Voices from Tibet
VOICES FROM TIBET: SELECTED ESSAYS AND REPORTAGE By TSERING WOESER AND WANG LIXIONG EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY VIOLET S. LAW A COMPILATION OF A SERIES OF ‘EXPERT ON TIBET PROGRAMS For RADIO FREE ASIA By WARREN SMITH 1 VOICES FROM TIBET Voices from Tibet is a recently published collection of articles about Tibet by Tsering Woeser and her husband Wang Lixiong. The articles were translated into English and published by a Chinese-American woman named Violet Law. Woeser is well-known to many Tibetans as a commentator on the political situation in Tibet. Wang Lixiong is a Chinese democracy activist and supporter of Tibetan human rights. They are based in Beijing. This is the first of a series of programs on their collected articles. The first article, “Freedom for Chinese, Autonomy for Tibetans,” was written by Woeser. Woeser writes about her excitement in October 2010 upon hearing that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo. Lui was the first Chinese to win the Nobel Peace Prize, assuming, of course, that one does not consider the Dalai Lama, who won the Peace Prize in 1989, to be Chinese. Liu had been the organizer, in 2008, of Charter 08, which Woeser had signed, which called for human rights, democracy and the rule of law in China. It was modeled after Charter 77, which had originated in Czechoslovakia in 1977 and was credited to have begun the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. In response to the uprising in Tibet in 2008, Liu had organized a petition of 30 Chinese intellectuals calling on the Chinese Government to respect Tibetans’ rights, to cease the repression of their protests and to try to understand their grievances, and to allow them to exercise genuine autonomy as proposed by the Dalai Lama.
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