Cultural Genocide

How China Used a Times Documentary as Evidence Against Its Subject
By JONAH M. KESSEL

Last week, Tibetan activist Tashi Wangchuk was tried in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai on charges of “inciting separatism” after he appeared in a New York Times video about his fight to preserve the Tibetan language, which faces extinction due both to government efforts to enforce Mandarin learning and to economic pressures to learn the national tongue. No verdict has yet been announced, but the charges against him could bring a sentence of up to 15 years. CDT cartoonist Badiucao pays tribute to Tashi by depicting a snow lion, the traditional emblem of Tibet, with a muzzle over its mouth

During the eight years I lived in China, people would often say they felt as if they had no voice under Communist Party rule. 

This was especially true for minorities.
So when Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan herder turned shopkeeper, showed up at my apartment in Beijing in the spring of 2015, I of course wanted to listen to his story.
He told me the Chinese authorities on the Tibetan Plateau had been slowly eradicating the Tibetan language from schools and the business world. 

Mr. Tashi believed prohibiting the study of the Tibetan language went against China’s constitution.
The New York Times was not Mr. Tashi’s first stop in his attempt to raise this issue, I learned. 

Chinese state-controlled media had refused to listen to him. 

And years earlier, the Chinese authorities had briefly jailed him for expressing his opinions on social media. 

Foreign media were his last resort to be heard.
Last week, more than two years after our first meeting, Mr. Tashi was tried in court for “inciting separatism,” a criminal charge that largely amounts to seeking independence from the Chinese state. No verdict has come down yet, but the sentence could hold a punishment of 15 years in prison. (For those hoping for an acquittal, it’s important to note that China’s courts have a 99 percent conviction rate.)
But the root of his crime was talking to me.
In 2015, after I met Mr. Tashi, I made a nine-minute film for The Times about his efforts to raise the issue of Tibetan education to the central government and Chinese state media. 

Last week, that documentary was shown in court as the main evidence that Mr. Tashi was inciting separatism.
The use of my film as evidence against Mr. Tashi gets at the heart of one of the thorniest issues that can plague foreign journalists: How do we justify instances when our work — aimed at giving voice to the voiceless and holding the powerful to account — ends up putting its subjects at risk or in danger?

Protesters gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in London on the first anniversary of Mr. Tashi’s detention.

Before I made this documentary, Edward Wong — then The Times’s Beijing bureau chief — and I talked at length with Mr. Tashi about the risks he assumed in speaking with us and appearing on video.
Mr. Tashi thought that people wouldn’t believe his story if they couldn’t see him. 

I agreed that it wouldn’t hold the same power. 

He believed he was acting within the guidelines of the law. 

I believed in giving him the agency the Chinese government and state media had refused him. 

He believed his voice must be heard at all costs.
But for Mr. Tashi, speaking out has come at a price.
In early 2016, Mr. Tashi — who specifically told me that he was not advocating Tibetan independence — was kidnapped and held in secret detention, without contact with lawyers and family members for months on end. 

He was subjected to constant interrogation. 

For two years, he has waited in jail, silenced.
But along with his struggles came renewed hope in a story long plagued by news fatigue: The international community began speaking up for Mr. Tashi and his cause.
United Nations officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, PEN America and the United States Embassy in Beijing have all publicly criticized the Chinese government over the case. 

Last March, the European Union and Germany voiced concerns at the United Nations Human Rights Council over Mr. Tashi’s arrest. 

His case has been covered by countless publications around the world, and his arrest has transformed him from an ordinary shopkeeper with a fifth-grade education into a cultural icon of both justice and oppression.

Protesters gathered in support of Mr. Tashi outside the Chinese consulate in New York on Monday.

One of Mr. Tashi’s lawyers told us that community members in Yushu, his hometown, had said that Mr. Tashi had “made a big impact on local Tibetans” and that “people admire him.”
The International Tibet Network awarded him the Tenzin Delek Rinpoche Medal of Courage, recognizing his “courage and dedication to promoting Tibetan human rights and justice for the Tibetan people.”
Meanwhile, some have asked me if I regret making my film. 

I’ve fielded a variety of queries on the topic — from Tibetan advocacy groups, journalists, students, press freedom groups and social media. 

Some have been critical, saying I shouldn’t have made the documentary. 

A former State Department official raised the question of whether I am “complicit in exposing a person vulnerable for his ethnicity.”
I’ve struggled with some of these issues on my own. 

I’ve wondered: Is our discussion of Tibetan rights worth more than a decade of one man’s freedom? Has Mr. Tashi’s arrest ultimately furthered his cause?

Protesters from @SFTHQ demanding the release of #TashiWangchuk are outside of the Chinese consulate in New York City

These are important and difficult questions. 

And while I don’t have definite answers, I do know this: Mr. Tashi and his concerns are now being acknowledged throughout the world. 

On Monday, protesters gathered outside the Chinese consulate in New York City to demand language rights for all Chinese — as well as the release of Mr. Tashi. 

Similar gatherings have happened in London. 

A political cartoonist in Australia has turned his message into pop art. 

His voice, at last, is resonating on an international stage.
I know, too, that Mr. Tashi has asked these kinds of questions himself and that he came to his own conclusions: that language rights are human rights, that they are protected by both China’s constitution and international human rights law, and that it was his duty to help protect his culture, no matter the cost.

Rogue nation: Why Europe need not kowtow to China

With a modicum of confidence, EU nations can set the terms of the relationship 
By PHILIP STEPHENS

Economic weakness has seen EU governments allow Beijing to play divide and rule 

It is a commonplace in Chinese commentary that Europe is in irreversible decline.
Hope, you suspect, is welded to expectation.
Democracies, the story goes, are in trouble as the old economic powers are left behind.
China is stealing a technological march.
As the US turns inward, an enfeebled Europe will have to turn eastward.
China’s grand “one belt, one road” project will connect east to west, new to old.
Guess who will be in charge?
Western liberalism, this prognosis has it, has outlived its time.
Cumbersome, inefficient and divisive, it lacks the unity of purpose harnessed by autocratic regimes.
Nor can it any longer meet the demands of the people — witness the trouncing of the old elite by Donald Trump in the US and the nationalist backlash in much of Europe.
The future belongs to strongman leaders untroubled by the competing demands of pluralist societies — Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and, above all, China’s Xi Jinping. Europeans are often too feeble in the face of such jibes.
The autocrats, otherwise intelligent people mutter, have a point.

Xi has attached the might of the state to his great China dream.
The breathless advance of technology is allowing autocrats to tighten their grip on the state.
Look at China’s chilling experiment to capture digitally every detail of its citizens’ lives in a single electronic “rating”, combining everything from credit status to fealty to the party.
Economic weakness at home has seen EU governments scramble for the benefits of doing business with a booming China. 
They have allowed Beijing to play divide and rule. 
London, Paris and Berlin have had their sights on the rich market for exports; smaller economies on the eastern periphery seek a new source of investment.
Human rights now take a back seat. 
Only the other day, 16 leaders from the eastern half of the continent paid homage to Chinese premier Li Keqiang at a summit in Budapest.
All true.
But, as the European Council on Foreign Relations says in an excellent analysis of the balance of power in the EU-China relationship, even the most enthusiastic mercantilists have begun to count the costs of doing business with Beijing. 
Win-win too often refers to a double whammy for China. 
 There is anyway a bigger flaw in these grand predictive sweeps.
The organising assumption is that history travels in straight lines — that Europe’s troubles are inescapable and that China will be forever impervious to the economic cycle and the human desire for freedom.
To the contrary, the EU is on the mend.
Sure, Britain is leaving, but every passing week simply confirms Brexit as a grotesque act of self-harm. 
The rest of the continent has rediscovered economic growth.
Unemployment is falling and investment rising.
Greece no longer threatens to collapse the eurozone.
The migration crisis has subsided.
There are strong hopes in Paris and Berlin for a reinvigoration of the Franco-German relationship.
In short, Europe no longer feels like a continent flat on its back.
 As for European democracy, the populists have been held at bay.
For all the imperfections, successive crises have also shown the peculiar resilience of democratic systems. 
Chucking out the rascals is a safety valve.
Angry though they might be, voters are not clamouring for curbs on individual freedom or yearning for despotic rule.
What is needed now is for Europe to recover confidence in its values and institutions.
The oft-rehearsed argument between those certain that China will soon rule the world and others sure that it will collapse under the collision of rising living standards and political repression is a silly one. What can be sensibly be said is that China has plenty of hurdles yet to jump before it realises Xi’s dream.
Party rule rests on a fragile bargain — economic prosperity in return for the absence of freedom.
One of the striking features of authoritarian regimes is their brittleness. 
They are unassailable until the moment they break.
 Where Beijing is right is that the relationship between China and Europe will be as important as any in shaping geopolitics during coming decades.
The belligerent isolationism of Trump’s foreign policy is unlikely to survive beyond his presidency, but it is a fair assessment that his successors in the White House will draw tighter lines around America’s international commitments.
 So the focus of geopolitical attention will shift from the littoral states of the north Atlantic to what the late Zbigniew Brzezinski once called the “axial supercontinent” of Eurasia.
This is the vast space over which China would like to hold sway during the second half of the 21st century.
The EU has a choice: it can be supplicant, partner or roadblock.
 Europe is rich, technologically advanced and educationally sophisticated.
“One belt, one road” is an offer it can refuse. 
At the very least it can set its own terms for the relationship.
If China wants connectivity it must open up its own economy; if it wants to be an investment partner, it should observe European standards and norms. 
All that is required of EU nations is a modicum of confidence and shared resolve. 
 Europe has taken a battering.
China’s rise has been amplified by western disarray.
Geopolitics, though, is a long game.
Not so long ago the US called itself the indispensable superpower.
Beijing is not immune from such hubris.
China may be at the gates, but Europe should feel no obligation to bow to Beijing.

France Should Spotlight China's Rights Crisis

Foreign Minister Le Drian Should Call for Releases, Announce Policy Review
Human Rights Watch

French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping attend a bilateral meeting in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. 

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian should publicly urge respect for human rights in meetings with China’s new leadership, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the foreign minister. 

Le Drian is visiting China for the first time as foreign minister from November 24 to 27, 2017.
“French President Emmanuel Macron has explicitly committed to promoting human rights in China along with diplomatic and economic concerns,” said Bénédicte Jeannerod, France director. “Minister Le Drian’s visit is an important opportunity to publicly challenge the Chinese leadership over its rampant human rights violations.”
Human Rights Watch urged Le Drian to:

• Publicly call for the releases of political prisoners Liu Xia, Gao Zhisheng, Jiang Tianyong, and Wang Quanzhang;
• Express concerns about China’s increasing efforts to undermine international institutions that should help defend human rights, including the United Nations, Interpol, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and
• Announce a review of all bilateral law enforcement cooperation.

“France has long been a defender of fundamental rights and liberties worldwide,” Jeannerod said. 

“In the face of an unreceptive Chinese leadership, Minister Le Drian’s visit will be a test of France’s commitment.”

Miss World Contestant Who Challenged China Is Allowed to Speak Once More

Forced organ harvesting: “China does not have a viable voluntary transplant system, so someone has to die... It’s not like the organs grow on plants.”

By ANDREW JACOBS

Anastasia Lin, Canada’s Miss World entrant, spoke out about murky, government-sanctioned organ transplant programs in China. 

Anastasia Lin, the Miss World contestant whose advocacy for victims of human right abuses in China has infuriated Beijing, appears to have regained her voice.
On Wednesday evening, pageant organizers gave Ms. Lin, a Chinese-born Canadian, the green light to speak to the news media, ending a three-week standoff in Washington that had drawn unflattering attention to a storied beauty pageant that has become increasingly dependent on Chinese corporate sponsors.
According to friends and relatives of Ms. Lin’s, employees of the British-owned beauty pageant had warned her that she would be ejected from the competition if she spoke publicly about China's government-sanctioned transplant programs that rely heavily on the organs of murdered prisoners of conscience.

In a brief phone interview, Ms. Lin, 26, declined to discuss whether she had been silenced and praised the Miss World Organization for allowing her to compete in the finals, which will be televised Sunday night and are expected to draw a global audience of one billion. 

“To their credit, they did give me this platform, and I’m able to speak freely now,” she said.
She also said the pageant’s executive director, Julia Morley, had given her permission to attend the premiere of a feature film, “The Bleeding Edge,” that stars Ms. Lin and seeks to dramatize the cruelties of Chinese government-run programs that harvest the organs of prisoners.
In an emailed statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Ms. Morley said she had never barred Ms. Lin from the premiere, which is scheduled for Wednesday night in Washington. 

The event is sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Last year, China blocked Ms. Lin from attending the Miss World finals in Sanya, the southern Chinese resort city that has hosted the finals a half-dozen times since 2003. 

She said pageant officials had made little effort to intervene on her behalf, but they allowed her to retain the Miss Canada title for another year, paving the way for her participation in the 2016 finals.
Ms. Lin sought to focus the interview on her project, which aims to raise awareness about Beijing’s persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is banned in China. 

Adherents face imprisonment, and those who refuse to renounce the movement are subjected to torture.
Ms. Lin and other experts say Falun Gong practitioners who die in custody are unwilling providers of organs for China’s lucrative transplant industry. 

“China does not have a viable voluntary transplant system, so someone has to die,” she said. 

“It’s not like the organs grow on plants.”
She has few illusions that her awareness campaign will make it past China’s strict censors, but she said her appearance in the finals might inspire others willing to stand up to the authorities.
During a visit to Taiwan this year, she described running into a tour group from mainland China. 

She was stunned, she said, when a number of people recognized her and then asked to be photographed by her side.
“Despite 60 years of censorship, people don’t believe everything they hear on the news,” she said, referring to Chinese reports over the past year that have sought to demonize her. 

“I may end up standing in the last row this year, but if they are able to see me, I hope people will be encouraged.”