CHINA OUT OF TIBET !!

Tibet, Falun Gong, Darfour et construction d'un Palais au Soudan, droit du Peuple Tibétain à l'autodétermination, autants de sujets abordés et de questions embarrassantes posées par le public sophistiqué des anciens értudiants de la "London School of Economics " et leurs distingués invités, ce qui a fait perdre son calme à Zhou Wenzhong, l'Ambassadeur de Chine.
Incident décrit par l'un des membres de ce avisé comme "un crack dans la façade diplomatique".

Résumé France-Tibet
d'après www.phayul.com



A Crack in the Diplomatic Facade
Nyamrup[Friday, February 16, 2007 11:10]
A cold evening passing out flyers on the sidewalk. Remnants of snow on the ground. The illuminated dome of the Capitol hanging overhead from the distance. I was outside the hall of a speaking engagement by Chinese ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, warmed by the smiles of my Tibetan colleagues if not by the weather. But I probably would not have felt the cold at all that night, had I known what was about to happen just inside...

What happened at the ambassador's speech that night of February 7 was quite eloquently described by a member of the audience as “a crack in the diplomatic facade”. In looking towards an increasingly strategic offensive against China's political interests, I wanted to know exactly what this meant, and what circumstances led up to Ambassador Zhou, the official representative of the People's Republic, losing his sophistication and composure on stage in front of a sophisticated audience.

The setting was a major Capitol Hill law firm, before an audience of London School of Economics alumni and other distinguished guests. Inside the building, in an elegant room overlooking the Capitol, a group of Tibetans had distributed flyers to nearly every member of the audience, asked the unanswerable questions, evoked an angry response, and confronted the ambassador with a banner as he rushed to flee the stage. For an account of the evening, I conducted an interview by phone with Tenzing, who was inside and among the Tibetans challenging Ambassador Zhou. He first gave a background on the evening's program:

The topic of his talk was China's ‘peaceful development’ and that's not a coincidence - lately the Chinese government has been putting a lot of effort into developing this as part of their diplomatic message. They're going on an offensive around the world trying to convince other countries that they are inevitably on their way up, and that you'd better not stand in their way - but at the same time that they're going to be peaceful and therefore not a threat, and that other countries can make a lot of money trading with them and cooperating with them. So there's a little bit of self-interest aspect that they're trying to build in.

And it's funny because the original quote that the Chinese government was using was “China's peaceful rise”. I guess someone in Beijing decided that it sounded too threatening because it's a “rise”, like “Rise of the Third Reich” sort of thing. And they changed it since to “China's peaceful development”, but it's really the same thing. It's a charm offensive/message of “Don't stand in our way, but if you cooperate, you can get very rich.” So that's the overall context of why the Chinese ambassador was doing this particular event.

Preparing for an environment where they would have to back up their position with facts and credible sources, Tenzing and his colleagues had prepared and distributed to each member of the audience a flyer, bearing (among a great deal of other information and well-structured arguments) a quotation from the February 3 issue of The Economist:

“China has, through force, won [Tibetans'] reluctant submission. Acceptance, however, cannot be bought.”

I asked Tenzing about the power and effectiveness this quotation might bring to the table, and whether it was an important part of reaching the audience.

Absolutely. It's something that I could not have said better myself, as a Tibetan, and yet it's coming from The Economist, which is one of the, if not the, most influential news magazines in the English-speaking world. It's very reputable. They're not given to hyperbole by any means. I think it really captured what a lot of us are saying: that China holds Tibet thru military force, and they have the guns and yet they have no legitimacy. They have no legitimacy in the eyes of Tibetans who want to rule themselves. And if China didn't have all the guns, if China were not using force to hold onto Tibet, Tibet would not be controlled by China today.

In the questions that followed Ambassador Zhou's speech, the audience brought forward difficult questions on China's role in the Darfur genocide, their military aspirations in space, and Tibet. According to Tenzing, “People were coming in with serious concerns. That's shown by the fact that they feel there's a need to have this ‘charm offensive’ trying to play up this idea of China's peaceful development.” Two Tibetans asked questions, including Tenzing, who reports:

I should say first that this was the second question touching on Tibet. There was another question from my friend and colleague who also went into the event. He asked a question that touched on Tibet and then spread out to Tiananmen and the Falun Gong. And the ambassador in response to that question went on quite a long rant about Tibet and how it used to be run by slave owners and how there were all these serfs, and he said to my friend, who was Tibetan, “I bet you've never been to Tibet.” “You don't know what you're talking about.” That sort of thing. then he gave quite a lengthy, rather imaginative version of Tibetan history where he said Tibet had been part of China since the 1200s and the standard Chinese government line about how China, because of various quirks in how they interpret history, has a right to act like Tibet's colonial master.

So I got up. I said that I was Tibetan, that yes i have been to Tibet, and that I must object to this rather imaginative version of Tibetan history, but that history is history, and can we maybe talk about the future instead, because after all this is about China's peaceful development. And so then I asked the second question on the flyer:

“As you know, the Dalai Lama has offered to give up Tibet's claim to independence for genuine autonomy, despite most Tibetans wanting independence. Yet your government calls the Dalai Lama a ‘separatist’ and bans his photograph for worshippers in Tibet. Please explain if vilifying the winnder of the Nobel Peace Prize is consistent with China's ‘peaceful rise’. In irresponsibly rejecting his conciliatory overtures, is your government not essentially saying that it considers non-violence and compromise useless when it holds the guns?”

The first thing the ambassador said was “Did you even go to LSE?” implying that maybe I wasn't smart enough to have gone there or something. I'm not sure what he was implying, but it was a very personal attack. Then he went on to provide what I would describe as a fairly standard Chinese government response to the question of Tibet, where they were basically trying to condense it to a question of the personal status of the Dalai Lama, rather than the question of self-determination for all Tibetans.

First he said “This question is fundamentally one of territorial integrity of China.” and I actually shouted out “or self-determination”. He went on to say that Tibet had been a part of China for centuries, and then he started saying “We do actually have contacts with the Dalai Lama” as if that was the end of the story. He basically said that the Dalai Lama is welcome to come back to China whenever he wants, he just has to say that Tibet's always been a part of China, that Taiwan is a part of China, and he actually forgot to add the third requirement that they usually say, which was to recognize that the government of the People's Republic of China is the only legitimate government. But yeah it was basically the standard Chinese government line that the door to dialogue is open and that it's the Dalai Lama who's being unreasonable and holding things up. That's not accurate, and that's also completely aside from the point because the question wasn't about the personal status of the Dalai Lama, the question was about the right to self-determination for the Tibetan people.

In my view, publicly questioning Chinese officials, however satisfying it may be, is not strategically useful in itself. The effectiveness of such an action is dependent upon both the audience's reaction to the challenger and the audience's interpretation of the official's reaction, and upon how these factors influence China's interests in the short-term and long-term. I asked Tenzing to gauge the audience's response to his question.

It was hard to say at the time because everyone was of course looking at him. But afterwards several people came up to me, one of whom actually said to me that it was funny because the ambassador received several difficult questions that night including about China's role in the genocide in Darfur, building a palace for the president of Sudan, and various other quite difficult questions, and this person said to me that the only time the ambassador lost his cool - or what they said was actually that the only time they were able to see a crack in the diplomatic facade was when the ambassador started off not answering my question about Tibet but attacking me personally, and that that really showed how sensitive they are about the issue. And I would actually add sensitive, but also that they realize how illegitimate they are, and how much they really have to worry. There were quite a number of people who came up to me and my two friends who were there afterward. No one had anything negative to say. It was all quite supportive. I do think that the flyer helped. I think the Economist quote helped. And I also think that people were aware of the issue and generally supportive of the right of people to self-determination. I don't think that's a very extreme position or a very hard position to take.

Tenzing also explained the strategy employed by Students for a Free Tibet, to which he credited the night's action, and how it fit into a larger picture.

SFT's strategic goal is to make China's occupation of tibet as costly as possible to the Chinese government and the Chinese leadership. and that's costly politically, economically, in terms of reputational damage, in terms of diplomatic consequences, and so I think [our action] fits in very well in two ways.

On the one level, it was personally to the ambassador quite shameful, because the person who came up to me afterwards was right: his facade cracked. He lost it. He became......angry, as he showed how sensitive and concerned the Chinese government is over its grip on Tibet. He let the audience see that the Chinese government is very very uncomfortable about its position in Tibet. They like to tell the world that everything's fine, that everything's great, but this audience, a lot of whom were influential people, saw how uncomfortable the Chinese government is in its role in Tibet.

And at the very end, as he was leaving, we brought out a banner and were shouting at him, “Mr. Ambassador, the Tibet issue will not go away,” and on his face there was a mixture of fear and sort of embarassment. He came to this event thinking that he would be talking about “China's peaceful development”, and he would be convincing everyone that China has only good things to provide the world, and the event ended up being dominated by the fact of China's illegal occupation of Tibet.

So, both on a personal level it was embarassing to him, and - you also said this, Rich - that if we can get the word out about how poorly he reacted and how he was shamed, both by his reaction, and how here he is, the ambassador of China, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, being hounded by protestors and basically running for the elevator like an unpopular singer being booed off the stage, and how as long as they're in Tibet this is going to be there, this is going to be shaming them, their diplomats, and their entire country. It's something that I think the Chinese people should realize: that their government is bringing shame to their nation.

In light of what Tenzing had to say about the Chinese government's public relations strategy in holding programs like this - their “charm offensive” - I wondered whether Ambassador Zhou and the Chinese government side could view the outcome of the evening as still advancing their diplomatic goals at all, or whether the Tibetans' action had rendered the evening unproductive or even counter-productive to them. Tenzing answered quite simply that while the event was unproductive to the Chinese government's goals, it was very informative to the audience, people who had come to learn more about what the Chinese government is like:

You have a bunch of very well-educated, well-informed people, that are coming in, willing to listen but having serious concerns. And this is something that is a very very important issue to China, that matters tremendously, this issue of whether the rest of the world is going to turn hostile and see China as a threat, or if they're going to see China as a responsible member of the international community. So people are coming in with concerns, and these are fairly intellectual people, and they see sort of the “crack in the facade”, and how the Chinese government is so uncomfortable with how they are ruling this people which does not want to be ruled by the Chinese government, which is only controlled by China because of China's military force. To the audience, they have to ask themselves, if the government of China is capable of doing this to the Tibetan people, what else is it capable of, and what does it say about these other claims the Chinese government is making about its supposedly peaceful aspiration when it's willing to hold an entire people captive against their wishes, and do so using military force.

In concluding, Tenzing offered the following thoughts on the shame the Ambassador Zhou faced on the night of February 7:

I think that things like this are important. I wish that I'd had a chance to have some sort of debate with the Chinese ambassador, but obviously that's not something that he is going to be interested in. But I will say this: I think it's a shame what the Chinese government is doing in Tibet. I have friends who are from China and I have no ill wishes towards the Chinese people. I want to see them successful, I want to see them peaceful, I want to see them economically more well-off, but the fact remains, that their government is committing horrible crimes in Tibet, and as long as their government keeps doing that, their government is going to bring shame to their nation.

Maybe the ambassador thought that my friends and I were the ones who were shaming him, but we were only pointing out the truth, And if the truth is shameful to him, if the truth is shameful to the Chinese government, then maybe what they ought to do is, instead of trying to shut us up, try to act in a more respectible way - in Tibet and in the other issues that they are ashamed of.