A Mission of Dissent In the Heart of Beijing - Caution, Resilience Aided Pro-Tibet Team

Washington Post

Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 23, 2008; Page A01

BEIJING — Sam Maron came to China posing as a tourist excited about his first trip to the country. With his point-and-shoot camera and monotone T-shirts, he blended into the crowds of other foreigners in town for the Olympic Games.

Had Chinese authorities bothered to check his luggage and that of his companions, they might have gotten a hint of what was to come: a 25-by-15-foot white nylon sheet, a handful of black Sharpie markers, climbing ropes, harnesses and walkie-talkies.

Within days of the group’s arrival, the items had been assembled.

Shortly before dawn on Aug. 15, Maron, two other Americans, a Canadian woman and a British man were hanging off the side of a billboard next to the new headquarters of China’s state-run television station, CCTV, and raising a banner that said “Free Tibet.”

It was yet another victory for Students for a Free Tibet, an activist organization based in New York that has pulled off eight protests over two weeks in one of the most locked-down countries in the world, a record far surpassing that of any other group.

Activists upset over China’s hosting of the Games had hoped demonstrators would descend on Beijing in droves this month. The groups’ causes included human rights, religious freedom, environmentalism and media freedom, as well as Darfur and China’s role there.

But with the Olympics ending on Sunday, few groups have demonstrated. Many activists proved unable to evade Chinese security authorities long enough to stage a successful protest; others, facing severe visa restrictions, never even got into the country.

Protests by Students for a Free Tibet have been far more theatrical. As of Friday, 55 volunteers from the group had been detained or deported for their short-lived demonstrations in some of Beijing’s most iconic venues: Tiananmen Square, the National Stadium, the Olympic Green. Six are still being held on a 10-day detention sentence, and four were taken away by police Thursday, their whereabouts unknown.

How the group, a grass-roots organization using about 150 volunteers and a budget of $1 million in donations, managed to outmaneuver the vast Chinese security apparatus is a study in persistence, planning and passion. Their goal was to draw attention to what they say is the oppression of a region that has been under Beijing’s control since 1950.

Authorities in Beijing maintain that Tibet is an inalienable part of China and that foreigners do not understand the situation there. Protesters, they say, are intent on simply embarrassing China.

Maron, 22, who graduated from the University of Vermont in May, doesn’t see it that way.

“I don’t expect Tibet to be free once the Olympics end,” he said, “but we’re trying to take the spotlight away from China’s growth and put it on the abuses of their occupation.”

The Plan

The planning for the Beijing protests, funded mostly through individual donations of as little as $10, began in earnest earlier this year as volunteers from around the world flooded Chinese visa offices with their applications.

Those who were approved deployed to Beijing in teams of four or five, with specific instructions. The teams were to operate independently and with only minimal communication with the outside. Each knew its own mission but was provided with little information about the other teams. That way, if one was captured, it couldn’t tip off authorities to the broader plans.

Separately, a group of “citizen journalists” working for Students for a Free Tibet was assigned to photograph, film and otherwise document each protest and post footage on the Internet. A “witness” would watch and serve as a spokesman to the media if the protesters were arrested.

While in China, these observers were not to interact with the protesters. In many cases they would be told the time and location of the demonstrations — or “actions” — minutes before they happened. Only when speaking to reporters were they to identify themselves as spokesmen for Students for a Free Tibet.

Maron said he was assigned to what became known as Group 6. Its members had never met before a planning meeting in San Francisco this summer.

Besides Maron, the two other Americans were Bianca Bockman, 27, a substitute teacher from Oakland, Calif., who is active in animal and human rights campaigns, and Kelly Osborne, 39, a youth minister from Oklahoma City.

They were joined by Canadian Nicole Rycroft, 41, formerly a nationally ranked rower in Australia and head of an environmental group, and Britain’s Phil Kirk, 24, an experienced rock climber who works in a sports equipment store.

Their motivations were as diverse as their backgrounds. Some had been inspired by listening to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. Others had spent time in India or Nepal and heard stories of Tibetan repression.

Rycroft said her goal was to tell the Chinese government: “It takes more than just economic might to be a world leader. Justice has to be part of that.” Osborne said he hoped he could inspire ordinary Chinese to get involved. “I believed that as human beings, the Chinese people, if they knew what was really going on in Tibet, they would be outraged by that as well,” he said.

For months, Maron agonized over whether to volunteer. His parents were worried he would get hurt. He was concerned he would never be able to get a Chinese visa again.

“But the more I thought about it, this is something I felt I had to do. I realized that I have the ability to go and to go speak out and in a way that a lot of Tibetans are not able to,” he said.

So on July 31, he boarded a plane to Beijing.

The Adjustment

Maron met his co-conspirators in a two-bedroom apartment hotel in the central part of the city. None spoke Chinese, and only one had been to Beijing before.

They spent the first few days checking out their assigned target — a tourist spot near the Great Wall — but they found security there too tight. They needed a new plan.

Armed with a Lonely Planet phrase book, they hit all the other major sites in Beijing in search of a new location: the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Sanlitun bar street. They were careful not to blow their covers. They ate Chinese for every meal, went drinking, played a few matches of Ping-Pong.

“We were tourists through and through. They would have gotten really bored if they followed us,” Bockman said.

In their spare time, the group’s members worked on the banner in their apartment, using pens to carefully write F-R-E-E T-I-B-E-T in giant letters. They copied the four Chinese characters with an equivalent meaning from a piece of paper they had brought from the United States.

All the while, they carefully followed a set of rules: limit personal e-mail; use pay phones to check in with family and friends; in phone conversations, use vague phrases such as “Hi, I’m fine” and “We’re having a great time.”

When they talked about the protest in their hotel room, they turned on the shower or the TV to try to drown out any listening devices that might have been planted. All notes were ripped into tiny shreds, separated into piles so they could not be reassembled easily, and disposed of in multiple trash cans on the street.

One day they were riding in a taxi along Beijing’s Third Ring Road when Bockman spotted the gleaming new CCTV building, an imposing structure of twisted steel, and suggested it might make a good target.

Security around the building was light. While the tower was under construction and probably dangerous to climb, a row of billboards nearby with steel frame grids seemed sturdy.

Most of the signs had corporate ads, but one of them said simply “Beijing 2008″ and featured the Olympic rings.

Perfect.

The ‘Poignant’ Point

At 5:45 a.m. a few days later, team members were climbing the billboard.

Rycroft and Kirk went first. Their job was to get the banner to the top and unroll it.

The three Americans played a support role. They were the lookouts.

Within 10 minutes, Rycroft and Kirk had scaled the structure and managed to unfurl the “Free Tibet” banner. They were taking some Tibetan flags out of their backpacks when trouble arrived.

The Chinese security forces were fast. Maron was the first to spot them and their clubs.

“It’s hard not to be nervous and scared when you see 12 paramilitary police in full camouflage sprinting towards you across the parking lot,” he recalled.

Maron tried to talk to them, to explain that if they just left the group alone everyone would come down safely. But three of the men grabbed Bockman and pulled her down. The others quickly scrambled down, and all five were put inside a white police van.

By early afternoon, the foreigners were on a plane home.

Back in central Beijing, the Chinese police were still looking for accomplices.

Kurt Langer, a 34-year-old who works in the music industry in New York, was the “witness” assigned to the CCTV protest. He had arrived separately, evaded capture and was still talking to reporters.