I just heard about another journalist colleague who received an anonymous warning online which threatened not just him but also his kids. Creepy.  With just 100 days to go before the 2008 Games, some Western journalists don't exactly feel welcome in the face of death threats, shrill and sometimes obscene name-calling, and criticisms of purported "bias" in Western media reporting of Tibet.

The interesting thing is this: when I tell Chinese friends that foreign reporters are getting death threats, some don't believe it and others just shrug as if to say "what can anyone do?"  Even if I point out that issuing a death threat violates Chinese law, few seem to think this law needs to be enforced.

Don't get me wrong: China remains a relatively safe country to work in as a foreign reporter. That's precisely what makes the present nastiness so noticeable.  

he Foreign Correspondents Club of China -- of which I'm president --  released a statement about such concerns. Here's the text:

Before tensions imploded in Tibetan areas, Chinese officials thought the chief domestic security threat to the 2008 Summer Games would come from Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Many officials still think that. My recent journey to one traditional redoubt of Uighur unrest revealed growing polarization of the religious and cultural landscape, as both the economy and Islam begin to flourish. Whether the situation might devolve into the extremism Beijing evokes is another question however. Herewith some field notes I made while reporting an earlier magazine piece:

Sunday’s “big bazaar” day in Khotan, on China’s northwest frontier, where the big money’s tied up in Khotanese jade. Prices for pure nephrite from the local “White Jade River” have shot up ten-fold in just two to three years, helping this desert junction on the storied Silk Road – in the late 1990’s, a poor, dusty seedbed of violent outbursts by Muslim Uighur separatists – recoup some of its ancient luster as a nexus of trade. On a recent Sunday in April, along an arcade lined by dozens of jade shops and a vast mosque, Uighur men in skullcaps shuffled about in scrums, palms extended like beggars. They held pebbles with black beauty marks, sunbursts of orange, and creme de mint-colored ripples. The precious stones fetched offers in the hundreds of dollars from Han Chinese collectors from as far east as Suzhou.

Chinese authorities and representatives of the exiled Dalai Lama will meet in "coming days," says the state-run Xinhua News Agency. This is a potential breakthrough. Chinese officials blame the "splittist Dalai clique" for violent riots that erupted in Lhasa March 14, followed by brushfire protests in other Tibetan communities, and have demonized the Tibetan spiritual leader as a "jackal wrapped in monk's robes," as one put it.  

But the Dalai Lama denied Beijing's accusations, and has kept the door open to high-level negotiations. Such contacts have taken place sporadically since 1980 -- I remember making my first trip to Lhasa, in July 1980, and being startled to see dozens of emotional Tibetans crying and prostrating on the ground in a courtyard beside the guesthouse where I was staying (as part of a government-organized media tour.)  Turns out an envoy of the Dalai Lama was staying in the next-door guesthouse. We foreign correspondents on that trip got our story simply by interviewing people across the courtyard wall.

But institutionalized talks between the two sides broke down in 2006. When my colleague Sudip Mazumdar and I interviewed the Dalai Lama in Dharmsala on March 20, he said he'd received private messages of sympathy from ordinary citizens, and even some officials, in China. And he expressed his extreme willingness to talk with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, for whom he professed "great respect".

Just before our interview, we glimpsed the Dalai Lama through a window saying farewell to a delegation of Buddhist believers of Asian descent.  One of his aides said that they were from mainland China, and that if their identities were made public they "could be executed" just for visiting Dharmsala. The Dalai Lama said "thousands" of ordinary Buddhist devotees from China had requested audiences with him over the years (he fled from Lhasa into exile in 1959, after an abortive Tibetan uprising) and that even some officials considered to be upright communist party loyalists had sent him private expressions of support.

Xinhua quoted an anonymous Chinese official saying that authorities had taken into account "requests repeatedly made by the Dalai side for resuming talks",  and that "the relevant department of the central government will have contact and consultation with Dalai's private representative in the coming days."

Greg Baker / AP

The Party's Over: Chinese music fans rocked out last year's Midi festival, but authorities have canceled the 2008 event

To Chinese authorities, the prospect of a cheeky European rocker yelling "Free Tibet!" must be frightening enough right now  -- and that of thousands of Chinese rock kids reacting emotionally to it, scarier still. No shocker, then, that Beijing police are scuttling the May installment of the Midi Fest, China's only legitimate annual Rock festival, out of concerns over "security". Police won't provide it, and without them the show can't go on.

Now nine years old, this year's Midi was supposed to be the biggest on record, comprising 100 local bands and 30 visiting acts. Just last week, all 30 got their performance permits from the local culture bureau. But on Tuesday, Midi came unraveled. Several of the headline acts from Europe, just having processed their visas, got word that the upcoming Midi is off for now, according to two Beijing-based promoters working with them.

By Jeremy Kahn

Indian police were ready for protesters

Just after the discombobulated San Francisco torch relay concluded, a new threat hit the headlines: Beijing said it had thwarted a Muslim terror plot in which terrorists planned to kidnap Olympic athletes, foreign journalists and other visitors during the August Games. And China's attempts to police its borders are getting media attention too; the visa clampdown that we'd blogged and written about earlier is really beginning to bite.

Today in a Beijing press conference Ministry of Public Security spokesman Wu Heping said 35 people had been arrested, and bomb-making materials discovered, between March 26 and April 6 in the far Western region of Xinjiang, home to some 8 million Uighur Muslims. Militant Uighurs have long been accused of "religious extremism, separatism and terrorism", by the government, though there's alot of disagreement over whether the intensity of the threat has been hyped.

Xinjiang was home to a brief-lived East Turkestan Republic in the 1930's and 40's. Today's East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is recognized by both Beijing and Washington D.C. as a terrorist organization with links to Al Qaeda.  In an earlier plot revealed in March, Wu said, ETIM extremists had plotted to attack hotels, government offices and military targets in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities with poison, poison gas and remotely controlled bombs.

If you think "patriotic education" is a staid academic practice in China, think again. Bloody Tibetan unrest from now on--such as the April 3 shooting incident in Sichuan, which reportedly killed at least eight Tibetans--will likely have at its roots this Orwellian phrase. 

"Patriotic education" is the term Chinese authorities use for government indoctrination campaigns that, in the Tibetan context, aim to crush separatist aspirations, to replace religious devotion with secular obedience, and undermine the deep-seated respect most Tibetans feel for their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Coercion is often involved, such as forcing monks and nuns to denounce the Dalai Lama in public, or to spit on his photograph.

So abhorrent are such practices to many Tibetans that they resort to protest--or even attempt suicide--despite the risk of harsh retribution. This appeared to be the case in the April 3 eruption of protest at Donggu monastery near the western Sichuan province town of Ganzi (also known as Kardze or Garze). Armed police reportedly fired on several hundred monks and laypersons protesting the detention of two lamas who'd objected to an ongoing "patriotic education" drive, according to pro-Tibet lobby groups in the West.

 
Mark Ralston / AFP-Getty Images
A Muslim Uighur woman walks with her son past security forces in the town of Kashgar, Xinjiang Province on April 2, 2008.

Even as Chinese officials warned of Tibetan "suicide squads" mobilizing for action, we hear reports of Muslim Uighurs clashing with police in remote Xinjiang. This is serious indeed, if true. It could represent a perfect storm of trouble in the run-up to the Beijing Games.

Uighur militants had trained in Taliban training camps in Afghanistan. I remember seeing yuan currency and Chinese passports with Uighur names in the debris of one of Osama bin Laden's farms in Jalalabad right after the Taliban fell. Moreover Uighurs captured by U.S.-led troops wound up behind bars in Guantanamo Bay. (However the question of whether the banned  East Turkestan Independence Movement is as an organization—as opposed to Uighur individuals—in thrall to bin Laden, as Beijing authorities allege, remains a topic of debate.)

Over the past decade, Uighurs are reported to have engaged in bombings, assassinations, and hijackings inside China to promote their separatist cause. As recently as last month, Chinese officials announced they'd foiled a terrorist plot to blow up an aircraft, an act that they said was part of a conspiracy to sabotage the Olympics. At the moment it's impossible to confirm independently the extent of reported unrest in Xinjiang. The two locations identified below are deep in Central Asia not far from the frontier with Pakistan and Afghanistan. So far the most detailed report is this dispatch from Radio Free Asia: