04.4.2008 Greetings,
Hu Ji, a leading Chinese activist has been sentenced to 3.5 years for "subverting the state's political and socialist system."
Ji, wrote five articles about HIV, the environment and human rights. He gave two interviews to foreign journalists.
He "confessed" according to state media.
The government continues to harden their position against dissent.
Peace.
04.3.2008 Greetings,
The Chinese government spin continues in Tibet and now Xinjiang. First the Tibetans and now the Uyghurs. Han economics, heavy handed military police state and repression of human rights.
Here, you are sitting in a blue plastic chair in the metro. It is zooming along above ground through a gray raining morning - the mountains are hiding in clouds, fast moving white above green and down along rocky forested slopes.
You see mosques, spires. You see out. Passengers are, (except for for two cheerful talkative women close to you) cold, distant, lost, bored, going somewhere important. It must be important or else they'd be home, asleep, dreaming inside their magic.
Then, suddenly the metro track slopes down and edges of concrete blur, as the trees disappear and the sky edge becomes indistinct, sliding into darkness as florescent light becomes quick and natural sliding flashes of light
on steel tracks with a long stretch of black
click clack then the station immediately with tiles,
a machine holding bagged sweets.
Women in scarves, eyes downward, heavy territorial shoes,
gripping plastic bags;
a green and yellow uniformed man with a broom
pushes everything
in front of him and the metro automatic voice calls out a place.
Doors open - people in, people out. Doors close.
Enjoy the ride. You're only on it once.
Peace.
03.31.2008 Greetings,
Here comes the garbage truck! Yes, the overflowing amount of data, information, sludge, grime, slime, prime-time rubbish, lies, distortion, hubris, and unlimited broken dreams is amazing.
Can you say it slowly? A-maze-ing.
What people absorb in their daily diet of propaganda sleaze if you please, is utterly downright incredible.
Consider the old guard in Peking now, for example. The survivors from the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976. They didn't get to their present position by being nice guys all sugar and spice and what not. No, they turned in-on-at-from everyone. They executed their rivals. They saved their thin skin. They purged and regurgitated slogans and harmonious social alphabet soup.
Politics in the BIG C is a deadly game of power and control. The haves and the haves not. Big Brother is watching you. All day and all night. All the time. In your dreams you drag your monkeys through the streets past a pregnant woman on her knees begging for mercy from strangers down at the crossroads.
In China it's all about relationships.
"No class, no struggle," said a Chinese business university student cramming for exams.
"Now it's all about money." In June there will be millions of new graduates chasing hundreds of jobs.
"You should just blend in," said a Chinese teacher to a foreign fool. She was one of them, the informers. He was an untouchable.
The leaders and teeming population are waiting for the imaginary torch of legitimacy, the golden flaming Greek ideal of fair play, old sport, good on ya and razamataz...to begin it's long arduous trek through the hinterlands across 135 countries toward Eversee Everest, the pinnacle of their land grab a bag of bones will ya...no fooling.
Peace.
03.30.2008 
Greetings,
The following piece was written during a visit to Lhasa in 2005 while teaching in Sichuan. The Ramoche monastery was a special place for me to sit down and practice.
Ramoche was the starting point, the beginning of a peaceful march by monks on March 10th which began the current international Tibetan demonstrations and cries for freedom.
+
A Tibetan woman in her rainbow apron and thick heavy yak felt boots shuffles along, pausing to make sacred prayers. Her deep lined brown hands join, rise in a blessing over her head, descend to her forehead down to her heart before prostrating herself out, stretching full length along stones on hands and knees, touching her forehead to the ground with her arms extended out in front of her. She unfolds from the ground, rising softly and walks forward, performing her ritual repeatedly. Earning merit. Offerings.
Side streets offer tables of huge yellow cakes of butter, slabs of meat as laughing Khampa men hack through bone, weighing it up on old scales. Piles of yak heads, glistening butter. Muslim merchants in skull caps and white beards from Xinjing push rolling carts of dried fruit - apricots, raisins, dates.
I wander near the Barkhor down narrow twisted alleys - severed tree branches with prayer flags stapled to their thin arms stand against a house. The trees have been cut into long slender segments. Before New Year, or Losar, people will buy them, climb onto their roofs and replace the old ones on four corners.
A man inks prayer flags. He sits in partial sun with rolls of white, red, blue, yellow, green cotton cloth to his left. On a pillow are two 8×10" carved wooden blocks. Black ink from a plastic bottle floats in a small pan. He sponges up what he needs and coats a block. He pulls white cloth over it, centers a segment, slides his hand into a torn plastic bag, starts at the bottom and applies pressure up, down, sideways. Ink bleeds through. He pulls cloth through, re-inks the block, repeating the procedure. A man next to him cuts dried cloth into individual pieces and staples colors to thin branches.
I took a side street to Ramoche built in 641 by Wenchang, a Chinese princess. Her Tibetan name was Kongjo.
Peaceful, quiet, - many pilgrims, kids, elderly spinning long rows of prayer wheels. Inside beautiful statues, past, present and future Buddhas, dancing in flickering butter lamps. Many people buy yellow bags of butter to spoon into large ornate butter candles as they proceed around and through the temples.
A monk invites me to sit on a carpet inside a small interior chapel in late afternoon, contemplating large tall, beautifully sculpted and decorated statues. Amazing art and meditative peace.
On the far ochre wall is a mural painting of multiple yellow Buddhas, with a patina aureole halo around his smiling head and face. Suddenly I see one image is half illuminated by a single shaft of bright light from the sun slanting through an opening way near the ceiling. Beautiful and immediate!
I just sat there absorbing this vision as light examined the face, slowly moving across it from left to right.
An old man with a serene dirty face entered with a toddler. The child immediately went to the statue on the left, touched his forehead on the fabric at the base, backed up, put his hands together at his head, mumbled his prayer and moved to the larger center statue. He repeated his ritual.
He forgot to put his hands together so his grandfather whispered a couple of words and the boy made his prayer. He skipped off to the third statue as the old man followed him.
Families, parents, old single men and women, young singles, and couples shuffled through in an endless procession.
I went outside, past people doing their prostrations to sit in the sun with a group of monks. One smiled, “You didn’t pay the entrance fee.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know there was one.”
“Yes,” he said, pointing to a half hidden fading sign on a slab of door, reading “Office. 20Y.”
“Would you like me to pay now?”
“No, it’s ok,” he smiled.
He asked the standard questions. “Where are you from? How long have you been here?”
“I am from everywhere. I’ve been here all day.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Seven years. It’s ok,” adding, “Buddhism is about compassion.”
“Yes it is.”
Ramoche is a fine place and I will return often.
Peace.
03.26.2008 Greetings,
Reports say the hard line Chinese #1 and his Tibetan co-leader visited the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa. They didn't go there to pray for peace.
They went there to tell the monks they would increase "patriotic education" classes in all the monasteries. Re-education through reform, ideology, propaganda and control. It's about control.
Historically, the Chinese, after destroying and looting monasteries in Tibet and in mainland China during the 10-year Cultural Revolution, restricted the number of monks at the three major Lhasa monasteries, Sera, Drepung and Ganden.
They recruited some Tibetans to live and work in the monasteries as spies and informers. This system had proved effective during the Cultural Revolution when family members reported on each other, neighbors and wild capitalist running dogs. It was a practical "peoples" campaign of fear and suspicion to create paranoia and ideological control.
Monks and nuns allowed to live and practice in the monasteries who resist or question this form of subtle "patriotic education" risk imprisonment, torture and death. They well know what has and continues to happen to monks and nuns at the notorious Drapchi prison outside Lhasa.
Peace.
