Image:xinhua
If we are to believe communist China’s propaganda machine, Xinhua, the image you are looking at represents the standard of health care available for Tibetans under the tender mercies of the occupying communist regime. According to a report which celebrated International Nurses Day on May 13th a young Tibetan patient is being treated by “Yangzong (editors note: a Sinocised version of a Tibetan name, used to suggest the economic and employment opportunities which presumably abound inside Tibet, thanks to Beijing’s ‘enlightened’ rule) a nurse of the department of pediatrics of the People’s Hospital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, takes care of a child who suffers from food poisoning”.
It is only when we stand back and consider that this scene was arranged with a psychotic attention to detail that the chilling awfulness of what we are witnessing dawns. This cynical deception obscures a disturbing truth that in their own nation Tibetans are second-class citizens denied access to a quality health service, through a range of economic, social and political measures, which are wholly to the advantage of Chinese colonizers. Rather like the crude disinformation peddled by Nazi-Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_concentration_camp which sought to convince the world that Gypsies, Jews and other oppressed peoples were receiving high levels of care, China’s ministry of propanganda is unsleeping in its efforts to camouflage the suffering and deprivation it has inflicted upon Tibetans and Uyghurs.
Under a regime of medical apartheid for Tibetans there are no ‘angels-of-mercy’ dispensing comfort and treatments in high-tech and modern facilities, most Tibetans find themselves at the back of a depressingly long line when it comes to health provision, and then are charged rates few can afford. Little wonder so many have to rely upon traditional Tibetan medicine, or so-called barefoot doctors. The only time that the Chinese state mobilises health provision across Tibet is when implementing one of the many campaigns of mass sterilisations, where Tibetan women are subject to forced sterilisation, often without anaesthetic, and most certainly utterly lacking the service and care so crudely staged in the image above.
