Phurbu Thinley
Dharamsala, January 10: China says it has released world’s first Tibetan-language office software, its state controlled news agency reported Wednesday.
The newly released “Neo-shine Tibet Office 3.0” has been jointly developed by China Standard Software Corporation (CSCC) and Tibet University.
“Schools in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, are expected to be equipped with the software” CSCC manager Han Nai Ping was quoted as saying.
“The software is world-leading because the programmers have tackled several technological difficulties, such as the coding and input of the Tibetan language,” said Han.
According to the report, the office software is expected to replace Microsoft Office which was previously widely used in Tibetan-speaking regions, but requires additional plug-ins for the use of the Tibetan language.
The report also stated that Chinese companies are also developing 12 other Tibetan Software products, including “STAR Tibetan for Windows 2000/XP” and “Tibetan operating system for Linux” and are expected to be launched later in 2008.
The report also says the latest software has been released in an effort to facilitate the use of computers among Tibetans and push the development of information industry in Tibet.
But such one-sided developmental assertions by Chinese authorities and media makes little sense to Tibetans who are completely denied of freedom of information inside Tibet, where flow of information is tightly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which routinely censors information deemed to be negative in content or those that expresses the Tibetan cultural or political aspirations.
Last month, a Tibetan language online discussion forum with over 6,200 registered members was shut down for having content that was against Chinese law, according to a notice on its website.
The popular forum, which was hosted at www.Tibet123.com, was shut down for containing “illegal content,” according to a notice on the Web site.
The notice says it “strongly condemns the ‘rotten apple in the barrel’ who published harmful information.”
This was not the first time that a Tibetan forum has been forced to shut down by Chinese Communist authorities. There are other Tibetan sites, which have been routinely facing similar restrictions.
The Chinese government blocks access to thousands of news Web sites and chat forums. It regularly jams Chinese-, Tibetan- and Uyghur-language programs of international radio stations. The authorities are also now said to be concentrating on blogs and video-sharing sites and mobile phone text-messaging to control flow of information.
On top of these, majority of Tibetans are still illiterate and more so in computer fields. Besides, Tibetan language is fast being surpassed by the use of Chinese language inside Tibet, allegedly as a result of China’s discriminative policy on Tibet.
Tibet: A human Development and Environment Report, a comprehensive report released last month by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, says China is responsible for Tibet’s abysmal 48 percent literacy rate.
The report points out that the development taking place in Tibet under Chinese rule is not helping the Tibetan people and is resulting in the erosion of Tibetan culture.
