Tibet: Your questions answered by ill-informed BBC reporter
29 Nov 2007 03:09 EST

A captioned photo appears beside the first paragraph, reading “Tibetans enjoy a certain level of religious freedom.” We see two old men, one dressed in monk’s robes, the other with what appears to be a crutch beside his leg, sitting by what looks like one of the lungta-wrapped pillars placed at each corner of the Tsuklakhang (Jokhang). Let’s forget for a moment the question of whether the man in the picture is actually a monk — most of those I encountered begging during my stay in Lhasa were obviously not monks — and just ask what the picture says about religious freedom. Is Michael Bristow really so ignorant as to think that begging is standard Tibetan religious practice? Somehow the juxtaposition of the image and the caption struck me as brazenly Orwellian.

In answering the second question, where a reader has commented that “It is very hard for me to understand how you can claim that there is even minimal political and religious freedom in Tibet,” Michael Bristow claims that “People can worship openly on the streets and in temples and monasteries, so there is at least some level of religious freedom.” Apparently he is unaware of the orders forbidding government workers and university students from visiting temples during holidays, and threatening them with loss of their jobs or expulsion from school should they ignore those orders. His claim that people can openly worship in temples and monasteries is simply factually incorrect, unless he’s claiming that such government orders are unenforced.

Later in his answer to the same question, he makes some remarks about how government officials claim to “listen to what ordinary people say before making decisions” and has the audacity to follow it up with “Of course, Westerners would not recognise this as political freedom.” For some reason it seems irrelevant to him whether Tibetans recognize this as political freedom, which anyone who’s visited Tibet and actually spoken with Tibetans there can tell you they do not.

On his last question, posed by a would-be traveller asking “Is it difficult to gain access to Tibet?” Michael Bristow would have done better to answer honestly: “Not if you bow down and kiss China’s feet and offer to do their overseas publicity work for them!”

Sarcastic remarks aside, Bristow’s answer to this question actually contains some of the most factually inaccurate information. He writes, “You firstly need to get a special permit for Tibet, which can be obtained through a travel agent in China.” It’s true that such permits exist, but questionable whether one actually needs them now that the railway is in operation, and they are very easy to obtain directly from any Tibet Travel Bureau (a government agency) office without going through a travel agent.

The one thing Michael Bristow got right in this answer was remarking that “rules seem to change quite quickly,” but then he went and followed that comment up with severely outdated and inaccurate information — “There were reports that tourist restrictions were tightened earlier this year after a demonstration by free-Tibet supporters at Mount Everest base camp.” — which seems to serve no purpose other than maligning political action in front of would-be tourists. I travelled to Lhasa by train less than a month after the feat on Jomolangma, and there was no security to speak of, much less hightened security. I have been informed by Tibetans living abroad that China has made things much more difficult for them to enter Tibet or even enter China since then, but China is both unwilling (and presently unequipped) to impose tight restrictions on rail travel due both to their desperate desire to seem “open” and their greed for tourist dollars (or pounds or euros, as Michael may have).

I could write another 3 or 4 paragraphs on Michael Bristow’s gullibility and shameless echoing of the lies the Chinese fed him, but I think his own words do him more justice than I ever could: “Swiss watches are advertised in the capital Lhasa, but children were running around barefoot in a village outside the second city, Shigatse.” Yeah Michael. Tibet really has religious and political freedom, and those are real Swiss watches that Chinese dude is selling in an alley for £15...