A Tibetan Blogger, Always Under Close Watch, Struggles for Visibility
BEIJING
WOESER, a Tibetan poet and blogger whose every word is of great interest to the Chinese authorities, described the nightmare that jolted her awake shortly before a reporter arrived for what some might describe as a foolhardy interview.
She dreamed that she was back in Tibet and that an army truck was passing before her, its cargo enveloped in green canvas.
One side of the truck was uncovered, however, and inside she could see a heap of black-and-blue bodies, Tibetans old and young, who had been battered into submission.
Desperate to record the sight, she reached for her camera but it was gone.
“The dream ends with me chasing the truck, wailing and yelling,” said Ms. Woeser, 42, who follows Tibetan tradition of using a single name.
The nightmare vividly reflects the anxiety felt by many Tibetans, both inside and outside China. But it is a particularly fitting reflection of the sense of helplessness that confronts one of China’s best-known bloggers as she tries to chronicle life in Tibet amid a continued yearlong crackdown on dissent.
Her books are banned here, and the blog she has kept since 2005 is currently blocked. Still, with foreign media banned from much of the Tibetan plateau, Ms. Woeser’s blog, “Invisible Tibet,” has become one of the few reliable news outlets for those able to circumvent what is cynically referred to as The Great Firewall.
Ms. Woeser has been kept especially busy by a run of politically delicate dates, including the 50th anniversary of the “liberation” of Lhasa by the Chinese Army, which upended the Tibetan aristocracy and sent the Dalai Lama into exile. This year Beijing christened March 28 a national holiday, Serf Liberation Day, but among many Tibetans it was a time for mourning.
This year’s commemoration was made all the more tense by a security lockdown that accompanied the first anniversary of the riots in Lhasa in which 19 people were killed, many of them Han Chinese migrants.
In the weeks and months that followed, hundreds of Tibetans were arrested; by her own tally, based on accounts of those she said she trusts, as many as 300 people may have died at the hands of public security forces.
“It’s impossible to know the exact number because the bodies are always immediately cremated,” she said. “I am sympathetic to the loss of Han lives, but I am angry at the government for responding with such heartlessness. They have only made the situation worse by awakening the anger of the Tibetan people.”
A graceful, soft-spoken woman whose disquieting tales are often punctuated by nervous laughter, Ms. Woeser has become an accidental hero to a generation of disenfranchised young Tibetans. Like many of her peers, she was schooled in Mandarin, part of a policy of assimilation that left her unable to write Tibetan, and she grew up embracing the official version of history — that the Communist Party brought freedom and prosperity to a backward land.
HER pedigree is all the more notable because her father, the son of a Han father and a Tibetan mother, was a deputy general in the Chinese Army who oversaw Lhasa.
It was only at 24, after seven years studying Chinese poetry and literature, that she reconnected with her Tibetan DNA. During a visit to Lhasa, an aunt dragged her to the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest sites, and she found herself overwhelmed by the emotional intensity of the faithful. “I was crying so loudly a monk told my aunt, ‘Look at that pathetic Chinese girl, she can’t control herself.’
“It was that moment I realized I had come home,” she said.
She moved back to Lhasa, found a job at Tibetan Literature, a government-run journal, and began delving into the history and folklore of Tibet. In 2003, a publisher in Guangzhou put out her first book, “Notes on Tibet,” a collection of prose and short stories that quickly sold out. It was just before the second print run that the authorities took notice. They promptly banned the book, saying it contained “serious political mistakes.”
In their condemnation of the book, her employer, the Tibetan Literature Association, said she had glorified the Dalai Lama, harmed the solidarity of the nation and “exaggerated and beautified the positive function of religion in social life.” They demanded a confession of her errors. She refused, and found herself unemployed.
With no means of support, she moved to Beijing. After gushing to friends about one of China’s best-known writers, Wang Lixiong, an introduction was made. They married a year later.
In contrast to Tibetan dissidents who agitate from places of exile, Ms. Woeser’s is a rare voice that emanates from China. Robert Barnett, a professor of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University, described her as “fierce and courageous” but said she was never strident. “She is not a politician but a poet who quite late in her career started talking about politics,” he said. “She is an eloquent reminder of what’s happening in Tibet.”
One of her most startling recent projects is “Forbidden Memory,” a book of photographs taken by her father during the Cultural Revolution. Published in Taiwan, the book provides a disturbing glimpse of the tumultuous decade that destroyed thousands of temples and laid waste to countless lives. There are pictures of trampled relics, jubilant crowds bearing oversized Mao portraits and a female living Buddha, head bowed in humiliation, as she is hectored in the streets. “My father loved photography and no one dared stop him because he was in uniform,” she said.
The photographs also offer a telling window into the soul of a conflicted man. Ms. Woeser recalled her father as a devoted Communist who would publicly denounce religion by day and seek refuge in Buddhist texts at night. After he died in 1991, she found a dog-eared biography of the Dalai Lama hidden on his bookshelf. “He was like many Tibetans who work for the government,” she said. “They are divided inside. We call them people with two heads.”
In recent years Ms. Woeser has become less tolerant of Chinese rule and more vocally opposed to the Han migrants and tourists who she claims have diluted Tibetan culture and damaged a fragile ecosystem. Such outspokenness has only heightened the interest of the authorities, who blocked her first three blogs. (The fourth, she said, was destroyed by hackers.)
LAST year, she and her husband were briefly placed under house arrest after they spoke to the foreign news media.
Her visits to Tibet are even more tightly scrutinized. The police track her every move, interrogating any friend who dares to meet with her. “Most of my friends no longer have the guts to see me,” she said.
During her last visit in August, public security officials searched her mother’s home in Lhasa, confiscating computers and subjecting Ms. Woeser to eight hours of questioning. When she returned home, her mother, fearful for her safety, begged her to pack her bags and go. “That was one of the most heartbreaking moments,” she said.
Most of the news that appears on her blog arrives through e-mail messages or via Skype, the Internet calling service, although they are not without risk. She said 13 of her friends are still in detention, some facing charges that they illegally disseminated details of arrests and protests to the outside world. “Every day I cry because I don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” she said, glancing out the 20th-floor window of her apartment, with its expansive view of a hazy Beijing sunset.
Despite her relatively high profile both inside and outside China, she is well aware that her liberty is fragile. Since 2004 she has been waiting for a passport, which would allow her to travel and speak abroad.
“I feel so insecure inside,” she said. “I feel like I’m sitting on the edge of a cliff and I could fall down at any moment.”
