If Tragyal was surprised when police showed up at his office in April, he did not show it, his co-workers say. If anything, he wondered what had taken them so long.
It turns out that the public security bureau in Qinghai Province simply needed a full month to translate his Tibetan prose into Chinese.
That night, as officers searched his home, carting away computers, handwritten notes and copies of the offending book, Tragyal, who like many Tibetans uses one name, stood by silently.
“He was perfectly serene in front of the policemen and this somehow calmed my fears,” his wife wrote in an e-mail.
His trial is expected to begin this month in the provincial capital, Xining. His book, The Line Between Sky and Earth, will undoubtedly be the main evidence. An employee of a state-run publishing house, whose earlier books called on Tibetans to slough off their superstitious ways, Tragyal, 47, faces the charge of “splittism,” one of the gravest crimes under Chinese law. If recent history is any guide, the trial will be brief and the penalty severe.
The book, published illegally in March, is a poetic, painstakingly written indictment of Chinese rule and a call for a “peaceful revolution” against what Tragyal describes as Beijing’s heavy-handed governing style.
Such strictures have tightened since spring 2008, many Tibetans say, when a deadly burst of rioting in Lhasa elicited a government response that has sent hundreds of monks, nomads, students and shopkeepers to jail — and several of those accused of rioting to their deaths — but unlike previous crackdowns on dissent in Tibet and adjoining provinces, the current campaign has deeply unnerved those Tibetans who usually keep their heads down.
SOUL-SEARCHING
Robert Barnett, director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia, said two years of detentions, secret trials and torture accusations has prompted soul-searching and quiet resistance.
Elderly Tibetans have published memoirs on long-forgotten massacres by Communist troops.
Middle-age functionaries have openly voiced qualms about their role in China’s bureaucracy.
Online, the young and the radicalized post provocative anti-Chinese comments.
“People are no longer hiding behind the tradition of self-censorship that comes from fear,” Barnett said. “What we’re seeing is a new kind of intellectual heroism.”
That shift can be seen in the public transformation of Tragyal, better known by his pen name, Shogdung. The founder of the New School of Thought, he ran an informal salon in Xining where other young iconoclasts shared the writings of philosophers such as Friedrich von Hayek or denounced the Tibetan belief in reincarnation.
“Some people misunderstood him, saying he opposed Buddhism,” said Phagmo Tashi, a friend and a filmmaker. “The truth is, he only opposed certain aspects of religion that violate universal values, like freedom and dignity.”
If Tragyal was once maligned for sentiments that some deemed anti-Buddhist, or for printing his essays in state-run newspapers, he has become something of a hero since publishing The Line Between Sky and Earth.
SOLD OUT
Its print run of 1,000 copies — and the thousands of pirated versions that followed — quickly sold out in Qinghai and beyond.
In the book, he apologizes for his previous writings and his failure to speak out after the Lhasa riots, saying: “I kept a disciplined silence and stayed passive like a coward, ultimately out of fear.”
What changed him, he said, was the sight of so many monks marching in the streets and the stories about harsh punishments for the protesters. He was also moved by passive resisters like Runggye Adak, a nomad whose videotaped paean to the Dalai Lama earned him an eight-year prison term.
“I got to thinking that there could be no worse suffering than this, even if someone were to murder your own father, because every time my thoughts turned to the methods of torture used by the dictators, my hair stood on end, I got goose bumps and my heart leapt out of my throat,” he wrote.
Perhaps the most audacious sections of his book call on the Tibetan intelligentsia and state workers to stop cooperating with the Beijing government and to wage a campaign of civil disobedience. Though Tragyal was careful not to advocate Tibetan independence, it is unlikely that the authorities would recognize such a distinction.
“I’ve read the book again and again, but I don’t see anything that breaks the law,” said his daughter, Yeshi Tsomo, 25, an editor at a state-owned Tibetan-language publisher. “I fear the government won’t care because they probably don’t like the idea behind the book.”
PRISON SENTENCES
In recent months, a number of prominent Tibetans have been given long prison sentences based on what defense lawyers contend was flimsy evidence or forced confessions.
The highest-profile case involved Karma Samdrup, an antiques dealer and philanthropist who was tried on 12-year-old charges of selling stolen relics. His real offense, family members say, was seeking the freedom of his two brothers, who were detained after accusing a local police chief of hunting endangered animals in a nature preserve.
In June, Samdrup was sentenced to 15 years in prison. In a sign of the legal system’s capriciousness, his lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang (浦志強), said he had not learned until Aug. 2 that Samdrup’s appeal had been turned down a month before — the day after it was filed. More worrisome, Samdrup’s wife said, is that he has essentially disappeared, with both the detention center and the court claiming they have no idea where he is.
“How is it that such a good man can be made to suffer so much?” his wife, Zhenga Cuomao, asked in an interview.
It is the sort of question that Tragyal poses again and again in his book. He asks why Tibetan society is suffused with fear and why China ignores the human rights conventions it has signed.
At the end of the book, he acknowledges that his very words will lead to his own perdition.
“I am naturally terrified at the thought that once this essay has been made public, I will eventually have to endure the hot hells and cold hells on earth,” he writes. “I may ‘lose my head because of my mouth,’ but this is the path I have chosen, so the responsibility is mine.”
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