Local Activism on a Global Stage

I don't know what our metric for "recent" is, but I'm going to refer to a specific instance of political action that is part of a broader and ongoing series of political action. It may be played out, but the People's Republic of China (PRC) crackdown on Tibetans in the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics was made visible to the world at large through the Internet. I'm not familiar with any activism sites or other technology based social networking tools that were used to organize protests within Tibet, but there were many videos posted to video sites from the spring of 2008 up through the beginning of the Olympics.

This wasn't a secret crackdown, but most everything that was being reported was based on information supplied by the Chinese government or through state sponsored news agencies. People (here and in China) knew that there was a Tibetan protest/uprising, but most news media was blocked from entering Tibet to see what was going on and very little information about the reality of the situation was available. The people who lived in Tibet and were witnessing the uprising (or riots as the PRC called them) found ways to use technology to circumvent the state media and state operated "Great Firewall of China" to get a non-state filtered point of view across.

As I noted above, I'm not certain how the Internet played into the organization of physical protests and whatnot, but the Internet and web were used to bring attention to and spread what was going on in the Tibet Autonomous Region and how the PRC controls the flow of information into and out of the country. If you go to a site like http://tibetanuprising.org/, you can see posts detailing experiences in Tibet during the lead up to the 2008 Olympics, the issues surrounding Tibet and China, and videos of the protests. What I mostly saw during that time was videos posted to YouTube and LiveLeak. You might have seen a news story about the Tibetan uprising or riots, but it tended to show aggressive protesters being subdued by perfectly behaved military officers. However, the videos posted online by anti-PRC or pro-Tibet groups showed a situation where protestors were antagonized by the state police, which led to violent clashes that started with more or less civil arrests but further devolved into protesters being severely beaten by police.

In addition to videos posted online, various sites have been created which serve to expose and bring attention to the political views and activities within China, and Tibet specifically, that would otherwise go suppressed and unnoticed in the greater global consciousness.