Some photos from Woeser

As noted by Reporters Without Borders, blogs belonging to poet and essayist Woeser have been pulled from two Chinese blog providers.

Belatedly, then, we bring you some photos and comments that Woeser posted while her blogs were open.

At the launch of the Qinghai-Tibet railroad, she commented on the flags and banners covering the city of Lhasa:

The train runs to Lhasa. Golmud beats the drum around the waist of northern Shaanxi, and Lhasa dances that old wordless dance.

My friend P.K told me about a website that is full of posts about the banners and balloons and fluttering red flags over the past few days.

“The Q-T Railroad is the line to happiness for all the peoples of Tibet.”

Such jubilance nearly drove reporters from CCTV and Phoenix TV stations to shout: Tibetans are so patriotic!

Yes, yes, that old saying that I don’t want to say; not loving the country brings a penalty, do you understand?!

My friend from Lhasa said that to welcome visitors from all parts, the fee collectors at Lhasa’s public toilets were given a salary card; reportedly during the celebrations for the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway they were not permitted to collect defecation fees from anyone, and the state would temporarily pay the workers’ salaries, ha!

[in the comments]

This is a comment I wrote on another friend’s blog:

For Spring Festival, every one must hang a flag. For Tibetan New Year, every house must hang a flag. For May 1, every house must hang a flag. For October 1, every house must hang a flag. At any “major day,” flag hanging is required….in Barkhor Street it is the same, every community organization in Lhasa is the same. If a house wants to hang a flag out of a personal wish, then perhaps this may mean something, but when you are forced to hang it, that unnaturalness, that indescribable awkwardness. Why isn’t it the families of cadres in all government departments that are forced to hang flags, but rather the common people – is it that the cadres are more enlightened? Or is it to let the people who come to Tibet understand how much the Tibetan people love their country? I asked an old man in the community committee why he had to hang a flag, and his answer was: the higher-ups require it; if we don’t hang a flag then we’ll be sorry.

Note: “Sorry” means a fine. Light fines, and heavy ones….

Last month, Woeser ran a series of photographs from a book she published in February. Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution collects several hundred photographs taken by her father during the CR; Woeser captioned the photos, wrote essays on historical events and the changes experienced in the intervening years, and interviewed several dozen Tibetans of her father’s generation.

The book’s Chinese title is “Killing and Plunder” (杀劫), pronounced “sha jie,” which happens to be the pronunciation of the word “revolution” in Tibetan. Woeser writes:

Many homophones in Chinese can be found for [“revolution” in Tibetan]; my choice of “killing and plunder” was made to symbolize the disaster that revolution has brought to Tibet since the 1950s. Forty years ago, another revolution, the “Cultural Revolution,” swept over Tibet, and in front of “sha jie” was added [“culture” in Tibetan]. The pronunciation of [“culture” in Tibetan] can be written in Chinese phonetics as “ren lei”, or close to the pronunciation of “humanity” (人类) in Chinese. So to use Chinese to express the word for “Cultural Revolution” in Tibetan becomes for the Tibetan people a “killing and plundering of humanity.”

Woeser was spurred to write Forbidden Memories by the Tibet-focused writer Wang Lixiong, and the two later married. In the book’s introduction, Wang writes:

In both Cultural Revolution studies and in the collation of Cultural Revolution material there has been a blank – Tibet. The most complete collection of CR material, China’s Cultural Revolution Library Discs (published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2002), assembles more than 10,000 files, transcripts, and other documents; only 8 of these relate to Tibet. The New Collection of Red Guard Publications published by the China Information Center in Washington, DC, collected 3100 Red Guard publications, and only four of those were publications from Tibet. Like CR researcher and CR materials collator Song Yuanying wrote to me in a letter, “Material from Tibet could be said to be sorely lacking…we truly understand too little about the CR in Tibet!”

Even in official archives in the Tibet Autonomous Region, there is a discontinuity between 1966 and 1971. There are only three records left from those six years. And from the two years of fiercest fighting at the start of the CR there is not one thing left.

In the face of the world, the CR is awkward for the CCP, and Tibet is awkward as well, so the CR in Tibet is a doubly forbidden region, one which it is even less permissible to approach. The Tibet’s Century in Pictures photobook compiled in 1999 by the CCP United Front department had not a single photograph of the CR out of hundreds of pictures; it seems the ten years between 1966 and 1976 never existed in Tibet’s history.

Interestingly, though Woeser’s blog is has been killed, photos still remain on the Daqi servers, and individual pages are currently accessible through Sogou’s cache system (and Google’s, probably). Check out Locus Publishing’s site for the Forbidden Memory book if the cache vanishes.

UPDATE: Woeser’s blog can be found at Middle-way.net. She’s posted more photos from the book there.