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关于西藏,一封给worldpress 编辑的信

(2008-04-15 13:55:49) 下一个
Dear editor,

I am disturbed by the approach adopted by Carole Reckinger\'s article T*bet: Unrest on the \'Roof of the World\' (March 27, 2008 http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/3103.cfm).

As a pro-democracy overseas Chinese and a PhD researcher I always try to look at the story from both sides and think critically. It\'s difficult to turn against tendency to only look into views and stories in favor of one\'s own pre-judgment, but it\'s the only way we can develop a objective view.

In Carole Reckinger\'s article, it claims In the early years of the Chinese occupation, control was maintained by force. More than one million of T*bet\'s six million people died, according to an estimate by the T*betan government in exile. Furthermore, an unknown number of people languished in prison and labor camps or fled the country. Limited relaxations of China\'s policies in T*bet came only very slowly after 1979. Not only did the author used the language style in a misleading way, in asserting firstly More than one million of T*bet\'s six million people died, then with slight touch, according to an estimate by the T*betan government in exile. But more importantly, the author did not bother at all to verify the figure.

Now if we look at another article which appears more like a rigorous treatment of the figures ( http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=68073&sid=ce0b20590dd445725153c83b5ef21c7f), I read In fact, as Michael Parenti has pointed out in his article on Friendly Feudalism: the T*bet Myth, “both the D*lai L*ma and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendz*n Choegyal, claimed that ‘more than 1.2 million T*betans are dead as a result of the Chinese occupation.’ But the official 1953 census - six years before the Chinese crackdown -recorded the entire population residing in T*bet at 1,274,000.33 Other census counts put the ethnic T*betan population within the country at about two million. If the Chinese killed 1.2 million in the early 1960s then whole cities and huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of T*bet, would have been depopulated, transformed into a killing field dotted with death camps and mass graves - of which we have not seen evidence. The thinly distributed Chinese military force in T*bet was not big enough to round up, hunt down, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all its time doing nothing else.”

It is exactly this kind of approach that annoys a lot overseas Chinese, many of whom want the objective truth. Yes those unverified figures and evidence catch the eyes of readership, but in the end of the day, comprising the spirit of journalism - objectivity and pursuit of nothing but the truth - could only serve the function of aliening overseas Chinese people, many of whom are critical thinkers like myself. Any eventually it is Chinese people, well informed with trustworthy sources, that makes China a civilized country that respect human rights and open to the world. Recent backfire from Chinese people against western media is a good example of the harm such biased views can make. It could be argued that the Chinese government played this smartly in turning the domestic Chinese people\'s view from pro-western media to anti-western media, but it was those media that gave the Chinese government the chances in the first place.

I hope in the reviewing process you could take this consideration on board.

Yours sincerely,
Charles
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