24 May, 2010
Perry Link, New York Review of Books

Talking About Tibet: An Open Dialogue Between Chinese Citizens and the Dalai Lama


Following is an English translation of an Internet dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens that took place on May 21. The exchange was organized by Wang Lixiong, a Chinese intellectual known for his writing on Tibet and for theorizing about how China might generate its own kind of democracy in the Internet age.

The idea of promoting “free dialogue” on the Web between the Dalai Lama and Chinese citizens is an extremely bold notion. To China’s rulers, nearly every word in the phrase “free dialogue with the Dalai Lama” is anathema. The Dalai Lama, in their language, is a traitor, a “splittist,” an “enemy of the people,” a “monster,” a “wolf in monk’s robes.” The word “dialogue” has not fared well in Chinese Communist history, either. It is what student protesters were asking for in spring 1989 just before tanks and machine guns settled the question by massacre.

So how did Wang Lixiong do it? First he asked representatives of the Dalai Lama, who is on a tour of the U.S., for an hour of time in which the Tibetan religious leader might answer questions from Chinese citizens. The Dalai Lama agreed to use the hour of 8 to 9 a.m. (EST) on May 21 for this purpose. Wang then arranged to open a Twitter page beginning on May 17 at 10:30 a.m. (Beijing time), onto which Chinese Web users could pose questions. In order to promote democracy in the questioning process, Wang decided to prioritize the questions using the program Google Moderator, which posts all questions on a Google Moderator page inside China. According to the program, any Web visitor can vote on which questions he or she prefers and only one vote from any one remote Web user is accepted (to prevent a cyber version of ballot-box stuffing); during the voting period, a running tally is published on which questions have received the most votes.

[...] 

(the rest of this article can be found at http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/may/24/talking-about-tibet/)