Tibetwatch

Taken from the BBC News website today

As Mr Wen arrived to deliver the speech, he was met by both pro-Chinese supporters and people demonstrating against China's human rights record in its own country and in Tibet.

Interesting to be able to read between the lines that the person writing the article believes that Tibet is a separate country from China. So much for impartiality.

Compare this to what my learned friend Madam Miaow observed. UK Government policy on Tibet.

I still don't know what I feel on the topic on Tibet myself, but I certainly don't feel many of things I read in the West or in China are totally unbiased.

Happy Tibetan New Year...obviously!!!

Yet more Tibetan shenanigans in the papers today. Chinese Premier Wen Jia Bao visits the UK and so the Free Tibet campaign get on their feet to exercise their right to protest. And then the Pro Chinese camp decide to get on their feet to exercise their right to voice their opinions. And then the police decide to get on their feet and sort out the ensuing kerfuffle. And I get on my feet and go for a walk because I've decided these kinds of events are getting just too samey.

So far so simple and so predictable, but however this quote by a Tibetan on the Telegraph somehow puzzled me:

Tibetan Ugyan Norbu ... criticised media coverage of the Chinese New Year pointing out that the Tibetan's New Year starts on a different date but is not marked in Britain in the same way.

He said: "It's either ignorance or bias either way it is very careless and does not show any respect to the growing number of Tibetans living in this country and the British people who believe in Free Tibet."

He has a point. I'm going to sit down and write a severely snotty letter to those red-flag-waving, Communist-lovers at Blue Peter lambasting them for always talking about Chinese New Year every year and shunning Losar, the Tibetan New Year for what can only be interpreted as political bias for a new generation.



Why I'm so annoyed by this I'm going to dig out my old Blue Peter badge and burn it in protest. And I hope both Shep and Goldie's remains rot in hell (or whatever the Tibetans regard as their equivalent to Hell, downtown Beijing maybe??? No jokes about about the dietary preferences of certain Chinese please...)

Give me a T, give me an I, give me a B, give me an E, give me a T!

Ok, my first venture into the darkest realms of the human topic of politics. I spotted this article on the BBC today, and the current status of that ever-dragging soap opera that is Tibet. (Maybe in many years from now when we get some proper historical perspective some future budding Rodgers and Hammestein could do a musical based on these goings-on and call it "Tibet!". If you can do a Julie Andrews vehicle based on the Anschluss of Austria then why not Michael Crawford as the Daila Lama as he prances around the himalayas declaring his simple love of yaks' milk in song. But I digress a teensy weensy bit)

This is the article, and the paragraph that actually caught my attention was:

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959, after Chinese troops had crushed an uprising by pro-independence Tibetans. Beijing says Tibet has been part of the Chinese nation since the 13th Century. Many Tibetans disagree, pointing out that the Himalayan region was an independent kingdom for many centuries, and that Chinese rule over Tibet has not been constant.

Now I actually applaud the BBC for starting to show signs of neutrality over the issue. A few years ago I would not have been surprised to see maybe only the first sentence being published. In other words the implication would have been was that Tibet was a happy, peaceful, independent and lover-ly place until the Chinese People's Liberation Army came in and annexed the region for no apparent reason other than maybe greed. The same kind of thing as Poland 1939 maybe. Now, I am no apologist for the People's Republic of China, but I do think the Western Media have been guilty of neatly packaging many of China's problems into easy-to-digest bite-sized morsels that somehow fail to provide any proper perspective and therefore nudges the reader towards one particular point of view.

In this article note how China "claims" something, whilst the Tibetans "point out" something else. Dipping into my Chinese history books written by westerners for the consumption of westerners it seems that Tibet was a part of Qing dynasty China before the whole nation splintered into independent, locally ruled provinces (including one called Tibet). It wasn't until the Chinese Liberation Army forcefully swept around the whole previous Qing-ruled territories (including Tibet) that China became united again. The violent cycle of unity and fragmenation is a sadly reoccuring theme in Chinese history.

I don't claim to be an expert in the Tibetan matter, or to have a solid opinion about Tibet, but I think many Western media should do more to provide the full facts on the issue and not just the bits that sound most juicy and riveting. The lesson for the today is that no media is free from bias intended or otherwise, here endeth the lesson.