Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread

[Yrys]

Coincidentally, the BBC correspondent in Beijing when Tienanmen happened is now in Tibet for another media...

 

[Yrys]

Prince Charles to meet with Dalai Lama in London

LONDON (AFP) - Prince Charles will meet with the Dalai Lama in London in May, a spokesman confirmed Thursday, just a day after Prime Minister
Gordon Brown said he would do the same, much to Beijing's ire. The announcement by the prince is likely to also draw opposition from Beijing, which said
it was "seriously concerned" over Brown's plans to meet the Tibetan leader when he vists London. Asked by AFP whether the prince would meet with the
Dalai Lama, a spokesman for the royal said: "Yes, that is accurate." The spokesman declined to comment further, however.

In January, Charles told a group that campaigns against human rights abuses in Tibet that he would not be attending the Beijing Olympics in August. The
prince is a well-known supporter of the Tibetan cause, and hosted a reception at St. James's Palace in May 2004 for the spiritual leader, whom Beijing regards
as a separatist. He has also not spoken kindly of China's leaders in the past -- in a diary entry made public in 2006, Charles wrote on the occasion of Hong Kong's
handover to China in 1997 that China's leaders resembled a "group of appalling old waxworks".

China, meanwhile, articulated its concerns over Brown's meeting with the Dalai Lama, with foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang describing him as "a political
refugee engaged in activities of splitting China under the camouflage of religion," according to the official Xinhua news agency. He added that Beijing was
"seriously concerned" by the news of Brown's announcement.

But the Dalai Lama's representative in Britain, Tsering Tashin, told Channel 4 News: "This is the standard official Chinese statement. If anything happens
they make this sort of statement." "The most important thing for China is to recognise that there is a real problem inside Tibet." Brown's confirmation came after
he spoke by telephone to Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao and pressed him to end violence in Tibet, which has triggered a swift clampdown by Chinese authorities.
"I made it absolutely clear that there had to be an end to violence in Tibet... I called for an end to the violence by dialogue between the different parties," he told parliament during his weekly question period. "The premier told me that, subject to two things that the Dalai Lama has already said -- that he does not support the
total independence of Tibet, and that he renounces violence -- that he would be prepared to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama." "I will meet the Dalai Lama
when he is in London," he added.

A spokesman for Brown's office could not say when the Dalai Lama might be coming, but the Tibetan leader is due to be in London on May 22 for an event at
the Royal Albert Hall, a spokeswoman from the Tibet Society UK said. The talks would be the Dalai Lama's first with Brown since the prime minister took office
last June. His predecessor Tony Blair was criticised when he declined to meet the Dalai Lama in 2004.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel triggered a deep freeze in relations between Berlin and Beijing for several months after she met the exiled Tibetan leader
in her chancellery offices in September last year.

An aide of the Dalai Lama said Wednesday that he wants talks between his government-in-exile and China to resume and is committed to a non-violent settlement
of the Tibet issue. Tibet's government-in-exile has put the "confirmed" death toll from a week of unrest at 99, while the exiled Tibetan parliament in Dharamshala
has said "hundreds" may have died in the Chinese crackdown.

China, however, has denied using deadly force to quell the unrest and said the only deaths so far were 13 "innocent civilians" killed by rioters in Lhasa on Friday,
while 325 people were injured.

Article link

 

[CougarKing]

Here are actual photos that leaked from Tibet:
   

     

     

     

     

 

     

 

[Yrys]

Dodgy translations being scrapped in the run-up to China's Olympics

THOUSANDS of dodgy translations are being scrapped in Beijing in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic Games in the Chinese capital.

Signs, shops, restaurants and hotels will be for the high jump if mistakes aren’t corrected. Menus offering “steamed crap” and warnings to “mind crotch” will
vanish. And disabled loos will no longer be described as “deformity man’s passage”. Tourism chiefs believe the awful attempts to translate Chinese into English
– known as Chinglish – could lead to sports fans taking the mickey out of the Olympics.

To give you a taste of what they are up against, DAVE MASTERS has picked out some of the best – or should that be worst? – howlers.

Click here to find link for slideshow (link article)

But while they may be a bit of a giggle, let’s face it – their English is probably better than your Mandarin.

 

[CougarKing]

Dodgy translations being scrapped in the run-up to China's Olympics

I guess most people did not notice my own comments earlier in the thread about these dodgy translations:

For example, a train station is not called a "CHOO-CHOO" station"- but there it was printed in English on a Beijing terminal, right below the Chinese translation. SHEESH!   (A train is called huo che in Mandarin, for those of you who are wondering, not CHOO-CHOO, either, hehehe)

 

[a_majoor]

China isn't inscrutable for people who know and understand history:

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0308/applebaum.php3?printer_friendly

Could Tibet bring down modern China?

By Anne Applebaum

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Cell-phone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cell-phone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet. Next year, will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China's Uighur minority? Or riot police rounding up refugees along the Chinese-North Korean border?

That covert cell phones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident. Lhasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang, and North Korea: All of these places are, directly or indirectly, dominated by the same media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime. Though we don't usually think of it this way, China is, in fact, a vast, anachronistic, territorial empire, within which one dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, rules over a host of reluctant "captive nations." To keep the peace, the Chinese use methods not so different from those once used by Austro-Hungary or czarist Russia: political manipulation, secret police repression, and military force.

But, then, modern China bears many surprising resemblances to the empires of the past in other ways, too. Like its Soviet imperial predecessor, for example, China encompasses both an "inner" empire, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are the most prominent components, and an "outer" empire, consisting most notably of its Burmese and North Korean clients. Like its French and British predecessors, the Chinese empire must wrestle constantly with nations whose languages, religions, and customs differ sharply from its own and whose behavior is, therefore, unpredictable. And like all its predecessors, the Chinese imperial class cares deeply about the pacification of the imperial periphery, more so than one might think.

For proof that this is so, look no further than the biography of Hu Jintao, the current Chinese president — and also the former Communist Party boss of Tibet. In 1988 and 1989, at the time of the last major riots, Hu was responsible both for the brutal repression of dissident Tibetan monks and dissidents and for what the Dalai Lama has subsequently called China's policy of "cultural genocide": the importation of thousands of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibet's cities in order to dilute and eventually outbreed the ethnic Tibetan population.

Clearly, the repression of Tibet matters enormously to the members of China's ruling clique, or they would not have promoted Hu, its mastermind, so far. The pacification of Tibet must also be considered a major political and propaganda success, or it would not have been copied by the Chinese-backed Burmese regime last year and repeated by the Chinese themselves in Tibet last week. Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire.

Keep that in mind, over the next few days and months, as China tries once again to belittle Tibet, to explain away a nationalist uprising as a bit of vandalism. The last week's riots began as a religious protest: Tibet's monks were demonstrating against laws that, among other things, require them to renounce the dalai lama. The monks' marches then escalated into generalized, unplanned, anti-Chinese violence, culminating in attacks on Han Chinese shops and businesses, among them — as you can see on the cell-phone videos — the Lhasa branch of the Bank of China.

However the official version evolves, in other words, make no mistake about it: This was not merely vandalism, it could not have been solely organized by outsiders, it was not only about the Olympics, and it was not the work of a tiny minority. It was a significant political event, proof that the Tibetans still identify themselves as Tibetan, not Chinese. As such, it must have significant reverberations in Beijing. The war in Algeria brought down the French Fourth Republic. The dissident movements on its periphery helped weaken the Soviet Union. Right now, I'd wager that Hu Jintao's Tibet policy is causing a lot of consternation among his colleagues.

And if they aren't worried, they should be. After all, the history of the last two centuries is filled with tales of strong, stable empires brought down by their subjects, undermined by their client states, overwhelmed by the national aspirations of small, subordinate countries. Why should the 21st century be any different? Watching the tear gas roll over the streets of Lhasa yesterday on a blurry, cell-phone video, I couldn't help but wonder when — maybe not in this decade, this generation, or even this century — Tibet and its monks will have their revenge.

 

[CougarKing]

With the Taiwan Presidential Election ocurring this weekend, the Mandarin news services of various overseas Chinese communities all over the world (except for Xinhua  : ) are featuring it as one of their top international stories.

With current Taipei mayor Ma-Ying Jiu of the Pan-blue coalition (which is pro-unification with mainland China) set to run against DPP candidate (and pro-independence) "Frank" Hsieh, it surely will be an interesting contest.

No doubt the CCP is also watching from the mainland to see whether their former arch-enemies (from the 1945-49 Chinese Civil War) the KMT/Guo Min Dang/the Pan-Blues actually aim to move Taiwan closer to reunification with the mainland if they win, while a DPP win will surely mean disaster for the PRC's future reunification plan.

The mention of Mayor Ma reminds me of a Chinese joke I mentioned earlier in the thread: ;D

As you know, Pres. Chen Sui Bian is the President of the ROC/Taiwan, while Mayor Ma Ying Jiu was the mayor of Taipei the last time I checked.  The joke is that if you put the two men together into one person, you would get a liar.

The last character in Chen's name- "Bian"- when combined with the first character in Ma's name-"Ma"- are themselves individual radicals/parts that, when combined into one character, literally embodies the Mandarin verb for lying, and when modified with the noun particle "zi", then becomes the word for LIAR= PIAN ZI= 骗子.

 

[CougarKing]

The people of Taiwan have spoken: KMT/Guo Min Dang/Pan-Blue candidate Ma-Ying Jiu has won. Perhaps even the majority of the local Taiwanese/benshengren really do favor the status quo more (for obvious economic reasons) rather than incur the wrath of the mainland. Whether President Ma really will move the island nation more toward reunifying with mainland China remains to be seen.

http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=134066

Taiwan's opposition Nationalist Party's (KMT) presidential candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has won more than half the vote in Saturday's election, the party said, auguring improved ties with diplomatic rival China.

Ma had won more than 7 million votes, the party said, more than half the total 13 million people who cast their ballot.

The Central Election Commission said that Ma had 58 percent of the vote, while the ruling Democratic Progressive Party's candidate Frank Hsieh had 42 percent, with counting still continuing.

Ma favours closer economic ties and political dialogue with China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control.

Voters had to choose a successor to President Chen Shui-bian, an anti-China firebrand who steps down in May and who has repeatedly angered Beijing with his pro-independence rhetoric.

China has claimed self-ruled Taiwan as its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.

Hsieh's DPP favours formal independence while Ma's Nationalist Party (KMT) wants eventual reunification once China embraces democracy.

"Whether you vote for Hsieh or for Ma, be sure to vote for Taiwan," Chen told reporters. "...Don't let Taiwan become the next Hong Kong. Don't let Taiwan become the next Tibet."

The former British colony of Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Chinese troops marched into Tibet, the scene of anti-Chinese rioting last week, in 1950.

Ma told reporters after voting his commitment to Taiwan was not in doubt.

"I have always said that if I get elected I will engage with mainland China on many issues, that I will protect Taiwan, not just its identity but its security, to my fullest strength," he said in fluent English.

"I have said also many times that Taiwan is not Tibet. Neither is it Hong Kong. So we will keep this democratic country running as it is."

INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION

The election has drawn keen international attention, with the United States, Russia and Britain criticising a referendum on U.N. membership, to be held alongside the vote, which they believe could upset the delicate balance with China.

Malaysia added its voice of opposition on Saturday, with its Foreign Ministry saying the referendum as "a provocative move".

Whatever the referendum result, U.N. membership is out of the question with just 23 countries recognising Taiwan, and with China a veto-wielding permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

The United States switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 1979, recognising "one China", but remains the island's biggest ally.

Two U.S. aircraft carriers are in the region for training exercises. China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait in 1996, trying to intimidate voters during an election.

"China hopes the United States and Japan will carry out their promises of not supporting 'Taiwan independence' or Taiwan authority's proposed 'referendum on U.N. membership'," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said.

In Taiwan, a faltering economy is a priority with voters.

"Domestic issues, such as the economy and corruption, are bigger than China or foreign policy," said Ralph Cossa, president of the U.S.-based think tank Pacific Forum CSIS.

The two candidates had toughened their stances on China following Beijing's crackdown in Tibet, but to help the economy, both advocate more direct flights, tourism and investment opportunities between Taiwan and China.

Ma advocates a common market with China.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This quote, from a story on today's Globe and Mail web site may tell a big part of the story:

"The people of Taiwan hope for clean government, with no corruption. Taiwan people hope for a flourishing economy. The people of Taiwan hope for peace across the straits, they don't want war."

While the second sentence is aimed at Beijing the first is for more general consumption - in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and New York, too.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I don’t want to be accused of being part of the CCP’s propaganda machine, because that’s certainly not my intention, but here is my own somewhat contrarian view on Tibet.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that China withdrew from Tibet – took out all the troops and police, all the officials and so on. (That probably means all the money, too, but that’s another issue.) Qui bono? Who will gain? Who will take over and exercise political and economic power in Tibet? Where is the Tibet Liberation Movement? Where, beyond in the fervid imaginations of sundry Hollywood celebrities, are the liberal democrats?

My guess is that power will move, quickly and completely, to the monasteries. We will, in other words, get a theocracy and the Dali Lama will be the theocrat in chief.

The Dali Lama has one weapon, one that he wields with great skill and effectiveness: public relations. But, it has not been effective at all in China, until 2008. The Chinese have made the Olympics a national and international celebration OF Chinese accomplishment and potential. The Chinese, themselves, the ordinary Chinese, are caught up in the Olympic fever. The Dali Lama, aided and abetted by groups and agencies (from around the world) with an anti-Chinese agenda, can try and maybe succeed in tarnishing, if not disrupting the Beijing Olympics.

I’m not here to argue that Tibet should or should not be a province of China, comme les autres – although I will argue that the Tibetan people are much, much better off with a remote, interfering, sometimes cruel and often capricious and corrupt Chinese government than they would have been had a Tibetan theocracy survived and prospered, or than they will be if another one is imposed.

 

[Edward Campbell]

My personal dealing with overseas Chinese and my reads (mostly read to me by an impatient friend) of the Chinese website and blogs tends to confirm Geoffrey York’s story which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080325.wTibetanalysis25/BNStory/International/home

The great call of China: fight a free Tibet

GEOFFREY YORK

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
March 25, 2008 at 1:58 AM EDT

BEIJING — Two weeks of often violent Tibetan protests have triggered a surge of angry nationalism across China, helping the Communist Party maintain its grip on the country but also sharply limiting its ability to offer any compromise.

Chinese websites, blogs and newspapers are full of anti-Western fury these days. Many of them say that the West has financed the Tibetan protests of the past two weeks in an evil conspiracy to sap China's strength.

“The Tibetan monks were all paid by the United States of America to weaken China,” one person wrote on the Web forum of China Daily, the state-owned propaganda newspaper.

Said another: “Let's face it, Tibet is just the trial balloon not only for the Dalai Lama but for the West as well. They just wanted to find out again how far they can go to destroy and balkanize China.”

The government has deliberately fuelled such xenophobic rage, blaming external forces for the Tibetan protests and using its propaganda organs to force-feed a steady diet of inflammatory images to the nation. It accuses its enemies of trying to “sabotage” the Beijing Olympics. But now it is riding a tiger of emotion that won't be easy to dismount.

In many ways, it is a repeat of the Chinese nationalist anger that has exploded repeatedly in recent years, including 2005, when massive anti-Japanese protests were held, and 1999, when mobs attacked U.S. diplomatic offices in China after an American bomb hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

When the Tibetan protests first turned violent on March 14 in Lhasa, the Chinese authorities allowed only a few terse reports in the state media. But over the past few days they have ratcheted up the publicity, orchestrating a media campaign with repeated images of knife-wielding Tibetan protesters, the torching of the Chinese flag and the charred bodies of Chinese victims of the Lhasa riots.

An outpouring of nationalist vitriol has followed. A deluge of angry phone calls and faxes has flooded into the Beijing office of CNN, which China has accused of “dishonest” reports on the Tibet story. The vast majority of Chinese citizens have no access to CNN, which is often censored or blocked in the few places where it is available, but Chinese bloggers and websites have convinced most people that the U.S. television network is unfairly biased against China.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has warned Western journalists in China to be “vigilant” of their personal safety because of the widespread Chinese anger at the Western media.

At least one Western media organization in Beijing has received hate messages by telephone and fax, the FCCC said in a statement, without naming the media outlet. “The organization has adopted extra security measures,” it said.

China's state-run news agency, Xinhua, says “tens of thousands” of Chinese Internet users have “condemned” CNN and other Western media.

Pro-Tibet activist groups in London and New York, meanwhile, have been bombarded with harassing phone calls and virus e-mails. One activist said he got abusive calls every two minutes on his cellphone from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. last Tuesday and also at his office. The calls often contained patriotic Chinese music, he said.

Tibetan activists have also been targeted by a sophisticated campaign of cyber attacks, which send out viruses in well-disguised e-mails. The attacks have been traced back to Chinese-based computer systems.

The virulence of the verbal attacks has alarmed some observers. In an open letter on the weekend, a group of 29 Chinese dissidents warned that the “one-sided propaganda” was stirring up “inter-ethnic animosity” in China. “We appeal to the Chinese people and overseas Chinese to be calm and tolerant,” the letter says. “Adopting a posture of aggressive nationalism will only invite antipathy from the international community and harm China's international image.”

Analysts say the Communist Party has mobilized nationalist themes – in the media and in “patriotic education” classes at school – as a way of bolstering its legitimacy and ensuring social stability at a time when Communist ideology has been widely discredited. But this nationalism has boxed the government into a corner, leaving it few options in a crisis.

“Chinese leaders are prone to public muscle-flexing because they feel the need to stay out in front of a growing tide of popular nationalism,” U.S. scholar and former diplomat Susan Shirk wrote in a book published last year.

“Whenever the public pays close attention to an issue, leaders feel they have to act tough to show how strong they are. Like Chinese Clark Kents, they abandon their usual mild-mannered international demeanour and reveal themselves as nationalist superheroes.”

A lot of Western people tend to forget (or never understood) the depths of Chinese patriotism and the deep, deep resentment that many (most?) Chinese still feel about 19th and 20th century humiliations suffered by China at Western hands.

There appears to be near universal belief that the “Free Tibet” movement is CIA funded. That’s not true, in my opinion: “Free Tibet” and the like appear to have lots of private funding but I, personally, would not be even a tiny bit surprised to find that most of the various anti-Chinese movements get some money, maybe quite a lot, from Western and Indian government agencies.

 

[time expired]

Obviously some Tibetans don't feel that they are better off
under the autocratic rule of an Imperialistic China.The Han
Chinese invasion will leave the Tibetans a minority in their
own country.I wonder were the Chinese drive for lebensraum
will end, is it just coincidence the the rebel group in Nepal
call themselves Maoists or are they next?.
                              Regards

 

[TCBF]

- Having a deep sea port in the Bay of Bengal might be a long range plan of theirs.

 

[CougarKing]

- Having a deep sea port in the Bay of Bengal might be a long range plan of theirs.

Well isn't Burma with its military junta a PRC ally? I believe the PRC has sold them some of their military equipment, IIRC. We might see the PRC lease/have a special joint agreement on a port like the approaches to Yangon/Rangoon for the use of the PLAN in the same way the Russian Navy used to be able to dock its ships at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam when the Soviet Union still existed and had an agreement with the Hanoi government then, IIRC.

Furthermore, didn't the government of Bangladesh also buy some fighter-bombers from the PRC for its own air force even though the Dhaka government has its own problems with local Communists/Maoists as well like its neighbors India and Nepal?

 

[a_majoor]

More from Jerry Pournelle's blogsite. The reply by Dr. Pournelle is very succinct and quite true in my opinion:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail509.html#inflation

China, Taiwan and the 2008 DoD "Military Power of the People's Republic of China"

The Beijing government only formally annexed Taiwan in 1683, well over a century after Spain was well seated in the New World. Taiwan was a Dutch colony (1624) before it was a Chinese possession. Dutch rule was ended by a regional warlord from Fujian Province, not by the central government. As late as 1871 the Q'ing regime in Beijing informed the Government of Japan that China lacked effective political control over the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan. Beijing did not even make Taiwan a formal province until 1887. The Unequal Treaties period of western dominance of China was well underway by then. In 1895 China and Japan went to war over the control of Korea. China lost and Beijing ceded Taiwan to Japan as part of the price of defeat. Japan then ruled Taiwan for 50 years until 1945.

Chang Kai Shek's regime exerted a fleeting period of 'unified' rule over China (minus the vast tracts already controlled by Mao) between 1946 and 1949. Chiang Kai Shek was then driven in retreat from the mainland to Taiwan, thus becoming another in a sucession of regional warlords to use Taiwan as a refuge from mainland defeat. A period of minor hot (or "kinetic" to use the report's adjective) military actions followed in the 1950s and 1960s. This period ended once Chiang Kai Shek and his claim to rule all of China expired.

Three conclusions are available from this historical review.

1. No Beijing government has ever made Taiwan a causus belli for a foreign war. The First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 that transferred Taiwan to Japan was fought for control of Korea, not Taiwan. And to that earlier Korean War we can add the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in late 1950.

2. There is no living tradition or any real history of stable Beijing bureaucratic rule over Taiwan.

3. The Beijing regime will only take direct military action against Taiwan when it perceives an imminent and serious political threat radiating from the island.

To this we can a small modern detail. Mainland China presently imports over 4 million barrels/day of oil. Nearly all of this oil arrives in tankers that must transit the South China Sea to reach Chinese oil terminals. This vital sea line of communication would become a war zone in the event of a mainland Chinese air-sea campaign against Taiwan.

The above historical and modern facts provide no basis for the prominence given to the China-Taiwan contingency by the authors of the "Military Power of the People's Republic of China". What would essentially be a Chinese civil war over Taipei cannot help China's fuels, natural resources or political positions. It can only hurt. The economic, political and military costs of such a campaign would have a vastly greater payoff if used to secure real control of Myanmar (Burma). This would provide China a port on the Indian Ocean and cut several thousand miles and several chokepoints off the Middle East/African Oil Route.

Mark

I think you do not understand the Chinese cast of mind. I assure you that while your analysis is correct, few Chinese will agree.

I also think it will be settled in ways we in the west will neither predict nor understand.

 

[CougarKing]

Before reading the article, I would have been surprised if the PRC authorities had closed the Muslim quarter of the city for reasons such as their seeing the Hui ren/回人 as a possible threat in conjunction with the Tibetans/Xi Zang ren/西藏人.

One must not confuse the Hui ren with the Uighurs/ 维吾尔 from Xinjiang province, since the Hui ren are a very integrated group within Chinese society and have been so for centuries; they are still ethnically Han in spite of following the Islamic religion and prominent Chinese who are from that group include Ming Admiral Zheng He  from the 1400s and ROC General Tang Enbo from the 1930s/World War II, who handed the Japanese one of their first land defeats in the Battle of Tai Er Zhuang, IIRC.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/tibet.china.ap/index.html

Police shut Muslim quarter in Lhasa
Story Highlights
Police close off Lhasa's Muslim quarter, two weeks after mosque was burnt down

Officers blockade streets into area, allowing in only residents and worshippers

Clean-up crews wade through destruction in other parts of Lhasa's old city

Dalai Lama says China's portrayal of the protests may incite ethnic conflict
Editor's note: CNN was denied permission to join the group of reporters to Tibet by China's foreign ministry.

LHASA, Tibet (AP) -- Police closed off Lhasa's Muslim quarter on Friday, two weeks after Tibetan rioters burned down the city's mosque amid the largest anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades.

Officers blockaded streets into the area, allowing in only residents and worshippers observing the Muslim day of prayer.

A heavy security presence lingered in other parts of Lhasa's old city as clean-up crews waded through the destruction inflicted when days of initially peaceful protests turned deadly on March 14.

Tibetans torched hundreds of buildings and attacked members of China's dominant Han ethnic group and Chinese Muslims known as Hui, who have dominated commerce in the city.
The Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, raised concerns Friday that China's portrayal of the protests in Lhasa was fanning the flames of ethnic conflict.

"The state media's portrayal of the recent events in Tibet, using deceit and distorted images, could sow the seeds of racial tension with unpredictable long-term consequences. This is of grave concern to me," he said in a statement from his headquarters in northern India.

The protests were the longest and most-sustained challenge to China's rule in the Himalayan region since 1989. See photos of the Tibetan protests. »

The ensuing crackdown by Chinese authorities has focused international attention on China's human rights record in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

China has faced growing calls from the United States and other nations to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, along with suggestions from some leaders that they were considering boycotting the Olympics' opening ceremony in protest at Beijing's handling of the Tibetan situation.

Apparently as a result of the pressure, the Foreign Ministry is allowing a group of foreign diplomats to visit Lhasa on Friday and Saturday. A United States diplomat will be on that trip, said U.S. Embassy Spokeswoman Susan Stevenson. She had no other details.

A woman who answered the phone at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said she did not know about the trip. She would not give her name, as is common among Chinese bureaucrats.

A small group of foreign journalists, including an Associated Press reporter, was taken to Lhasa earlier this week on a three-day government-organized trip that was to end Friday.

The otherwise tightly-scripted visit was disrupted when 30 red-robed monks pushed into a briefing being given by officials at the Jokhang Temple on Thursday, complaining of a lack of religious freedom and denouncing official claims that the Dalai Lama orchestrated the March 14 violence. See latest footage of the media in Lhasa. »

"What the government is saying is not true," one monk shouted out.

"They killed many people. They killed many people," another monk said, referring to Chinese security forces.

The outburst by the monks lasted for about 15 minutes before government officials ended it and told the journalists it was "time to go."

China has strenuously argued that the widespread arson and looting were criminal acts orchestrated by separatists, while refusing to discuss the root causes of the anger and alienation blamed for sparking the violence. Watch a former spokesman for China speak about Tibet »

A vice-governor of Tibet, Baima Chilin, later told reporters the monks would not be punished.

"We will never do anything to them. We will never detain anyone you met on the streets of Lhasa. I don't think any government would do such a thing," he said.

However, Tibet activists on Friday voiced concern over possible Chinese government retaliation against the Buddhist monks.

"There are serious fears for the welfare and whereabouts" of the monks, the International Campaign for Tibet said in a statement.

"The monks' peaceful protest shattered the authorities' plans to convey an image that the situation in Lhasa was under control after recent demonstrations and rioting," it said. Watch monks disrupt the media tour »

Other than the incident at the Jokhang, one of Tibetan Buddhism's holiest shrines, most of the second day of the tour went according to plan, with officials sticking to the government line that the most violent anti-Chinese protests in nearly two decades were plotted by supporters of the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama has denied the accusations and threatened to resign as head of the India-based Tibetan government-in-exile if the violence continued.

The government says at least 22 people have died in Lhasa; Tibetan rights groups say nearly 140 Tibetans were killed, including 19 in Gansu province.

One of the monks protesting Thursday said the death toll was far higher than the government was saying, but did not give the source of his information.

"The cadres and the army killed more than 100 Tibetans. They arrested more than a thousand," he said.

After the violent 1989 uprising in Lhasa, Tibetans claimed many more Tibetans died than the official toll of 16 because families feared punishment if participants went to hospitals.

Fu Jun, head of the News Affairs Office of the Propaganda Department of the Tibet Communist Party, said Friday the monks were spreading rumors.

"We are keeping an open mind about their complaints. The rumor is misleading the media without a shred of evidence ... We will clear up facts in a few days time when appropriate," Fu said.

The Chinese-installed vice governor of Tibet, Baima Chilin, told the reporters late Thursday that the monks would not be punished for their outburst.

State TV, which has widely covered the foreign journalists' tour, showed the Jokhang visit on its evening newscast, but not the monks' outburst.

Journalists were taken Friday morning to interview members of the Communist Party-run Buddhist Association, who reiterated standard Chinese accusations against the Dalai Lama.

"This was premeditated," said Drubkang, a reincarnated lama and member of Beijing's top government advisory body, who like many Tibetans uses just one name.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press

 

[TCBF]

Well isn't Burma with its military junta a PRC ally? I believe the PRC has sold them some of their military equipment, IIRC. We might see the PRC lease/have a special joint agreement on a port like the approaches to Yangon/Rangoon for the use of the PLAN in the same way the Russian Navy used to be able to dock its ships at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam when the Soviet Union still existed and had an agreement with the Hanoi government then, IIRC.

Furthermore, didn't the government of Bangladesh also buy some fighter-bombers from the PRC for its own air force even though the Dhaka government has its own problems with local Communists/Maoists as well like its neighbors India and Nepal?

- I see no reason why a long term planner would not try to position for Bangladesh AND Burma.  Play one against the other for competing benefits.

 

[a_majoor]

China demonstrates its Imperial ambitions in yet another field (as part of the propaganda fest being put on for the summer Olympics)

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20463/?nlid=961

Weather Engineering in China
How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers and artillery.
By Mark Williams

To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird's Nest, the city's branch of the national Weather Modification Office--itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration--has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.

First, Beijing's Weather Modification Office will track the region's weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.

Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city's weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.

Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird's Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won't fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing's Weather Modification Office, explains, "We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced." August is part of Northeast Asia's rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven't always been successful, Qian claims that "the results with light rain have been satisfactory."

Modifying the weather may seem a hubristic exercise. But arguably, given what else the Chinese have already invested to make this year's Olympics a showcase for China's emergence as a 21st-century superpower, it's almost the least they could do. Following the announcement in 2001 that the 2008 Games had been awarded to Beijing, the government of the People's Republic initiated $40 billion of new construction there, bringing 120,000 Chinese migrant workers into the city (at about $130 each a month) and triggering a five-year steel shortage worldwide. Today, Beijing boasts, alongside the vast Bird's Nest, megastructures like a new airport terminal that on its own is bigger than any airport elsewhere in the world. One measure of the city's transformation is that today 300 or so new towers, some designed by the most avant-garde architects on the planet, rise where a few short years ago there were only siheyuans (traditional Chinese courtyard residences) interspersed with bland 1950s-era boxes in the Sino-Soviet style.

Equally, though, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates that 1.5 million of Beijing's natives will have been displaced from their homes by government edict when the Olympics finally begins. This preemptory modernization is of a piece with China's scale, its 1.32 billion population, and the authoritarian control exerted by its Communist central government, which nowadays is dominated by technocrats and engineers who favor mega-projects like the world's largest dam (the Three Gorges dam over the Yangtze River), its highest railway (the Qinghai-Tibet line), and even its biggest Ferris wheel (in Beijing, opening in 2009). Unsurprisingly, therefore, China's national weather-engineering program is also the world's largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers--mostly peasant farmers--who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian's weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.

Although they possess the world's largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986, Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow, and in 2000 they cleared clouds before an anniversary ceremony commemorating the end of World War II; China's then president, Jiang Zemin, witnessed the results firsthand and pushed to adopt the same approach back home. As for the historical credit for starting the whole weather-engineering ball rolling back in 1946, that belongs to employees of General Electric in Schenectady, NY--most notably, scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of the late novelist Kurt), who worked out silver iodide's potential to provide crystals around which cloud moisture would condense. During the 1960s and '70s, the United States invested millions of federal dollars in experiments like Stormfury (aimed at hurricane control), Skywater (aimed at snow- and rainfall increase), and Skyfire (aimed at lightning suppression). Simultaneously, the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War, by rain-making over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to close it.

Nevertheless, because weather is the epitome of a complex, emergent system, no analytical models or methodologies existed that produced data conclusively, proving that weather modification worked. In the United States, research funding died down and commercial weather modification efforts became hemmed in by stringent regulation. A 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that despite more than 30 years of efforts, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts."

Still, according to William Cotton, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, "as far as the science of weather modification is concerned, the evidence that it works in certain situations is very compelling." The Chinese are certainly in no doubt: once they have demonstrated their capabilities to the rest of the world at the Olympics later this year, the party's central planners intend to expand their national weather modification program in 2010, turning the Weather Modification Office into a separate government ministry that will double the amount of rain-making and other weather engineering that China is now doing.

Copyright Technology Review 2008.

 

[Bane]

Seems like a roof or two would have been cheaper. 

 

[chanman]

I thought cloud seeding was old hat.  Seems like a number of groups in various places do it already.  Would it have made the news without the Olympics link?