A Silver Bag, a Few Lights and Detention in Beijing

This fairy tale begins with a giant silver purse. Visualize that purse being carried in a taxi through Beijing. Oh no, it did not glow. Despite all the brightness inside, the purse perfectly contained the light we were about to unfurl.

But wait, let me back track, just for a moment.

On Sunday, during the 2008 Olympic games’ closing ceremonies, the Chinese government deported 10 Tibet supporters. By 8pm Sunday night these ten citizen journalists and activists were on their way home. They had been sentenced to 10 days of prison; six of them were held for over five days. 

Yesterday, today and tomorrow, there were, are and will be thousands of Tibetans who remain detained since the uprising in March, with no foreseeable release, due process or trial. Hundreds of Chinese are in prison as well. Imagine the story we learned about recently: the Chinese government sentenced two 70 year old ladies to one year of reeducation camp because the women had applied for a permit to protest in the specially designated areas which the government set up explicitly for that purpose during the games.

I was detained for a mere 12 hours and for that reason, I write with a bit of trepidation. I don’t want to give myself or those 12 hours too much airtime when the point is to draw attention to the situation in Tibet. But I trust the power of stories and humbly offer the details of those 12 hours of my detention as a small window into a large and complex situation. Maybe windows bring light, maybe a view of the stars, maybe some fresh air. As a wise man in New Orleans once said: you never, never know.

So, do you remember that silver purse…? 

From that purse, we pulled out our shinning, bright banner with hundreds of small blue lights attached to it. Despite all the time and manual labor that went into making this beautiful message, it was snatched out of our hands only 15 seconds later when an undercover cop came around to the front side, looked at what it said momentarily and then ripped it out of our hands. He dragged it to one side as two other uniformed policemen approached. Within about fifteen minutes, we counted a total of 27 people surrounding us. A few of them were uniformed cops, the rest were undercover, government agents or civilian vigilantes; all had arrived on the scene within minutes, despite the fact that it was 11:30pm at night in a sparsely populated part of the city. If anybody ever tried to argue that China is moving towards democracy or that things aren’t so bad there, these 27 state agents were a clear indicator to me of the incredible amount of resources the Chinese government was pouring into control and censorship of anything but the happy go-lucky face they wanted the world to see during the Olympic games. 

At this point, our flashy, blinking banner was balled up in a pile on one side. Surrounded by 27 officials, we waited to see what would happen. Going into this action, we expected arrest, detention, interrogation and deportation. The unknowns were how it would all go down: how the action would be received by citizens and police alike, how long we would be detained and what the treatment would be like during that time. 

The style of arrest was the first surprise. For one, none of the uniformed or plainclothes policemen carried any weapons. Secondly, there was no handcuffing, and in fact, no touching whatsoever (later on they searched through our stuff and asked us to empty our pockets, but we were never patted down or asked to take our shoes off, normal protocol in the US). Once they were ready to go, they ordered us to form a single file line and get into the small police van. Lastly, what caught me by surprise was how obsessive they were about taking our pictures and video footage. For the first few hours of our detention, there were at least three video cameras rolling and twenty cameras snapping photos at any given moment. Even the next morning, as we were being shuffled through the airport the cameras were rolling at all times (once we were at the airport and in a public place, we all got a little more boisterous. Personally, I enjoyed making the peace symbol, smiling and saying Free Tibet into the camera).

We were driven to a nearby complex of empty buildings that appeared to be some sort of technical college. Of any of the moments throughout the night when I was a little scared, this was one of them. It was dark outside. We were in China. And the police van just pulled into an empty complex of buildings somewhere in the sprawling city of Beijing. Nobody in the world knew where we were.  But as soon as we got out of the van and were greeted by a new group of officials snapping away with their cameras, my fear dissipated – mostly I was struck by how bizarre the whole situation was.

We were escorted upstairs, where they placed us in a conference room of sorts with a long table and swivel leather chairs. Lots of people came in and out of the room and took pictures of us and said things to each other in Chinese. We waited.

After a little while, we were separated for questioning. According to my teammates’ accounts later on that night, I was lucky to get stuck with the meanest of the interrogators. He sneered and snarled and made a few threatening remarks. As soon as I responded to his questions with “I would like to speak to a representative of my embassy,” he got very angry with me and said, “you know what you have done is illegal in China and that you will be punished for it.” He continued by asking me about Tibet and whether I had ever been there. When I responded that I hadn’t, he said, “you are so stupid! You are so stupid for doing this thing with Tibet.” And then told me that I was behaving very badly, “you have such bad behavior.” I replied that I thought my behavior had been quite good!

As the questioning went on, the questions became more and more meaningless:

Him: “How did you get to the place where you did the action?”

Me: By taxi.

Him: “Five of you in one taxi?!”

Me: No, we took two taxis.

Him: What was the address you told the taxi driver to go to?

Me: I didn’t have an address.

Him: No address?!? How did you know where to go?

Me: We told the taxi driver to take us to the bird’s nest.

Him: So, you told the taxi driver to take you to the south of the bird’s nest?

Me: Yes…

Him: What did you do when you got out of the taxi?

And on and on like that until 2:40am in the morning.

At 3am we were taken downstairs into an auditorium, with blue chairs in rows and a podium at the front. These next seven hours were characterized by waiting, uncomfortable snoozing, more waiting, a game of hearts (thanks to Jake’s deck of cards), a lukewarm bowl of rice porridge at 4 in the morning (ugh), a second-hand smoke headache from the lack of ventilation, still more waiting, a long conversation with one of the policeman (who knows if he was trying to get information out of us, but at least he was doing it in a very friendly way) and the idea running through my head that we could be held there for days. At one point, they ordered us out of our chairs and outside where they asked us to hold up our night bright banner so that they could take another round of pictures! Bizarre indeed.

At 10am, we were told to get our luggage and again, in a single file line (always a single file line!), get into the van where we would be taken to the airport. Ah, this was a sigh of relief. We are at the beginning of our long journey home. But the next three hours seemed interminable: waiting in the van and getting a laughing attack only to be reprimanded by the officers. “Be quiet!” they barked. Being at the airport with our entourage of 20 Chinese officials seemed comical. At the check-in counter an American woman in front of us became quite nervous when she noticed a guy standing next to the counter and filming the line. She turned around and asked if we knew that he was filming. In good spirits (as home got closer and closer) we replied, “don’t worry, he’s with us!” She wasn’t sure how to take that and we clarified: “we’re being deported for doing a Free Tibet protest.” Later, to go through security, we were put in the athlete’s line (less of a wait). The guy behind us must have thought we looked like an awfully motley crew to be athletes and asked, “what sport do you guys play?” We replied, “protest sports!”

And finally, the last moment that stands out in my mind was on the runway to the plane. Half way down, we turned around, raised our fists and peace signs and yelled back to our entourage with huge, beaming smiles: “Free Tibet!”

So, as you can see, it was mild treatment (playing cards and being fed), although still ridiculous to think that just because we held up a banner with two simple words on it, we were arrested, detained for 12 hours, interrogated for one and a half and deported.

On Sunday night, as Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) organizers sat around to celebrate their successes, long-time activist Kirsten Westby put it succinctly: “the Chinese government spent $40 billion on security and had 500,000 security personnel during the Olympic games. Students for a Free Tibet had $50,000, 150 volunteers and was able to pull off eight beautiful, creative, non-violent actions inside China.”

The lesson I take from this is that even though we are up against some mighty powerful forces (world super powers, billions of dollars, war, and terrible human rights abuses) the powers are not impenetrable.

As Sam said to Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings, “Frodo, there’s still some good left in the world. And it’s worth fightin’ for!”