nyamrup
ONE WORLD. ONE DREAM. FREE TIBET!
Siemens’ propaganda billboards
29 Aug 2007 16:55 EDT
After this summer, I’m beginning to think you can tell a lot about a country from what you first see upon arriving at the airport. On my trip I arrived at airports in both Beijing, China, and Nagoya, Japan. What I saw before I even got off my plane in in Nagoya — so characteristic of Japan — was an airplane with a huge adorable Hello Kitty painted on it. What first caught my eye in Beijing — so characteristic of China — was a huge advertisement exploiting a Tibetan woman’s image for political gain.
Here it the image:
Another similar billboard in English, which I was unable to get a picture of, showed the message to be:
How can she get electricity when the nearest town is miles away?
THIS IS HOW: SIEMENS
Reading between the lines isn’t difficult here; the message is clear: Tibetans are thankful to Siemens and the Chinese government for their technology partnership in bringing electricity to remote parts of the Motherland. And while I’m sure it’s true that Tibetans in many places are glad to have electricity, they’re probably not glad to have China damming up their rivers. Regardless, Siemens has no business tooting their own horn over it as long as Tibet is under repressive colonial occupation, and no business showing only half the story and profiting the Chinese government by showing only the positive side. Seeing this billboard ad when I first arrived at the airport made me feel really sick and erased any doubts in my mind that the first thing on China’s mind these days is their desperate attempt to justify holding onto Tibet. But seeing international corporations jumping on the bandwagon of the propaganda was just too much.
Looking at Siemens’ website, we see pro-China propaganda right on the front page. It’s clear where their motivations are coming from. And somehow they have the nerve to “Showcase Shanghai” in their rhetoric about sustainable urban development, while the Chinese cities I visited were all so disgustingly polluted I felt sick the whole time I was there. Yeah, Siemens, that’s what I call sustainable...
Upon later traveling to many remote regions of Tibet, I found that people were often getting by just fine without China’s help in getting electricity, and moreover that they did have electricity even despite the absence of power lines! One monastery I visited powered all the temple lights and monks’ homes (including computers!) off of a large solar array out in front of the gate. And in nomadic places, almost everyone had small personal solar panels which charged batteries during the day and allowed them to light their tents with compact fluorescent bulbs as late into the night as they wished. Unlike the government’s plans for electricity, Tibetans’ ingenuity at getting it was actually sustainable and non-destructive to the environment.
Another really exciting energy-efficient item I found throughout Tibet was the solar water boiler, a parabolic dish (it looks like a satellite dish) covered with mirrors, reflecting all the light onto a bottle or pot of water at the parabola’s focal point. These things were able to rapidly boil water, due to the intense sunlight under Tibet’s thin atmosphere, without using any electricity or oil or other fuel.