Tibet Updates

WORDS I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SAY:  Hooray for France. 

A DARFUR ACTIVIST  GROUP  will hold an illegal protest  in Beijing during the Olympics.   Not even the Chinese can get away with brutalizing foreign,  non-Asian  liberals, or jailing them for years like they did Steve Kim. 

CHINA’S BRAND IMAGE is suffering in the region, too.  Most of the press coverage has focused on  a possible effect at the Beijing Olympics, but Asian nations that had seemed alarmingly deferential to the Motherland are growing wary.  The poll numbers in South Korea — taken a month before the uprising began —  are very negative.  Dan at Tdaxp wonders  whether Tibet could swing Taiwan’s next election.

AN AP REPORTER FINDS  Tibetans willing to reveal their sympathy for the protests against the Chinese regime, if approached out of earshot: 

But Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike quietly share news of the uprising. One taxi driver furtively showed off cell phone photos his family had sent him from the protest in Lhasa.

In the heavily Tibetan southeastern corner of Qinghai province, tucked among at least three regions of reported protests, Tibetans in thick coats bounced by on motorcycles over gravel-strewn roads, waving. They huddled in cafes over plates piled with dumplings, their sunburned faces creasing when they smiled. [….]

But a couple of hours down the road, several cars filled with police burst out of the darkness when a group of foreign journalists set off to walk around a checkpoint in one of the most heated areas of the Tibetan uprising, southern Gansu province.

“What did you see?” the officers angrily shouted. One officer did not put away his automatic rifle until the one ethnic Chinese journalist convinced him that he was a foreigner.  [….]   The journalists were pushed into a police van and driven out of the Tibetan prefecture through its capital, where squads of riot police marched through the city square and hundreds more lined the empty streets.  [AP, Cara Anna]

THE CRACKDOWN CONTINUES:  A fresh report tells us that China continues to pour thousands more troops into the regions around Tibet.  Some protests still continue, and the entire region sounds like an armed camp.  The BBC reports that security forces fired on protestors in Sichuan, where according to RFA, 2,000 people protested.  The longer this story stays in the headlines, the higher a price the Chinese government will pay.