Heart of Stone, brain of Sharon

Tibet’s cause was done no favors this week by one of its Hollywood supporters, glamor icon Sharon Stone, who did a Glenn Hoddle by suggesting the Sichuan earthquake was the down to bad karma, a kind of cosmic payback for China’s treatment of Tibet.  

The deep unpleasantness and anti-popular attitudes of airhead Western Buddhists and many Tibet supporters go right back to the founder of Buddhism, Sakyamuni himself. Sakyamuni was rich, heir to a kingdom; he sought and obtained the patronage of the rich, and his renunciation of wealth and royal status was always and at any time reversible.

His concept of “suffering”, one of the cornerstones of Buddhist thought, is that of a man who has everything, but still feels there is something lacking in his life. Rather like Hollywood’s ignorati devotees of the Dalai Lama.

Unlike Sakyamuni, Jesus of Nazareth was a carpenter, whose basic instinct was to sympathise with working people and the poor. Blessed are the poor, he said (although his epigones later bowdlerized his words) for they will inherit the earth. It is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

For the Christians (the early Christians at least) the rich will be punished in Christ’s Kingdom - or will simply not be present  - while the last (the poor) will be first. For Buddhists, the poor are already being punished and, by corollary, the rich rewarded, on the basis of their good works or mis-deeds in previous incarnations; it is a fundamental difference between the faiths.

All of which should go some way towards explaining the insufferable smugness of Sakyanmuni’s followers. Of course I exlude from this the millions of simple devotees of the Boddhisattva Guanyin. Also the tens or hundreds of thousands of Tibetan monks who, like all monks in history, take orders out of poverty and remain ignorant of everything but the formulae of their monastic routine.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is Wenchuan China’s Chernobyl?

Seems things are changing. Media organizations have been let off the leash and are competing with each other for headlines. Some are sending journalists to disaster areas without credentials. Publishing companies without the right to report are doing it anyway. Most journalists are party members purely for careerist reasons. The middle class nationalism associated with the Olympics could go either way for the Party. The next few months will be interesting.

Fox succeeds where Wolfie failed

In the years following May 1968 more baby boomers than would care to admit it today hawked their Red Moles and Socialist Workers around the streets and factory gates trying to convince the working class socialist papers were a truthful alternative to the biased bourgeois press.

Their naivety and ineptitude were brilliantly satirized in the TV comedy Citizen Smith about Wolfie Smith, an unwashed but charming revolutionary in a Che Guevara beret, his long suffering sidekick and adoring girlfriend. The series set Robert Lindsay in the title role on the road to stardom.

Circulation figures show the socialist press failed to convince more than a few thousand. Maybe the sports coverage wasn’t good enough.

Now in the course of a few weeks coverage of the Tibet crisis, the western media has managed to convince an entire sub-continent that it is institutionally and irremediably slanted. It takes a lot to convince ordinary Chinese that their own wretched and censored media is preferable to the BBC, the New York Times and so on, but somehow the western press has managed it.

The Chinese people have famously long memories and this lesson will not be forgotten any time soon. I wonder if the scribblers realize quite what they’ve done.

Striking pilots turn round, fly home

March 31. In an astonishingly bold move, striking aircrew turned 14 passenger jets round in mid-flight and flew back to their point of origin, Kunming in south-west Yunnan province. The pilots were protesting against restrictive labour contracts.

The action by pilots of China Eastern Airlines took place against a background of growing discontent among China’s aircrews. On March 14, forty Shanghai Airlines pilots “took sick leave”. Following their example, on March 28, eleven East Star Airline pilots threw sickies.

China’s booming airline business is facing a labour shortage but to prevent pilots moving to better -paid jobs, bosses have forced them to sign 99-year contracts with punitive penalty clauses if they resign. A labour arbitration committee ordered one pilot to pay his employer, Xiamen Airlines, 1.2 million yuan (86,000 pounds). In a case yet to be ruled on, China Eastern is demanding a staggering 12.57 million yuan (902,000 pounds)in compensation from a pilot who quit.

Pilots have tried filing lawsuits against the airlines to have the contracts declared invalid, but the courts have predictably sided with the employers.

“The only option left for us is to go on strike," said one of the China Eastern pilots.

The strike drew a predictable response from the so-called communist authorities. China’s civil aviation authority vowed to punish the China Eastern strikers severely and said strike leaders could face a lifetime employment ban.

Sources: Guangzhou Daily April 2, China.org.cn April 2, and previous China.org.cn stories.

Dalai Lama joins green ink brigade

Has the Dalai Lama lost it? Never the most logical thinker or speaker, the gaffe-prone Tibetan leader, faced with bad publicity re:Tibetan rioters attacking Han and Muslim civilians, is now suggesting that China staged the uprising in Tibet. "Tibetans are non-violent people. We have heard about a few hundred Chinese soldiers received monks’ dress." Dalai Lama suggests China could be behind Tibet unrest , Press Trust of India March 28.

Let’s see if we have this straight. China, anxious to show a human face to the world in Olympic year stirs up trouble in Tibet in order to…well do what exactly?

So the Dalai Lama has joined the nightmare, back-to-front, green ink, conspiracy world of the crackpot ‘blogosphere’ and in particular its elite American division, the lunosphere.

One crazed scribbler has Hu Jintao/Dr Evil/Fu Manchu deliberately provoking riots in March to justify an early lock-down of Tibet so that the Olympic Torch makes it safely to the top of Mount Everest in May. Er, yes..that makes a lot of sense.

The Problem with Cultural Genocide

The first major problem is that cultural genocide is not genocide. It’s a dramatic and emotive way of talking about assimilation.

The British tried assimilation in Ireland for centuries with a great deal of success. Although they failed to wipe out Catholicism, they effectively eliminated the Irish language. (Of course they alternated between assimilation and good old-fashioned genocide – Cromwell, the famine etc.) But despite their success in converting the Irish to “civilised” dress and language, the English still had to get out when their time was up. Dalai Lama and assorted Tibetan nationalists please note.

The second problem with the cultural genocide slogan is that it is manifestly at odds with the reality on the ground. Everywhere you go in Tibetan regions you see temples being lovingly restored, not just as tourist attractions, but with the full and enthusiastic participation of the Tibetan people, who donate their money and labour. In many places it seems that half the male population are monks. There are pictures of the Dalai Lama everywhere and everyone asks foreigners have they met him. The impression is not of a culture on the verge of extinction as was the case during the Cultural Revolution but of a resurgent people, growing in confidence; with the confidence, precisely, to stage a revolt.

Of course there are the necessary compromises with the authorities, such as ritually expressing loyalty to the Chinese state, denouncing “splittists” and so on. The portraits of the Dalai Lama are taken down when bigwigs visit and immediately put back up when they leave. But the Irish paid this sort of lip-service for centuries without losing their identity.

The third and biggest problem with the Cultural Genocide slogan is that it directs the anger of the Tibetan people not against the Chinese government, but against minorities in Tibet such as the Han and Muslim traders who bore the brunt of the March 14 violence. The energies of the people are concentrated not on achieving political freedom in a modern state, but on recreating the fantasy-land of Shangrila. At a time when even Bhutan is opening up and adopting democracy, an independent Tibet can’t expect to hide behind a cloud curtain. It should be made clear to Hans and Muslims that they are welcome in Tibet.

The great Irish Rebellion of 1798 was led by Theobald Wolfe Tone, a radical Protestant inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution. The revolt was scuppered when the mass of Catholic peasants rose and massacred Protestant settlers, allowing the British to exploit Ireland’s ethnic division. The most famous peasant leader was the courageous but narrow minded priest Father Murphy.

Tibet has its share of Father Murphy’s. It is still waiting for its Wolfe Tone.

Five dead, nothing said

The brutal slaying of five young girls burnt to death when the shop they were working in was torched during the Lhasa riot went largely unreported in the western media.

It didn’t fit the western preconception that the Tibet uprising was all about Chinese troops firing on peacefully demonstrating monks.

Chinese TV showed convincing coverage of the outrage including interviews with distraught relatives but nearly two weeks later no western outlet had mentioned it. Finally, yesterday the New York Times carried an article which, while acknowledging the tragedy, so minced its words as to be insulting to the memory of the girls.

Let’s be honest, the western press operates under severe restrictions in China, but the restrictions are not new. Basically western journalists while denied access can write what they like. All the more shameful that they got this one wrong while the tightly controlled and censored Chinese press got it right.

The western media has not exactly covered itself with glory with its coverage of the Tibet crisis. On the contrary, it has scored a massive own goal by losing the trust of the middle class Chinese who in the past viewed it as an antidote to China’s laughable state-controlled media.

Echo of class struggle livens up China Congress

More than 30 years after the death of Chairman Mao the class struggle has again reared its head in Chinese politics but this time it’s the rich who are making the running.

At the recent Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress, China’s richest woman, paper queen Zhang Yin, called for tax breaks for the rich and opposed moves to give workers the right to permanent contracts. Many delegates and commentators criticized her stance but other entrepreneurs supported her.

Zhang made her multi-billion dollar fortune importing waste from the USA to feed China’s insatiable demand for paper products. Her company, Nine Dragons Paper, is the largest paper manufacturer in China.

Zhang’s willingness to give open expression to apparent self-interest reflects the growing confidence of China’s wealthy. Cities are peppered with extravagant shopping malls stocking the glitziest western brands. The nouveaux riches increasingly enjoy flaunting their wealth in the form of flashy cars, designer clothes, jewellery, gated villas and uniformed servants. For the less well off, dozens of glossy magazines promote an in-flight fantasy world, and soap operas dramatizing the lives of the rich and famous are part of the daily diet on Chinese TV.

The Chinese leadership is only too aware of the widening gap between rich and poor. President Hu Jintao has made building a harmonious society the flagship policy of his term of office. He has abolished the centuries old agricultural tax and pumped money into poorer rural areas. But while Hu has pushed China in what observers describe as a more social democratic direction, he is treading a fine line; the last thing China’s leaders want is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Meanwhile the poor and middle income earners are increasingly concerned with the rising cost of living, as everyday items such as food, housing, education and health care go through the roof. They are unimpressed by the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy. A recent survey showed that 70 percent of the public, far from seeing the rich as glorious, regard them as self-serving and ungenerous. China’s rich have an image problem that commentators have advised them to address by following America’s wealthy down the road of large-scale philanthropy.

Trades unions, after decades of rubber-stamping management decisions under the planned economy are beginning to take a stronger line in defence of their members’ interests. Their initial targets have been foreign brands such as MacDonald’s and KFC, both recently investigated on suspicion of paying under the minimum wage, but some think it will not be long before some of China’s giant domestic corporations face challenges from organized labour.

The ruling Communist Party has welcomed the new rich into its ranks and hopes that “contradictions among the people” in Chairman Mao’s phrase, can be contained and resolved in one big happy family.

One thing that commentators on all sides have welcomed is that Zhang’s remarks have brought into the open the existence of different interest groups in society and initiated a debate about their competing claims. That, they argue, can only be a healthy development.

“JOURNALISTS” FOR THE PROSECUTION

I got talking over dinner to a big guy and a little guy in a roadside restaurant in Yunnan. The big guy said they were journalists from Beijing. Then he qualified it

Well, we’re sort of journalists. We’re a film crew and we record interviews. But most of the stuff we film is never seen by the public, only by the leadership.

So it’s like the emperor traveling incognito to find out what’s going on at the grass roots?

The big guy laughed. (There’s a popular TV show about a famous Emperor’s secret trips around China).

The big guy showed me his ID. At this point the little guy started to squirm in his seat.

They were from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s prosecution service.

The little guy was edgy but the big guy still wanted to talk.

We’re after corrupt officials. But we don’t arrest them. We just interview people and gather evidence. Other people carry out the arrests. Tomorrow we’re going to film in a small town down the road.

By this time the little guy made it clear to his friend that he was being indiscreet, and steered the conversation towards football.

The next morning I saw the entire film crew loading up a couple of land cruisers. The big guy waved me a cheery goodbye.

Don’t some people have interesting jobs?