Links » Cream » 81st Tibetan Self-Immolation Reported

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81st Tibetan Self-Immolation Reported Posted: 24 Nov 2012 02:39 AM PST According to the Dharamshala-based Central Tibetan Administration, an 81st self-immolation protest took place on Friday evening. Xinhua has confirmed the incident. Tadin Dorjee, 29, set fire to himself at the entrance of Dokarmo town office in Tsekhog around 6:30 pm (local time) on Friday. He then chanted prayers for the long life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama with folded hands. He died on the spot. Thousands of local Tibetans offered prayers and attended his funeral that night. The Chinese authorities have cut off Internet and phone lines following the incident RFA has published further details of new measures reportedly introduced to deter the protests: The India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) quoted a source as saying that the notification, issued both in Tibetan and Chinese, was shown on the Malho Prefectural TV channel. It said government aid to family members of self-immolators will be cut for three years while development funds for villages where self-immolations took place—even if projects had been approved earlier—will be cancelled for a similar period, TCHRD said in a statement. Officials, monks and monasteries sympathetic to the self-immolators will also face action, according to the circular. At the BBC, Martin Patience examined the prospects for change under the incoming fifth generation Chinese leadership. But even if Xi Jinping wanted to change direction he would have to tackle a vast security and government apparatus that has been geared up to deal with the Tibet issue, says Bi Yantao, a professor at Hainan University. […] But he believes that both sides need to show more flexibility, describing the current situation as "deadlock." Robert Barnett says there are suggestions that Xi Jinping has set an internal team to review Tibet policy and believes the possibility of a change in policy cannot be ruled out. "It will take great courage, Xi Jinping will have to overcome heavy internal resistance," he says. "Any change is likely to seem small from an outsider's perspective. "But in the current situation, even a slight change would have a significant effect among at least some of the Tibetan community in Tibet." See more on Tibet and the wave of self-immolations at CDT, including news of the 80th and 79th cases, discussion of the challenges involved in verifying reports from the region, and the last words of several of the self-immolators. © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Dalai Lama, Robert Barnett, self-immolations, Tibet, Xi Jinping Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Black Friday in Red China Posted: 24 Nov 2012 01:51 AM PST November 11th was Singles Day—in Evan Osnos' words, the "Chinese answer to Black Friday … an orgy of consumption on a level the world has rarely seen". At The New Yorker, Osnos contrasts this festival of middle class prosperity with the recent detention of Beijing-based Twitter user Zhai Xiaobing (@stariver) for a satirical post about the 18th Party Congress. In this contradiction—between Singles Day and illegal tweets, between needing the middle class to sustain the Party's rule, and punishing the middle class for passing jokes around—lies the Communist Party's essential problem. For years, the Party, and many observers abroad, believed that the middle class would be the Party's greatest ally, that it had gained so much during the boom years that it would never risk the trappings of prosperity for fuzzy notions of political freedom. It was an idea that reached all the way back to the ancient sage Mencius, who declared that "Those who have property are also inclined to preserve social stability." In modern China, that turned into the belief that the middle class would become the xiaofei qianwei, zhengzhi houwei: "the consumer avant-garde and political rear guard." […] The arrest of Zhai Xiaobing, which has inspired a petition calling for his release, stirred a particular kind of dread among China's self-made liberals because it reached into the privileged domain beyond the Great Firewall, the electronic dinner table where members of China's new knowledge class were supposed to be able to joke freely, as long as they kept shopping. Day by day, it seems, the Party is confronting the fact that prosperity alone—the politics of goods—is no match for the politics of information. Yasheng Huang questioned the nature of the link between stability and prosperity in a recent essay at Foreign Policy, featured on CDT earlier this week. "Some analysts believe that the Chinese people tolerate corruption in exchange for fast growth," he wrote. "This is a bit like saying that New Yorkers tolerated Hurricane Sandy. Fast growth maintains a façade of stability not because it has secured tacit complicity from the Chinese people, but because it has funded the instruments of repression." The petition for @stariver can be found here. © Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: 18th party congress, communist party, consumer class, consumerism, Evan Osnos, Great Firewall, mencius, middle class, singles day, social stability, stability, Twitter, Yasheng Huang Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

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