[Conditions have, by all accounts, deteriorated under President Xi Jinping, who envisions a “new era” of Communist Party supremacy after a headlong plunge into capitalism and, in hindsight, comparative openness under his predecessors.]
By
Steven Lee Myers
 |
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A
monk at Dzongsar monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan.
Credit
Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
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DZONGSAR
MONASTERY, China — The
monks, dressed in crimson robes and wielding blue plastic swords, were
rehearsing a dance they would perform the next day in celebration of the
Tibetan New Year. Then a uniformed police officer appeared in the temple and
said there were a few questions to answer.
So began nearly 17 hours in police custody
for me and a French photographer, Gilles Sabrié, a long though not uncommon
experience for foreign correspondents in China. It was hardly an ordeal, to be
clear; journalists face far worse threats and abuse in China and elsewhere. It
was, rather, a bother.
For the Chinese, though, it was a self-inflicted
embarrassment. We had traveled high into the mountains of the Tibetan plateau
last week to write about holiday traditions in that part of China. By detaining
us, and ultimately expelling us from the region, the authorities succeeded in
preventing that. So I am writing this instead.
China is a country that exudes confidence in
its rising place on the world stage — and yet its officials belie that
confidence with their hypersensitivity to what a foreign correspondent might
encounter traveling untethered, and thus uncensored.
Journalists in China are, as a result,
alternately ignored and followed. They are harassed, detained and even
assaulted, according to the latest survey by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club
of China, an organization not recognized by the government.
Conditions have, by all accounts,
deteriorated under President Xi Jinping, who envisions a “new era” of Communist
Party supremacy after a headlong plunge into capitalism and, in hindsight,
comparative openness under his predecessors.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Xi’s attitude is reverberating through
the ranks of officials, who seem to so fear any deviation from the official
orthodoxy that they consider it safer to avoid journalists than engage them.
The survey found that half of foreign
correspondents encountered obstacles to reporting over the last year. The
figures were even higher in sensitive regions: the mostly Muslim area of
Xinjiang in the west, for example, or the cities along the tense border with
North Korea. They were highest of all in Tibetan areas.
There is probably no issue in China more
fraught than Tibet. The country considers it part of its historical empire, but
many elsewhere believe it was illegally incorporated in 1951, after decades of
de facto independence following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
Today, the Tibet Autonomous Region of China
is off-limits to journalists without special permission, but foreign
correspondents can freely travel to China’s other mostly Tibetan regions, like
those in the bordering province of Sichuan. At least, officially they can.
This is where the Dzongsar monastery is. It
clings to the top of a narrow ridge overlooking a winding gorge that drains
into the Yangtze, the river that marks the border between the two regions. The
closest airport, in Kangding, is an 11-hour drive away, along roads that pass
through the mountains that rise to the Tibetan plateau. The gorge’s elevation
reaches nearly 11,500 feet.
The monastery dates to the eighth century,
but its temples were destroyed in 1958 during China’s campaign to impose
Communist Party control. Rebuilding began in 1983, and it now has some 200
monks who live and study in six temples.
Losar, the Tibetan New Year, is a festival
that, like its Chinese counterpart, unfolds over several days of rituals and
family reunions. The monks we encountered were preparing for a ritual that
would lure villagers from miles around to climb the steep ascent from the
valley; that such rituals have resumed suggested a growing government
acceptance of traditional faith.
I had barely caught my breath from the climb
when we were escorted to the police station in the closest village, Damaxiang.
The ostensible reason was a requirement to
register with the local authorities, as foreign travelers are required to do
within 24 hours of arriving in a new location in China (or 72 hours in rural
locations, as this surely was). This is a formality typically handled by hotel
receptionists, but we had arrived late the night before, at a guesthouse that,
while rustically charming, lacked modern amenities.
We could easily have registered when we
arrived at the police station, but it soon became clear that our mere presence
was the problem.
An officer explained that we had to wait for
officials to come from Dege, the county seat, which was a two-hour drive away.
Another officer arrived and brusquely told us we could no longer use our
phones. It was now detention, though a soft one.
We waited first inside, then outside in the
station’s sun-drenched courtyard, which had a basketball court where local kids
play in the summer. The officers, who were Tibetans, talked about their jobs,
their wages and the difficulty of attracting girlfriends and ultimately wives.
This is an abiding complaint among young men in a country with a surfeit of
them.
I asked one if the village was not, despite
our detention, a peaceful place. “Sometimes people lose their yaks,” he
replied, “and we help them find them.”
By the end, the officers seemed sympathetic. They
even shared their lunch — stir-fried yak meat, among other dishes — served by
an officer wearing an apron over his uniform.
The delegation from Dege arrived, not to ask
any questions, as we had been told, but to escort us back to Dege. After three
hours of circular questions in the police station there — Why had we come? Whom
did we know there? — an officer in plain clothes declared that we should have
registered first, and that we should have requested permission to come in the
first place.
That was not true, but it was the official
way of saying we were being expelled. The police would now escort us back to
Kangding.
“Kafkaesque” is overused as an adjective to
describe authoritarian regimes, but one aspect of the word is apt — the comic
absurdity of how power is sometimes wielded.
The driver of the police car that took us
back to Kangding wore a Yankees cap, which he turned backward at one point. The
officer in the front seat synced his mobile phone to the police radio and sang
along, karaoke style, to a popular rock dirge by Da Zhuang, with lyrics rolling
up his screen. “Wo men bu yi yang,” the title and refrain go. “We are
different.”
We arrived at a hotel in Kangding after 2
a.m., only to spend nearly an hour arguing with a woman who identified herself
as Liu Xiaoli, a representative of the Public Security Bureau.
Her hostility was palpable. At one point, she
asked suspiciously how she could know for certain that we had been in police
custody since 10 the previous morning, as if the police had not just delivered
us to the hotel.
We were allowed to check in, effectively
freed, though a guard remained in the lobby for the rest of the short night.
The next morning, Ms. Liu and three others piled into a sport utility vehicle
and drove us to the airport in Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, where we boarded a
flight back to Beijing.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State
Council Information Office did not respond to questions about our detention.
After the correspondents’ club released its
report, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, Hua Chunying, dismissed the
complaints detailed in it, saying that the majority of correspondents operated
without trouble in China.
“We hope that what you write and what you
capture on your cameras,” she said, “will present a China that is real,
multidimensional, and comprehensive.”
Follow Steven Lee Myers and Gilles Sabrié on
Twitter: @stevenleemyers and @gillsabrie