Rev. Danny Fisher

The Washington Post today has a great feature about the 41-year-old Tibetan writer Woeser, who lives in Beijing and willingly risks her freedom by chronicling the crackdown on Tibetans at a blog hosted by a server in the U.S.

As Olympic torchbearers prepare to scale the Tibetan side of Mount Everest and envoys of the Dalai Lama have begun informal talks with their Chinese counterparts over the current crisis in Tibet, a global battle rages over how to interpret what is happening in the remote Himalayan region. But almost entirely absent from the discussion are voices of Tibetans living within Tibet, the people who can describe everyday life and let others judge whether they are being wronged.

“The main voice is hers,” said Robbie Barnett, director of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. “She is one of the very, very few Tibetans who have been able to put their name to the discussion and have managed to stay afloat.”

Woeser’s writing finds no favor in the Chinese government. Her books are banned here and three different blogs she maintained on Chinese servers have been shut down in the past two years — on government orders, a friend at one of the Internet companies told her. Her current blog, http://woeser.middle-way.net, is hosted on a computer server in the United States, but even that one temporarily succumbed to an attack April 26.

“It’s not only me. Many scholars do not have freedom of speech. Their blogs and Web sites are also blocked,” Woeser said in a telephone interview from her 20th-floor apartment in China’s capital. Although her house arrest has been lifted, officials from the local security bureau keep watch at her building, and she says she is often followed.

“This reflects the Chinese government’s strict control over speech,” she said. “They don’t want me to leave this kind of record, to talk about what happened in Tibet in a real way. This voice is what the government does not want to hear.”

If you have a moment, be sure to read Jill Drew’s whole piece about this extraordinarily brave woman.