China Announces More Pollution Controls
….“Pictures cannot reflect reality,” said Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing environmental bureau, in comments in a report from the state-run Xinhua News Agency posted on the state environmental agency’s Web site. “They are not accurate. I really urge you not to use photos to base your assessment of air quality.”
Banning Tibet
Published 31 July 2008
More troops have been deployed to the Tibetan areas in Gansu and Sichuan provinces. Roadblocks and military police are seen everywhere. In Ganzi County alone, there are more than 70,000 soldiers – far more than the troops sent to suppress the Tibetan rebellion in 1959. More than 10,000 soldiers have set up camp in Maqu County, the same number as the local population. In Lhasa, everyone must pass a loyalty test in the campaign to clean up in the aftermath of the unrest in March. The Olympics are meaningless to Tibetans there.
Then there are the thousands of Tibetans in Beijing. Tibetan college students have been told to go home this summer, while students at Tibetan schools are not allowed to leave the school premises. The Tibetan Studies Centre has given its staff a rare long holiday: even those we call “Tibetans hired by the imperial court”, meaning those on the government payroll, are not trusted. A Tibetan tour guide who I know was detained for a month, with no explanation whatsoever from the police.
A Tibetan artist friend was interrogated for a day because Buddhist scripture in Tibetan was found in his painting. My good friend Dechen Pemba, an ethnic Tibetan who was born in London and has been studying and working in Beijing, was deported back to the UK for reasons that were never fully explained.
As for me, if I stay in Beijing during the Olympics, I expect to be put under house arrest. So, should I go back to Lhasa? Friends and relatives there tell me: “You’d better wait until after the Olympics.”
Translated from the Chinese by Bessie Du.
Woeser is a Tibetan writer based in Beijing. Her blog The Middle Way is frequently blocked and her books are banned in China
