Piecing together what is now happening in Tibet is difficult beyond the obvious fact that Lhasa is being heavily policed and the country in general garrisoned to damp down any re-combustion of last week’s violence.
The BBC reports house to house searches in Lhasa and that one of its correspondents in western China had seen long convoys of military vehicles heading across the mountains into Tibet, to add, presumably, to the large numbers of troops already there. Prime minister Web Jiaboa has made his first public comment on the subject, unilluminatingly accusing the Dalai Lama of masterminding the demonstrations, and defending the way they were dealt with.
With Tibet effectively closed to journalists, we are being reminded of the modern truth that if we don’t see something on television we don’t know its true. Worse, we are getting the black and white public stances of both sides, whereas the truth is inevitably grey. In any conflict there are usually three sides, the two antagonists and those on neither of their sides. Beijing Newspeak has a read-worthy post on that and the reporting by his former employer, Xinhua. EastSouthWestNorth shows how what little we do know can be read either way. Props, too, to Mutant Palm for trying to bridge the understanding gap with his Tibet Tweets posts and his evangelising of establishing direct contact with Chinese netizens.
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March 20, 2008 at 3:30 am
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