Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to Canberra yesterday – I would have liked to show my solidarity with the Tibetans and added one more number to those peacefully demonstrating against the insult of China’s nationalistic torch tour. Instead I sat through a three and a half hour meeting/conference call to do performance reviews for around 30 staff (sounds a lot worse than it actually is; it’s actually very important and very rewarding!).
From the reports I’ve heard from friends that were there it sounds like it was quite a scary place to be for anyone in a Free Tibet shirt or carrying a flag – regardless of whether you were ethnically Tibetan or not. Friends of mine were spat on, cursed, jostled and had their flags torn out of their hands – as well as intervening constantly to try and defuse potentially violent altercations. One story from a friend of mine involved a group of Chinese youths vigorously harrasing a small, elderly Tibetan women. After the youths were shooed away, she apparently swore at them with some fairly strong language, which apparently brought some much-needed comic relief to those within earshot.
The ATC chief minister and the AFP all think the day was a great success – due to their planning, of course. I think it was a success too – probably for different reasons. Our plans never involved attempting to interfere with the torch – so it’s not as if we were curtailed by the security presence. We simply wanted the torch’s tour through Canberra to be inseparable from the Tibetan issue in the mind of the public and the media – and all of the reporting (both here and abroad) that I’ve seen met this objective.
My biggest concern over the past few days was trying to get an objective gauge on public opinion on this issue. For a while there it was looking dicey. Media beat-ups about the extent of so-called ‘violence’ in the torch relay legs in London and Paris, were starting to give the impression that the protesters were the bad guys. But I think three things ended up swinging the balance of public opinion back in our favour by the end of the Canberra leg on Thursday. Firstly, the ridiculously over the top Chinese nationalism that bussed a 15,000 strong pro-China rent-a-crowd into Canberra in an attempt to defend both the torch and more importantly, Chinese pride. Second, the confusion (read arrogant defiance) of the ‘blue trackie crew’ in jostling with the AFP for torch defending honours despite being told unequivocally that they were not to be involved at all. And lastly, the violent thuggery and intimidation used by the pro-China camp against a much smaller Tibetan group who had come to Canberra to exercise their democratic right to express their views through peaceful protest.
I really believe (hope) that a lot of people who know nothing about these issues saw something today that might give them food for thought. This is the power of China. Through years of systematic nationalistic brainwashing, you can get 15,000 people who live in a foreign country to do what you want without asking them to do anything. I really get the sense that, in the eyes of the ‘average aussie’, the strategy of the Australian Chinese community backfired yesterday – they came out looking a little ‘extreme’ and the Tibetans came out looking relatively moderate.
The trick now, of course, is harnessing all of this public awareness and momentum to create some actual change
