公开信来了（征集修改意见）
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">公开信来了，谢谢swat和语文老大<img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> <img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> <img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3"></font> </p>Dear Editor:<br><br>To the five young Tibetan and Han Chinese girls being burned alive by the murderers, to an eight-month old baby, who never got the chance to grow up to see the world and whose life was cut short so brutally by the rioters, to a man who was trying to save two children could not escape from the skin of the mob’s teeth, to the medical personnel in ambulance not immune from the killing spree, to hundreds of peaceful and hard working people who lost everything overnight and whose lives were forever destroyed by the senseless atrocities, your news article of March 31 by Pamela Lawn, which described the recent Tibetan riot as if it were peaceful demonstration, appears to be a cruel irony and one of the worst journalism. <br><br>On March 14, what happened in Tibet is close to an act of terrorism when violence against civilians was at its summit, James Miles of The Economist, the only one Western journalist in Lhasa, said in a CNN interview, “what I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa.” Canadian backpacker John Kenwood recalled in an article on Washington Post of March 27, “‘it wasn’t about Tibet freedom anymore.’ What he witnessed next was a violent rampage . . . Hundreds of mostly young Tibetans broke up into roaming gangs and attacked Chinese passersby and vandalized shops, killing 19 people and injuring more than 600 over two days.” With no banners or speech of protest, but only rocks, knives, burning, looting, and killing with hatred, this riot has nothing to do with peaceful demonstration, or religious freedom as some may claim here. It is blood-shed violence against innocent civilians under the disguise of “peaceful” protests.<br><br>There are really two issues at play when we come to discuss the Tibet “problem,” sovereignty and human rights. Today no regime or person can fail to notice that China exercises legal sovereignty over Tibet. Even international legal experts sympathetic to the cause of Tibetan independence find it difficult to argue that Tibet ever technically established its independence of China. More important, separation has never been supported by most Tibetans who live their peaceful life on this beautiful land and enjoy an improving standard of living that they never had during the long suffered theocracy and slavery. The romanticization of the Tibetan theocracy and so-called “friendly feudalism” should be examined against bloody reality. In the theocratic Tibet, the Buddhist monastic nobility controlled all land on behalf of the “gods.” They monopolized and accumulated enormous wealth by exacting tribute and labor services from peasants and serfs, who accounted for 95 percent of Tibetan population and were considered appendages to the monastery and lived in dire poverty. Chris Mullin, writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1975, described Lithang’s monks as “not monks in the Western sense . . . many were involved in private trade; some carried guns and spent much of their time violently feuding with rival monasteries.” But the serfs had to accept their life of misery as atonement for sins of their previous life. It is a small column of the People’s Liberation Army, who was armed with good intention to bring peace and democracy to the Tibetan Chinese rather than weapons, helped the peasantry to overthrow the Holiness’ theocracy and slavery and officially reincorporated Tibet into the People’s Republic in 1951.<br><br>Behind this separation movement is not a passion for freedom, but a distaste for peace and hope. Against the peaceful Tibetan and other ethnic groups’ wishes, the so-called pro-independence movement, organized by the radical Tibetan Youth Congress, whose members were mostly born overseas and decided to employ a violent approach to push its separation agenda, in order to roll back the clock to their Holiness’s theocracy and slavery, is causing more harm than good. According to the Globe and Mail, the only national newspaper in Canada, “Last May, the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan government-in-exile put together a meeting in Brussels of all the major Tibet organizations — there are hundreds, and they’re organized under a Washington-based umbrella group, the International Tibet Support Network. There, the exiled Tibetans decided that the Olympics should be the single focus of their activities for the next 15 months, and they hired a full-time organizer for the Olympic-disruption campaign.” This meeting was followed by a call this past January for the “Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement,” with a focus on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The beginning date for the “uprising” in the Tibet was to be March 10. The rest is history, as you may have noticed. <br><br>The betterment of human rights could by no means achieved by theocracy and violence. The population of Tibet in 1959 was only about 1.19 million, in 2000, 7.3 million live in the Greater Tibet area of whom 6 million were ethnic Tibetans. If we consider the Tibet Autonomous Region only, as referred to in Wikipedia, “there were 2,616,300 people in Tibet, with Tibetans totalling 2,411,100 or 92.2 percent of the current regional population. Tibetan’s average lifespan has increased from 35 in 1950 to 68 in 2000 due to the improving standard of living and access to medical services” and the “infant mortality has dropped from 43 percent in 1950 to 0.661 percent in 2000.”<br><br>The Chinese central government is far from perfect, like any else government on this world. It may not know what and how to best help Tibetan Chinese. However, it has not stepped back from its responsibilities. It set up schools and hospitals for the Tibetan Chinese, which virtually did not exist under the Holiness’ slavery. It built the railroad for the Tibetan Chinese, whom never dreamed of under the Holiness’ exploitation, and it is the highest, the longest, and most beautiful one. It takes the whole country and Chinese people forty years to make the dream come true. Numerous volunteers from other parts of China, most of whom would complete a three-year service there, are helping their Tibetan brothers and sisters to improve the infrastructure, education, health care, while enduring thin air, rugged mountains, unpassable creek, dry and cold climate. As the Atlantic observed in its February issue of 1999, “many Chinese working in Tibet regard themselves as idealistic missionaries of progress, rejecting the Western idea of them as agents of cultural imperialism.” Yet the separatists called it colonization.<br><br>According to Barry Sautman, an associate professor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, “92-94 percent of ethnic Tibetans speak Tibetan,” “Instruction in primary school is pretty universally in Tibetan. Chinese is bilingual from secondary school onward. All middle schools in the Tibatan Autonomous Region also teach Tibetan. In Lhasa there are about equal time given to Chinese, Tibetan, and English.” The illiteracy rate in Tibet is less than 10 percent today, compared with 96 percent in 1950. The Chinese central government renovated the Tibetan monasteries and founded and funded Tibet University, Tibetan University for Minorities, Central University for Minorities, and National Center for Tibetan Studies, where Tibetan Chinese, whom never got a chance to learn know-how under the Holiness’ theocracy, study their religion, performing arts, poetry, medicine, and for their hometown. Yet the separatists called it cultural genocide.<br><br>Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe once said, “It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it.” The media in the States have unanimously, if not deliberately, overlooked the other side of the story. The voice of “Free Tibet” represented by a group of overseas Tibetan is portrayed as the voice of all Tibetan people, while the voice of the majority, Tibetan and Han Chinese alike, is muffled in their oversimplified version of the complex ethnic relations in Tibet. We stand against such outright media distortion conducted in the name of human rights, and are especially concerned when the newspaper of an educational institution such as University of Massachusetts, known for its forefront standing in advocating equality, diversity, and understanding, joined such concert of partial, patronizing, and polarizing representations. We share the same instinct that makes people sympathetic to ethnical minority groups in China. It is the same instinct that makes us to try to preserve an ethnically diverse Chinese culture, and urge us to speak up against violence and offense to humanity. Such violence and offense will never bring freedom to the people of Tibet in particular and the people of China in general.<br><br><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="3">估计这两天就要送出了，大家来提提意见吧<img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> <img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> <img alt="" src="http://www.umasscssa.org/forum/images/smilies/default/00000335.gif" smilieid="44" border="0"> </font></p>
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[[i] 本帖最后由 umasscssa 于 2008-4-7 11:29 PM 编辑 [/i]]