The Vice Guide to North Korea, Ep. 13
Shane goes to Arirang. Extreme individuality, meet extreme conformity.
Archive for March 19, 2008
Tibet Updates, and the Images China Doesn’t Want You to See
BARBARA DEMICK IS IN CHINA, filing reports about the spread of the protests beyond Lhasa and the Tibetan Autonomous Region.
Tibetan activists said at least 15 more were killed near a remote mountain monastery in Sichuan province when paramilitary troops fired at a crowd of demonstrators who waved the Tibetan flag and chanted, “Free Tibet!” and “Bring back the Dalai Lama!” [L.A. Times]
The surviving protestors then attacked a police station and government offices with Molotov cocktails. Guess which incident Chinese TV will tell the masses about. But that may well have been the pattern in Lhasa and elsewhere: protests begin peacefully, Chinese overreaction provokes Tibetan rage, China exploits images of the rage for domestic consumption. L.A. Times writer Mark Magnier is also reporting from western China on the spread of the protests.
PICTURES OF THE DEAD still emerge, somehow. A Tibetan dissident group has posted some very graphic photographs of at least a dozen dead and wounded people, apparently Tibetans, with what appear to be gunshot wounds.
PROTESTS IN BEIJING, TOO. Radio Free Asia has an extensive roundup of how far they’ve spread and the regime’s violent suppression of them.
WEN JIABAO MEETS THE PRESS and flubs the hard questions. Yes, being an unaccountable autocrat can leave you ill-prepared for that sort of thing.
WORLD CONDEMNATION of the Chinese protests has been largely muted by Chinese money and influence, and China has been careful to keep most of its brutality out of view, but it’s growing more difficult for some to ignore it. Who would have thought that the Foreign Minister of France would be the first to suggest that foreign governments make some gesture, however empty, of disapproval?
THE NEW YORK TIMES strongly condemns the crackdown in an editorial entitled, “China Terrorizes Tibet.” If China were more openly anti-American and less capitalist, the Times would probably be more understanding.
“Most of the film had to be kept secret for the past years.”
So says the director of a new South Korean film about a North Korean orphan living secretly in China.
“Crossing,” a story directed by Kim Tae-gyun and starring Korean TV star Cha In-pyo, depicts an 8,000 km arduous and lonely journey made by an 11-year-old North Korean boy in search of his coal-miner father who ended up defecting to South Korea. [….]
“I had to be very cautious in making this film because of the political sensitivity of the defector issue,” Kim said during a news conference in which part of the incomplete film was open to media for the first time. [The Hankyoreh]
Secret from whom? Please tell me he doesn’t mean the South Korean government. He doesn’t quite say it.
That would mean that tens of thousands of us served in uniform to protect this nominally free country where a democratically elected government led by a former “human rights lawyer” censored media discussion, whether fictionalized or documentary, of the world’s gravest human rights violations, but subsidized fictionalized accounts of American atrocities and missteps, accounts where considerable dramatic license had to be taken for maximum demagogic effect.
It’s not as if this is the first we knew of the Roh Administration acting as a proxy North Korean censor, blocking demonstrations, or trying to putinize the media, but this sudden deluge of new information about North Korean refugees — all of which evidently had to hide until Lee Myung Bak’s inauguration — is pretty remarkable for what it says about (the absence of) free speech in Roh’s Korea. Doesn’t that all sound vaguely … fascist?
If talking about human rights in North Korea is the new political fad, it’s a fad I suppose I can live with.
More on the film, “Crossing,” at the Daily NK. See also GI Korea’s take.
Update: There’s more information about “Crossing” and a video clip here. It didn’t play on my computer, but I liked these pictures, including stills from the film. For the record, the makers of the film are not saying that the South Korean government tried to interfere with the film’s production or release, although they do say that the North Koreans did.