In Beijing, author treads fine line as she tells Tibet's story

Woeser has sued the government, investigated Tibet's March uprising, and flouted the official line about Tibet.

from the November 18, 2008 edition

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Blogging and dodging

Woeser also started blogs, hosted on servers outside China but available in the country. In the past two years, four have been shut down.

When violence erupted in Lhasa last spring, her website became a go-to source for information that the authorities tried to block by barring foreigners from Tibet.

"Her updates after the events of mid-March helped to inform a lot of people who did not have immediate access to Tibet or to eyewitness accounts, and she was very important in helping to get the facts straight," says Sperling.

The writer is still working with Western journalists to reconstruct the event.

"We don't even know how it started," she says. But what she does know she shares with the world in long, detailed blog posts.

Despite the risk, Woeser says telling the story is key. Chinese-Tibetan relations are so hostile because the government has successfully portrayed Tibetans as backward and evil, she says. Indeed, few Han Chinese show any tolerance for her perspective.

"This stinking face, if anyone sees her, give a ferocious beating to this drowning dog for me!!!!!!!!!" an Internet user, identified as China Hackers Association, wrote in May on a social-networking website.

Even Woeser's Han friends won't hear her out, she says. Tibetans have berated her, too, saying she's "causing trouble," she adds.

Works translated

But outside China her work – which has been translated into Tibetan, English, and French – has an adoring audience. Her most famous book, "Notes on Tibet," had 11,000 copies printed.

Even as the Tibetan diaspora has become divided over politics – some, like the Dalai Lama, hope to reconcile with China, while a growing faction wants independence – her writing resonates across the spectrum.

"It's really important because it deals with ideas of identity and ideas of freedom.... I think as long as Tibetans keep doing that, we have some hope," says Jamyang Norbu, a pro-independence activist who has openly criticized the Dalai Lama.

"Of course I'll argue with her about that," he laughs. But "I'd love to meet her."

Like other fans and Tibetan exiles, though, he has little chance of that. The Chinese government has effectively banned Woeser from leaving the country. Her application for a passport, filed in 2005, is still pending.

So in July the writer tried another genre: a lawsuit over the right to travel abroad.

The effort has been stalled for months. But it makes a point, her thinking goes.

Not that her literary work until now hasn't.

"She's not someone who's primarily political. Her reactions are of somebody who's actually interested in the way they feel through language and culture," says Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University in New York.

Still, he continues, Woeser is "trying to create a space for expression, and everyone knows that in China that's hugely political."

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