“Okay, here are the rules:
Number 1 — No cell phones.
Number 2 — ENERGY!
Number 3 — There is one mic, so only one person speaks at a time.
Number 4 — Step up, step back. After you made your point, step back to give other people a chance to say something.”

This was how a community workshop — part of New York City’s Immigrant History Week — began. What made this meeting different from dozens of other events that week was who was running it: High school students were leading the gathering for other high school and college students. The meeting coordinators were part of the Immigrant and Refugee Media Project, one of several programs run by Global Action Project, or G.A.P. — a youth media and leadership organization for New York City high school students. Over the next hour and a half, they discussed how national policies on immigration affect people’s lives, the power of the media, and how to effectively work with other organizations to pool resources and use technology to spread their messages to a wider audience.

G.A.P. started in 1991 as a video-letters project with the goal of initiating exchanges between young people in different countries to help them learn about each other and discover similar issues each group faced in its communities. Susan Siegel, who had a background in art and youth education, came up with the original idea for what would become G.A.P. She met cofounder Diana Coryat in 1989. Their experiences in community media and youth-focused arts, education, and filmmaking led them to believe that media could be a transformative education and communication tool for students.

Susan facilitated the first video-letter project in Kopeyia, a rural village in Ghana. The youth chose to create a fictional film based on a schoolmate who had recently died of malaria. When the video was screened in New York City public schools, students were so moved that they made and sent a manual of home remedies from their cultures and a video-letter back to the youth. The film also sparked dialogue among the New York students about health issues they faced in their own communities. A second international video-letter was produced in 1993 in Livingston, Guatemala. Shortly afterwards, Susan and Diana began establishing New York City–based programs.

The seeds of change

The first activity at the workshop on immigration was the Mambo Mixer, an ice-breaking activity set to hip hop that introduced the students to each other and let them know that this would be a participatory event. They then screened “twisted truth,” a 12-minute film G.A.P. youth made in 2006 to address the U.S. government’s proposal to criminalize undocumented immigrants, and to highlight the role of globalization in the issue. The opening scene shows President Bush speaking from the Oval Office on the need for immigration reform. A clip from a pro-immigration rally then appears, with dialogue in English and Spanish, before the words “twisted truth” appear in white on a black screen. Students sit at a table discussing the impact of the developed world’s economic policies on so-called Third World countries. We are asked to consider what conditions would make people leave their own countries to come to America, and random New Yorkers are asked for their views on immigration. The film is rich with political cartoons, text to highlight key points, shots of misspelled graffiti, and dramatized scenes of people cleaning toilets to show the menial jobs that immigrants often have to take. The credits roll to “Dead Prez Beat” by M.I.A.

Next on the agenda: “Aliens vs. Predators,” a three-minute mock trailer that portrays the difficulties faced by undocumented immigrants trying to afford college, and the way that the U.S. military is targeting this group as potential recruits. They dangle citizenship, free college tuition, and employment opportunities to try to get these immigrants to enlist. The haunting chorus from Orff’s “Carmina Burana” plays in the background.

The students then engaged in a discussion about the videos they had just watched. One student asked, “Why do people have to kill in order to become a citizen?” while another related the story of his cousin’s experience and warned, “It’s easy to enroll, but hard to get out.” Asmaou, a 16-year-old, added, “Mainstream media only narrows your mind, since they want you to think like them.”

Next, Dan and Pilar, two G.A.P. staff members serving as facilitators for the meeting, divided the students into smaller groups in order to get them to think about ways they can collaborate in the future. The students suggested various alternative media outlets to use, offered to share equipment, and planned events. I got the feeling that I had witnessed the beginning of the slow process of change.

No sugarcoating here

G.A.P. turns the prevailing notion that youth have nothing to contribute and no opinions to share on its head by teaching students that their voices count. Dare Dukes, G.A.P.’s development director, explains that one of the organization’s core philosophies is that “people should share in their own knowledge-building as opposed to sitting and listening to an expert.”

Each project produces two films during the school year. Students come after school and on weekends to G.A.P.’s office in midtown New York. Working with the facilitators who have backgrounds in film and education, the participants decide what issue they want to take on, how they want to portray it on film, and how to write the script and storyboard the shots. They are then taught how to use the equipment and will shoot, act in, and edit the film.

The youth select issues that they deal with on a daily basis. At a script meeting I attended, the students were creating the dialogue and shots for a film on street harassment. They had come up with the idea of using a split screen to be able to show the same scene from the male and female perspectives. Shreya, a G.A.P. facilitator, asked Jessica, who would be playing the girl who gets harassed in the film, if the language was too strong. Seventeen-year-old Jessica reassured her, “I don’t want to sugarcoat any of this. I take the blows every day of my life, I can take it.”

While each project is centered on learning how to produce media, the students also acquire media literacy skills that help them deal with such issues as how minorities are represented in the media, the concentration of media ownership, and what images mean and how to use them to express their points of view. Additionally, the film is not the end result. Part of G.A.P.’s mission is to be a catalyst for change. With guidance from G.A.P.’s Community Outreach Director Binh Ly, the youths who make each film devise an outreach plan by researching organizations that might be interested in a screening, figuring out answers to potential audience questions, and developing workshops on the issues that the video addressed.

Cofounder Diana Coryat describes the impact of the work on the youth: “They were excited about having the opportunity to direct their own learning process, to get their voices heard, and take positive action in ways they hadn’t believed to be possible for young people. When the work was shown, reflected back at them were images and stories that accurately represented their lives, but were rarely articulated in other media. Their audiences, too, were affected because it gave them a fresh way to see these young people as smart, articulate, and vital members of the community.”

G.A.P.’s programs have produced videos on issues as varied and complex as teenage prostitution, workfare, the lives of refugee youth in New York City, teen pregnancy, human rights, the truths and lies of gangs, and how the educational system can push students to drop out of school. Over 1,100 students have participated in the program. And every year, more than 100,000 people see the videos at conferences and festivals, and on YouTube and cable broadcasts.

Over the years, G.A.P. students have continued to exchange video-letters with youth in other regions. After the events of Sept. 11, they engaged students in Dubai in a video project that explored misconceptions about Muslims and Americans. They have also exchanged video-letters with students in the Dominican Republic, Northern Ireland, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and refugee youth living in camps in West Africa and Croatia.

G.A.P. will be holding its free end-of-year screening in New York City this June 14 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. at HBO (1100 Avenue of the Americas, 15th floor). The students will be presenting at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit from June 22-24, and leading three workshops at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta from June 27-July 1.

“Our job as media makers is to reveal the truth,” Asmaou declares. “People should know it.”

Randy Klein

Most people are unaware of the existence of Israelis or Palestinians working to find a non-violent solution to the conflict in the region. Violence and bloodshed make for better headlines and allow the conflict to be easily reduced to “us versus them.”

But Ronit Avni is trying to change that. Ronit is the founder and director of Just Vision, an organization that documents and raises awareness of Israeli and Palestinian grassroots peace activists. She is also the co-director of the documentary Encounter Point, which features the stories of activists she has met through the course of her work.

The film has been screened at several festivals over the past few months, including Hot Docs, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Sao Paulo Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. Encounter Point also won the audience award for best documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival in May. It opens for a limited run at the Quad Cinema in New York on November 17.

The interviewer: Randy Klein, ITF Board of Directors member
The interviewee: Ronit Avni, filmmaker and activist

You have been involved in human rights work for a long time and Just Vision seems like an outgrowth of several of your past experiences. What was it like interning for B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories?

Human rights work is generally a sobering and difficult experience. You develop a vocabulary you wish you would never have use for; words to describe torture, degradation, assassinations, discrimination, abuse. It is painful to confront what we human beings are capable of. It is especially painful if you were taught to hold your community or society to high standards of moral conduct. The dissonance can be destabilizing.

I interned at B’Tselem in 1999, during the Oslo process. It was eye-opening. A field researcher, Najib Abu Rokaya, was kind enough to take me with him on various occasions to the West Bank as he collected testimonies of Palestinians whose homes had been destroyed or whose child had been hit by a rubber-coated steel bullet. At the time, the intern coordinator introduced me to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) so I would split my time between my own research, PCATI, and B’Tselem.

What struck me was that communities who lived ten or fifteen minutes apart from one another had virtually no sense of the other’s perspective. It isn’t a unique phenomenonæthere are plenty of communities in Brooklyn or Manhattan that never interactæbut it really affected me. B’Tselem gave me the opportunity to see through these two separate lenses. I have tremendous respect for their work. It is never easy to hold a mirror up to one’s society. Many prophetic voices have been killed or ostracized over generations for critiquing dominant views or habits, and yet such voices are essential to our growth as ethical human beings. B’Tselem holds a mirror up to Israeli society. Those who take the time to read their reports see a picture that is less than flattering. I also started reading Stanley Cohen’s work during that timeæabout different ways that societies deflect responsibility through denial, or rationalization or by displacing blame. I was seeing this play out in the public’s responses to B’Tselem.

You spent several years working at WITNESS, which is an amazing human rights organization. Tell us a little about the organization and some of your experiences working there.

WITNESS was conceived by Peter Gabriel. The idea was to train human rights organizations to document abuses using video cameras. After the Rodney King beating, the organization was launched together with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, now called “Human Rights First.” When I started, I was one of three full-time staff members, so each person wore many hats. Part of my role became to train human rights organizations from countries including Afghanistan, the Gambia, Honduras and Senegal to document violations using video and to strategize with them about effective uses of video for social change. I loved the work as it was at the intersection of technology, film, human rights advocacy and public policy. It was also tremendously humbling to meet so many courageous people. I was particularly inspired by indigenous rights advocate Joey Lozano from the Philippines, the women from RAWA [Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan], and the youth of color from the Bay Area who all demonstrated civic leadership in their communities despite personal hardship. They were not politicians, yet they had a sense of agency and urgency and this led them to get involved. They inspired me to look for Israelis and Palestinians doing the same within their own societies. This was the beginning of my journey to launch Just Vision.

What did you learn about using video as a tool for advocacy?

I learned about the strengths and limits of the medium. It is an inherently reductive, narrative-driven medium that lends itself to telling personal stories rather than providing a structural overview of a systemic problem. Also, there are few rules; what is safe or ethical or effective in one context might be entirely problematic for another. It takes patience, planning and networks of support to make change happen. Very few rights violations are documented as they unfold. Instead, video is often used for evidence, awareness-raising, to reconstruct events or as a deterrent to further abuse. Most of the work happens after the film is producedæto ensure it is seen by those with the power to effect change. I learned that ultimately it is about community organizing, strategic thinking, reliability and quality. If all those elements come into play, you are more likely to be effective. If you are disorganized, lack buy-in from potential stakeholders, or are unreliable or shoddy in your work, you are unlikely to succeed.

When did you get the idea for Just Vision? Which came first, the film or the organization?

Encounter Point is an integral part of a broader effort to raise awareness about Palestinians and Israelis at the vanguard of a movement to promote nonviolence and peace building. The film was never meant to emerge in isolation. From the beginning, we wanted to create in-depth materials online to complement the film, since no 90-minute film can ever do justice to the painful, divisive and complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For this reason we are interviewing 180 peace builders and publishing this living history archive online at JustVision.org together with educational curricula and a timeline of the conflict through the lens of these 180 people who are committed to ending it. We are also trying to connect such peace builders to policymakers, journalists, community leaders, religious figures and more. We’ve taken our work to members of the State Department, Capitol Hill, the World Bank, the Oprah Winfrey Show, temples, mosques and community centers, to name a few.

Why do you think stories of these brave and inspiring individuals are so absent from the coverage of the situation?

They are not sensational. They are complex and hard to describe. They don’t “sell” or “pitch” well. A photo of a bomb or the wounded is self-explanatory. The picture tells the story. Peace work is slow, incremental, it is relational and requires context. I don’t think there is any ill-intent by journalists who do not cover this story, but it requires them to know more background, to speak the languages of the peace builders, to take time to learn the nuances of different approaches. And social change is slow. Policy is immediate and wide-ranging in its impact so it feels urgent to report on. Grassroots work is ongoing and develops over years or decades, Sometimes we take this for granted and don’t bother to stop and say, “Wait, this is important.” We have yet to fully appreciate the impact of this type of work, though. The Israeli movement to withdraw its troops from Lebanon began with small grassroots organizations and networks of mothers and then soldiers and others who wanted to see change. It took two decades, but it finally happened by and large. These movements take a long time to take root, and to enter into public discourse and ultimately to reflect the mainstream.

Just as the individuals featured in the film come from different backgrounds, Just Vision is itself a collaboration of people from various parts of the globe. Can you talk about some of the various staff and what their perspective brings to the organization?

We are a core team of young women from Israel, Canada, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Brazil and the US. Julia Bacha is from Brazil. She was the co-writer and editor of the filmControl Room, and studied Middle Eastern history and politics. Joline Makhlouf is the first Palestinian woman pilot. She’s worked with Israeli-Palestinian co-existence and dialogue groups ranging from Face-to-Face, Faith-to-Faith and Seeds of Peace. Nahanni Rous is a journalist from the US who interned in Jerusalem with Linda Gradstein of NPR and traveled cross country interviewing families after September 11th. I am part Israeli, part Canadian. It takes everyone to move this agenda forward. The more communities begin to back non-violent peace builders, and the more we demand that they be reported on and supported, the better.

You have shown the film at locations in Israel and the West Bank.  Can you talk about the reaction of the audience at these screenings?

The reactions to Encounter Point have been largely positive. We opened the film in West Jerusalem at the Jerusalem International Film Festival to a sold-out audience. It was perhaps the most diverse group of people I have seen in the region with cynics and sceptics along with those eager for the film. They ranged from Israeli orthodox Jewish settlers to Northern Tel Aviv secular affluent Israeli Jews to Palestinian Christians to Palestinian Muslims from Ramallah, Jenin, East Jerusalem and other nearby cities. We were terrified at how they would react but the film subjects received a standing ovation at the end. One orthodox Jewish Israeli man got up and stated that he felt the film was biased in favor of Palestinians. One devout Palestinian Muslim woman stood and expressed that she felt it was biased in favor of Israelis. Afterwards, most people went outside and continued the conversation for 1.5 hours. This included the two individuals who felt the film favored the “other side.” It was truly amazing.

In East Jerusalem we received a similarly positive response. We also showed the film in Haifa and Jenin. In Haifa, we screened the film three times but people were just returning to their homes so the turnout was low. They have invited us back for a proper, publicized screening. In Jenin about 100 people came, watched the film, clapped and then ran into the streets as the Israeli army had just invaded, so we didn’t have a substantive Q&A afterwards. In Gaza, I wasn’t there, but my understanding is that the audience had a hard time. The Israeli army was engaged in military operations in Gaza at the time, so it was even more tense than usual for residents. Their only exposure to Israelis are as settlers and soldiers so they had difficulty seeing empathic depictions of Israeli civilians. Also, they wanted to see the army invasion reflected in the film, which it was not, although the military occupation is. We have just been invited to screen the film in Nazareth and Tel Aviv and are working on a Ramallah screening.

Are there any plans to reach out to schools or community groups to use this for educational purposes?

Yes, definitely. We made a special Arabic and Hebrew version of the film and have offered it to local educators and community leaders to use as a tool for sparking dialogue and understanding on some of these issues.  We’ve been working with graduate students from Columbia University Teacher’s College, as well as the staff of Abraham’s Vision to provide in-depth educational lessons about this issue. We hope to distribute the lessons to high schools and colleges across the country, as well as online.

Has the trouble over the summer in the West Bank and Lebanon impacted the work of the activists featured in the film?

Not really—Robi, Ali, Shlomo, Tzvika and Sami continue to be advocates for resolving the conflict through non-militant means. As far as I know, everyone is still engaged in their work.

Finally, it is impossible to have a conversation about the conflict without asking about the elections.  You have commented that Just Vision tries to focus on the people who will “have to live with the peace.” What are your thoughts and what have your contacts on both sides expressed to you concerning Hamas gaining so many seats in the Parliament?

Generally, we really focus on the people who do this work regardless of who is in power. So many events garner that question. When [Ariel] Sharon was elected, many Palestinians reacted similarly to Israelis’ reactions to Hamas’s victory. Yet peace building must continue, and it does. We want to strengthen the voices of those who are trying to build a culture and consensus that favors nonviolence and peace. This will take time, but it is essential. I was not surprised about the Hamas election. I don’t think it signals the radicalization of Palestinian society, just as the Likud vote for Sharon did not necessarily signal a major shift to the right by the Israeli public. People want to trust their leaders, and they want change. History demonstrates that sometimes hard liners make tough choices that doves cannot. I can only hope that whatever the outcome of these two elections, ultimately the voices for compromise, dignity and diplomacy on both sides take center stage. “Inshallah,” as they say.

Randy Klein

Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games signals the increasing geopolitical influence wielded by China, as it tries to transform itself into an economic and political superpower. Though the eyes, or at least the television sets, of the world will be fixated on the world’s most populous country during the summer of 2008, neither China nor the mainstream media is likely to offer viewers and competitors a behind-the-scenes look at the experiences of the Tibetan and Tai people, two ethnic minorities residing on China’s geographic, cultural, and political border.

In preparation for their March 2 reading in New York, I recently sat down with Sara Davis and Robert Barnett. Dr. Davis is the author of Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. She is a former China researcher for Human Rights Watch and has written for several publications, including the Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and Modern China. Dr. Barnett is the author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories. He is a lecturer in Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and a former journalist for the BBC.  He is also the former director and founder of the now-defunct Tibet Information Network.

The interviewer: Randy Klein, chair of the Human Rights Watch Young Advocates of New York
The interviewees: Robert Barnett and Sara Davis

How did each of you become interested in studying the Tibetans and Tai Lües?

Robert Barnett: I was working in Hong Kong about 15 or 20 years ago. A friend persuaded me to travel around China and India. In order to get to India overland, one had to go through Tibet.  Unfortunately, the day I was to go see the main tourist site in the capital, Lhasa, I walked into the middle of a big demonstration in which a number of people were killed. No Westerner had ever [witnessed] one before in Tibet. So I became one of a group of foreigners who were [the first] eyewitnesses to these events.

Sara Davis: I was studying Chinese oral literature and folklore in graduate school.  I knew I wanted to study Chinese storytelling but did not know where.  I had seen storytellers in Sichuan, [a province in southwest China], when I [was] traveling around in that post-college, pre-anything-else period.  I saw these amazing storytellers and decided I was going to study that, but the question was where, since there was almost no storytelling going on in China anymore.

Why was that?

SD:  Television, radio, movies, the usual stuff.  My graduate school advisor suggested I work in Yunnan.  I [spoke with] people I knew who had spent time in Yunnan, and found someone who said [he was] once in this temple in Sipsongpanna, in southern Yunnan, and saw this woman telling a story.  I managed to dig up someone’s master’s thesis that had a passing reference to storytellers in Sipsongpanna.  So based on these two slim pieces of information, I submitted an entire dissertation proposal and convinced them that I was going to go off and find storytellers — without actually knowing if there were any.  That’s how I wound up in Yunnan and did my doctoral research on the Tai Lües, which became the basis for the book.

How many other nationalities other than the Han are there in China?

RB: This is a huge question. China has a population of roughly 1.3 billion people and 91 percent are considered ethnic Chinese or Han. The Chinese run a very tight ship in which classification is done by the government in a highly organized and pre-determined way.  They had a system where [different communities] had to register to have their nationalities recognized.  About 400 managed to register … [The Chinese government] sent specialists around the country … to determine which of the 400 actually met the criteria. [The scholars] used Marxist criteria, which were actually Stalin’s criteria for [determining what constituted] nationality. Eventually, 55 [groups were] accepted as “minorities.”  

The Chinese [government] are very definite in saying there are only 56 nationalities, including the Han.  Although the 91 percent are all the same nationality, they see themselves as treating all nationalities equally and as being very tolerant.

SD: When they were doing this process of boiling down the 400 ethnicities and coming up with 55, they initially sent out teams of anthropologists and ethnologists to create books on the different [ethnic] regions.  

What time period was this?

SD: It went on for a while. Most of it was done [in the 1950s and 60s], but some of it continued into the 70s.  I don’t know about Tibet, but the books on Yunnan are quite serious scholarly research. They categorized the ethnic groups, placing each one on a different level of evolutionary advancement.  The Tibetans and the Tais were in the middle because they had written scripts and their own systems of government.  Some groups that had never had any contact with each other were lumped together as one group while others that have had lots of contact were split in two — so it wasn’t always a rational system

Based on this evolutionary scale the government decided they were going to move everyone up the scale. Of course, at the top are the Han.  The idea was to accentuate the positive qualities and eliminate the negative.  The government, often including ethnic scholars themselves, then went through and picked out which qualities were good qualities (such as singing and dancing, wearing nice pretty clothes), and which qualities were bad, like polygamous marriage.  They then set up programs to “improve” all of the nationalities.    

RB: This all came from an American model.

SD: Henry Morgan, based on his study of the Iroquois.  

RB: His idea that society can be organized in an evolutionary pyramid inspired [19th century German political philosopher Friedrich] Engels, who gave it to [19th century German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer Karl] Marx.  

SD: [The Chinese government] went around creating practices that would be “better.” For instance, with the Tais, they felt their dances were okay, but they needed to be improved.  They [had] a nice written alphabet, but not good enough, so they needed to improve the alphabet.  The government got very involved in almost every aspect of the public and private lives of these border people.

This sounds similar to the Chinese government’s stated goal in Tibet of modernizing them.

RB: It’s very interesting because the –ize word [changes] over time.  When the Chinese invaded Tibet, they never mentioned anything about equality or [advancement].  They just said, “We are here to liberate you, not from oppression by nasty aristocrats or religion, but from imperialists from the West who are trying to take you over.”  Then, nine years later, it changed from feudalism to liberation.  They gave that up in the 1980s and changed it to “We’re here to modernize you.”  

SD: In Yunnan, too.  It started out as, “We are liberating you from the nationalist warlords”. Actually, there was a certain amount of delight about that because people in Yunnan had really been oppressed and were suffering economically under the thugs … running the southwestern part of the country.  Then it became, “We are going to liberate you from your past,” which [was] much more abstract and cleared the space for all kinds of different projects.  

RB: There were huge changes that took place with enormous consequences that led to thousands of deaths, and some of these changes have never been acknowledged.  The state always gives the impression that the changes happened seamlessly.  

SD: You’re still not allowed to talk about what happened.  

This touches on the notion of research.  How did each of you manage to get people to talk to you about these and other issues?

RB: I don’t do any research in Tibet now and I don’t ask people there any questions. If I did, the people I speak to could [get] in serious trouble. Lots of people won’t speak to me in Tibet because I said on a U.S. radio interview about a year and a half ago that “lots of people say to me that they don’t want a railway in Tibet.” [In 2001, the Chinese began construction on a 685-mile, $2.3 billion railway from Golmud to Lhasa]. I was threatened with [banishment] from China for a while because the Chinese do not allow criticism of their new railway project.  The Tibetans are terrified because I said “lots of people say,” which means I talked to specific people. They might investigate whoever talked to me, even though I used the phrase in a general way.  

SD: Yunnan has much more freedom and it’s interesting to compare the different border areas, and … ask why some areas have more leeway than others. In Yunnan, people are very adept at self-censorship.  You can go there as a backpacker and get invited into people’s homes. You can talk about all kinds of topics, but when you get to politics, the conversation shifts to, “Oh never mind, let’s go back to hearing about America, tell us more about your wonderful country.” They are also very good at preserving certain areas where they have some space, and keeping [them] marked off from public view. There are areas in Yunnan where people are able to do things that would [have] stiff repercussions in Tibet.  

What kinds of things?  

SD: Religious activities, border crossings. There is a lot of trade across the border, which is legal. It means that Buddhist monks can also cross the border to Thailand and come back with computers and new ideas. They are allowed to do that, but they are very good at keeping it quiet. The Tais are monitored by the government but they manage their government interactions. There are no conflicts or mass protests in the streets, but they do have Buddhist ceremonies with thousands of people who come across the border to participate.  It’s all done in some little town far away from the center of the prefecture. So if you’re a government official, you can know about it and not know about it. It is not challenging the state’s control, even though it is actually subverting it.

RB: In Tibet, you can talk to people, just not about politics. They won’t get arrested as long as they are not talking about “dangerous” things. The question is, how [does the government determine] what you are talking about? So you have to talk in public, and have a third person present so it does not look suspicious. And you must avoid certain topics.

SD: I once asked one of my Tai friends why they are treated differently from the Tibetans.  She said, “[The government] feel they eliminated our culture during the Cultural Revolution, so now there is nothing to worry about.”  But the Tais have been able to revive and reinvent their culture.  They are rebuilding temples but they are also bringing in new ideas.

RB: We should say that there were some gains to be had from being part of the Chinese system.  It’s just that they really didn’t have much choice.  Most Chinese citizens make shrewd calculations on where the gains are, such as “My children might get an education” or “We can travel outside of the country if we do x and y.”  It’s highly pressurized and there are only a limited set of choices that can be “successful.”

SD: I think the Tais and Tibetans are like the carrot and the stick. It’s an equation that is also very clear to the rest of the country.  If you misbehave, you’ll get slammed, but if you behave, then everyone will come to watch you sing and dance.

What role do each of you see the Internet playing in cultural survival, especially in light of heavy Chinese censorship?

SD: That is very easy for me to answer since the Tais I know have computers but do not have the Internet.  I keep nagging them to get it, but they don’t really care about it.  They use computers to produce materials in Tai on disks, and then they carry these across the borders and exchange them by hand, just as they have been doing with other goods for centuries.  It is an effective system, and they can avoid Internet censorship, but they are also not as connected to the outside world. They don’t have as large a profile as they could if they were more Web savvy — but it works for them.

RB: There is a lot of Internet use in Tibet, but people have to be very careful how they use it. They have to [show] an ID card before they log on, so it is heavily monitored. Public computers throughout China have software embedded in them that records every keystroke and transmits it back to the police.

Randy Klein