Asia

I’d like to offer a belated congratulations to Simon for winning a 2007 Human Rights Press Award. His story on China’s justice system was one of two winners in the magazine category. The other winner was also from TIME Asia, Andrew Marshall’s story about last year’s protests in Burma. The awards, which are co-sponsored by Amnesty …

Activist Hu Jia, about whom we have written often (and whose wife Zeng Jinyan–who is under house arrest– we tried to see in February but were impeded by the police) has been found guilty on a charge of “inciting the overthrow of state power” (煽动颠覆国家政权罪). He was given a sentence of three and a half years. Although his …

After a couple weeks here of almost all Tibet, almost all the time, I’d like to take a moment to discuss some different subjects, basketball and beer. OK, mainly just beer. The occasion is the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Each March, 65 U.S. colleges participate in the single-elimination tournament that has a long tradition of …

Just kidding. It’s still all happening in our beloved, smoggy Beijing. Happy April Fools Day.

A big thank you to all our schoolfriends from the Tianya forum (one of the most popular in China and the site that started off the investigation of the Brick Kiln Slavery Scandal; it is also where the instructions on how to harass foreign media offices mentioned in a post below were posted) for their extensive, lively comments on this …

Two reports out today seem to point in opposite directions:

Dalai Lama lambasted for ‘abusing religion’
TIBET

Reuters in Beijing

4:15pm, Mar 31, 2008

Beijing stepped up its attacks on the Dalai Lama on Monday, blasting him for abusing religion, stirring protests in Tibet and preparing for independence as the Olympic flame arrived

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The Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders released a document today it says outlines the Chinese government’s strategy for the management of overseas media during this Olympic year. The group doesn’t detail where the memo came from, or who wrote it, though it is directed at a province and its local governments. Much …

Above is a mock/humorous edition of the overseas edition of the People’s Daily currently circulating on the net. Every country has its nationalist nutters of course. But there’s something particularly scary to non-Chinese about this sort of thing, which seems to reflect a combination of patriotic pride and lingering resentment over …

As I said in a story earlier, the Chinese web can be a wild and hairy place. Though it’s very tightly controlled (especially now: even from behind a VPN a lot of Tibet sites are blocked or semi-blocked, ie only parts will come up, and try sending an email from gmail or yahoo with the word Tibet in the body from inside the GFW: forget …

Here’s some video of the protest by monks during the government-run trip to Lhasa.

My colleague Lin Yang, who has traveled extensively in Tibet, offers her thoughts on the recent unrest:

I vaguely remember the last serious demonstrations in Tibet in 1989. I overheard bits and pieces from my parents’ hushed conversations. It was a time before the Internet and one could pretend the protests were not happening. But …

Here’s something I did on the media battle over the Tibet events. And here is an account of how the best laid plans for media management can go horribly wrong. (It’s from the Associated Press but I reproduce it whole as I got it from behind a paywall):

TIBET
Associated Press in Lhasa
12:30pm, Mar 27, 2008

A group of Buddhist monks

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