Forgot to mention, the limited footage we have, Chinese sourced or not, also doesn't indicate Tibetans were acting in self-defence.
source [rquoter] China Tensions Could Sway Vote in Taiwan By KEITH BRADSHER Published: March 21, 2008 TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s suppression of protests in Tibet and missteps by the opposition Nationalist Party have made the Taiwanese presidential election on Saturday an unexpectedly close race. What once seemed to be an insuperable lead for the Nationalist candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, has narrowed considerably, politicians and political analysts said. A narrow victory for Mr. Ma would give him a weaker mandate for his goal of closer economic relations with mainland China. An actual defeat for Mr. Ma, now a possibility although not yet the most likely outcome, would be a serious setback for Beijing officials, who have cultivated relations with the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, over the past four years. Mainland Chinese officials loathe Taiwan’s current president, Chen Shui-bian, and his party, the Democratic Progressive Party, for pursuing greater political separation from the mainland. Beijing has been wary of the party’s candidate, Frank Hsieh, even though Mr. Hsieh has repeatedly voiced much more willingness than Mr. Chen to allow increased Taiwanese investment on the mainland and more cross-strait transportation links. A victory by Mr. Hsieh could be perceived in Beijing as a high price to have paid for forcefully putting down demonstrations in Tibet. Mr. Hsieh received an influential endorsement on Thursday. Lee Teng-hui, a former Nationalist president of Taiwan who now favors much greater political independence from the mainland, said that he would vote for Mr. Hsieh. Mr. Lee echoed a recent theme of Mr. Hsieh’s campaign, which has repeatedly highlighted the Nationalists’ history as an authoritarian party that ran Taiwan under martial law for decades until 1987. Mr. Lee said it would not be healthy for Taiwan’s democracy if the Nationalists, who took firm control of the legislature in January, won the presidency now. In the January election, the Nationalists and two affiliated minor parties together captured three-quarters of the seats in the legislature, in a crushing defeat for the Democratic Progressive Party. The Nationalists capitalized on voters’ concerns about stagnant household incomes and paralysis in Taiwan’s contacts with the fast-growing mainland economy — two potent issues that could still produce a victory for Mr. Ma on Saturday. But an unusual fracas last week has lent resonance to the Democratic Progressives’ warnings to voters against giving too much power to the Nationalists. It started when four Nationalist lawmakers roamed through Mr. Hsieh’s campaign headquarters in an attempt to document whether the building lease complied with election laws. Mr. Hsieh’s aides trapped the four in an elevator, accused them of trespassing and called the police. A crowd of Democratic Progressive Party supporters formed and smashed the windshield of one of the police cars that rescued the four. Mr. Ma has apologized for the incident repeatedly since then, and the lawmakers, called “the four idiots” by the Taiwanese news media, bowed low in apology at a news conference as well. Entering the Democratic Progressive Party’s headquarters “of course fed right into the D.P.P.’s hands,” said J. Bruce Jacobs, the director of the Taiwan research unit at Monash University in Australia. Mr. Hsieh has staked out a much more moderate position toward Beijing than President Chen. Mr. Ma has taken fairly similar positions on economic issues, and said that he would not seek political reunification with the mainland, still the goal of many Nationalists. Many of the two men’s proposals, like direct flights to the mainland, would require negotiations with Beijing, and are more likely to happen if Mr. Ma is elected because mainland officials have been reluctant to have formal contacts with the Democratic Progressive Party. Up through the middle of last week, opinion polls had shown Mr. Ma with a lead of up to 20 percentage points. Taiwan election laws do not allow the release of poll results during the final 10 days before voting. But continuing surveys by both parties show that much of that lead has evaporated, with Mr. Ma now ahead by only a slender margin, politicians and political analysts said. This has reinvigorated the Democratic Progressive Party, where many were deeply gloomy after the January legislative elections. “We have narrowed the gap significantly since January, and I believe the final outcome will be very close,” said Hsiao Bi-khim, the international affairs director of Mr. Hsieh’s campaign. Su Chi, a Nationalist lawmaker and deputy campaign manager for Mr. Ma, agreed that Mr. Ma’s lead had narrowed in the last few days, but said that this was to be expected. Many Democratic Progressive Party supporters did not vote in the legislative elections because they were disillusioned with corruption cases involving the current government, but are now becoming more active as Mr. Hsieh campaigns aggressively, Mr. Su said, adding he still thought Mr. Ma would win. Government ministers have helped Mr. Hsieh by repeatedly drawing attention to the unrest in Tibet. “What has happened in Tibet in the past three decades, and what is going on now, is a warning to us,” said Shieh Jhy-wey, the minister of information. “We don’t want to have the same fate as Tibet.” Chen Ming-tong, the chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, the government ministry responsible for relations with the mainland, called Thursday for the international community to put more pressure on China to begin a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibet’s government in exile. The nightmare situation for the Nationalists would be a repeat of the 2004 presidential election. Lien Chan, the Nationalist candidate, went into the final 10 days of the campaign with a commanding lead in the polls, only to lose by a quarter of a percentage point. President Chen won re-election then partly because of the sympathy he received when he was lightly wounded in a shooting while campaigning on the eve of voting. The police concluded a year later that the gunman had been a severely depressed man who drowned himself 10 days after the shots were fired. [/rquoter]
A somewhat more even-handed report from the Washington Post, although I find it funny how many times he used the word "Government propaganda" in this article. Apparently he believes that we poor dumb Chinese are incacpable of thinking for ourselves. LOL, a person like me is probably far more exposed to Western propaganda than to Chinese propaganda. But he does give a more accurate description of Tibetan history, acknowledging that Tibet was a part of the Chinese empire and described the march of the PLA into Tibet in 1950 as "reimposing rule", rather than the common "invasion". But he was wrong in claiming that Tibet was independent during the half-century before. The Dalai Lama may have ruled relatively "independently" during this period, but dejure independence was never achieved nor recognized by any foreign country. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/16/AR2008031602649.html Beijing's Crackdown Gets Strong Domestic Support Ethnic Pride Stoked by Government Propaganda By Edward Cody Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, March 17, 2008; Page A12 BEIJING, March 16 -- In the West, the name Tibet has long evoked unspoiled Himalayan landscapes, cinnamon-robed monks spinning prayer wheels and a peace-loving Dalai Lama seeking freedom for his repressed Buddhist followers. Here in China, people have embraced a different view; they regard Tibet as a historical part of the nation and see its sympathizers in the West as easily fooled romantics. Thanks to government propaganda, but also to ethnic pride, most Chinese see the Dalai Lama and his monks as obscurantist reactionaries trying to split the country and reverse the economic and social progress that China has brought to a backward and isolated land over the past 58 years. The violent protests by Buddhist monks and other Tibetans that exploded in Lhasa on Friday, therefore, have generated widespread condemnation among the country's majority Han Chinese. In street conversations, Internet discussions and academic forums, most Chinese have readily embraced the government's contention that the violence resulted from a plot mounted by the Dalai Lama from his exile headquarters in India. Against that background, the Communist Party has met with broad popular approval in vowing to crack down on the rioters -- most of whose victims were Han Chinese -- and in qualifying the "impudent" Dalai Lama as a "master terror maker" who has hoodwinked the West with his appeals for peace. While the rest of the world invokes the Beijing Olympics and advises restraint, Chinese specialists and the public have urged the government to move decisively -- and gamble that the Olympics will not be spoiled. "The riot in Lhasa was caused by the Dalai Lama," said Zhang Yun, a professor at the government-sponsored Chinese Center for Tibetan Studies in Beijing. "The monks are very easily influenced by their religious leader, so they are irrational compared to other types of people," he added. "I don't believe any country in the world would allow anything that would destroy social order and ruin people's lives. There is a lot of prejudice against the Chinese government. People believe all that stuff about the Dalai Lama, and that the Chinese government is all wrong. But actually, the reality is not like that." Jorge Chiang, a stylishly dressed Hong Kong businessman on a trip to Beijing, said he, too, believed the bloody rioting was set off on orders from the Dalai Lama. Now, he predicted, the Chinese government will use the violence as a reason to round up the most prominent activist monks and "tighten its control over Tibet." "I believe the government is capable of resolving this situation," said a young woman walking in central Beijing on a brilliant spring afternoon. "It's not the first time this has happened." An Internet commentator who identified himself as Roomx said Buddhist monks have no more right than anybody else to torch shops and kill the Han Chinese businessmen inside. "They are all Chinese citizens," he added. "The monks who are connected to this conduct have to be arrested. Otherwise, it is not in conformity with rule by law." Dramatizing how broadly such views are held even among the computer-savvy young generation, similar outrage exploded on the Internet after the Icelandic pop singer Bjork capped a concert in Shanghai on March 2 by shouting "Tibet! Tibet!" after a song about independence. Censorship officials huffed about how her gesture was out of place and pledged to tighten controls over foreign performers in China. The Tibet Autonomous Region's local government issued an announcement after the riots saying the Dalai Lama and his followers instigated the violence "intending to break Tibet away from the motherland." Their allegation reflected China's long-standing complaint that the Dalai Lama, although he preaches limited autonomy, in fact has not abandoned his campaign to make Tibet and its 2.8 million residents fully independent from China. For those with long memories in Beijing, that has always been the situation. The Dalai Lama, now 72, led a violent uprising with help from the Central Intelligence Agency after Chinese troops reimposed rule from Beijing in 1950. The subversion campaign failed, and he was forced in 1959 to flee on horseback to India, where he has lived in exile for half a century. It was to mark the anniversary of his dramatic flight over the Himalayas that anti-China demonstrations in Lhasa got started last Monday. Tibet, a 750,000-square-mile territory sitting between the Himalayan and Kun Lun mountain ranges, was more or less part of various Chinese empires over the centuries, paying fealty but often too remote to be totally controlled. With the Dalai Lama as its leader, however, Tibet governed itself as an independent nation while China was torn by the upheavals of the first half of the 20th century. So for Beijing officials and the public they have educated through propaganda, the Dalai Lama is less a devout Buddhist than a secessionist rebel. "Now the blaze and blood in Lhasa has unclad the nature of the Dalai Lama," said an editorial from the official New China News Agency. "And it's time for the international community to recheck their stance toward the group under the camouflage of nonviolence, if they do not want to be willingly misled." The Dalai Lama's hold on people's imagination in the West has long irritated the Chinese government. The New China News Agency editorial described his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1989, as "tainted" by Friday's rioting. The Congressional Gold Medal, which injected a chill into U.S.-China relations last October, turned out to be a "fig leaf" for the "rhetoric lama to sell his deceitful philosophy," it said. In any case, the Chinese government has portrayed its presence in Tibet as beneficial for the population, citing the breakup of traditional serfdom in the countryside, improved health care and school construction. A Beijing-to-Lhasa train that began service in July 2006 was designed to further accelerate economic development, bringing in tourists and taking out minerals. The economic development has been accompanied by an influx of Han Chinese who, Tibetan nationalists complain, have tightened their grip on all the economic and political levers. The Han Chinese who were killed in Friday's rioting, for instance, were identified as shop owners and employees singled out by Tibetans resentful of their economic domination. The Chinese arrivals, Tibetans and their supporters abroad say, have submerged Tibetan culture and Buddhist traditions by drawing the territory more closely into the rest of China. Signs along the main street leading to Lhasa's celebrated Jokhang Temple, they note, are just as likely to be written in Chinese as Tibetan, and the saleswomen tend to speak Mandarin rather than the region's own tongue. A Chinese Tibet specialist in Beijing who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the tensions said the situation was inevitable as China pursues economic development of the region. Like the American West in the 19th century, he said, modernization of China's West in the 21st century is bound to dilute the traditional Tibetan ways so esteemed abroad. "China's government does not intend to destroy Tibetan culture," he said. "But with the economy developing, the culture will change gradually, the same as in other places in the world."
i just watched some interviews from china. i know it's propaganda, but the emotions shown by the victims were true. it's pretty clearly now that when the rioters set buildings on fire. most of the people are still inside. a lot innocent people were burnt to death. those who jumped and ran were injured or beaten by the thugs. a tibetan doctor who was trying to save a 6 year old chinese boy's life, was beaten so bad by the thugs that he was in the hospital. many ordinary tibetan citizens were very troubled by the riots. it's pretty clear now that, one of the main reason for the riot is social/economic gap. most rioters were the poor ones. well to do tibetans had no problem with their life. also saw a bunch of people who turned themselves in. but those are probably just the ones got caught up in the moment wanted to rub some money. the bad ones probably hid/ran away.
Well, the riot has just ended, wouldn't it be a bit more reasonable to wait for a period of time before passing your judgment? Maybe you should be a bit more broad-minded and more considerate, and stop accusing anyone who disagrees with you as paranoid and defensive.
tibetan cavalry raiding chinese government in Gansu province. <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iTmZr61seiE&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iTmZr61seiE&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>
OMG, I don't know whether I should laugh at these people or feel sorry for them. They truely do still live in the 15th century. Cavalry? Why don't they come up with some bows and arrows too! And what exactly do they think they are staging here? A peaceful demonstration? Obviously not, they were trying to storm a government building. An armed rebellion? With horses? Are you kidding? Their head Lama probably told them, go kill some Chinese and you will reach Nirvana in your next life, and off them went happily on their little ponies. Poor suckers. And that CTV crew "just happened" to be in the right place at the right time. Yeah right! Good thing nobody seems to have died in this incident, otherwise they would be accessory to murder. And look at those people happily posing for the camera. At least cover up their faces, CTV, if you truly do feel sorry for them. Very soon these people would be sitting in prisons. I wonder whether they know all they accomplished was providing some "interesting footage" for TV. Again, poor suckers. Also note that the security forces again exercised restraint and used tear gas only. Them Commies are actually learning something from their past mistakes. Although I am sure the CTV crew was disappointed. Some blood would have been even better for ratings.
Well, one of them did get beaten up trying to storm a building with "100 heavily armed soldiers" in it.
Thats fine. But you are the first one to bring that up. Everybody post thus far has been 'Tibetans doctored and faked a photo' or 'It was obviously self defense' or 'Tibetans got what they deserved' He, He.. I guess you didn't notice that I was just responding to your insulting remarks when you said, I guess you can dish it out, but can't take it, huh? Glass jaw? Maybe you should not accuse me of being self-righteous in the first place, and I will never respond in kind. You reap what you sew.
Revisionist history? The only poster who suggested doctored Tibetan photos was foofy. It also seem that you passed judgment prior to finding out the details. But I'm not surprised.
At least the government has finally admited that the police were carrying guns. Lets see how many more times they change their story. [rquoter] China admits police fired at Tibetans in self-defence Beijing - Chinese police said they shot protesters during violent Tibet-related unrest in the south-western province of Sichuan, the official news agency Xinhua reported Friday, in the first admission by government authorities that guns were used against Tibetan protesters. Police opened fire in self-defence during unrest Sunday in the town of Aba, where members of China's Tibetan minority live, Xinhua said, citing police sources. In an initial report, Xinhua said four people were killed, but it later corrected the story to say that police were still looking for four injured protesters, who fled after they were shot. Authorities had previously insisted that Chinese security forces had not used any lethal weapons. The spokesman for China's Foreign Affairs Ministry on Thursday appeared to deny that security forces had used guns to quell Tibetan independence protests outside the Tibet Autonomous Region. 'They showed maximum restraint,' Qin Gang said when asked about the reaction of paramilitary police to widespread protests in Sichuan, the neighbouring province of Gansu and other Tibetan areas. 'They did not use or take any lethal weapons,' Qin told reporters. But the ministry on Friday said Qin had only reiterated the government's earlier statement that police did not open fire in Lhasa. A source in Aba town told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that 13 Tibetans, including an 8-year-old, were shot dead during clashes March 14 and five more were killed March 15. The source said one of his relatives was among the 18 dead. A Tibetan exile group earlier said troops had shot dead at least 39 people in Aba prefecture. The India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy on Friday identified 16-year-old student Lhundup Tso and nine others as being among 23 people it said were fatally shot Sunday during protests that began at the Kirti monastery in Aba county. The Xinhua report said police fired shots Sunday after demonstrators attacked officers with knives and tried to take away their weapons. Police first fired warning shots but were attacked again, an official with the local public security bureau said. 'Police were forced to fire in self-defence,' the official said. A police station was burned and police cars were destroyed during the unrest, the report said. The central government has confirmed only 13 deaths in the demonstrations, apparently all non-Tibetans, during rioting March 14 in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. It earlier denied opening fire on protesters there. The India-based Tibetan government in exile said it had confirmed the death of at least 80 people in Lhasa. Protests by Tibetans in China and other countries began March 10, the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese rule. [/rquoter] source
No. I didn't suggest that. I just tried to rule out the possibility of execution style. I hate people say something that is not based on facts.
Good try. The government admitted to police carrying guns in Sichuan, not TAR. I re-read your post. After thinking about it, it does appear to be the case. Let's just call it a misunderstanding. But you shouldn't be surprised somebody like Sammy Fisher would claim an execution style shooting.
And what is wrong with that? I wish they had done the same on the first day of riots in Lhasa. They failed to do their job and allowed innocent people to be murdered. If the government should be indicted for anything, it is that failure of action. And you continue to duck the question why it is ok for American cops to shoot rioters and not the Chinese cops. Heck, I even remember a case a few years ago a drunk Chinese immigrant was shot dozens of times and killed by the cops because he was waving a broom at the cops. And the killing was found to be legitimate.
It is not that they had guns. That is their perogative. It is the fact that the government spent the last week making clearly false statements that the police didn't have guns. If they were lying for the last week about that, why should I trust anything else they have said? The Tibetan reports about what happened are more credible. If the CPC had cared enough about the truth to admit that they were armed with guns the first day, then I might trust some of the other things that they are saying. But apparently they have been in full spin mode this entire time. CPC = no cred.
you have no cred. where did you see that CPC said, police had NO guns? find the article. the only thing i saw is that they said no guns were fired. i saw them with riot gear basically hiding from the stones, fire and such. besides, it's a known fact that a lot of para-military don't have guns. a lot police are not equiped with guns on regular basis, my aunt worked for a police department.
Uh.... How 'bout the article I posted? [rquoter] 'They did not use or take any lethal weapons,' Qin told reporters. [/rquoter]
And they said specifically no shots were fired "in Lhasa". To me, these commies are really dumb. In situations like this, the police are fully justified in opening fire. By emphasizing no shots were fired, they are just backing themselves into a corner. Now the western press are just going to pretend that it should be the norm for the cops to just sit back and take a beating. I guess the commies do not yet have the art of propaganda, err I mean public relations, down pat like we do here in the west.
