It seems that the world has sat up and taken notice of the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ This state sponsored apparatus of 30,000 people monitors emails of Chinese citizens and blocks any website deemed controversial to the Chinese government, including sites containing the word Tibet. Check out Amnesty’s initiatives that we supportAmnesty International and www.SaveTibet.org that targets the Great Wall. Indeed, it is the only campaign we presently support because we feel it is so vital for the world to understand.

I had met with the Dalai Lama back in May in London and when asked what we in the West could do to help the Tibetan people, he had an amazing answer. He said, paraphrasing here, “If you care about Tibetans, then you care about justice. If you care about justice than help all those that lack freedoms, especially freedom of speech and press. If people had this then so many problems in the world would disappear, including for Tibet.” The wisdom of these words took awhile to penetrate my mind, but when I saw the wisdom of his words, I set out on a course. Since then, I have focused all our energies (outside of making the album) on the Great Firewall. It was my belief that if people really understood what was happening to Chinese citizens that they would be outraged.

Some very interesting things will begin to emerge over the next week. First, there will become widespread knowledge this apparatus exists – most people have not heard about this. Athletes and journalists will now be within the firewall and unable to access many things that they have taken for granted. It’s an amazing experiment, if you think about it. What happens when 20,000 Western journalists experience a taste of what it is like to have freedoms stripped from them? Judging by the initial reactions in every major newspaper around the world, they’re not too happy. I couldn’t have thought of a better breeding ground for discontent. This should not only raise the issue over the next week or two, but hopefully more than a few journalists will begin probing a bit deeper into this issue. Perhaps they may even report on it not for their own sakes alone, but for the sake of the 1.2 billion people living under Chinese control every day, including the people of Tibet.

The Chinese government has used this extreme censorship to control what the Chinese people think about their history, the history Tibet and of the Dalai Lama. The Chinese government has skewed information so much about the Dalai Lama that they refer to him as a “wolf in monks robes.” Now of course nobody living in the free world would ever think of one of the most universally beloved people in the world this way. The Chinese government is making these statements for the benefit of their citizens, who can only surf websites that verify these views. More on this soon, but now onto another interesting aspect of the Great Firewall…

US corporations aid and abet the Chinese government by building and supporting the Great Firewall. Corporations from Cisco (who defends themselves by saying they are politically neutral – they just supply what their customer wants) to Google that does no evil (at least in Western countries where the media focuses). Here’s why: The reason someone in China can’t access certain sites is because of controls that the ISPs have on all Internet traffic in China. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Myspace, etc have all modified their technology to allow the Chinese government to filter information and suppress the Chinese population – and now Olympic athletes and journalists. Their argument is weak: 1) It is better to allow some information to flow rather than none and 2) If they didn’t do it then somebody else would.

The latter argument is like saying if I didn’t supply a murderer a gun, then somebody else would. Our government does not take kindly to this line of argument in the case of a murder, but somehow it has not been high enough on the radar to apply to the 1.2 billion people under Chinese rule. The argument about some information is better than none is completely wrong. The example of the Dalai Lama is perfect. By allowing only certain information about the Dalai Lama to be accessible to Chinese citizens, the government has created a generation of people that detest the Dalai Lama. How can this help with peace at all? Instead, we see the opposite. Limited information is hardening a generation of Chinese people to an amicable solution with Tibet. How can they make peace with a man that is, “a wolf in monk’s robes??” It is not the citizens’ fault. It is the Great Firewall of China and the people that control it and the minds’ of the Chinese people. Much more to come about this…