Tibet Crisis

Police in Garze didn't respond to a request for comment. The Chinese government on Tuesday said 22 people have died so far in the unrest in Lhasa, while the exiled Tibetan government puts the number closer to 140 in a broader region.

As it is taught in Chinese schools, Tibet has been a part of the Chinese nation for hundreds of years, and the Dalai Lama's appointment has always been subject to Beijing's approval. This coincides with the modern idea of China as a country that harmoniously incorporates 56 distinct ethnic groups -- the majority Han (around 92% of the population) along with 55 minorities, including Tibetans. At the same time, experts say, China's experience of being partly colonized by foreign powers in the 19th and 20th centuries makes many people deeply suspicious of foreign involvement in Chinese affairs.

Not all Chinese have defended the government's position. On Saturday, more than two dozen Chinese intellectuals signed an open petition laying out a 12-point plan for dealing with the Tibetan situation. Their points included ending the government-run media's 'one-sided propaganda campaign,' allowing foreign media to report in Tibet and negotiating directly with the Dalai Lama.

For nearly two weeks, information about Tibet has been extremely hard to come by. Government-controlled media have kept their coverage sparse, while foreign journalists have been ejected from Tibet.

Broadcasts of foreign channels such as CNN, which are ordinarily allowed only in select hotels and special compounds, now face blackouts even there when Tibet news comes on. Many Web sites offering news, video or comment about the situation have been blocked, including Google Inc.'s YouTube, which was inaccessible inside China for nearly a week after the uprising began. Access to YouTube was restored Sunday, but portions of the site remained blocked, including most news clips about Tibet by Western media outlets. A search for 'CNN' on YouTube in China generated an error message.

Amid the confusion, the Internet is serving as a propaganda battleground in shaping Chinese opinions.

In particular, some Chinese are using the Web to attack the accuracy of Western reporting about the Tibet situation. Their argument: foreign news media frequently write about censorship in the Chinese press, so they should be forced to see their own bias.

Mr. Rao's anti-cnn.com site has been visited by more than 100,000 people so far, he says. The 23-year-old entrepreneur, who runs an Internet-services company, says he came up with the idea for the site after chatting with friends outside China who felt that much of the Tibet coverage was biased or exaggerated.

So far, Mr. Rao says his site has collected more than a dozen inaccuracies or exaggerations in the Western press, he says. One example: He says CNN's Web site ran a photo from news agency Agence France-Presse that was cropped to show a police van, but not people nearby attacking the vehicle with stones. On some occasions, he says, a CNN anchor has also referred to Tibet as a 'country.'

A CNN spokeswoman says the image in question had to be cropped to fit the standard story size of the site. 'It was impossible to include both the drama of the crashed vehicle on the left and the protesters on the right in the same crop,' she says, noting that the image's caption said that Tibetans were throwing stones.

'CNN not only stands by its decision to publish the image in question, but also refutes all allegations by bloggers that CNN distorts its coverage of the events in Tibet to portray either side in a more favorable light,' she says. CNN calls the 'country' reference a 'spoken error' which wasn't repeated by the on-air graphic.

Mr. Rao says his site isn't targeting CNN in particular, but picked it for the name because it 'stands for the voice of the mainstream Western media.' He hopes that 'running the Web site will help supervise the media at home and abroad and help uphold journalism ethics.'

Many of the complaints made by Mr. Rao and other bloggers are about photos with inaccurate captions, depicting violent police crackdowns on Tibetan protestors in Nepal and India but labeling them as taking place in Tibet. The errors, say bloggers, create the misimpression that the violence has been one way, from Chinese police toward Tibetans.

The Washington Post Web site has amended a caption on a photo to correct the location and published an editor's note saying, 'The caption for an earlier version of this slideshow was incorrectly associated with a photo from Nepal.'

German TV station n-tv Nachrichtenfernsehen GmbH admitted in a statement that it had heard from some Web sites and newspapers that it had used pictures in the wrong context, and has corrected them. 'We sincerely regret this mistake while, at the same time, assert that n-tv reports independently,' said company spokesman Christoph Hammerschmidt.

The domestic Chinese press has picked up on the efforts of Mr. Rao and other bloggers. Sunday's Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper in Guangzhou ran a full-page story documenting the 'unbelievable variety of errors.'

Mr. Rao says he is aware that the Chinese government itself works to censor the information available about Tibet, which makes it difficult for journalists to do their jobs. Yet he supports the restrictions because, 'if [foreign reporters] are biased before getting into Tibet, they are very likely to work out one-sided stories about the incident,' he says.

So where does he turn for the accurate information?

'I read books and search for information online,' he says. 'Netizens here are able to make their own judgments on things. They do not rely only on the government or Western media for information. They apply their tech prowess in searching for information and verifying things they've been told.'

YouTube now hosts a video, watched more than 1.7 million times as of Tuesday night China time, titled 'Tibet was, is and always will be a part of China.' There are responses on YouTube from the other side, too -- including one titled 'Tibet is not, should not and will never be a part of China' -- but they are far outnumbered so far.

If anything, Mr. Rao says, the Chinese government would do itself a service by reducing the censorship it applies to foreign sites such as YouTube, 'to allow a larger stage for Chinese Netizens to fight back.'

http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/20080326/chw103417.asp?source=article