L. is a US citizen in her early thirties.
In January 2015 she moved to China to work as an English teacher in a public
high school in Shenzhen. Her life in China was good. She had already lived in foreign
countries such as Russia and South Korea, so she had learnt to adjust herself
to new cultures and customs. She liked her new job and her flat. She loved her
students. But it all came to an abrupt end after she decided to travel to
Tibet.
Tibet Autonomous Region is unlike any other
part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Foreign nationals cannot go there
with a simple Chinese visa. They must organise their trip via an authorised tour
operator and travel with a tourist group. The agency applies for a Tibet Travel Permit issued by the Tibet Tourism Bureau (TTB). The application must include a
route plan of the areas of Tibet one wishes to visit. However, foreign
travellers enjoy freedom of movement only within Lhasa city.
If you want to leave Lhasa you need another
document: the Aliens’ Travel Permit, issued by the Public Security Bureau (PSB).
This permit allows you to visit ‘unopened areas’ of Tibet, like Mount Everest
or Samye Monastery. Another kind of permit, the Military Area Permit, is
required for sensitive areas such as Mount Kailash or Rowok Lake.
Such restrictions testify to the political
instability of Tibet, which the central authorities struggle to bring under
control. As the website tibettravel.org explains, “Tibet occasionally sees
political tension and social unrest. When there are important political events
or any indication of such political or social unrest, the government may not
issue Tibet Travel Permits.” Despite all this, the website reassures that such
events happen rarely. Any “unofficial information you find on the Internet or
hear from other people, even from travel agencies, can be considered as
rumor,” the website states. “Please do
not believe it unless you get an announcement from the government.”
In February of this year L. decided to take
advantage of the long Chinese Spring Festival holidays to visit Tibet. After
securing a Tibet Travel Permit, her travel agency assigned her to a tourist group
consisting of a Korean man and his daughter. On February 6 she took a train of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, a prestige project of the Communist government. Former premier Zhu Rongji praised the railroad as an "unprecedented" engineering feat in the "history of mankind".
For centuries Tibet was a secluded mountainous region; low temperatures, lack of oxygen, high altitudes and frequent earthquakes made journeys difficult and hindered the construction of infrastructure. Tibet was therefore the last Chinese province to be connected with the rest of China through a railroad. Its inauguration in July 2006 was hailed by the PRC leadership as an historic moment. The authorities claimed that the Qinghai-Tibet Railway would promote the "modernisation" of Tibet. However, critics argue that the railroad is a means to facilitate the "sinicisation" of Tibet and the exploitation of natural resources such as copper, iron and zinc.
Loudspeaker announcements on trains bound for Tibet echo Beijing's official line, praising the railway and listing impressive statistics about the engineering marvel. For L. this was just government propaganda, an attempt to hush up the fact that the Han Chinese are oppressing the Tibetans and destroying their culture. She sent a few SMS to a friend
of hers who also lived in China. The two of them criticised the central
authorities’ Tibet policy. Despite Beijing’s official version of
history, L. felt that there was something wrong about how Tibet was run by the
Communist government. It was like a police state in which one didn’t have the
same basic freedoms enjoyed by the people in other parts of China, let alone in the West.
When her train arrived in Lhasa, her tour guide picked her up at the station.
He was Tibetan and spoke English. He was nice and friendly to her, but she soon
noticed that the political situation of the region was a sensitive topic the
guide was reluctant to talk about. He took L. to the local police
station, where foreigners need to register upon their arrival in Tibet. Afterwards they went to the hotel in which L. would be staying during the next three days. There she met for the first time the other two members of her small travel group.
The group visited Lhasa’s most famous landmarks such as the Potala Palace, Jokhang Temple and Barkhor Street. L. was dismayed by how China’s government seemed to have changed the face of Tibet. Lhasa looked very much like an occupied city. The presence of soldiers and checkpoints was conspicuous. Even inside Lhasa
one had to go through security checks similar to those in place at airports. Apart from a few traditional landmarks and areas, Lhasa had been
transformed into a dull, boring city that looked just like any other city in
China, an unremarkable urban landscape full of monotonous modern buildings.
The number of Han Chinese in the city was overwhelming. Beijing claims that ethnic
Tibetans make up over 90% of the region’s population. However, the authorities
do not release figures on Han Chinese immigration. According to information
published by the PRC embassy, in 2008 Tibet's population stood at 2.84 million of
whom more than 2.5 million, or 95.3%, were Tibetans.
But the government has been actively encouraging Han Chinese people to move to Tibet.
Recently it began promoting intermarriages between Tibetans and Han as a way of cementing the ‘unity’ of the nation. The authorities have invested large sums in the
economic development of Tibet, opening it up to business, which is often
dominated by Han Chinese. The construction of the Qinghai-Tibet railway was
meant to facilitate this process of ‘integration’ which – many people fear –
might ultimately lead to the annihilation of Tibetan civilisation.
While L. was visiting Lhasa’s centre, her
friend D. sent her an SMS asking her how she liked Tibet. “Lhasa is really great
except for all the f*** Chinese!” she replied. "Don't forget after you
leave you can donate money to organisations," wrote D. half-jokingly.
In the evening of February 8, L. was in her
hotel room. She had been sick the previous day and was still recovering. At 23:30
someone knocked on the door. When she opened, she saw two men standing in front
of her. They identified themselves as police officers. They were wearing
civilian clothes and claimed it was just a routine inspection. One of the policemen was Han Chinese; he was thin, had short hair and wore
glasses. The other man was an ethnic Tibetan; he was around 6 ft tall (1.82 m), had thick black
hair, glasses, and was quite muscular.
At first the officers were rather polite.
They made small talk and it seemed as if it was indeed just a routine job. But
one question revealed the nature of their surprise visit: “How do you feel
about Tibet?” they asked. That's when L. realised she had got herself into serious trouble.
“It’s
very beautiful, I really like it,” L. responded vaguely, trying to keep her
calm. The police officers became more aggressive.
“How do you feel about Tibet?” they repeated. “You need to be serious with us
right now. Or it would be bad for you.” Their tone was intimidating. L. hedged.
She was afraid that if she said too much, things might take a turn for the worse. “Listen, we know about your text messages
on the train,” said the Han Chinese menacingly.
L. panicked. “What messages?” she said, pretending to know nothing about it. “You sent text messages to D., the Australian,” said
one of the policemen. The fact that they knew her friend’s name sent a shiver
down her spine. “Oh yeah, I texted D.,” she finally
admitted.
L. was now frightened to death. Her whole
body was shaking and she involuntarily kept clutching her stomach. The attitude
of the two officers was subtle. Sometimes they were really nice, sometimes they
were aggressive. The Han Chinese was bluntly confrontational and hostile, while
the Tibetan was more manipulative. Their words were often ambiguous, which made
them sound all the more terrifying.
“Are you nervous right now?” asked one of
the men.
“I have been sick,” L. said.
“We know you have been sick,” they
responded. It became clearer and clearer to L. that the police had not just
read her SMS, but had also been spying on her since she’d arrived in Tibet.
The interrogation lasted for 3 hours,
during which the police officers kept asking her the same questions over and
over again to see if her answers were the same. Sometimes they repeated her
answers in the wrong way to test her. It was a
psychological game. They tried to make her betray herself. As she spoke, they
wrote down her statements. They kept flipping through files which
L. thought contained information about her.
“Why don’t you lie down?” they asked
several times. It was hard for L. to tell if they were concerned about her
health or if it was just one of their tricks. It would have been awkward for
her to lie down with two male police officers in her room who were
interrogating her.
The Tibetan wanted to see her phone. It
contained all of her messages, including those she had denied having written. Yet
she had no choice but to hand the phone over to the man. Luckily for her, she
had bought her phone in Russia and the Tibetan officer couldn’t read the Cyrillic keyboard.
He gave it back to her and asked her to show him the SMS she had sent. Whether
the Tibetan really couldn’t use the phone, or whether he wanted to help her,
she did not know. She was just happy that she could seize that opportunity to
delete the most compromising messages. But she was taking too long, and the Tibetan impatiently asked her to hand it back
to him. He left the room with the phone, and she heard him taking pictures in the
corridor.
She was now alone with the Chinese policeman.
He asked her about her family background, wanted to know the names of her
parents, what they did for a living etc. L. said that her father was a US army
officer, which made the Chinese man even more suspicious. A few minutes
later the Tibetan man came back. “You’re a female, and we are going to bring
in a female police officer,” he announced. “She’s on her way.” L. thought they would search her.
The Tibetan had printed out her text
messages. They questioned her about each of them. “What do you mean by ‘bullshit’?”,
they asked. One of the messages read: “One day the world will know the tr***h
lol” This SMS had been sent by D.. It was just a joke; he knew L. was in a bad
mood and he tried to make her laugh. He had ‘censored’ the word ‘truth’, as if
he had been afraid someone would read the message. At that time, neither he nor
L. could have imagined that the Chinese authorities were indeed reading their
messages.
“Why
is D. saying this?” the men asked, “Did you and D. talk about Tibet?”
She admitted that they did.
“Have you heard anything bad about Tibet?”
“Well, in America and other countries we
have heard some bad things.”
“Some bad things? From where?”
“We heard about some troubles back a few
years ago, that there were some tensions. We heard about it in the news, there
are movies about it, there are books,” she said. She immediately realised she
had said too much. “But I know that the media likes to sensationalise
things to make more money, to make news more exciting,” she hastily added, hoping that
this was what the two men wanted to hear. As a matter of fact, they
emphatically agreed with her last words.
“Why did you say this to D.? Why did you
say these things?” they asked.
“I was in a bad mood on the train, the trip
was long, and the children were very loud. D. is a good friend and he’s very
patient, and he was just kidding.”
“Did your parents suggest you do things in
China?”
L. understood that telling them about her
father’s profession had not been wise. Initially, she had hoped it would scare
them and make them more prudent. She now realised that her dad’s job had only weakened her
position. “They said I should be safe, I shouldn’t go out too late …,” she
answered sarcastically.
Meanwhile the female officer had arrived.
She had brought with her L.’s Tibetan guide. The woman was young, probably in
her twenties, and pretty. Her job was to write down L.’s formal
statement, which summed up the content of the interrogation.
When L. saw P., her Tibetan guide, who had
been so kind and helpful to her, she felt guilty. She knew that he would be held responsible for her 'mistakes'. She had heard that while foreigners could be deported out of Tibet if they caused trouble, the local
guides would face the long-term consequences of such incidents. L. wanted to do something to protect him. While he was standing behind the officers, she said: “Since I have
come to Tibet, I saw that the media was wrong, that they sensationalised the
situation. I can see that things are just fine, that the people are happy.” The two officers nodded approvingly.
L. had to repeat her story all over again,
telling them all the places she had been to during her stay in Lhasa. The
female cop wrote down her ‘final’ statement, which was 10 pages long. L. had to
sign it and put her thumbprint on each page and on almost every paragraph of
each page. On the very last page she had to write “I guarantee that everything
I have said is true. I promise not to spread rumours any more.”
The officers gathered up all their papers
and prepared to leave. “I want to give you a
second chance," the Tibetan guide told her. "I have to go and talk to my leader about it. I will come back in
the morning. Tonight don’t text anyone, don’t e-mail anyone. If you do, we will
know, and it would be bad. Get some sleep.”
This last piece of advice seemed ludicrous, as L. could obviously not fall asleep after what had happened. No sooner had she remained alone in her room than she burst into tears, unable to restrain herself any longer. Despite what the tour guide had told her, she felt so lonely and desperate that she sent an e-mail to her mother telling her what had occurred.
The tour guide returned to the hotel the following morning. He
said that the police were coming back at 11 a.m. He added that the remaining
members of the tour group would get another guide.
“Are you going to be in trouble?” L. asked.
“No, because the texts you sent were before
you met me,” he replied, “and because of what you said about the tour.”
They went to the hotel lobby. There she met the two
Koreans she had been travelling with. They were completely unaware of what had
happened the previous night. The girl saw that L. was shaking and that she had
cried. She asked what was wrong with her. L. took her aside and told her
everything. The girl was shocked. A little while later the Korean family left
the hotel to continue their tour. L. suddenly panicked. She told P. that she
wanted to call the US embassy. “Don’t do it. If you call the embassy it will be
worse,” he said.
The owner of the tour operator went to the
lobby to meet her. He said she couldn't stay in the lobby and had to go back to her room; the police were trying to keep things quiet. L. refused, saying that she would not go back to the room where she had been subject to the previous night's terrifying experience. She broke down and began to cry. He booked her a new room, one of the
best, most luxurious rooms of the hotel. The tour guide said that she wasn’t
allowed to leave the hotel. If she was hungry she could go with him to a nearby
restaurant. But she was too nervous to have lunch.
The police didn’t show up until 4 p.m.
They informed her that she had two
choices. They would either drive her to the Tibet border where she could catch
a train; or they could take her to the airport, where she could fly to
Kathmandu. The Tibetan officer said that she should fly because she had been
sick and the journey by road would be too tiring. But she said she had no money
for a flight ticket, as she had already spent 920 dollars for the tour. “I will call my
boss and maybe we can pay for half of your plane ticket,” said the Tibetan in a
rare show of compassion. Or perhaps he just wanted her to leave Tibet as soon
as possible.
L., the guide and the two policemen went to the AirChina office in Lhasa, and they bought a ticket to Kathmandu. It cost
US$400, half of which were paid by the Chinese government. Then they returned
to the hotel. Before the officers left, they warned her: “You must never tell anybody that this happened, that you spoke to the police, that you must
leave Tibet.”
She had to spend her last night in Tibet in her hotel. The next morning her tour guide drove her to the airport and she flew to Nepal. Her family members had already
contacted the US embassy. When she arrived in Kathmandu she found out that the
embassy had sent her several e-mails. She explained to them what had happened. The embassy first told her not go back to mainland China, but to fly to HK and have someone
take her belongings, which were still in her Shenzhen flat, to the Hong Kong border.
After gathering more information, however, they changed
their mind. They told L. that the Chinese authorities wanted to keep things as quiet as possible and nothing would happen to her if she re-entered mainland China. On
February 28 she flew to Hong Kong, and then she went to Shenzhen by train. She had no
problem crossing the border from the former British colony to mainland China.
She returned to her school and continued her normal life.
But on the 21st of March she returned to Hong Kong to have lunch with a friend. Afterwards she took the train back
to Shenzhen. No sooner had the immigration officer scanned her passport than
she was surrounded by three policemen who told her she had to follow them. They
took her to a cubicle area. She asked what was going on, but the officers refused to answer. “We don’t know,” they said.
After about half an hour they finally told
her that her visa had been cancelled and that she was "no longer welcome in
China". She asked them why, and they said they didn’t know. She asked if she
could give her friend the keys to her flat so that he could send her belongings
to Hong Kong. First they said they didn’t know if that was possible. She insisted and in
the end they agreed. They allowed her to give her friend, who was on the mainland side, the keys over the counter.
Then she walked back to the Hong Kong side of the border, but the Hong Kong police stopped her. The design of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border is similar to that of an airport, with one-way paths for people travelling to or from
Hong Kong. Once she had entered the mainland’s immigration area she was not
supposed to go back to the other side.
When L. saw that even the Hong Kong
authorities might let her down, that she was standing alone on a steel and glass bridge
suspended over the Shenzhen river, she had a nervous breakdown and began to cry. “They sent me back, my visa has been cancelled,” she explained to the officers. The Hong
Kong police soon understood what had happened. They took her to
their superior, who comforted her and reassured her that she could re-enter Hong
Kong.
L. was forced to give up her job in mainland China. Her
former school in Shenzhen withheld her previous months’ wages. Despite her
pleads, they refused to pay, showing no compassion whatsoever for her situation.
She stayed for a few days in the safe haven of Hong Kong, where she could say
and write what she pleased without being spied on. Yet the paranoia that the
mainland regime so carefully nurtures in the Chinese people had already sunk into her soul. Only after leaving Chinese soil for good would she feel completely safe,
she said. As she talked, her eyes were filled with the fear of being watched,
with the internal struggle between her desire to speak out and the memory of how only a few days earlier words had turned her into a state criminal –
defenceless, lonely and weak, entirely at the mercy of the Communist regime.
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