That Place in Western China that Starts with a “T”

josh — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:48:58 +0000

Tom Engelhardt, the editing guru whose baffling enthusiasm once prevented me from dumping journalism to go back to skimming the fat off of veal stock in some cut-rate San Francisco brasserie, would probably sooner suck the ink out of his pen than see me start a post on a topic by confessing I have nothing real to say about it. Sorry, Tom. In this case, I have no choice.

It’s not that I couldn’t go on about the riots in Tibet. I could. For pages, probably. But there are two problems with that: 1) Hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of people have already done it; and 2) Very little of what those hundreds (or thousands) have said is based on reliable information.

As Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth was astute enough to point out when all this erupted last weekend, virtually everything we hear about Tibet comes filtered through one of two very well-oiled propaganda machines: one in Beijing, the other in Dharamsala (where the Dalai Lama maintains Tibet’s government-in-exile). Even in the best of times, independent reporting on the place is both rare and restricted. Now? It’s anybody’s guess what’s really going on.

Rather than add to the blather, then, I’ll simply post a few useful links and hope everyone takes what they find with due skepticism:

—For a reliable first-hand account, the best choice right now is The Economist, which has the only accredited foreign journalist actually reporting from inside Lhasa.
—For reactions from the Chinese media and blogosphere, see Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation, Roland at ESWN and John Kennedy at Global Voices
—For a more general overview, go to China Digital Times, which has done its damndest to set up a one-stop-shop of riot information and commentary.

And if the above don’t satisfy your Lhasa riot information jones, Kenneth Tan has complied the authoritative link list over at the Shanghaiist.

If it’s opinion you crave, then I’ll join the chorus in support of Dave at the Tenement Palm blog, who makes an unassailable yet somehow seldom heard argument that regular people on both sides of the China-Tibet shouting war need to stop waving their flags for a moment and try actually having a conversation.

[Photo by 2 Dogs]

Ch-infamous » riot

That Place in Western China that Starts with a “T”