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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 11th, 2010 Wednesday, March 10, 2010Dalai Lama voices support for UighursBy Jamil Anderlini and Kathrin Hille in Beijing
Published: March 10 2010, newsessentials.blogspot.com/…/dalai-lama-voices-support-for-uighurs.html The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, expressed solidarity and support for Muslim Uighurs on Wednesday, raising the spectre for Beijing of closer co-ordination between opponents of Chinese rule and minority groups in territories that have seen ethnic rioting in the past two years. His comments came in a blistering attack on the ruling Communist party’s policies in his homeland that was timed to mark the anniversary of a Tibetan revolt against Chinese rule in 2008 and the 51st anniversary of the uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight to India.“Let us also remember the people of East Turkestan [China’s Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region] who have experienced great difficulties and increased oppression, and the Chinese intellectuals campaigning for greater freedom who have received severe sentences. I would like to express my solidarity and stand firmly with them,” the Dalai Lama said in his statement. There has been little co-ordination or communication between Tibetan and Uighur groups. The 2008 uprising in Tibet was separate from the bloody ethnic riots that broke out in Xinjiang last year. Beijing’s response to the unrest has been heavy-handed, with a massive influx of troops into both regions and “patriotic re-education” campaigns. The World Uighur Congress, an exile organisation, welcomed the Dalai Lama’s remarks and appealed to Beijing to respect the political will of the Tibetan and Uighur people. “We both face the threat of suppression of our religion, cultural extinction and large-scale Chinese migration into our homelands,” it said. A Chinese foreign ministry official referred questions to the United Front Department saying that any issues related to Tibet and the Dalai Lama were a domestic affair and not the foreign ministry’s responsibility. The United Front Department could not be reached for comment. Posted by World Watch. ———— Had China accepted the reality that it needs to allow more self-government to its ethnic and politically different component regions – there would be no problem with the reintegration of Taiwan as part of a confederation of friendly states and cities. We say this all the time on this website and we think it would be in China’s interest. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 27th, 2010 U.S.-China Spat Escalates Over Internet Freedom. WASHINGTON, Jan 26 (IPS) – The stern warning given to China by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning internet censorship and responding to allegations that Chinese hackers had accessed Google email addresses has received a pointed response from the Chinese government, raising questions over what the next move will be for Google, the United States, and U.S. firms that do business in China. On Thursday, Clinton laid out the national security threat posed by cyber attacks and warned that attacks would not go unnoticed and would bring a response. “States, terrorist and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” said Clinton. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society,” she continued. The Chinese response to Clinton’s remarks took sharply differing tones depending on which audience Beijing was addressing. On the foreign ministry website, the government responded on Friday with measured language, saying, “The U.S. attacks China’s internet policy, indicating that China has been restricting internet freedom. We resolutely oppose such remarks and practices that contravene facts and undermine China-U.S. relations,” and, “We urge the U.S. to respect facts and stop attacking China under the excuse of the so-called freedom of internet.” But in state-controlled news outlets, primarily published for a domestic readership, the war of words was much more harshly framed. “Accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China. We are firmly opposed to that,” a spokesman of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua News Agency on Sunday. The state-controlled newspaper, The Global Times, wrote, “China’s real stake in the ‘free flow of information’ is evident in its refusal to be victimised by information imperialism.” “With the Chinese-language media, there are two important themes to keep in mind. First, [the controversy over Google] is really not that big a deal. The Chinese Google saga is really more interesting to people in Washington than most average folks in Beijing or elsewhere,” Christina Larson, an expert on Chinese civil society and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, told IPS. “The second thing is that it’s portrayed [in the Chinese media] as really this sense that foreign companies don’t really have the right to come in and dictate their terms to China,” Larson continued. The war of words between Beijing and Washington was set off on Jan. 12 when Google announced its intention to cease the censorship of its search engine results in China and disclosed that a number of Google email accounts used by human rights advocates, diplomats and journalists had been breached by Chinese hackers. The accusations were followed by other rumours and allegations that Chinese hackers had stolen proprietary Google source code, and that cyber attacks and corporate espionage originating from China were becoming increasingly big concerns for the U.S. government and U.S. companies doing business in China. The mixture of accusations coming from Google, and Clinton’s calls for a Chinese investigation into the allegations, have left a somewhat confusing message about what Google seeks from Beijing in the upcoming discussions over its refusal to continue censoring search results. —————– We actually sympathize with the idea that Media should not be monopolized by Big Business, but when private people in China, and even international Google, tell us that the Chinese do not get full free flow of internet information we know China is not talking truth. We are also worried about China inpact on dissemination of information by multinational organizations like the UN where they insist on having a superviser appointment to be given to one of their nationals. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 10th, 2008 Tackling Tibet and Taiwan – Differently: writes Antoaneta Bezlova for IPS from Beijing, November 9, 2008. BEIJING, Nov 9 (IPS) – Chinese negotiators have, this week, discussed Tibet’s quest for genuine autonomy with the Dalai Lama’s representatives and also pushed forward the agenda to establish economic rapprochement with Taipei. Beijing has been seeking reunification with Taiwan for as long as Tibet has pursued a promised right to self-determination. Tellingly, the two negotiations got very different treatments in the state-sanctioned Chinese press. The Taiwan talks, which sought to build foundations for closer engagement over the Taiwan Strait, were covered extensively in the mainland media. Negotiators signed several agreements bringing the former arch-rivals — that fought a civil war in the 1940s — closer together by establishing direct air, postal and shipping links.
When it did report on the visit of the Dalai Lama envoys and their dialogue with Chinese officials, the agency struck a harsh note, saying the Tibetan spiritual leader should “face reality”.
But, despite the longer than usual time for discussions, no breakthrough was made, giving rise to even more doubts about the success of the Dalai Lama’s “middle path” doctrine of pursuing autonomy. Tibet and Taiwan are both grappling to find solutions to decades-long standoffs. Taiwan has been ruled separately from China since 1949. The Nationalist troops of Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island after losing the civil war against the communists on the Chinese mainland. Beijing continues to see the island as a breakaway province and has warned that it would use force to prevent Taiwan from declaring formal independence. For Beijing, the latest talks are a breakthrough because they included a visit to Taiwan of Chen Yunlin, chairman of China’s semi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, whose goal is to reunify the island and the mainland. Chen is the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit Taiwan in a half century. He also met with Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou. Ma assumed power five months ago, promising a new era of peace and economic normalisation with China, after years of tense relations under his predecessor Chen Shui-bian. Beijing, which hopes that an economic thaw across the Taiwan Strait would facilitate future reunification, has welcomed his administration. The latest talks however, were dogged by rowdy protesters and faced vocal opposition from supporters of the Democratic Progressive Party, which favors independence. Polls conducted by the Mainland Affairs Council, which oversees Taiwan’s China policy, found that 30 percent of the interviews considered Ma Ying-jeou’s opening up to China too fast in early October, compared with 19 percent who felt that way in March. Beijing had once proposed the “one country, two systems” formula, practised in the administration of Hong Kong as a possible model for Taiwan. The doctrine allows Chinese sovereignty to be applied to a territory, with foreign affairs and defence issues handled by the central government while domestic matters are left to a local administration. The same model, though, is being denied to Tibet. Du Qinglin ruled out a Hong Kong-style solution to the Tibetan question, saying China would not allow Tibet the wide degree of autonomy it has granted territories such as Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. “It is a fundamental political system of China… It does not allow the promotion of ethnic separatism under the banner of ‘genuine ethnic self-governance’,” Du said. “We will never allow someone to hold a banner of ‘real autonomy’ and damage the national unity,” he added. For the Tibetans, the stand-off over their right to self-determination has continued ever since the 15th Dalai Lama fled his homeland in 1951 for India and set up a government-in-exile in Dharamsala. But China has repeatedly accused him of leading a campaign to split off the Himalayan region from the rest of the country. The two sides have held seven rounds of talks before the current one with little progress to show for it. Beijing blamed the Dalai Lama and his followers for the riots. As the current talks were about to begin in the Chinese capital, the authorities announced they had sentenced 55 people for their involvement in March’s anti-government protests. Adding to the gloomy prospects for the dialogue, the Dalai Lama has voiced his frustration with the lack of progress in negotiations, saying Tibet was “now dying” under China’s iron-fist rule. “My trust in the Chinese government is now thinner, thinner, thinner,” he told reporters during his visit to Japan this week. “I have to accept failure”. The future of his “middle path” policy will be the focus of a special meeting, in Dharamsala, on Nov. 17, of around 300 delegates representing the worldwide exiled Tibetan community. Younger and more radical forces among the community have increasingly been calling for a tougher stance against Beijing. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 22nd, 2008 From: media at avaaz.org The August 23, 2008 – PRESS RELEASE – Will Appear In the International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao, on the Day of The Beijing Olympics’ Closing. It Willl Say – Love China / Love Tibet / Love Burma / Love Darfur – and Will Promote Human Rights For China – a Hanshake to the World. 175,000 STRONG GLOBAL HANDSHAKE TO LAND IN BEIJING AHEAD OF OLYMPIC CLOSING CEREMONY see avaaz.org A virtual global handshake will land in Beijing tomorrow ahead of the Olympic Closing Ceremony. To culminate the campaign, this weekend, Avaaz.org has taken out an advertisement in Saturday’s International Herald Tribune and China’s Ming Pao to deliver the handshake to the world.
*** The global handshake petition reads: “With this handshake, we reach out to one another as citizens round the world in the Olympic spirit of friendship and excellence, committing to hold all our governments to a higher standard of peace, justice and respect for human dignity wherever they fall short – be it in Tibet, Iraq, Burma or beyond. Dialogue is the best way forward, for China, and the world.” *** AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW Ricken Patel, Executive Director, ricken at avaaz.org, +1 646 229 5416 *** Avaaz is a global web movement with over 3.3 million members worldwide, working to ensure that the views and values of people everywhere inform global decision-making. Avaaz means “voice” in many languages. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 18th, 2008 From: mweldon at civic-exchange.org Hong Kong-based public policy think tank Civic Exchange has released a new report - A full copy of the report can be downloaded from the Civic Exchange website: A copy of the presentation can also be found on the website at : Related reports Marine Emission Reduction Options for Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region A Price too High: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in South China Lessons for Hong Kong: Air Quality Management in London and Los Angeles Apologies for cross posting Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. If you would like or further information on Civic Exchange’s ongoing and planned research programmes, please do not hesitate to contact our new Environmental Programme Manger Mike Kilburn ( mkilburn at civic-exchange.org) or visit our website at www.civic-exchange.org. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 11th, 2008 A Price Too High: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in Southern China. Hong Kong-based think tank Civic Exchange, the Department of Community Medicine, School of Public Health of Hong Kong University; the Department of Community and Family Medicine, School of Public Health of Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Institute for the Environment of the University of Hong Kong for Science & Technology are pleased to announce the release a groundbreaking study today entitled A Price Too High – Health Impacts of Air Pollution in southern China. Using 2006 air quality data, the number of premature deaths estimated at 10,000 in Hong Kong, Macao and the Pearl River Delta can be avoided. At current levels, the pollution is also responsible for 440,000 annual hospital bed-days, and 11 million annual outpatient visits throughout the region. These are very large numbers exacting a heavy cost on the citizens in the region. The research also shows there has not been sufficient local and regional air pollution and public health research to track the effectiveness of policies, and assist the authorities to formulate the best policies to reduce pollution. In the past 25 years only 147 such reports have been conducted for all of mainland China, with only 37 of those concerned with southern China. With the East Asian and Asian Games coming to Hong Kong and Guangzhou in 2009 and 2010 respectively, the report outlines clear opportunities for positive collaboration to reduce emissions and improve public health. Full report and presentation are available on Civic Exchange website: Full literature review and supplementary report: http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload… Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. For more information about Civic Exchange, please visit www.civic-exchange.org Michele Weldon Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 18th, 2008 PROACTIVE CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY ON BUILDINGS NEEDED IN HONG KONG AND MACAU Civic Exchange and the Architects Association of Macau (AAM) are pleased to inform you of their first joint report on buildings and climate change, titled ‘Green’ House or Greenhouse? - Climate Change & The Building Stock of Hong Kong & Macau and funded by ADM Capital Foundation. The report argues that reducing emissions from buildings should be a priority since they are both major contributors to and very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Other key messages include: · Good buildings are vital to quality of life; The report can be downloaded from the Civic Exchange website http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/upload… To coincide with the release, on Friday 25th April 2008, Civic Exchange and the AAM will host a lively workshop on the challenges and opportunities for creating a low carbon built environment in Hong Kong. For further details and registration please go the Civic Exchange website at http://www.civic-exchange.org/eng/event_… Civic Exchange is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Hong Kong that helps to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. For more information about Civic Exchange, please visit www.civic-exchange.org AAM is an association of public and private sector architects based in Macau and undertakes a variety of activities related to architecture in Macau. For more information please visit www.macaoarchitects.com Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 8th, 2008 Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma. By BRAHMA CHELLANEY, April 9, 2008, The Japan Times online. NEW DELHI — There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led protests in Tibet and Burma has been a study in contrast. When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protesters in Yangon last September left at least 31 people dead — according to a U.N. special rapporteur’s report — it ignited international indignation and a new round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta’s closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed. Despite growing international appeals to Beijing to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity, and to begin dialogue with the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild, against China. Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing Olympics is not being seized upon to help end the repression in the Tibetan region. When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their prodemocracy supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to citizen reporters using the Internet. But China employs tens of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists. As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks.
But now the Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the areas to the northeast. Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact, the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle. Each is a symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international respect and influence. Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet and Burma. If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular monk-led revolts in Tibet and Burma have highlighted.
Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically penetrating Burma, which it values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Beijing is now busy completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail, port and energy-transport links. The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China’s People’s Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in full control of its own affairs. At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China’s failure to grant the autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a “17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. Instead of agreeing to autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese. It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s birthplace) Qinghai province and merging eastern Kham into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan. The traditional Tibetan region is a distinct cultural and economic entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central plateau comprising U-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan plateau. Yet China has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where there were hardly any Han settlers before the Chinese annexation. TAR, home to barely 40 percent of the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last “autonomous region” created by the Chinese communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang (1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia (1958). In addition, China has 30 “autonomous prefectures,” 120 “autonomous counties” and 1,256 “autonomous townships.” All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu. Today, these areas are autonomous only in name, with that tag designed to package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up three-fifths of China’s landmass), Beijing grants them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet, what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced “political education” since has sought to accomplish.
Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking “Greater Tibet” and pressed a maximalist historical position. Not content with the Dalai Lama’s 1987 concession in publicly forsaking Tibetan independence, Beijing insists that he also affirm that Tibet was always part of China. But as the Dalai Lama said in a recent interview, “Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history.” Contrary to China’s claim that its present national political structure is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the creation of 47 new supposedly “autonomous” municipalities or counties in minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard scholar Lobsang Sangay. Until the latest uprising, Beijing believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macau. President Hu Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama to return home from his long exile in India. Following the uprising, Hu’s line on Tibet is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought to bear. The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient truth: The principle that engagement is better than punitive action to help change state behavior is applied only to powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favored tool to try and tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where its interests are trifling, is a soft target. So, while an impoverished Burma reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing. No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By making the success of this summer’s Olympics a prestige issue, China has handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised. This rare opportunity must not be frittered away. Permalink |
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