Much hype and media coverage right now surrounding the first ever Beijing-Lhasa train journey, which set out from Beijing yesterday. But the best story has so far nabbed only a sentence in Alexa Olesen’s story on the voyage for AP:
On Friday, three protesters from the United States, Canada and Britain were detained after unfurling a banner at Beijing’s main train station reading, “China’s Tibet Railway, Designed to Destroy.”
Never mind that the train left from a different station. According to a fellow journalist I talked to yesterday, the sign they displayed was in English, not Chinese. They apparently climbed to the top of the station to display it, but no one noticed them because they didn’t say anything. Just stood there silently. And when the calvary arrived—a single policeman, according to my source—they submitted with equal aplomb, quietly rolling up the banner and walking obediently behind the cop to be interrogated.
Real protests have been going on elsewhere, to which the government has responded predictably:
The official Xinhua News Agency lashed out at critics, calling them hypocrites who want Tibet to remain undeveloped and a “stereotyped cultural specimen for them to enjoy.”
Yet one detects just the slightest enjoyment of Tibet as a “stereotyped cultural specimen” in effusive coverage of the trip from the Chinese press. Take the the Beijing News (新京报). The once-rebellious but lately compliant paper led this morning with a front page photo of a 54-year-old Tibetan woman named Qiangba Dama (Chinese transliteration) riding the train in a full complement of traditional garb, smiling beatifically as she eats from a boxed lunch, so so happy to be on her “first ever” train ride!
For those who want to see for themselves what a happy minority are the Tibetans, Duncan Peattie has just produced a fine English translation of the train timetable with prices for major destinations. The less user-friendly Chinese original is here.