What on earth are we to make of this picture:
Are they taking robes as presents for the monks as a goodwill gesture? Was the photograph actually taken this year?
[UPDATE] As Chiara points out in the comments below, Wang Xiaoshan has now deleted the post I linked to and issued an apology. A commenter at Time Magazine’s China Blog says:
这是武警为电影做群众演员，在中国经常会有投资较大需要人来扮演古代军队等大规模群体时，请武警甚至是军人来当演员。因为他们训练有素，比普通人强悍。这是个很可笑的现象，但是这在中国挺常见。
(These are armed police acting as extras for a crowd scene. Big budget movies needing large crowds, such as soldiers in an ancient army, often ask armed police or soldiers to act. That’s because they are well trained and braver than ordinary people. This is a ridiculous phenomenon, but it often happens.)
That would make Gemini’s joke about costumes for a play quite relevant. The photograph appears to have been used for the back cover of the TCHRD 2003 Annual Report, which would make it at least five years old. A number of websites (eg. this one) are posting it along with an article from the Canada Free Press by Gordon Thomas - a writer whose startling exclusives have included the ‘revelation’ (as in hallucinatory dream) that Osama bin Laden was in China, keeping the peace in Xinjiang. Hmm, not sure I buy that one.
So, once again a picture tells a thousand words. But which words and what do they mean? That depends on what you want to believe.
3 Comments
Costumes for a play ?
wang xiaoshan has deleted the photo on his blog,and post a new entry entitled “apologize and be ashamed”
he also quote some comments :
[匿名] 这个图片你引用错了 [APNIC] @ 2008-3-30 17:33:35
但是，即使在3月29日，拉萨气温是零下2度到11度，那末在半个月、一个月前就更冷了。相片上还有穿衬衫的呢。
这是几年前，找武警拍电影时的照片。图中的喇嘛服饰，是班禅系的颜色。
移花接木，这么做不地道。做人不要太CNN。
However, it’s March 29 by now, but in Lhasa, the temperature is still -2 to -11 , then how about half a a month ago and a month ago? it’s even colder.
as you can see, some people wear shirts in the photo
It was a few years ago, the PLA play some charactors in a film . according to the color of the costumes, it’s a scene about Panchen Lama, but not Dalai Lama
do not be too CNN.
Copied from
http://thinkpossible.gaia.com/blog/2008/4/dharma_or_deception_chinese_soldiers_dressed_as_tibetan_monks?printable=1
Truth or lie, make your own judgment.
1) Following the link at the end of the email on the day this email was sent (I learned from the webmaster that on this day he had over 150,000 hits), there was a statement (which has now changed) which read “This is not an uncommon ’tactical move’ from the Chinese government as could be seen from the 2003 annual TCHRD Report”. In the email I recieved, however, and elsewhere on the web, on various blogs and such, which mostly link back to this webpage, this statement is omitted.
2) The article states it is by Gordon Thomas of the Canada Free Press. A search of the Canada Free Press website does not return the article. I sent an email to Canada Free Press asking about the article. Judi McLeod, editor of Canada Free Press responded:
“Gordon Thomas generally files columns to Canada Free Press. The article he wrote was apparently for World Net Daily’s G2 Bulletin. David Dastych our Polish-based reporter sent the article in knowing CFP would be interested in the topic. After posting the article, Gordon Thomas wrote to say we had no right to post it. I immediately wrote to Mr. Joseph Farah, editor of World Net Daily, who requested for us to take the article down. Apparently WND G2 only goes out to paid subscribers.”
3) So, the article originated on “G2 Bulletin”, a subscription only subsidiary of World Net Daily (WND), which are both right-wing conservative, muckracking, rumor mills.
Canada Free Press (CFP) is also a right-wing uber-conservative web-publication, that has legally gotten in trouble in the past for getting caught with false stories.
G2, WND and CFP’s other columnists include: Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, the late Rev.Jerry Falwell, Dr. John Hagee, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Novak and Bill O’Rielly
4) Gordon Thomas. Mr. Thomas is an ’intelligence expert’, who is or has been an exclusive columnist for G2 Bulletin, World Net Daily, Canada Free Press, as well as ’American Free Press’, which is well known to be an ’Anti-Zionist’ (some people claim a Neo-Nazi) publication.
Mr. Thomas was the keynote speaker at the ’Anti-Zionist’, Holocaust-denying “4th Conference on Authentic History, Real News and the First Amendment”, hosted by the founder of the American Free Press and the white supremicist ’Populist Party’ (the party of KKK Grand Wizard David Duke), Willis Carto.
Some titles of Mr. Thomas’ other articles: “Brit MI6 confirms bin Laden nukes”, “Russian WMDs hidden in U.S.” and from 2003: “Smoking Gun: Saddam’s Bodyguard Reveals Secret Arsenal”, in which he claims he “independently obtained documents smuggled out of Iraq which show he (Saddam) does have weapons of mass destruction that have eluded discovery by UN inspectors.” including “motorised underwater chemical weaponized mines”, “self-detonating precise guided missiles” and warheads stockpiled in sand bunkers, all of which are “concealed in a tunnel complex deep beneath the sewers of Baghdad”. He also wrote a book called “Seeds of Fire” in Dec 2001 in which he claims China used bin Laden to assault U.S. on 9/11.
5) This “article” by Mr.Thomas appears to have been then disseminated by “The Epoch Times”, a privately owned newspaper, originally published in Chinese with close ties to Falun Gong. The photo in question was not included in the article.
6) A different article: http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-3-29/67906.html DOES show a different photo which is said to have been doctored by Chinese to exclude what purportedly shows a Chinese policeman dressed like a Tibetan with a machete.
7) The article nor the information within it does not appear in any ’mainstream’ news outlet.
8) An email to the GCHQ (UK Government Communications Headquarters - the centre for Her Majesty’s Government’s Signal Intelligence activities) which is the main focus of the article, questioning the validity of the article yielded this response from Alan Thompson, Press Officer at the GCHQ:
“Thank you for your email. It is GCHQ’s long-standing policy to respond that we are able to neither confirm nor deny in respect to enquiries on intelligence matters. I would simply add that I am not aware of Gordon Thomas making any approach to GCHQ prior to publishing on this subject; such an approach would invariably be directed through the Press Office. I hope that is of some help.”
9) A search of the website of the TCHRD (Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy), which is referenced underneath the image on the kalachakranet.org website, reveals none of the information reported in the article. Downloading a pdf file of “The 2003 TCHRD Annual Report” also makes no mention of any incidents of this nature and does not show this photo.
10) I then emailed TCHRD asking them if they could identify the image. I then received this email this morning from Tashi Phuntsok at the TCHRD:
“The photo you are referring has nothing to do with the recent unrest in Lhasa. It was true that the photo was depicted in our 2003 TCHRD Annual report back cover. The photo was a part of filmshoot (A MOVIE) made in Tibet where Chinese armies wore the monk robes. We received the photos in 2003.”
11) I did some further searching which led to two sources who state that the film in question was Xiaogang Feng’s “A World Without Thieves”, filmed in Tibet and China in April-May 2004. It is a film with strong Buddhist themes, and settings that include a Tibetan monastery, a train leaving Tibet for ’inland’ China, an undercover police force, etc…
Whether or not this is the actual film is still a question in my mind. The 2003 TCHRD report was 1st released in January 2004, before shooting began on “World without Thieves”. And Mr. Phuntsok says they recieved the image in 2003. But for arguments sake, if we say that Mr. Phuntsok may have confused that date, the 2003 report was re-released in Tibetan in June 2004, 2 months after the film began shooting. So it is possible that this could have been the film, but I am not confident in saying so. Regardless, Mr. Phuntsok asserts that it is from the set of a film shot in Tibet.
12) After forwarding this information to the webmaster at Kalachakra.net, he changed the subtitle of the photo to read: “This is not an uncommon ’tactical move’ from the Chinese government, as could be seen on the back-cover of the 2003 annual TCHRD Report. This photo was apparently made when monks refused to play as actors in a movie, so soldiers were ordered to put on robes.”
While this is slightly more accurate, it is still misleading… as he decided to interpret the information I gave him differently than the truth I offered. Nowhere does this information suggest that monks refused to be actors in the film. Without knowing what film it is actually from, this is just not possible to know. The people in the photo may not have even been real soldiers. Even if they were real Chinese soldiers, they are routinely asked to be extras in films made in China. The 2002 movie ’Hero’ used 18,000 soldiers as extras, for example.
UPDATE - TUES. APRIL 8: The International Campaign for Tibet made a statement via their website www.savetibet.org that they do not regard this photo as credible evidence of Chinese soldiers disguising themselves as Buddhist monks during unrest in Lhasa last month. They aknowledge that they are in possession of similar images of soldiers carrying monks’ robes in the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, which were taken during a film shoot in 2001 which involved soldiers appearing as monks.
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