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Titolo: Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home

Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home 
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By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: April 29, 2008
Correction Appended
LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front
of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions,
the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had
plenty to lob at their guest: 
Skip to next paragraph 
 
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Ben Huang challenging a Tibetan monk last Tuesday. 
Enlarge This Image
 
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Min Zhu, center, was removed from an event with a monk at the University
of Southern California after a bottle was thrown. 
 
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
A lecture by a Tibetan monk at U.S.C. 
 
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
The lecture drew Chinese students who angrily questioned him and handed
out fliers opposing the Dalai Lama. 
If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one
to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with
the “slavery system” in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What
about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?
As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They
brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop
lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the
wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who
threw it out of the room.
Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at
colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in
the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland
that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in
Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening
ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent
on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a
pervasive anti-Chinese bias. 
Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China
studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003,
according to the State Department.
Campuses including Cornell, the University of Washington in Seattle and
the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of
counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American
academic context. At the University of Washington, students fought to
limit the Dalai Lama’s address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke, pro-China
students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a Chinese freshman
who tried to mediate received death threats, and her family was forced
into hiding. 
And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee traveled
to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty, referred to
the Chinese as “goons and thugs.” (CNN said he was referring to the
government, not the people.)
The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus
mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese
government but from shock at the portrayal of its actions, as well as
frustration over the West’s long-standing love affair with Tibet — a love
these students see as willfully blind. 
By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious crackdown
in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered under China’s
economic development, and that only a small minority are unhappy. 
“Before I came here, I’m very liberal,” said Minna Jia, a graduate student
in political science at U.S.C. who encouraged fellow students to attend
the monk’s lecture. “But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m
nationalist.” 
“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to
criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes
and you are using Chinese goods.”
Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme
expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and the
tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students had
little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could also
understand them. 
“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another
graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture. 
By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or
censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media
had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas
Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or
manipulated by the government,” she said.
No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the arena
of world opinion. “When we have a billion people, you said we were
destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is
human rights abuse,” reads a poem posted on the Internet by “a silent,
silent Chinese” and cited by some students as an accurate expression of
their feelings. “When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we
loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries,
you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global
warming.”
Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the
more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian
framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants and
sometimes drowning out dissent. 
A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment
said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he
also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to, I really did want to go — it’s our
cause,” he said. “At the same time, I have to consider that my family’s
back there, and I’m going back there in May.”
Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be
that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely
believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists. 
Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese
students. Before the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Washington,
the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the
university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on
nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a
posting on the group’s Web site, the university president, Mark A. Emmert,
told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at the
Dalai Lama’s speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened an
office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before the
Chinese students voiced their concerns.
Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more
extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural
sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.
“I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censorship,” said Peter
Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University
of Oklahoma, “and not just among American China scholars but among the
whole web of people who do business with China, including school
administrators.”
At the U.S.C. lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute
handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated
history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that infant
mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist Chinese
government asserted control, did not provide any means for comparison with
mortality rates in China or other countries. 
One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of
“Seven Years in Tibet” and a one-time member of the Nazi Party — hence the
question about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler, who died when the
Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the feudal
system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another photograph
purported to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the caption, was
covered with “a virgin girl’s skin.” 
The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of
the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the
Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic
majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources, 22 died in
the rioting. 
Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen
Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of
otherwise elusive truth. 
“We thought Western media is very objective,” said Chau Wu, a 28-year-old
working on his doctorate in material science, “and what it turned out is
that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media. They’re no
better, and even more, they’re against us.”
Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools,
roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such
development, they looked blankly incredulous. “They don’t ask that
question,” said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. “They’ve
accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization.”
That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families can
afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most from
China’s economic liberalization. 
Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at U.S.C., dismissed the notion
that her patriotism stemmed from the government’s efforts to use the
schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square. 
Rather, Ms. Zheng said, “We have witnessed with our own eyes about the
rapid change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people’s
lives” are “becoming better and better, fast.”
As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a
documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for
this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on
both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each
other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem
from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap
box?”
At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.
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 SHAILA DEWAN
Questa non mi è nuova.
Era nella sezione Colle Oppio per caso?
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"Orwell was an optimist"
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