If your plan is to make a scene, I am asking you to review your reasons for coming here. If you are coming here to free Tibet, don’t bother coming. More often than not those who do the loudest wailing have no idea what that means to the lives of all the poor Tibetans in China who have no idea why things just got worse. All they really know is that things just got a whole lot worse. They don’t need your self-righteousness being played out in China. They don’t need your Olympic plans to make the world a better place. What may sound like a good idea in a well-lit meeting room in a comfortable Student Center, may, in fact, be the absolute worst thing you could possibly do.

To exacerbate an already bad situation, then hop on a jet and fly back home, is not helping anyone at all. No one needs false ‘heroics’ now, especially the indigenous Tibetans who are, more often than not, disregarded by everyone when it comes to promoting outside agendas. … The reality of life in the countryside is a lot more difficult than what you can possibly imagine it to be. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s always about them, so learn who they are and how their lives go down every day, which, at the moment, is difficult, to say the least. You should ask yourself if what you are planning to do would make life any more difficult for the lives of those who you believe you are helping. The saying, “First do no harm,” is actually not a cliché. Pay it some attention. There are other, more effective ways to make your voices heard.

One week into the Games and we’ve seen the self-righteous waving, swinging and unfurling of one thing and another by those with a higher message. It’s tiresome, counter-productive, and irksomely self-promoting. And now in what appears to be a piss poor piece of journalism, a story by the Guardian’s Jonathan Haynes, accompanied by an incriminating photo, tells us all that it has happened again, this time along the East Third Ring Rd. The accuracy of the story is highly questionable.

The photo shows a couple of folks swinging from ropes from the wall of giant billboards along the what appears to be the western perimeter of the CCTV Bldg. property, not the actual building as Haynes reports.

The pair abseiled down the building’s glass facade and hung their banner over an Olympics billboard with the slogan “Beijing 2008″ at 5.45am local time.

If, in fact, I am correct about the location of the pair – on one of the billboards along the East Third Ring Rd. – it would be virtually impossible to abseil down that side of the building and end up on the billboards. Tower 1 leans 6 degrees to the east, not the west, and to abseil from the building to the billboards would be a real trick, one that would have needed a boom, some expensive and cleverly rigged wires, and the creative direction of Zhang Yimou. It appears to me from the photo that the pair of self-promoting rope folks were near the new Jintaixizhao subway entrance, close to the CCTV Bldg, but hardly on it. I expect better of the Guardian. And if I am wrong, I will be more than happy to apologize to Mr. Haynes, though I think that the apology will be owed by them for their shoddiness of reporting.

In another forum I posted a comment after watching the video, where, among other things, the demonstratorssang “The March of the Volunteers,” the Chinese national anthem, as traffic sped by between them and the CNN building. I was moved. Here was a large crowd, many of them clearly not US citizens, expressing their displeasure at what they believed was a racist attack upon their country and its citizens, vociferously expressing their discontent in the very public daylight with a bullhorn. I commented:

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this picture. But imagine a reversal of roles and locations. Say, Beijing, the CCTV Bldg, foreign students and expats waving their home countries’ flags, protesting CCTV’s coverage of a story. Just imagine, a round of La Marseillaise on the Third Ring Road.”

This morning I checked to see if there had been any responses, and though there were three more comments, only one anonymous response was directed at me:

“you stupid, it seems cctv never slander other nations as thugs and goon, and they never metion amercian product are junk because their questioned beef.”

Though I’ve misplaced my decoder ring, I think I get what this one is about, but I’m still a bit fuzzy on the beef. To say that anonymous had missed the point is, I hope, obvious to the reader. If it is not, take a few minutes and read both comments a couple more times before you angrily bang your keyboard. Then, if you need it, take another minute or two and imagine the response on a Beijing street to a demonstrations by angry Americans upset at a perceived cultural snub by a Chinese media story, along with the subsequent singing of the Star Spangled Banner while waving American flags. If you think they should be clubbed and arrested, please go to the top and try reading this again. If after further reading, you still think they should be beaten into paste and hosed into the nearest sewer, then please go somewhere else. We are clearly not a match.
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Last night I also read an account in the Shanghaiist concerning an attack by a crowd of protesters on an unwitting American volunteer English teacher at a local middle school in Zhuzhou, Hunan, who made the mistake of wandering into a boycott-targeted Carrefours. Upon exiting the store he was “attacked by a mob of about 150 people outside the Carrefours.”

… 3 men started to push him and then he was hit in the back of the head at least 3 times. He started to run, and the mob chased him. He jumped into a cab, but the mob surrounded the car and started shaking and rocking it. The cab driver was shouting at him to get out. Then they started hitting the car. The crowd was shouting “kill him! kill the Frenchman.”

One-hundred-and-fifty Chinese to one un-Frenchman. Bruce Lee would have loved the odds, but most folks I imagine would not. The police had to intercede. This is the sort of behavior which, if not checked, may guarantee a Chinese Olympic medal sweep. There are obviously better ways to win. Or to make a point.
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In early 1970 I visited Yokosuka, Japan for the first of several times, though it seems odd to call it a visit. I had no passport and no customs line to pass through, had not ticket there or back. I was in the US Navy aboard an old WWII destroyer, a tin can, and we were fresh from several months patrolling the waters in and around Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin. There was a war, even if it was never declared, and we were obviously combatants. Yokosuka Naval Base was one of the two major Seventh Fleet port/bases where ships from the line put into to get patched back up, either to return to the gunline or to make the long trip back across the Pacific. This time it was a patch job prior to our return south.

I had an opportunity to take the train north to Tokyo for a day, so three of us headed to the station not far from the main gate of the base. It was a Sunday. As we entered the station we were met by a trainload of protesters who, I imagine were from Tokyo. They were coming to Yokosuka to protest the presence of the base. There must have been at least a couple of hundred young and very prepared people. They departed the train with their helmets and padding, their shields and banners, their sticks. These folks were ready to rock ‘n roll. And there we were, three young men outnumbered a good 60:1. Life became very focused in those moments, as the other side suited up on the platform, belting each other up, clashing their shields, cinching their helmets under their chins just right. These were people preparing for battle. What became clear in nearly less time than it took to take three or four breaths was that they had no interest in us. Indirectly we were the objects of their objections, and in that sense, we were the enemy. But we were not the battle. To have attacked us would have been to lose moral authority, to give away the higher ground, and to, ultimately, lose the ‘war.’ They had a mission, and that mission wasn’t to accost three young sailors in the train station, and everyone of the protesters knew that. Some of them even smiled and nodded as they prepared for the assault on the line of police guarding the main gate. They had a goal, it was informed, and together they would try their best to achieve it. I stopped and watched them collect themselves, get it all together, lift their banners high and march out into the street. Then I caught the train to Tokyo.

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