Tensions have escalated at St Anne’s following an incident involving a student who displayed a Tibetan flag in her window.
Last week third year Sophie Chau had stones thrown through her window. A number of Chinese students have now hung the Chinese flag in response to her Tibetan one.
The day after the stone-throwing, carried out by three unidentified students, Chao was approached by a Chinese acquaintance in college who asked her to take down her flag.
The student, who wished to remain anonymous, defended his decision.
He said, “I asked Sophie if she could consider taking the flag down because we didn’t want to escalate this issue.
“Hanging the ‘Snow Lion’ flag is a very serious criminal offence in China, as people perceive it as a symbol of violence. Any Chinese students would be disturbed by this flag.”
Chao responded, saying that the Tibetan flag “is in no way anti-Chinese.”
“The Tibetan flag is not pro-independence; it is a pro-human rights and this is not particular to China. This distinction is one that many Chinese people fail to make.”
The political stand-off in St Anne’s has affected the student body, with Chao saying, “The atmosphere in College is slightly tense. My flag looks down on the Quad. It is provoking quite a bit of discussion.”
One first year at St Anne’s described college atmosphere as “awkward”.
She added, “Expressing political opinion is one thing, but it shouldn’t have to affect the community we all live and work in such a negative way.”
St Anne’s College Dean, Dr Liora Lazarus, condemned the response to Chao’s flag, although she admitted that she could see why it might have caused offence.
She said, “Throwing stones at somebody for whatever political beliefs they hold is just not acceptable.
“But we appreciate that there are some students in this College who do not agree with the hanging of the Tibetan flag.”
One St Anne’s student, Edward Allbutt, an undergraduate in Arabic studies, described the violence that had taken place as “shocking”.
He claims to have found the behaviour of some Chinese students strange. “It’s frankly bizarre that they think they can just casually complain to the authorities and so force someone to stop making a slightly controversial political statement.”
Chao has expressed surprise at the controversy she has caused.
She said, “I was disturbed by the reaction of the Chinese students studying in Oxford. I had expected a higher degree of open-mindedness from these people.”
The College authorities claim that they do not want to intervene in this situation from any political angle and stressed that they wished to remain neutral.
Lazarus stated, “It is not the place of the College Dean to stipulate whether or not people should exercise their political rights.”
“All the students are intelligent and are able to make this decision for themselves. The College respects everyone’s right to express their political belief and is certainly not taking a political stand.”
To this she added, “Everyone has a right to hang up a flag should they chose to do so. At this stage we would like the students to come to a resolution on their own.”
JCR President Amaru Villanueva Rance, said he supports students’ rights to express their beliefs, but added that he hoped students would be able to work through the issue without too much College interference.
He said, “What we don’t want is latent animosity in College. We don’t want to cauterise debate and pretend nothing is going on. We also want to prevent the issue from snowballing.”
There have been no further incidents of physical hostility from any students in St Anne’s.
However Chao claims that due to the negative response, she no longer intends to remove her flag any time soon.
She said, “Recent developments have placed me in a position where I cannot remove it. Chinese flags will stay up and it will legitimise their claim of being the victim in this scenario.”
She added, “Some college students have even asked me to get hold of Tibetan flags, and the order is underway!”
In a bid to settle the problem, Villanueva Rance said that he was willing to give time to the issue at last Sunday’s JCR meeting.
“Before the meeting I mentioned that we would be talking about the flags issue. I was hoping that there would be a debate and that the students would work out a solution or a compromise.
“We made reference to the situation during the meeting but it seems that no-one turned up to discuss it.”
He added, “The JCR wants to protect freedom of expression and in this sense we support people’s freedom to exhibit their flags in public from their balconies.”
Excess baggage
We are destroying our planet. It’s an idea with which we all ought to be painfully familiar. It may sit uncomfortably with our lavish western religion of consumerism, but it’s something we’ve all got to get used to. If we’re actually going to do something about the environmental disaster that we all of us in our hearts know is coming, then this mandates changes. Some will be more drastic than others, and some must necessarily hurt. What society really needs is a solution that, while meaningful, impinges on our lives as little as possible: a plastic bag tax.
Before the reactionary-minded nanny-state-haters among you balk, let me give you a few statistics. Last year, an estimated 13 billion plastic carrier bags were given away to shoppers in the UK, 217 plastic bags for every English citizen. Worldwide, the figure is closer to 500 billion. Though these bags are called disposable, that is precisely what they are not. Instead, each bag will take around 1,000 years to degrade. They remain as unsightly blots on our landscape, an unhappy reminder of our sheer apathy towards the well-being of our planet.
Consider also how plastic bags are made. Most plastic bags are made from high density polyethylene, produced from ever-precious crude oil. Most of these bags are made in south-east Asia, and by the time they reach merry old England, they will have travelled over 8,000 miles, with a massive carbon footprint to boot.
We are all guilty in this matter. We all know that we should recycle that empty wine bottle, reuse that carrier bag, turn off that light switch; but we don’t. We need a persistent nudge in the right direction. As far as plastic bags go, the Irish government has the right idea. In 2001 they introduced a plastic bag tax. Before the levy was introduced Ireland consumed 1.2 billion plastic bags, or 316 per person. After a year, plastic bag consumption had fallen by a massive 90%, saving 18,000,000 litres of oil in the process. These figures speak for themselves.
At last, our government is catching up, with Gordon Brown last week warning supermarkets that if they don’t cut down on plastic bags, he would force a change. My question to Gordon is: why wait?
Supermarkets are monolithic organisations, reluctant to change. They fear that a charge on plastic bags would send their customers scurrying away to their competitors. The fairest way to force change would be to mandate a universal charge in every supermarket, thus levelling the playing field. A reduction in plastic bag usage isn’t going to save the planet, but it would be a step in the right direction.
‘Every little helps’ they say. Well, let’s start with our addiction to plastic bags.