woman who was said to have taken sides with Tibet spread through China’s most popular Web sites, at each stop generating hundreds or thousands of raging, derogatory posts, some even suggesting that Ms. Wang — a slight, rosy 20-year-old — be burned in oil. Someone posted a photo of what was purported to be a bucket of feces emptied on the doorstep of her parents, who had gone into hiding.

This sort of “Internet vigilantism” is a piece of China’s emergent online culture and has made headlines before; most famously when, in 2006, outraged Chinese citizens reacted to an anonymous blog by a British expatriate recounting the latter’s sexual conquest of Chinese women. While the anonymity afforded by the net has long fostered nasty comments on forums and in chat rooms, the vitriol of the attacks in this and other cases from China along with the posting of specific information about the target make the phenomenon particularly troubling. High technology, nationalism, and the cloak of a random username make for a dangerous cocktail, it would seem.

Justin Herman, considered by many to be San Francisco’s answer to Robert Moses, was a controversially autocratic urban planner who used eminent domain at will to revitalize the city’s beleaguered waterfront. One wonders how fitting it was then to have the Plaza that was named for him host one of the largest political protests in recent memory, albeit against an authority of a different sort – the People’s Republic of China.

I was standing in Justin Herman Plaza on that cool, sunny spring day last Wednesday. Getting off the Embarcadero, one was drawn into the cavalcade of people wearing bright colors, waving flags, and bursting with endless political restlessness. Out of context, it could be mistaken for a World Cup soccer match (though with somewhat less drinking, hooliganism, and Zinedane Zidane). Even leaving the subway, several groups of local high schools students practiced pro-Tibetan chants, and the walkway to the Plaza attracted a diverse mix of hobos and beggars, who know the purchasing power of a good crowd when they see one.

Tibetan protestors waved signs and handed out sheets of paper profiling injuries claimed to have been sustained by Tibetans under Chinese rule. On the closing stage, a band played KC and the Sunshine Band’s iconic (and singularly irreverent) “That’s the Way (I Like It)”.

PRC-flag waiving supporters thronged the stage where the closing ceremonies were supposed to occur an hour later (the public was still ignorant of the route change); most were undeterred (and remarkably polite) despite the protestors, who have been a touchy subject to many Chinese nationals. If the locals were annoyed by the perceived threat to Olympic Pax Sinica that the Tibetans were causing, it didn’t show.

To get from one side of the Plaza to the other, I quickly found myself in the back of a line of Tibetan protestors that were working their way around the stage. This particular group was led by a Tibetan monk (or a man dressed as one), and was populated by a diverse mix of Tibetans, Chinese, and American college students wearing white T-shirts emblazoned with the Tibetan flag.

PRC supporters and indifferent locals parted peacefully on both sides, their bodies forming a barrier to the escaping stream of people that headed to a nearby plaza. There, a group of local activists stood defiantly behind a “San Francisco Says: No Torch in Tibet” sign that stretched across the Plaza. Twenty or so Darfur supporters were also in the mix, their dark green shirts a reminder of how easy it is for the fickle public conscience to abandon old causes to support a fresh injustice.

Remarkable as the protests were, they should be lauded for the relative peace that pervaded the festivities. Despite the close proximity of such vastly different political views, San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong reported only three arrests (undoubtedly due to the extensive police presence). Chinese state agency Xinhua issued an upbeat report as the festivities were underway, mentioning the Tibetan protesters in a brief article entitled ‘Tibetan separatists try to sabotage Olympic torch relay in U.S.’.

This article in NPR displayed a picture of PRC supporters apparently beating a man clutching a Tibetan flag. Heavy police presence kept violence limited, and I saw no evidence of any particularly negative act on either side – the city’s reputation for tolerance and diversity prevailed.

Given the city’s large but diverse Chinese-American population, one wonders how the Chinese Community (who make up some 20% of the city’s population) reacted to the storm of protest. In this article, Reuters points out that while the Olympics are a source of pride for the city, the actual community remains divided on the inherent political issues involved. Don’t blame them – San Francisco’s Chinese population ranges from recent immigrants to seventh generation (and greater) Americans who helped build the city during its formative years in the middle of the 19^th century. Likewise, grouping them together as a political bloc is like grouping a recent Northern Irish Orangemen immigrant with a 6^th generation Irish American college coed whose greatest contribution to Irish culture was stumbling out of a bar on St. Patrick’s Day.

It has been argued that the Olympics are an inappropriate vehicle for Tibetan protests. While this may be true, there was no turning back the tide of Tibetans on the San Francisco waterfront last week, all of whom seemed to beg the question: if not now, then when?

Reports have emerged of new, violent protests by Tibetans in the city of Garze, part of China’s Sichuan Province. Given the lack of media access and the vaunted “reliability” of government information, details are still sketchy at the moment. Tibetan exile groups claim that People’s Armed Police units shot and killed eight protesters, while Xinhua, the Chinese state news service, says simply that the rioters were restrained after “warning shots” were fired. Given that the Rashomon effect may be in play here, I’ll hold off on calling it one way or another…

The discrepancy is likely to stir up more angry voices on the net as a number of Chinese “netizens” have taken umbrage at what they see as biased Western reporting on the Tibetan protests. In fact, one group of disgruntled viewers has created its own website, anti-cnn.com, which seeks to go beard to beard with Blitzer or any other journalist that distorts the truth as they see it. The site does seem to have caught quite a few examples of sloppy editing, especially where images of protests at the Chinese embassy in Nepal were displayed next to headlines about China (then again, pictures from Tibet are hard to come by…maybe the news organizations didn’t have anything else to show).

Having some years of experience as a consumer of the very media these individuals are critiquing, I can say with confidence that they’ve probably caught some legitimate screw ups, distortions, and examples of good, old-fashioned ignorance born of two decades worth of foreign bureau budget cuts at the major papers and networks. Still, most coverage I read and watched made no secret of the fact that protesters were hurling rocks and burning stores. Within the constraints of covering a story as inaccessible as the riots were, I think I got pretty good picture of what was going on. Now, if they expect the New York Times to run a front page story explaining that the Dalai Lama has never done a good deed in his life and is clearly responsible for all of the Spring time risings in China’s west, they have another thing coming…

This morning’s New York Times has an excellent story on the role of Chinese nationalism in fueling popular backlash against violent protests by Tibetans and against the Chinese Communist Party. Why the party you ask? The piece has a great explanatory quote in the second graph:

“We couldn’t believe our government was being so weak and cowardly,” said Ms. Meng, 52, an office worker, who was appalled that the authorities had failed to initially douse the violence. “The Dalai Lama is trying to separate China, and it is not acceptable at all. We must crack down on the rioters.”

It goes on to explain that some Chinese are talking about the Tibet incident in stark, ideological terms such as “people’s war.” (In fact, I find this a little ironic since “people’s war” was Mao Zedong’s term of art for his groundbreaking theory of guerrilla resistance against the established order.) The sentiments expressed in the piece are a reflection of a new civic culture that has emerged in China in past two decades, namely popular nationalism. Since the practical demise of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought, national pride has been cultivated as a ready replacement by the CCP and is often put on public display when Japan’s prime minister visits the Yasukuni Shrine (containing the remains war criminals from the 1940s) or when, say, America accidentally bombs a Chinese embassy (our bad).

However, as the CCP has learned in several previous mass protests, the genie of nationalism is difficult to put back in its bottle. Stoking the flames is easy but reigning in an angry public is another matter, and when the government is perceived as weak on issue like Tibet, the ire of the people can easily be directed toward the powers that be. Beijing needs to be more careful what kind of sentiment it inculcates in its populace lest it get burned in the future.

According to the Times of India, Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops have made more than a dozen incursions into Indian claimed territory since January. The piece goes on to note that Chinese patrols regularly cross into disputed territory that is claimed by New Delhi. The Sino-Indian border dispute is one of the last outstanding territorial grievances that China has with its neighbors and stems from a nasty border war fought between Asia’s giants back in 1962; a war that the PLA won handily. This just goes to show that for all the bilateral exchanges and improved relations between India and China in recent years, there are still problems to be overcome. Let us not forget that the official security rationale for India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1970s was not a hostile Pakistan, but deterrence against China’s strategic arms.

The disputed area in question is a key piece of territory for both states. India has had a significant interest in maintaining control over the region to protect itself from both China and Pakistan, a sentiment that was only reinforced by the Kargil Crisis in 1999. For China, the interest is in stabilizing its restive western frontier and controlling who and what can come across the border. The Chinese province adjacent to India is Tibet and as recent events have made painfully clear, there are some Tibetans who are, shall we say, nonplussed at the idea of being a part of China. All this is not to say we should be on the look out for another clash of the titans in the Himalayas, but this issue will likely remain a stumbling block between the two countries. When neighbors with a history of conflict cram lots of military hardware into a small, sensitive piece of territory that both lay claim to, parceling out the land can be a long, painful endeavor. Just ask these guys.

In Washington, there is a daily ritual that occurs along side other traditional happenings like the opening prayer in Congress and the President’s morning nap (supervised by the Director of National Intelligence). It is the State Department’s daily press briefing. The briefing is a chance for reporters to get the official stance state straight from the horse’s mouth; which, in this case, would be the mouth of Sean McCormack.

Like its White House counterpart, the State Department press briefing is characterized by probing, incisive questions (ex. “There was a question of why the briefing is so early today, and I said perhaps it’s because the Red Sox are on TV. [Laughter.]“) and carefully worded, evasive answers (ex. “No, that’s tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning at 6:00 a.m., the Red Sox begin their defense of their World Series title and begin the baseball season.”). Unlike many White House press briefings, the State Department briefing is incredibly boring; to the point that a self-proclaimed C-Span junkie like myself (who usually follows committee hearings the way most people follow Lost) dozes off by the fifth or sixth question. I decided it might be fun to take a few points from yesterday’s briefing and recast them in more punchy language while also trying to decipher the reality behind the vague, diplomatic wording. So here it goes.

Here, Mr. McCormack addresses the ongoing talks between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Government initiated at the Annapolis Conference on Middle East peace:

QUESTION: Can you put — we’re now a good four months into the sort of post-Annapolis period. Can you put anything in that period that (a) demonstrates that either side is meeting their Roadmap obligations and (b) that you would argue constitutes material, substantive progress toward reaching an agreement of some sort by the end of this year, as the President hopes to do?

MR. MCCORMACK: In terms of Roadmap obligations, I guess I would just refer back to what the Secretary herself has said on this, and that is that each side needs to do more, that they haven’t done enough, and I expect that that will be a topic of her conversation when she goes out on the next trip as well as the trip after that. This is going to be something that we work with both sides in detail on.

General Fraser recently had the first trilateral meeting, I think, last – was it last week or the week before – with bringing together all the sides. I think it’s fair to say that we are still in the process of getting each side to focus on what they need to do and get out of the mode of pointing the finger at the other guy and talking about what they need to do. The focus needs to be on each side examining where it stands in terms of its obligations and what it is doing to meet its own obligations and worry less about what the other guy is doing or not doing [...]

It’s our assessment, though, in talking to both sides that they are making progress. And they both have abided by a commitment to the other side that they are not going to talk about where they stand in negotiations. They are not going to do a blow-by-blow in public. We think that’s – we think that that is a wise decision at this point and, certainly, it’s not for us, then, to talk about what it is that we might have heard from each side in terms of where they stand in the political process.

First, we notice that McCormack refers constantly to the statements others have made, especially the Secretary of State. Moderately bothersome perhaps, but hey…he is the spokesman. The other thing we notice right away is that he doesn’t give us any specific evidence to back up his claim that things are going well. Just that both sides are making “good progress”…meaning they aren’t attempting to slaughter one another en masse at the moment. Sure, there might be the odd rocket attack on Israel or an IDF shooting near Gaza, but as long as nothing so horrifically shocking happens to inflame public opinion against even sitting at the table with the other side, talks continue. Progress. (Sadly, there’s some truth to this…)

On the recent scandal involving State employees snooping on presidential candidate’s passport files:

Okay, yes, lots of hands, yeah. Elise.

QUESTION: More on the passports. Just one quick follow-up on that. Can you say whether typically, passport files, in addition to the application, also have when the passport was – when and where the passport was used?

MR. MCCORMACK: I don’t think that – I’ll check for you, Elise, but I don’t believe that that is – that is in that –

QUESTION: In that –

MR. MCCORMACK: — that passport file, yeah, because it’s not the function of that file. We don’t keep a record of people entering into foreign countries. That’s not part of what we would do, as far as I know.

QUESTION: Okay. And then –

MR. MCCORMACK: Like I said, to –

QUESTION: Entry into U.S. Can you check –

MR. MCCORMACK: Entry, that would – again, that’s not something that we keep. That’s something – that’s a separate function of the Department of Homeland Security. You can ask them what records they maintain in terms of people’s entry and exit into the United States, but that is not a function that we perform in terms of monitoring entry and exit to the United States.

An awkward question. McCormack is clearly groping for a dodge on this one and then-yes! That old favorite of officialdom, “the passing of the buck”. Unfortunately, the spokesman doesn’t know exactly what kind of information the perpetrators were able to see because the labyrinthine construction of bureaucracy charges another agency with that. Better go talk to DHS…

Finally, to the Tibetan protests against Chinese rule:

QUESTION: On Tibet, I know the Secretary spoke a little bit earlier this morning, but there’s been a lot of talk about the Olympics and whether there should be some kind of boycotting because of China’s actions towards Tibet. Do you think that the U.S. is sending the wrong message to China by attending the Olympics at such a high level?

MR. MCCORMACK: No.

QUESTION: President Bush is supposed to be attending.

MR. MCCORMACK: No. We’ve made our views clear on this. We believe that the Olympics is an important international sporting event. We’re going to treat it as such. And we have consistently and will consistently urge China to put its best face forward, to allow expansion of basic human freedoms, whether that’s the ability to report on events in China or to speak out in a peaceful manner to voice one’s own opinion in China, whether or not to be able to worship as an individual sees fit.

So we will – we have done that. We’ll continue to do that. And we would only counsel China that, given the fact that the Olympics is such a high-profile international sporting event, that there will be the world’s attention on China for those couple of weeks in August when they host the Olympics, and that that is an important opportunity for China and that they should take up the opportunity to put their best face forward to the world.

Here we find a long-time favorite of official State Department language: thinly veiled realpolitik. Simply put, the U.S. relationship with China is strategically crucial for a number of reasons, both economic and political. Thus, America has to attend China’s big coming out party at the Summer Olympics, otherwise Beijing will get upset and stop answering our calls or talking to us about exchange rate policy or something of the like. The problem is that Americans generally don’t like to see oppressive governments deploying paramilitary goons to crack the heads of protesters, however raucous. The solution, as is often the case, is to pay lip service to the idea of human rights (because we know China will put its “best face forward” if we just ask) while pursuing American national interests in the realm of policy.

Of course, as a student of international relations, I recognize that there is really little else for the U.S. to do, however galling this may be. I sometimes like to think that if the government invested more time educating the citizens of the United States about foreign policy and what American power can realistically achieve, we could dispense with this charade of discussing policy in such formulaic terms. Yet, I fear that is a might too idealistic…

Whenever something serious is happening in China, I always take a minute to browse through People’s Daily and marvel at the bizarre unreality offered up by the media mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. This is wonderful example of the sort of “coverage” offered by our friends at Renmin Ribao:

Lying in the People’s Hospital, Losang Cering had seven stitches on his face. His cheekbone was broken and the Tibetan doctor also suffered cerebral concussion.

“I didn’t regret helping the Hans,” he said.
Losang Cering went out with nurse Cejig last Friday to rescue the injured in the riot, when he saw a tearful father, whose name he knew later was Wu Guanglin, cuddling his son in front of a smoky house crying for help. The boy was trampled by rioters and suffocated.

They performed artificial respiration for the six-year-old boy and drove him and Wu Guanglin to hospital. But the ambulance was intercepted within 10 meters by a dozen mobsters wielding knives and clubs or holding bricks, who asked for the Hans.

Rebuffing their demand, Losang Cering clinched the boy to his chest and gave his safety helmet to Wu.

“I am a doctor. They won’t hurt me,” he said.

Although the doctor and the nurse were both injured seriously in the violence, he was glad the boy was saved.

Talking about his story, Losang Cering didn’t appear proud at all. “It was my duty,” he said, “when we are in trouble, I believe that the Hans would do the same.”

Though I have no doubt that this story is true, you have to admire the skilled construction of a soothing narrative portraying the “good Tibetan” in solidarity with his Han brethren, facing down the ravenous mob of “splittists” who seem intent on violence against anyone of any ethnicity who falls in their path. Just when you think the CCP is getting soft, they prove that they still have the old propaganda magic. Oh well…you have to at least give them credit for even talking about  Tibet.

Big Trouble in Little Tibet

It’s been a great week for China watchers everywhere…unless your vantage point happens be somewhere on the Tibetan Plateau. Agitated Tibetans took to the streets this week in protest against the policies imposed upon them by the communist Chinese government in Beijing. The Chinese response was tragic, yet predictable, and exercised with all the finesse of a raging mountain gorilla. Police and paramilitary units descended on the Tibetan Autonomous Region to quash the protesters, leaving an unknown number dead (perhaps a dozen or more) and many others in state custody.

Of course, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, had a ready explanation for the widespread unrest. It was all orchestrated by that nefarious mastermind of international intrigue, Tenzin Gyatso; better known as the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Yes, how could we have not seen it? It was the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Lamist Buddhism that sparked the revolt, not state restrictions on religious worship, demographic dilution by Han Chinese through official settlement policies, or outright discrimination. That tricky, bald bastard.

Any attempt at achieving true autonomy for Tibet, let alone independence, is almost certainly a doomed enterprise. The PRC is dead set on maintaining its territorial integrity and there are a lot more Chinese with a lot more guns than there are Tibetans. No amount of protest, international scolding, or meditation by Richard Gere is going to change that.

I am, however, curious to see how these events will play out domestically in China. In spite of the government’s best efforts to control internal news coverage of the protests, China is too wired today to keep out reports from the international media. Will this create outrage in China proper? I doubt it. Ever since Tiananmen Square in 1989, Americans seem to think of the Chinese multitude as yearning for freedom within the oppressive constraints of the state. But in reality, Chinese society has become increasingly nationalistic in recent years and many (though not all) have done quite well from its economic boom. Why rock the boat? In fact, why should the Han Chinese reaction to injustice against Tibetans be any different from white America’s reaction to the L.A. riots or the Katrina debacle? I could be wrong, but I’m not holding my breath for any popular Chinese outcry on Tibet’s behalf.

News and Notes

• Saudi clerics: “So wait, now we aren’t supposed to call for the ritual beheading of heretics and infidels? Time for another sermon revision…”
• Holy crap, Canada has state secrets? And an “elite counter terrorism squad”!? And a “Department of National Defense”?!?
• If you’re going to spy on someone, it’s probably not a good idea to carry your CIA buddy’s business card with you at all times.
• Do I sense a diplomatic cat fight coming on?