American Buddhist Net

2008-07-08 16:14:09 -

BEIJING (AP) - Chinese police have detained a man they say spread a rumor that the Dalai Lama would pay people large sums of money to disrupt the Beijing Olympics torch relay, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

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The Tibet-China talks are a sham, Sarkozy has said he won't go to the opening ceremonies if there is no progress, but after all that good food and wine, who knows? Now China tells him--with no apparent sense of irony--that he must not meet with the Dalai Lama in FRANCE because that would “would be contrary to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.” ABN
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 9, 2008

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is expected to announce on Wednesday that he will after all attend the opening ceremonies of Beijing’s Olympic Games, was warned by China on Tuesday not to meet with the Dalai Lama in France next month.

China’s ambassador to France, Kong Quan, told reporters there would be “serious consequences” for Chinese-French relations if Mr. Sarkozy meets the Dalai Lama, asserting that it “would be contrary to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.”

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"We do not recognise this 'Tibetan exiled government'," Xinhua quoted an unnamed spokesman of the party's United Front Work Department as saying in an exclusive interview.
"The central government will never hold consultations with such an illegal organisation."
Tibet's "illegal" government-in-exile also has no role in the dialogue, the Xinhua news agency quoted the senior Communist Party official.
The official also insisted the dialogue only concerned the "personal future" of the Dalai Lama, in an apparent reference to negotiations on whether the Tibetan spiritual leader could one day return to China and eventually Tibet.
This has been China's central position since the talks started in 2002, although the Tibetan side has pushed for the dialogue to cover a broader range of issues, such as more meaningful autonomy for the Himalayan region.
AFP | China warns Dalai Lama ahead of Olympics

Jul 8, 2008

On July 1, Xian opened three newly-built ancient relics parks to the public free of charge. The three parks are the Tang Dynasty City Wall Relics Park, the Tang Dynasty Ci'en Temple Relics Park and Qujiangchi Relics Park.

Located near the Gaoxin Fourth Road, the Tang Dynasty City Wall Relics Park is a long corridor about 2.2 miles long and 100-meter wide. Displaying the Tang poems and calligraphy by stone carvings, the park is a nice place for visitors to savor the brilliant art and culture of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

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NBA .noos ereh taht yrt ot evah yam eW
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July 7, 2008 by Mark O'Neill
By Mark O’Neill

You have to hand it to Chinese bloggers - they are determined to get the truth out, no matter what. OK, they are not facing the death sentence like their fellow counterparts in Iran but nevertheless, they still face prison for their opinions. At the very least, their work will be deleted by faceless humorless bureaucrats.

So the bloggers are trying out new methods to evade Chinese government censors - the latest one is they are using tools and software to write backwards. Or write vertically instead of horizontally. This is apparently confusing the censors because they now cannot automatically track “objectionable phrases” (aw my heart bleeds for them). One such “text flipping” tool is here. Obviously the government will eventually find a way around it but the resourceful bloggers will probably have found another solution by then and will have moved on.

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Where in Asia do people eat dog meat?

Monday July 7, 2008
By MAJORIE CHIEW

...In recent times, the bulk of dog meat has been produced commercially by dog breeding farms. Various breeds are reared but many farmers prefer St Bernards for their rapid growth, bulk and flavour. Today, however, they appear to have fallen from favour because of their substantial feeding costs.

Farmed dogs endure short, cramped, miserable lives. Brutal death awaits them. Many are said to be tortured or bled to death slowly. This results in adrenaline-rich meat which, according to folklore, makes men who eat it more virile.

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July 6, 2008
By HOLLAND COTTER

SAND is implacable here in far western China. It blows and shifts and eats away at everything, erasing boundaries, scouring graves, leaving farmers in despair.

It’s one of many threats to the major tourist draw of this oasis city on the lip of the Gobi desert: the hundreds of rock-cut Buddhist grottoes that pepper a cliff face outside town. Known as Mogaoku — “peerless caves” — and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-molded clay sculptures of savior-gods and saints, they are, in size and historical breadth, like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world.

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Mon, 07 Jul 2008

London, July 7: Fears over the possible occurrence of fresh unrests in Tibet on the occasion of the birthday of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, have prompted the Chinese authorities into virtually emptying out Tibet's main monasteries and banning visits to a sacred site on the edge of Tibetan capital Lhasa.

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July 6, 2008
Flora Bagenal

Pollution around the Olympic stadium in Beijing could be five times worse than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.

Chinese officials admit they can no longer guarantee that the air quality will match international standards as pollution tests by The Sunday Times revealed the full extent of the challenge facing British athletes.

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Sunday, July 6, 2008
By Evan Osnos

In the 26 years she has risen through the ranks of China's religious-affairs bureaucracy, Ma Yuhong has watched a radical shift in the way an officially atheist Communist Party talks about the faithful.

"There was a saying: 'One more Christian is one less Chinese,'" Ma recalled. "Nobody says that anymore."

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July 6, 2008
By Ching-Ching Ni

NANJING, China - The factory could be any plant in this export-driven nation. Hundreds of Chinese workers huddle over loud machines churning out large orders for customers near and far.

But what they're making might surprise you: Bibles.

As Tibetan monks grab headlines protesting the lack of religious freedom under Chinese rule, a booming Bible industry is turning the world's biggest atheist nation into the world's largest supplier of the Good Book.

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China has ordered the closure of 40 factories in a city close to Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics Games.

The plants in the eastern port city of Tianjin have been ordered to stop production from late July.

The move is the latest attempt by China to minimise air pollution in the capital during the Games in August.

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Jul 05, 2008

DHARAMSHALA, India - Representatives of the Dalai Lama and China made no headway on the status of Tibet in formal talks this week, an envoy of the spiritual leader said today, describing himself as "disappointed."

"There is a growing perception among the Tibetans and my friends that the whole tactic of the Chinese government is to engage us to stall for time," said Lodi Gyari, who led the two-man team which met Chinese officials in Beijing.

"My colleague and I told our Chinese counterpart candidly that we ourselves are beginning to inch towards this school of thought."

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By Chris Buckley
July 3, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters) - China made a barely veiled swipe at French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday and state media warned he can expect a cold public shoulder if he attends the Beijing Olympics after he threatened not to go over Tibet.

Sarkozy has said he will decide next week whether to attend the opening of the Games in August, with his choice depending on how talks go between Beijing and the Dalai Lama's envoys.

China often lashes out at foreign leaders for meeting the exiled Dalai Lama or criticizing its policies in Tibet, which it calls an internal affair.

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July 4, 2008

TAOYUAN (Taiwan) - TAIWANESE lion dancers and singers in traditional costumes on Friday gave a warm welcome to the first Chinese tourists to arrive here on a direct regular flight in nearly six decades.

Mr Liu Shaoyong, the chairman of China Southern Airlines who personally piloted the flight from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to Taiwan, gave a triumphant thumbs-up as he landed the Airbus A330.

Jets of water then doused the plane, in a traditional ceremony that symbolises washing the dust from travellers.

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Change in the face of foreign devils

By Francesco Sisci

BEIJING - Libraries are filled with thousands of volumes explaining all the problems and intricacies of the momentous passage from agricultural to industrial society, from rural to urban life, from a world marked by huge gaps in time and space to another in which communications and telecommunications immensely narrow time and distance.

These changes still puzzle us and seem largely unexplained. Yet the changes, occurring over a span of 200 years, are minimal if compared to what has happened in China in the past 30 years.

The changes have been concentrated in a little more than a generation. But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China's complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision. That is, not only did China have to undergo the same structural changes as the West in a shorter period, at the same time it also underwent dramatic cultural changes.

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July 4, 2008

Tibet's foreign minister in exile yesterday said the latest round of talks between the Dalai Lama's envoys and China so far did not look encouraging.

"Judging from some of the statements made by the Chinese leadership, particularly the office for the autonomous region of Tibet, what they have to say about the Tibetan situation is not very encouraging," Kesang Yangkyi Takla told a news conference in Tokyo.

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Beijing scolds Dalai Lama as envoys talk

Jonathan Adams
Published: July 3, 2008

TAIPEI: Outside a popular tourist site in Taipei on a baking-hot morning recently, Gao Mingzhu, 56, a visitor from Beijing, took a break in the shade and posed as his tour group companion took a picture.

Six meters, or 20 feet away, 10 members of Falun Gong, the spiritual group outlawed as an "evil cult" in China, were greeting the newly arrived Chinese tourists and trying to pass out promotional flyers and newspaper articles.

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03 Jul 2008

BEIJING, (Reuters) - Hundreds of prisoners in China's quake-hit southwestern province of Sichuan have had their jail terms reduced for courage shown in relief and rescue work when the disaster struck, state media said on Thursday.

A total of 436 prisoners will be released from jail early and more than 1,000 have been praised for "protecting state property and/or rescuing survivors", the official China Daily said.

One prisoner, jailed for murder, was released on probation for carrying a handicapped inmate to safety after May's 7.9 magnitude quake.

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July 2, 2008
By JAKE HOOKER

BEIJING — They were 19-year-old farm boys wearing cloth shoes and carrying rucksacks, soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, responding to a national emergency.

They marched into the mountains, with shovels tied to their backs. They cleared rocks the size of houses from blocked roads, with ropes and brute force. They crawled over piles of bricks and concrete, listening for human sounds.

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July 2, 2008
By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Chinese officials and senior envoys of the Dalai Lama opened their latest round of negotiations over Tibet on Tuesday, as international pressure for a breakthrough intensifies ahead of the Olympic Games.

The discussions, held at an undisclosed location in Beijing, are the second round of formal talks since March, when anti-Chinese protests erupted in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and spread to Tibetan regions of western China. The precise agenda is unknown, but the two sides have sharp differences over the political status of Tibet and the possible return of the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.

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July 2, 2008
By JIM YARDLEY

BEIJING — Two United States representatives who were in Beijing to lobby for the release of more than 700 political prisoners had hoped to have dinner on Sunday with a group of Chinese human rights lawyers. But security agents had a different idea: they detained some of the lawyers and warned the others to stay away.

The detention is the latest example of how Chinese security agents are increasing pressure on dissidents in advance of the Beijing Olympics in August. The governing Communist Party has issued broader orders for local governments to defuse public protests, as a violent demonstration involving an estimated 30,000 people erupted last weekend in southwestern China.

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This revelation is shocking, ludicrous, absurd, even when judged by the exceptionally low standards of this administration. Everything this group does is so bad, describing it strains the English language. As Senator Carl Levin says, "What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions." Besides being arrogant, wrong, duplicitous, violent, elitist, and the worst administration in US history, these people are also just plain stupid. If you have not already done so, take a moment to study Leo Strauss (it does not take long because his ideas are very simple). This will provide you with the "intellectual" foundation of neo-conservatism, the spineless, twisted "backbone" of the Bush administration. It will also inoculate you against more of their "noble lies," which are so often spewed by smiling faces on TV advocating yet more wars, or whatever. They are just plain wrong virtually all the time. The profound error of their ways is fully revealed by this document for it shows the weakness of their historical research, their need to plagiarize the ideas of others (such ideas!), their poor grasp of the fullness of the human mind and the fullness of traditional American legal and political values. Honestly, I think we often do need some sort of leadership from an elite group of wise thinkers, but THIS IS NOT THAT GROUP, IT NEVER WAS THAT GROUP, AND IT NEVER WILL BE. ABN
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July 2, 2008
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

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July 2, 2008

A man has stormed into a police station in the Chinese city of Shanghai and stabbed at least five officers to death, officials said.

The man was arrested after the attack in the Public Security Bureau office in the city's Zhabei district.

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Many Beijing Residents Find Tribulations of Olympics Outweigh Benefits

July. 1, 2008
By Maureen Fan

The Aug. 8-24 Summer Olympics are supposed to mark a major celebration for China, an extravaganza that has ordinary citizens bursting with pride and excitement. Locals here are, by and large, proud to play host. But many are also increasingly feeling burdened by or disconnected from a billion-dollar spectacle for which expectations have been set so high.

Tenants are upset that development has driven up the cost of living in the city; drivers are bracing for major traffic congestion; and hotel managers and travel agents are complaining that security restrictions have held up business and tourist visas, keeping occupancy rates unexpectedly low for the Olympic period.

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