Straight off the presses of Xinhua government-approved news, China publishes evidences of Dalai clique's masterminding of riots!
China's Ministry of Public Security said on Tuesday that it had gathered sufficient evidence showing that March 14 riots in Lhasa was not isolated or accidental but was part of the "Tibetan People's Uprising Movement" plotted by the Dalai clique.
Solid facts showed that the unrest in Lhasa, the capital of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, was organized, premeditated, masterminded and instigated by the Dalai clique and its "Tibet independence" forces, the ministry said.
The Dalai clique believed that this would be "the last chance" for them and decided to launch the "Tibetan People's Uprising Movement" within and outside China, attempting to "create a crisis in China through awakening and coordinating the maneuver in Tibet," the ministry said.
I'm struck by the recurrent Chinese usage of the term "Dalai clique" as the designated appellation for the Tibetan government-in-exile. I'm not sure what connotations they think the word clique has, but to me "Dalai clique" sounds like just the sort of hip and exclusive organization I'd like to get involved with: something like an Oriental Scooby and the gang but with spiritual gravitas and rebel sex appeal. It certainly sounds more alluring than the retro-vanguard revolutionary yawn of "Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China." If the Chinese government really wants to win the PR battle over human rights, it needs to realize that stuffy paleo-Leninist language no longer cuts it in the post-ideological digital age. Even tired university Marxists have updated their jargon to suit the new globalized cultural imperialist narrative of neo-liberal hegemony.
Pacifist monks pitted against riot police orchestrated by aging technocrats in suits is not an image war the communists can win. Just compare the colourful and magisterial Tibetan flag with the drab Chinese red star emblem. George Lucas couldn't have made the good-guy bad-guy dichotomy more obvious. The communist leadership should be calling themselves the "Confucius clique" to battle the Eastern mystic appeal of Tibetans head-on, declaring that the Tibetan uprising is in violation of Tao. Or if they feel they must continue touting obsolete Western ideological rhetoric, they could at least dress the dead socialist corpse in new clothes like Chavez is doing in Venezuela. Terms like "People's Republic" may have fooled people once, but not even tenured Berkeley professors are willing to parrot such baldly out-of-date party lines in the 21st century.
It's not your methods that are unjustifiable, China -- Stalin was an intellectual folk hero in his heyday -- it's your outmoded style. Change the name of the Communist party to the Communalist party, start calling your ideology Managed Harmonious Development, build a faux-traditional eco-garden for every hundred factories - be creative! Otherwise even the most crypto-authoritarian collectivists will continue flocking to the side of the Dalai clique. The Olympic games were a propaganda coup for Nazi Germany because Nazi ideology still seemed genuinely new and exciting in many quarters. If the Chinese government can't get a single Western apologist to play along to its scratched Soviet-built phonograph -- and I have yet to hear of any (though I'm sure Noam Chomsky is pinning it all on the American government as we speak) -- it has no one to blame for the ensuing public relations disaster but itself.
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