While the Chinese dictatorship takes the "addiction" of ethnic Chinese boys to the internet, and all the potentially anti-Party material lurking there, very seriously, that same machinery has zero tolerance for the neighbouring Tibetans under their brutal occupation who pine for their freedom and independence...
The small concrete room smells of urine. In the corner, a young woman lies on a metal cot, moaning softly and vomiting up blood. A former Buddhist nun, she is recovering from an operation on her stomach to fix internal injuries caused by beatings from Chinese guards. Her roommate, Lhundrub Zangmo, speaks in a whispery monotone. Zangmo's head is no longer shaven, and her straight black hair falls over her tight sweater emblazoned with the words The Coolest Boy. But even though she has left the clergy, Zangmo remains deeply religious. She has plastered the walls of the tiny room with photos of Buddhist deities and the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhists.
It has been only a few months since Zangmo and her friend fled Tibet on foot over the Himalayas to this squat, block-shaped center for Tibetan refugees in India. The two women had been imprisoned along with a group of other nuns, some for as long as sixteen years. They were first arrested in 1990 for staging a protest in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to demonstrate their outrage over China's continuing presence in their native land. As the women chanted "Free Tibet," Chinese police moved quickly, knocking them to the ground and dragging them to jail before their protest could attract attention. Inside the prison, Chinese authorities subjected the nuns to a brutal routine. "Police stuck electric prods into my vagina and then hung me from the ceiling," Zangmo says softly. Her voice doesn't waver, but she looks away. Some of her friends lost consciousness as soon as guards pushed the cattle prods inside them, but Zangmo remained alert throughout the torture. "I was totally, totally frightened," she says.
Police eventually transferred the women to Drapchi, the most feared prison in Lhasa. According to human rights organizations like the International Campaign for Tibet, there are hundreds of political prisoners in Tibet, the majority of them Buddhist clergy. Scores have died from torture at the hands of Chinese authorities: electric shock, hanging, forced blood extraction. "They tried to pull my arms out of my sockets, and beat my legs and arms with metal bars and shocked me," recalls Phuntsog Nyidron, another nun who was imprisoned at Drapchi. "I was worried they could easily kill me." After repeated beatings, a monk named Lobsang Choephel hanged himself at Drapchi, his body dangling from the iron bars of his cell.
The punishment was most severe for those who refused to give up their faith. "In Drapchi, there were numerous demonstrations," Zangmo says. One day, four nuns refused to renounce their Buddhist beliefs in front of the Chinese guards. "They were beaten until they died." Zangmo stares at the floor and starts to cry, her voice breaking. "They died together."
Perhaps General Electric don't fancy the idea of the market cutting back energy consumption since the power generation side of their business is far larger than the light bulb manufacturing ("the Lighting division")? Only now that other technologies have far surpassed their age-old filament light bulbs in efficiency and their current offerings are on the verge of obsolescence and outright judicial bans are they coming out with this improved incandescent bulb.
The industrial behemoths often play both sides of the field and have no (profit) incentive to change their ways until forced to do so by (the threat of) legislation. GE and their ilk could have kept improving the incandescent technology for decades while coming up with better alternatives but the status quo and all the lobbying to maintain it was deemed more profitable, regardless of environmental consequences.
The disclaimer at the bottom of the iGmail site might constitute a third "limitation"..
Tibetan exiles' mesh now under attack by Chinese!
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Tibet's Mesh
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First off, this Wi-Fi mesh is being built in the major Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala (India). After the Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong (the most murderous character in history) took over China in 1949, his first international move was to send hordes of "people's liberation army" (PLA) soldiers across the border into Tibet in 1950. By 1959 things had gotten unbearable for the Tibetans who staged an uprising against the Chinese but it was put down violently by the well-armed PLA. At that point the Dalai Lama left the Tibetan capital Lhasa and evading the PLA encampments all around the area managed to eventually cross the Himalayas into safety in India.
Well over hundred thousand Tibetans have since escaped the Chinese rule over their fatherland ("phayul" in Tibetan) and settled in refugee communities in India and in third countries. A large number have died attempting to escape, either by the harsh elements of the Himalayas or in the hands of the Chinese military hunting them down.
A great many Tibetans, mainly young children travelling in groups accompanied by a couple of adults, have also made the perilous journey into India to be able to study (free subjects without Chinese indoctrination and in their own language) in the exile-run schools in India (like the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala) before returning back to their families in the Chinese-occupied Tibet.
Now, this Wi-Fi mesh network, which is being built by some great foreign volunteers in coordination with the Tibetan exile administration, is aimed at connecting the various local institutions in a seriously hilly areas of the Himalayan foothills. The objective is to enable the sharing of information between these locations, not to create a first-person-shooter gaming network. The exiled Tibetans are extremely serious about their education *and* their ability to communicate and campaign for the freedom of their homeland in the modern world. This mesh network is aimed at facilitating both of these needs.
Meanwhile in Chinese-occupied Tibet a 29-year-old Tibetan teacher and writer, Dolma Kyab, was sentenced to 10 years in prison where the Tibetans are invariably infected with tuberculosis and other serious heath problems (besides the usual other forms of "mistreatment" by guards) for... having written a book which wasn't even published!
Details of such a heinous thought crime can be found here.
In the past the US of A took a much stronger stand against such obscene human rights violations by the Chinese regime and other dictatorships, but it is very clear that the current regime in Washington has neither the intention nor moral standing to help oppressed and occupied peoples. You see, the dictators in Beijing are among Bush's "staunchest allies" in this bizarre "global war of terror" where the occupied and the oppressed are considered to be the "terrorists"!
Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world:
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.
Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
The six million Tibetans living in the world largest concentration camp they once knew as their homeland meanwhile haven't even got a clue that the "world's most powerful man and the leader of the Free World" ever uttered those words. Even possessing a copy of the UN's Human Rights Declaration is enough to get a Tibetan slammed into the Chinese prison camps...
India is a democratic nation where its citizens enjoy certain unalienable human rights. Its people have full rights to form labour unions. Its political parties must not only appeal to the electorate but they also need to compromise their policies with those of other government parties, follow the rule of law and last but not least perform well enough to earn re-election.
In China the ruling Communist Party (CCP; with policies closer to a capitalist fasist party) does exactly what it wants in order for China to become the greatest power on earth under their rule. Sacrificing their people and even swallowing up neighbouring nations to reach that aim doesn't bother the CCP dictatorship one bit.
Case in point: The CCP recently finished the building of the massive Three Gorges Dam. Millions of locals had to be relocated with much if not most of the meager compensation stolen by opportunistic party officials. People attempting to report facts about it face arrest, suspicious muggings or worse.
In India far smaller dam projects face long delays or even cancellation because the locals have various means of defending their rights.
In China, business people with the right guanxi (political connections) can take over anyone's land and if the locals riot as their last recourse, the Party's paramilitary police will quickly take care of it.
If democracy and basic human rights meant anything to Western business people and Western politicians who are responsible for the "rules of engagement", the West would choose to invest in and trade with democratic developing nations (like India) instead of expansionist totalitarian regimes (like China).
As long as democracy and basic human rights are only paid superficial lip-service by the West, free countries will lag behind the dictatorships. Beside the West losing (selling out) its fundamental moral foundations, such policies will also encourage developing countries to adopt the more dictatorial forms of government since they are proving to be more beneficial in terms of foreign investment. In fact China is increasingly channeling its own foreign investments into Central Asia, Africa and South America, further undermining the West's half-assed efforts at encouraging democracy and human rights in those countries.
Democracy and human rights certainly incur some financial costs but are we surrendering it all up just to help global corporations rake in short-term profits? It wasn't the corporations who suffered when the Stalins, Hitlers, Maos and Hirohitos went on a rampage; no, it was people who took the bullets in the name of their continued freedom.
If today's people still value those ideals, then global trade could easily be harnessed as a force for good. If countries like India were to be given preferential trade treatment over expansionist dictatorships like China, it would force the Chinese people to rethink their system and policies instead of giving them an edge over free societies.
Against the regime in China economic action (embargoes and progressively increased export duties) would work very well since it is the money-making (at least in the coastal regions and by the business classes) that provides the criminal regime some kind of air of "legitimacy" in the eyes of the ignorant populace who don't know the least thing about actual history.
Are you promoting a view that when an expansionist fascist regime totally wipes out its peaceful neighbouring state to steal their national resources and to advance their militaristic geo-political position, the rest of the world should just... do exactly nothing? Actually just keep doing business with that regime??
Of course governments, those representatives of the people, must make their choices wrt. China based on facts. If China was not committing genocide outside its borders I'd give it more time but their victims in Tibet don't have that luxury.
In the end the people of China are responsible for their regime's crimes whether they were elected them or not.
Do you not realize that the Chinese regime is not only controlling their native Chinese population but they've been in the process of sucking the life out of their neighbouring Tibet for more than half a century now!?
I feel a lot of sympathy for the Chinese who've died or who've been jailed and tortured for disobeying their formerly communist and now fascist regime, but in the end changing that is up to the admittedly indifferent and mostly indoctrinated Chinese population.
However when the Chinese people allow their communist party gestapo to continue raping and demolishing their *peaceful* Tibetan neighbours, *that's* something no decent person in the whole world should tolerate without taking some action.
It's both ridiculous and ironic at the same time that the general indoctrinated (everyone's spending a minute in the Chinese "education system" gets a full load of brainwashing, that is a verifiable fact) Chinese population is taught to hate the Japanese to their guts for what took place in *parts* of China during their *civil war* over sixty years ago while these same idiots are absolutely idolizing their own expansionism-driven 100% destruction of Tibet.
*That* is what should drive the action against the Chinese regime by both decent Chinese people (who are few but do exist) and anybody else who feels that wiping out a peaceful nation (which Tibet was for centuries after adopting buddhism) can not be tolerated.
Geeks with respect for human life and dignity can play a major part in breaking the fascist Communist Party's stranglehold on information. I've made my informed choice and you can either 1) play ignorant and sympathize with the Chinese regime, 2) wash your hands and ignore the whole thing, or 3) figure out ways to try and stop the madness driven by the Chinese dictatorship. It's that simple.
Although most Americans seem to accept this kind of erosion of personal privacy in the name of comrade Bush's long war of terror or simply as the undeniable birthright of large corporations, only a handful understands that these kind of US policies are helping spread the big chill across other continents as well.
Forgetting about hypocrisy for a moment, there was a time when the US would advocate and to an extent even represent personal freedoms in most other parts of the world. Now it's all empty talk in inaugural speeches about the great USA is helping oppressed people regain their freedoms but as it happens most of those people desperately needing american support just happen to be oppressed by so-called allies in this "war of terror, countries like China etc.
For those of us who actually live under undemocratic governments, the fact that american telecoms are helping the government track people and their interests is making it painfully easy for other freedom-hating regimes to impose similar or worse policies which only help chill the personal freedoms even further.
How much do you know about (Tibetan) Buddhism or the Dalai Lama to be able to label his statement as a pure PR play?
Unlike other major religions which are centered around an infallible and omnipotent god(s), Tibetan Buddhism has no such show (or science)-stopper but all doctrines are open to argumentation and reinterpretation.
Since the Tibetan branch of Buddhism developed over the last two millenia in a region steeped in ancient animistic superstitions, the spirits and demons became part of the Tibetan tantric Buddhism as well. However alongside this lively inner world of spirituality developed a parallel scholastic framework studying the external nature of the world as well. In Tibet great discoveries in the fields of medicin, philosophy, astrology and astronomy were made not despite of the Buddhist world view but because of it. There was no god or Pope to dictate dogma "just because" but the monastic scholars were encouraged to debate and challenge existing knowledge. And they still are, although in today's Tibet occupied by the Gestapo-like Chinese the monasteries have been largely destroyed and neutered of independent thought.
Against that background the Dalai Lama's reply of being open to re-evaluating reality based upon new facts is exactly what one should expect from him. Perhaps the one thing he would be most hesitant to relinguish is the necessity of compassion as a force for good for the human kind, since he happens to represent the 14th reincarnation of the Buddhist deity of compassion.
If you must link "PR play" and the Dalai Lama, you need to leave aside the scientific domain and turn to issues of faith. With the Chinese regime hell-bent on extinguishing the light of the Tibetan civilization and nationhood, the Dalai Lama has put his, and his people's, faith in the power of compassion eventually winning over the doctine of brutality, greed and ignorance that drives the Chinese totalitarianism.
Unfortunately in this major issue of faith (instead of scientific reasoning), both the Chinese and the supposedly freedom-loving western world are proving the Tibetans' faith in compassion wrong. Instead, political and materialistic opportunism is making sure that the world remains indifferent to the Tibetans' struggle for survival. The Dalai Lama's calls for the world to adopt more compassionate policies (instead of the existing hard values) are only accepted as good PR in the west by the politicians who don't mind being associated with that message but who are unlikely to lift a finger to help the Tibetan people since business links with the occupying Chinese nazi regime would be affected.
Finally, it is interesting that neither the Vatican nor the religious world leaders like Bush or Blair are taking a stand against the Chinese genocide of the Tibetans, their religion, language and culture. John Paul II probably felt a lot of human, umm, compassion towards the plight of the Tibetan people, having himself grown up in the Russian-occupied Poland. But even the brutal military occupation he suffered from pales in comparison with what the Tibetans are facing in the hands of the Chinese...
We have literally dozens of different languages. I dont think this is necessarily wrong, it's just a consecuence of our history. But the really stupid thing is the politicians are very busy trying to revitalize dead or semi-dead languages and dialects like galician, basque and catalan to have another more justification to fight with other regions, get local privileges, and keeping their positions. Of course these languages are studied in schools, diminishing the time young people should rather use studying maths, literature, economics, english or whatever. Mix this with governmet regulation and you get a lot more overhead for business.
I wonder if your own mother tongue just happens to be among the few imperial winners which deserve to live on while all others could as well be euthanized in the name of an ever more efficient global business environment?
But how did literature slip into that list of yours of subjects that the young people (in Europe?) should spend their time on instead. Perhaps you meant that studying the literature of those linguistically surviving empires (only) would be beneficial in moulding the populations of the lesser nations into more homogenous and thereby more easily targeted markets?
The largest military empires and their obedient sidekicks all agree that it is the "freedom of business" that matters, with other supposed freedoms and rights merrily relegated to the lip-service pages of international conventions where they don't bother the money people.
If you did bother to spend a moment to learn what the Tibetans have been put through since the Chinese invaded and still find it appropriate to maintain that detached and calculating "cost-benefit" and "access to market" mentality I should probably praise you but I'll try to spare some compassion for you instead.
Really. I realize that most people will never come face to face with victims of torture, people forced to flee their homeland with no return, and it is all too easy to ignore even the cry of a whole nation being suffocated to death when it has no bearing whatsoever to your comfortable existence. So forget everything I said already about trying to put yourself in their shoes, if it ever even registered, and just be proud of your superior ability of rationalizing.
I fail to see how Google operating in China is endorsing the Chinese government.
Collaborating with a violent regime, on their terms, to withhold critical information of the regime's crimes from their ignorant subjects... how can that not be considered endorsing the regime?
Perhaps you lack perspective. What if such a brutal totalitarian regime from a foreign country was strangling the life away from your people, language, religion, culture, history and national identity with a Final Solution looming ever closer?
Can you somehow try imagining that it was you, your family, your friends and your whole nation being wiped out by an indoctrinated and unrepenting alien horde?
Then you'd witness how businesses and politicians from the supposedly freedom-respecting parts of the world would queue up to strike business deals with your torturers, even running "information-seeking services" which would for some reason omit any mention of the horrors you and your people keep facing. As if life under that regime was just fine and dandy.
Every time people from these supposedly freedom-loving countries arrive to make deals with the Chinese regime or just under its glorious guidance and regulations, it gives them another stamp of approval and tells the Chinese populace that their Great Leaders are truly making their nation stronger and stronger! That their strangling of Tibet and stealing the Tibetans' natural resources is not just making the Chinese richer but there's nothing wrong with committing murder and landgrab (unless others try something similar, like the Japanese...)!
Just look up Tibet using the collaborating "information services". All those happy stories of grateful Tibetans singing their praises to the glorious and enlightened Chinese Red Army, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Motherland... How bloody marvellous!
Instead of being deeply shamed for being worse that their invading Japanese oppressors were over sixty years ago, the Chinese are not allowed to see any reason to change their evil ways.
By collaborating with the Chinese regime, Google and other foreign "information providers" are simply helping the regime to maintain a perception that the status quo is fully satisfactory.
The Chinese regime is exterminating the Tibetan nation while they suppress any facts from reaching the Chinese population which is fed with fantastical and jingoistic propaganda instead. You may not realize how dangerous and criminal the behaviour of the Chinese regime actually is. Like in Nazi Germany, the Chinese are actually benefitting from the rape and destruction of their helpless neighbours.
The presence of Google in that "market" is helping endorse that Chinese totalitarian media structure which is aggressively brushing their remorseless holocaust under the carpet so that no one in China sees nothing but wonder-stories of Mao's "liberation" of yet another second-class "Chinese minority".
Isn't any kind of a statement that makes even a few Chinese asking questions about their empire's policies, even if it's just Google withdrawing, better than nothing?
Of course decisions such as whether to do business with expansionist and genocidal regimes shouldn't be left to the largely $$$-centric and McKinsey-lobotomized executives but this is the wonderful new globalized corporate world the powers-that-be have created for us and the free and democratic nations (or rather their leaders) have surrendered their supposed moral backbones to participate in this vulture feast...
First off I fully realize that capitalism is the best way of maximizing economic output, although personally I'd prefer the so-called social-democratic model where the benefits of that growth get also filtered down to the have-nots in an organized manner.
However our friendly old capitalism has increasingly metamorphosed into a new kind of faceless corporate globalism where any remains of social responsibility have given way to pure greed and only the rights of the major shareholders -- themselves increasingly being faceless holding companies -- are catered for.
This globalistic corporate might relies upon collaboration with the political elite and since the regimes in both the USA and China feel that they can (ab)use this system to their national benefit, the rest of the world is just trying to hang on for the ride.
The European Union was supposedly founded upon the European ideals of morality and shared social responsibility -- doing the right thing, if you will -- but even there the most powerful national governments (UK, France, Germany etc.) and the executive body of the EU itself are increasingly controlled by corporate interests. Doing the right thing simply doesn't pay in the new globalism-driven market environment.
While Charles Cooper only refers to the USA, the main instigator behind globalization, when he says that "cuddling up to Beijing inevitably will raise discomfiting questions about globalization and the cost U.S. companies must pay to operate in the countries in which they do business", one day the whole world must wake up to the reality of the moral costs of this increasingly non-democratic way of putting corporate interests above the rights of an individual, not forgetting whole nations under modern-day imperial occupation.
Although the destructive US-lead occupation of Iraq is bad enough, the Americans are expected to eventually leave that burned country to Iraqis (or whatever the remaining peoples choose to call themselves and their ethno-religious units). But other increasingly fascist second-rate superpowers like China and (Soviet) Russia are in the process of occupying and swallowing (de facto wiping off the map) their neigbouring nations and peoples as part of a nationalistic neo-imperial drive.
From a moral viewpoint, even that which is encapsulated in the founding principles of the United Nations (peoples rights to self-determination and their own language, freedom of religion, freedom from torture etc.), the Free World really should unite against such expansionist totalitarian regimes until they stop their genocidal aggressions. Choosing not to trade with such criminal regimes would be the morally acceptable course of action, but the current free-for-all business-driven system would appear to actually favour fascist regimes instead of giving their populations incentive to demand reform.
US government's decision against buying PCs from the Chinese Lenovo is based on ludicruous reasoning when that same government continues to promote business with the totalitarian and lebensraum-seeking Chinese regime. It is just hypocrisy and money talking nonsense.
Either it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to deal with fascist China and live with the consequences (or die with the consequences as is the case with China's occupied neighbours who depend on world's support and have no choice), or the elected governments should grow some balls and decide not to collaborate with any criminal regimes.
Invest that freely floating money from the West into non-aggressive and democratic developing nations instead and kick the aggressors out of the WTO while slap very significant import, export and investment duties on them. How hard can that be??
The Chinese people won't lift a finger to change their regime for a less criminal one as long as the current dictatorship continues to make them money and the state propaganda continues to hail China's genodical expansionism as something to be jingoistic about.
"Normally I am not recognized, people don't throw their panties at me."
A considerable majority of the open source movement are guys. I for one wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of a crusty boxer short shower!
Come the next Linus-attended Linux convention, we need to respond to Linus' between-the-lines appeal for a panty shower one way or another. Will the geekgrrls and the linuxchixs please stand up(, remove panties, aim, let loose) and be counted to preempt the crusty boxer short shower scenario!
(PS. If there really are no females available, would the brave volunteer kindly remember to shower and shave prior to executing the maneuver in order to add a dash of realism... oh, and [ask someone to] wash those boxers too!)
Do you have any proof that this official did any of the things you mentioned, or are you just making a bigoted generalization about all Chinese people?
Did the poster claim that this particular Chinese regime spokesman had personally taken part in the destruction of any of the some 2,000 (i.e. almost all of them) Tibetan buddhist monasteries that the communist party's army has destroyed in Tibet since China's invasion in 1950? No.
Neither did the poster claim that this particular official personally murdered any of the 1,500,000 Tibetans who have perished under the Chinese occupation.
Do the Chinese people bear collective responsibility for the lebensraum-style genocidal crimes committed by their regime? Of course they do, especially since the Chinese people still aren't lifting a finger to stop those crimes from being committed in their name.
The active regime officials (who by definition are also members of the Chinese Communist Party) must bear particular responsibility since they are the ones keeping the oppressive machinery functioning.
If anyone's bigoted(*) here it is the Chinese people who blindly support their regime's ongoing genocidal occupation of China's neighbours while obediently hating the Japanese for having attempted to do the same to China over 60 years ago.
And what ruffled your feathers here anyway? The Chinese regime's Propaganda Ministry's talking heads are notorious for their ridiculously facts-defying xenophobic and jingoistic lingo but one shouldn't have fun with their usage of the term "despicable"?
(*) Bigoted | Big"ot*ed |
a.
Obstinately and blindly attached to some creed, opinion
practice, or ritual; unreasonably devoted to a system or
party, and illiberal toward the opinions of others.
Lovely! The emotional reference to "co-conspiratorship" was just what I was expecting. Straight from the Guilt Trip Handbook.
Every semi-educated person knows that colonianism, and particularly the British Empire, spawned crimes against humanity across the globe. Were you aware that the current civil war in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) also stems from the colonial policies of the British?
However China's *ongoing* genocidal aggression against its historical non-Chinese neighbours is taking place *now*, while the CCP's Propandaga Ministry is trying to convince the world that the Chinese dictatorship is somehow a civilized nation.
So instead of the past guilt diversion trick, how about explaining how Imperial Japan's past brutality against its neighbours was a crime never to be forgotten while Chinese communists' ongoing imperial genocide against its historical neighbours is perfectly acceptable. Surely as an AC you can present some wonderful reasoning to defend Mao Zedong's crimes that the current regime continues to glorify.
Do you reckon it is okay for people to simply ignore genocides committed by their regime? Would you care to ask for your Chinese acquintances opinions on this issue? How do they feel about the Japanese imperial occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s compared to China brutal occupation of Tibet from 1950 onwards? Do they absolutely hate what the Japanese did in parts of China while hailing China's ongoing crimes against the completely occupied and terrorized Tibet as something benevolent and enlightened?
Earlier you said: "May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?"
And let them continue doing with absolute impunity what Stalin and Hitler did before them? Is it really okay to just wipe your neighbours off the map?
The point is that we'd like the Chinese to have that opportunity. They don't.
I personally don't believe that it's any of our business in this instance.
If the Chinese were like, say, Iranians who by and large just want to left alone by foreign bullies, or even like North Koreans who are run by a (Chinese-backed) brutal regime killing their own people, I might agree to a degree. Perhaps regimes do have the right to try and destroy their own nation and people, and it is the responsibility of those people to do something about their own regimes. I wouldn't leave such people standing alone, but I can understand how some people in the "free world" wouldn't care what genocides take place within despotic nations.
But here we were specifically referring to China, a militaristic dictatorship which is not only holding its neighbours (Tibet, turkic Uighur people's East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia which the Chinese euphemistically call "Inner Mongolia") under Gestapo-style occupation but which is actively committing genocide against the occupied neighbours.
And you're saying that the "free world" shouldn't even assist the Chinese population (and here we must include the occupied "Chinese nationals") in being able to gain access to outside information or the freedom to communicate?
If the Soviet Russians under Stalin or the Germans under Hitler had had freedom to communicate and access to outside information, don't you think a great many people in those countries would have questioned the sanity of their leaders, perhaps even refused to help the war (preparation) efforts or helped the victims of the genocides or helped create domestic resistance etc.? But the people didn't know the facts and nor did they have any opportunity to communicate freely. They just went along with the madness.
Today we have China behaving like a genuine Nazional Socialist dictatorship (albeit with cutesy business ties to other major military powers), its people indoctrinated to believe that it is their patriotic right and duty to subjugate their "barbarian" non-Chinese neighbours!
Stalin began his eradication of tens of millions human beings already in the 1920s but the world didn't care (and we didn't exactly have the tools to help the Soviets of that era to learn about the reality). Hitler established his network of extermination camps in the 1940s but the West only learned to extent of his crimes when the WWII was in the closing stages.
Yet today we know what the Chinese regime is doing to its neighbours so shouldn't anyone with even slightest interest in upholding the UN's Human Rights Declaration or the rights of people to self-determination be supporting efforts at stopping their crimes? Or do these UN ideals only apply to Caucasian christians and not when the victims are Tibetan buddhists, Turkic Uighur muslims or Mongolians?
Enabling communications within the areas under the Chinese regime's control would IMO be of urgent and primary importance. As long as the Chinese population is unaware of the crimes being committed in their name they have no reason to try and stop it from taking place.
PS. One group of people I have no respect for is those Chinese residing outside China who have access to information but who choose to follow and actively support their regime's jingoistic Great China propaganda nevertheless. They are akin to those active Nazi supporters who actually knew that the Holocaust was taking place and yet loudly and blindly supported it.
Not all of us have the same concept of "personal freedoms" that you do. We understand that we must sacrifice some of our personal freedoms for the greater good of the society as a whole. I can only speak for my friends, family and myself, but we give these freedoms happily and in the knowledge that we know that the government that we elected works for the benefit of all in China. Not all of us agree, we all know there are plenty of dissidents who openly voice their opinions, but you must recognise that these can be dangerous people.
Sure, launching military invasions of neighbouring countries, annexing their land and national resources and systematically extinguishing those neighbours' indentities and statehoods is certainly "beneficial to all of China", but do you find that acceptable?
Is it acceptable for a China to commit genocide and for the Chinese people to do nothing to stop it?
Are you ashamed or proud of that imperialist aggressor aspect of your country?
Do you hate the Japanese for having attempted to do to China (over sixty years ago) what the Chinese have been doing to Tibet since 1950? (incidentally, your arguments for accepting CCP's dictatorship sound eerily similar to what the Japanese were indoctrinated to believe in the 1930s and 1940s.)
I don't know where you got the idea that the Chinese are expansionist. If anything, they are the most insular bunch of folks on the whole damn planet (with the possible exception of native Vermonters). I read a book a number of decades ago that projected that China's foreign goals would be restricted to taking over Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and regions of traditional Chinese/Tibetan culture that the McMahon line (which China never at any time accepted as a legitimate border) put into India.
The chinese communist dictatorship has either fought wars with or outright invaded (Tibet, East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia) its every neighbour during its relatively short existance. While it didn't exactly invade its "vassal-istic" North Korean communist dictatorship, it fought alongside the communist-god Kim Il Jong against the democratic South supported by the UN. Oh, and in Cambodia the chinese regime helped the Khmer Rouge to go on a massive killing spree a la Cultural Revolution brutally wiping out some one-and-a-half-million helpless Cambodian civilians while they were at it. They're also the main, if not only, supporters of the Burmese military dictatorship. So, they either support neighbouring mad dictatorships or fight other neighbours, even if it takes invading a neighbour to move their empire's border for the next border war!
Just how aren't the chinese communist regime's invasions and annexations of their non-chinese neighbours Mongolia, East Turkestan and Tibet expansionist aggressions???
And wtf is "traditional Chinese/Tibetan culture", especially in that context when before the chinese invasion there were no chinese anywhere near the Indo-Tibetan border? What comes to the British Imperial McMahon Line, it was accepted by the Tibetans, and the Tibetans also had their own state border with China far, far away which was mutually agreed upon but which the chinese just didn't feel like respecting.
Linus Benedict Torvalds. That's where these tongue-in-cheek claims for his benevolent dictatorship over Linux (and the coming World Domination) originally stem from.
While the Communist Party clique that ordered thousands of peaceful students butchered in the Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989, were denied invitations to the Western democracies, Hu Jintao was at that time the Communist Party's appointed uber-chief in the Chinese-occupied Tibet and instituted an extremely brutal crackdown against Tibetans. No one outside the Communist Party, perhaps even within its dark hierarchy, knows the exact number of Tibetans who were killed and/or tortured under Hu's orders.
When the Communist Party needed to find an iron-fisted successor to the likes of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng - someone with blood on his hands as a guarantee to his "faithfulness to the Party doctrines" - they found a loyal Party executor in Hu Jintao, the Butcher of Tibet.
It greatly saddens me that some western, supposedly freedom-loving and democratic, leaders invite such murderous dictators to a state visit. Meanwhile some self-appointed moral guardians like Tony Bliar refuse to even meet the Dalai Lama, the representative of occupied and exiled Tibetans and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as not to offend the brutal dictators of China! Dubuya Bush has been a catastrophy to the world but at least he dares to expose his face to the Dalai Lama in person, even if he isn't willing to help the oppressed Tibetans with actual deeds.
That someone like Billy Gates would be the first in line to host and toast the Butcher of Tibet should come as no surprise to anyone. But the representatives of free and democratic states...?
I wonder if there was a national referendum in the US about welcoming the murderous Hu, with a fact-sheet of his crimes attached, would the people still welcome the Butcher to be wined and dined as the nation's guest of "honor"?
While I understand and in fact largely share your "anti-american" sentiment (any sane person is worried about the US government's evangelical neo-mccarthyism), you appear to go too far in your accommodation of China's totalitarian regime, as some people do when trying to find some counter-balance to the Bushites.
The US continues to trade with and indeed support many despotic regimes, but at least they nominally support change towards more democracy. China on the other hand *prefers* to deal with despotic rulers. For instance, China vetoed UN intervention in the Darfur genocide as they had lucrative oil and business deals with the military regime there.
The mad regime in North Korea only stays in power because Beijing finds it in their interests to prop it up for strategic reasons. Same with Burma.
Chinese state-owned military companies have certainly "disseminated" nuclear and missile technology to other despotic regimes to win influence there, with the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear programme proliferating Chinese and North Korean technology further yet. Not to the democratic India though, which China sees as a strategic competitor to be contained (thus Chinese support to both Pakistan and Burma, and the invasion and militarization of occupied Tibet).
While China isn't invading Middle Eastern states (yet?), it has *annexed* several neighboring states and peoples by military force (Tibetans, Uigurs and Mongols to name the most prominent ones). The expansionist policies of the most murderous dictator in human history, Mao Zedong, still persist and the dictator continues to be hailed as *the* national hero.
Living in China for a short period (probably in the more liberal Han-Chinese areas as well) and having some Chinese friends doesn't necessarily give one any knowledge or insights into the policies of the ruling regime there. I have closely followed the developments in China, both from inside and outside, since the 1980s, besides having familiarized myself with their contemporary and dynastic history, and still don't consider myself as an expert on China. The vast majority of Chinese, however, only get to "learn" what their regime wants them to believe and never get to understand China's foreign policy in other than glorious patriotic terms.
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Quote from a recent Rolling Stone article "The End of Tibet"
The industrial behemoths often play both sides of the field and have no (profit) incentive to change their ways until forced to do so by (the threat of) legislation. GE and their ilk could have kept improving the incandescent technology for decades while coming up with better alternatives but the status quo and all the lobbying to maintain it was deemed more profitable, regardless of environmental consequences.
Well over hundred thousand Tibetans have since escaped the Chinese rule over their fatherland ("phayul" in Tibetan) and settled in refugee communities in India and in third countries. A large number have died attempting to escape, either by the harsh elements of the Himalayas or in the hands of the Chinese military hunting them down.
A great many Tibetans, mainly young children travelling in groups accompanied by a couple of adults, have also made the perilous journey into India to be able to study (free subjects without Chinese indoctrination and in their own language) in the exile-run schools in India (like the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala) before returning back to their families in the Chinese-occupied Tibet.
Now, this Wi-Fi mesh network, which is being built by some great foreign volunteers in coordination with the Tibetan exile administration, is aimed at connecting the various local institutions in a seriously hilly areas of the Himalayan foothills. The objective is to enable the sharing of information between these locations, not to create a first-person-shooter gaming network. The exiled Tibetans are extremely serious about their education *and* their ability to communicate and campaign for the freedom of their homeland in the modern world. This mesh network is aimed at facilitating both of these needs.
Incidentally, since the Wired story went public on Thursday, and possibly thanks to some blindly "patriotic" chinese hackers learning about this Wi-Fi mesh from this Slashdot story, the Tibetan exiles' network has now come under DDoS attack after initial scanning from IPs in China.
Details of such a heinous thought crime can be found here.
In the past the US of A took a much stronger stand against such obscene human rights violations by the Chinese regime and other dictatorships, but it is very clear that the current regime in Washington has neither the intention nor moral standing to help oppressed and occupied peoples. You see, the dictators in Beijing are among Bush's "staunchest allies" in this bizarre "global war of terror" where the occupied and the oppressed are considered to be the "terrorists"!
Dubya's inaugural address (2005) now reads like a sad mockery of the Freedoms the USA used to claim to be representing:
The six million Tibetans living in the world largest concentration camp they once knew as their homeland meanwhile haven't even got a clue that the "world's most powerful man and the leader of the Free World" ever uttered those words. Even possessing a copy of the UN's Human Rights Declaration is enough to get a Tibetan slammed into the Chinese prison camps...
In China the ruling Communist Party (CCP; with policies closer to a capitalist fasist party) does exactly what it wants in order for China to become the greatest power on earth under their rule. Sacrificing their people and even swallowing up neighbouring nations to reach that aim doesn't bother the CCP dictatorship one bit.
Case in point: The CCP recently finished the building of the massive Three Gorges Dam. Millions of locals had to be relocated with much if not most of the meager compensation stolen by opportunistic party officials. People attempting to report facts about it face arrest, suspicious muggings or worse.
In India far smaller dam projects face long delays or even cancellation because the locals have various means of defending their rights.
In China, business people with the right guanxi (political connections) can take over anyone's land and if the locals riot as their last recourse, the Party's paramilitary police will quickly take care of it.
If democracy and basic human rights meant anything to Western business people and Western politicians who are responsible for the "rules of engagement", the West would choose to invest in and trade with democratic developing nations (like India) instead of expansionist totalitarian regimes (like China).
As long as democracy and basic human rights are only paid superficial lip-service by the West, free countries will lag behind the dictatorships. Beside the West losing (selling out) its fundamental moral foundations, such policies will also encourage developing countries to adopt the more dictatorial forms of government since they are proving to be more beneficial in terms of foreign investment. In fact China is increasingly channeling its own foreign investments into Central Asia, Africa and South America, further undermining the West's half-assed efforts at encouraging democracy and human rights in those countries.
Democracy and human rights certainly incur some financial costs but are we surrendering it all up just to help global corporations rake in short-term profits? It wasn't the corporations who suffered when the Stalins, Hitlers, Maos and Hirohitos went on a rampage; no, it was people who took the bullets in the name of their continued freedom.
If today's people still value those ideals, then global trade could easily be harnessed as a force for good. If countries like India were to be given preferential trade treatment over expansionist dictatorships like China, it would force the Chinese people to rethink their system and policies instead of giving them an edge over free societies.
Are you promoting a view that when an expansionist fascist regime totally wipes out its peaceful neighbouring state to steal their national resources and to advance their militaristic geo-political position, the rest of the world should just... do exactly nothing? Actually just keep doing business with that regime??
Of course governments, those representatives of the people, must make their choices wrt. China based on facts. If China was not committing genocide outside its borders I'd give it more time but their victims in Tibet don't have that luxury.
In the end the people of China are responsible for their regime's crimes whether they were elected them or not.
I feel a lot of sympathy for the Chinese who've died or who've been jailed and tortured for disobeying their formerly communist and now fascist regime, but in the end changing that is up to the admittedly indifferent and mostly indoctrinated Chinese population.
However when the Chinese people allow their communist party gestapo to continue raping and demolishing their *peaceful* Tibetan neighbours, *that's* something no decent person in the whole world should tolerate without taking some action.
It's both ridiculous and ironic at the same time that the general indoctrinated (everyone's spending a minute in the Chinese "education system" gets a full load of brainwashing, that is a verifiable fact) Chinese population is taught to hate the Japanese to their guts for what took place in *parts* of China during their *civil war* over sixty years ago while these same idiots are absolutely idolizing their own expansionism-driven 100% destruction of Tibet.
*That* is what should drive the action against the Chinese regime by both decent Chinese people (who are few but do exist) and anybody else who feels that wiping out a peaceful nation (which Tibet was for centuries after adopting buddhism) can not be tolerated.
Geeks with respect for human life and dignity can play a major part in breaking the fascist Communist Party's stranglehold on information. I've made my informed choice and you can either 1) play ignorant and sympathize with the Chinese regime, 2) wash your hands and ignore the whole thing, or 3) figure out ways to try and stop the madness driven by the Chinese dictatorship. It's that simple.
Forgetting about hypocrisy for a moment, there was a time when the US would advocate and to an extent even represent personal freedoms in most other parts of the world. Now it's all empty talk in inaugural speeches about the great USA is helping oppressed people regain their freedoms but as it happens most of those people desperately needing american support just happen to be oppressed by so-called allies in this "war of terror, countries like China etc.
For those of us who actually live under undemocratic governments, the fact that american telecoms are helping the government track people and their interests is making it painfully easy for other freedom-hating regimes to impose similar or worse policies which only help chill the personal freedoms even further.
Unlike other major religions which are centered around an infallible and omnipotent god(s), Tibetan Buddhism has no such show (or science)-stopper but all doctrines are open to argumentation and reinterpretation.
Since the Tibetan branch of Buddhism developed over the last two millenia in a region steeped in ancient animistic superstitions, the spirits and demons became part of the Tibetan tantric Buddhism as well. However alongside this lively inner world of spirituality developed a parallel scholastic framework studying the external nature of the world as well. In Tibet great discoveries in the fields of medicin, philosophy, astrology and astronomy were made not despite of the Buddhist world view but because of it. There was no god or Pope to dictate dogma "just because" but the monastic scholars were encouraged to debate and challenge existing knowledge. And they still are, although in today's Tibet occupied by the Gestapo-like Chinese the monasteries have been largely destroyed and neutered of independent thought.
Against that background the Dalai Lama's reply of being open to re-evaluating reality based upon new facts is exactly what one should expect from him. Perhaps the one thing he would be most hesitant to relinguish is the necessity of compassion as a force for good for the human kind, since he happens to represent the 14th reincarnation of the Buddhist deity of compassion.
If you must link "PR play" and the Dalai Lama, you need to leave aside the scientific domain and turn to issues of faith. With the Chinese regime hell-bent on extinguishing the light of the Tibetan civilization and nationhood, the Dalai Lama has put his, and his people's, faith in the power of compassion eventually winning over the doctine of brutality, greed and ignorance that drives the Chinese totalitarianism.
Unfortunately in this major issue of faith (instead of scientific reasoning), both the Chinese and the supposedly freedom-loving western world are proving the Tibetans' faith in compassion wrong. Instead, political and materialistic opportunism is making sure that the world remains indifferent to the Tibetans' struggle for survival. The Dalai Lama's calls for the world to adopt more compassionate policies (instead of the existing hard values) are only accepted as good PR in the west by the politicians who don't mind being associated with that message but who are unlikely to lift a finger to help the Tibetan people since business links with the occupying Chinese nazi regime would be affected.
Finally, it is interesting that neither the Vatican nor the religious world leaders like Bush or Blair are taking a stand against the Chinese genocide of the Tibetans, their religion, language and culture. John Paul II probably felt a lot of human, umm, compassion towards the plight of the Tibetan people, having himself grown up in the Russian-occupied Poland. But even the brutal military occupation he suffered from pales in comparison with what the Tibetans are facing in the hands of the Chinese...
I wonder if your own mother tongue just happens to be among the few imperial winners which deserve to live on while all others could as well be euthanized in the name of an ever more efficient global business environment?
But how did literature slip into that list of yours of subjects that the young people (in Europe?) should spend their time on instead. Perhaps you meant that studying the literature of those linguistically surviving empires (only) would be beneficial in moulding the populations of the lesser nations into more homogenous and thereby more easily targeted markets?
The largest military empires and their obedient sidekicks all agree that it is the "freedom of business" that matters, with other supposed freedoms and rights merrily relegated to the lip-service pages of international conventions where they don't bother the money people.
Pob hwyl i'r dyfodol...
If you did bother to spend a moment to learn what the Tibetans have been put through since the Chinese invaded and still find it appropriate to maintain that detached and calculating "cost-benefit" and "access to market" mentality I should probably praise you but I'll try to spare some compassion for you instead.
Really. I realize that most people will never come face to face with victims of torture, people forced to flee their homeland with no return, and it is all too easy to ignore even the cry of a whole nation being suffocated to death when it has no bearing whatsoever to your comfortable existence. So forget everything I said already about trying to put yourself in their shoes, if it ever even registered, and just be proud of your superior ability of rationalizing.
Collaborating with a violent regime, on their terms, to withhold critical information of the regime's crimes from their ignorant subjects... how can that not be considered endorsing the regime?
Perhaps you lack perspective. What if such a brutal totalitarian regime from a foreign country was strangling the life away from your people, language, religion, culture, history and national identity with a Final Solution looming ever closer?
Can you somehow try imagining that it was you, your family, your friends and your whole nation being wiped out by an indoctrinated and unrepenting alien horde?
Then you'd witness how businesses and politicians from the supposedly freedom-respecting parts of the world would queue up to strike business deals with your torturers, even running "information-seeking services" which would for some reason omit any mention of the horrors you and your people keep facing. As if life under that regime was just fine and dandy.
Every time people from these supposedly freedom-loving countries arrive to make deals with the Chinese regime or just under its glorious guidance and regulations, it gives them another stamp of approval and tells the Chinese populace that their Great Leaders are truly making their nation stronger and stronger! That their strangling of Tibet and stealing the Tibetans' natural resources is not just making the Chinese richer but there's nothing wrong with committing murder and landgrab (unless others try something similar, like the Japanese...)!
Just look up Tibet using the collaborating "information services". All those happy stories of grateful Tibetans singing their praises to the glorious and enlightened Chinese Red Army, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Motherland... How bloody marvellous!
Instead of being deeply shamed for being worse that their invading Japanese oppressors were over sixty years ago, the Chinese are not allowed to see any reason to change their evil ways.
By collaborating with the Chinese regime, Google and other foreign "information providers" are simply helping the regime to maintain a perception that the status quo is fully satisfactory.
Please spend a few moments reading why the status quo shouldn't be acceptable to anyone respectful of basic human rights.
The presence of Google in that "market" is helping endorse that Chinese totalitarian media structure which is aggressively brushing their remorseless holocaust under the carpet so that no one in China sees nothing but wonder-stories of Mao's "liberation" of yet another second-class "Chinese minority".
Isn't any kind of a statement that makes even a few Chinese asking questions about their empire's policies, even if it's just Google withdrawing, better than nothing?
Of course decisions such as whether to do business with expansionist and genocidal regimes shouldn't be left to the largely $$$-centric and McKinsey-lobotomized executives but this is the wonderful new globalized corporate world the powers-that-be have created for us and the free and democratic nations (or rather their leaders) have surrendered their supposed moral backbones to participate in this vulture feast...
However our friendly old capitalism has increasingly metamorphosed into a new kind of faceless corporate globalism where any remains of social responsibility have given way to pure greed and only the rights of the major shareholders -- themselves increasingly being faceless holding companies -- are catered for. This globalistic corporate might relies upon collaboration with the political elite and since the regimes in both the USA and China feel that they can (ab)use this system to their national benefit, the rest of the world is just trying to hang on for the ride.
The European Union was supposedly founded upon the European ideals of morality and shared social responsibility -- doing the right thing, if you will -- but even there the most powerful national governments (UK, France, Germany etc.) and the executive body of the EU itself are increasingly controlled by corporate interests. Doing the right thing simply doesn't pay in the new globalism-driven market environment.
While Charles Cooper only refers to the USA, the main instigator behind globalization, when he says that "cuddling up to Beijing inevitably will raise discomfiting questions about globalization and the cost U.S. companies must pay to operate in the countries in which they do business", one day the whole world must wake up to the reality of the moral costs of this increasingly non-democratic way of putting corporate interests above the rights of an individual, not forgetting whole nations under modern-day imperial occupation.
Although the destructive US-lead occupation of Iraq is bad enough, the Americans are expected to eventually leave that burned country to Iraqis (or whatever the remaining peoples choose to call themselves and their ethno-religious units). But other increasingly fascist second-rate superpowers like China and (Soviet) Russia are in the process of occupying and swallowing (de facto wiping off the map) their neigbouring nations and peoples as part of a nationalistic neo-imperial drive.
From a moral viewpoint, even that which is encapsulated in the founding principles of the United Nations (peoples rights to self-determination and their own language, freedom of religion, freedom from torture etc.), the Free World really should unite against such expansionist totalitarian regimes until they stop their genocidal aggressions. Choosing not to trade with such criminal regimes would be the morally acceptable course of action, but the current free-for-all business-driven system would appear to actually favour fascist regimes instead of giving their populations incentive to demand reform. US government's decision against buying PCs from the Chinese Lenovo is based on ludicruous reasoning when that same government continues to promote business with the totalitarian and lebensraum-seeking Chinese regime. It is just hypocrisy and money talking nonsense.
Either it is perfectly acceptable for the Free World to deal with fascist China and live with the consequences (or die with the consequences as is the case with China's occupied neighbours who depend on world's support and have no choice), or the elected governments should grow some balls and decide not to collaborate with any criminal regimes.
Invest that freely floating money from the West into non-aggressive and democratic developing nations instead and kick the aggressors out of the WTO while slap very significant import, export and investment duties on them. How hard can that be??
The Chinese people won't lift a finger to change their regime for a less criminal one as long as the current dictatorship continues to make them money and the state propaganda continues to hail China's genodical expansionism as something to be jingoistic about.
Come the next Linus-attended Linux convention, we need to respond to Linus' between-the-lines appeal for a panty shower one way or another. Will the geekgrrls and the linuxchixs please stand up(, remove panties, aim, let loose) and be counted to preempt the crusty boxer short shower scenario!
(PS. If there really are no females available, would the brave volunteer kindly remember to shower and shave prior to executing the maneuver in order to add a dash of realism... oh, and [ask someone to] wash those boxers too!)
Did the poster claim that this particular Chinese regime spokesman had personally taken part in the destruction of any of the some 2,000 (i.e. almost all of them) Tibetan buddhist monasteries that the communist party's army has destroyed in Tibet since China's invasion in 1950? No.
Neither did the poster claim that this particular official personally murdered any of the 1,500,000 Tibetans who have perished under the Chinese occupation.
Do the Chinese people bear collective responsibility for the lebensraum-style genocidal crimes committed by their regime? Of course they do, especially since the Chinese people still aren't lifting a finger to stop those crimes from being committed in their name.
The active regime officials (who by definition are also members of the Chinese Communist Party) must bear particular responsibility since they are the ones keeping the oppressive machinery functioning.
If anyone's bigoted(*) here it is the Chinese people who blindly support their regime's ongoing genocidal occupation of China's neighbours while obediently hating the Japanese for having attempted to do the same to China over 60 years ago.
And what ruffled your feathers here anyway? The Chinese regime's Propaganda Ministry's talking heads are notorious for their ridiculously facts-defying xenophobic and jingoistic lingo but one shouldn't have fun with their usage of the term "despicable"?
(*) Bigoted | Big"ot*ed | a. Obstinately and blindly attached to some creed, opinion practice, or ritual; unreasonably devoted to a system or party, and illiberal toward the opinions of others.
Every semi-educated person knows that colonianism, and particularly the British Empire, spawned crimes against humanity across the globe. Were you aware that the current civil war in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) also stems from the colonial policies of the British?
However China's *ongoing* genocidal aggression against its historical non-Chinese neighbours is taking place *now*, while the CCP's Propandaga Ministry is trying to convince the world that the Chinese dictatorship is somehow a civilized nation.
So instead of the past guilt diversion trick, how about explaining how Imperial Japan's past brutality against its neighbours was a crime never to be forgotten while Chinese communists' ongoing imperial genocide against its historical neighbours is perfectly acceptable. Surely as an AC you can present some wonderful reasoning to defend Mao Zedong's crimes that the current regime continues to glorify.
Do you reckon it is okay for people to simply ignore genocides committed by their regime? Would you care to ask for your Chinese acquintances opinions on this issue? How do they feel about the Japanese imperial occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s compared to China brutal occupation of Tibet from 1950 onwards? Do they absolutely hate what the Japanese did in parts of China while hailing China's ongoing crimes against the completely occupied and terrorized Tibet as something benevolent and enlightened?
Earlier you said: "May be westerners should get themselves a break for a change and let Chinese decide what to do with the country?"
And let them continue doing with absolute impunity what Stalin and Hitler did before them? Is it really okay to just wipe your neighbours off the map?
If the Chinese were like, say, Iranians who by and large just want to left alone by foreign bullies, or even like North Koreans who are run by a (Chinese-backed) brutal regime killing their own people, I might agree to a degree. Perhaps regimes do have the right to try and destroy their own nation and people, and it is the responsibility of those people to do something about their own regimes. I wouldn't leave such people standing alone, but I can understand how some people in the "free world" wouldn't care what genocides take place within despotic nations.
But here we were specifically referring to China, a militaristic dictatorship which is not only holding its neighbours (Tibet, turkic Uighur people's East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia which the Chinese euphemistically call "Inner Mongolia") under Gestapo-style occupation but which is actively committing genocide against the occupied neighbours.
And you're saying that the "free world" shouldn't even assist the Chinese population (and here we must include the occupied "Chinese nationals") in being able to gain access to outside information or the freedom to communicate?
If the Soviet Russians under Stalin or the Germans under Hitler had had freedom to communicate and access to outside information, don't you think a great many people in those countries would have questioned the sanity of their leaders, perhaps even refused to help the war (preparation) efforts or helped the victims of the genocides or helped create domestic resistance etc.? But the people didn't know the facts and nor did they have any opportunity to communicate freely. They just went along with the madness.
Today we have China behaving like a genuine Nazional Socialist dictatorship (albeit with cutesy business ties to other major military powers), its people indoctrinated to believe that it is their patriotic right and duty to subjugate their "barbarian" non-Chinese neighbours!
Stalin began his eradication of tens of millions human beings already in the 1920s but the world didn't care (and we didn't exactly have the tools to help the Soviets of that era to learn about the reality). Hitler established his network of extermination camps in the 1940s but the West only learned to extent of his crimes when the WWII was in the closing stages.
Yet today we know what the Chinese regime is doing to its neighbours so shouldn't anyone with even slightest interest in upholding the UN's Human Rights Declaration or the rights of people to self-determination be supporting efforts at stopping their crimes? Or do these UN ideals only apply to Caucasian christians and not when the victims are Tibetan buddhists, Turkic Uighur muslims or Mongolians?
Enabling communications within the areas under the Chinese regime's control would IMO be of urgent and primary importance. As long as the Chinese population is unaware of the crimes being committed in their name they have no reason to try and stop it from taking place.
PS. One group of people I have no respect for is those Chinese residing outside China who have access to information but who choose to follow and actively support their regime's jingoistic Great China propaganda nevertheless. They are akin to those active Nazi supporters who actually knew that the Holocaust was taking place and yet loudly and blindly supported it.
Sure, launching military invasions of neighbouring countries, annexing their land and national resources and systematically extinguishing those neighbours' indentities and statehoods is certainly "beneficial to all of China", but do you find that acceptable?
If your people, the Chinese, were still suffering under brutal Japanese occupation the same way that the Tibetan people are in reality suffering under Chinese oppression, would you be fine with that?
Is it acceptable for a China to commit genocide and for the Chinese people to do nothing to stop it?
Are you ashamed or proud of that imperialist aggressor aspect of your country?
Do you hate the Japanese for having attempted to do to China (over sixty years ago) what the Chinese have been doing to Tibet since 1950? (incidentally, your arguments for accepting CCP's dictatorship sound eerily similar to what the Japanese were indoctrinated to believe in the 1930s and 1940s.)
The chinese communist dictatorship has either fought wars with or outright invaded (Tibet, East Turkestan and Southern Mongolia) its every neighbour during its relatively short existance. While it didn't exactly invade its "vassal-istic" North Korean communist dictatorship, it fought alongside the communist-god Kim Il Jong against the democratic South supported by the UN. Oh, and in Cambodia the chinese regime helped the Khmer Rouge to go on a massive killing spree a la Cultural Revolution brutally wiping out some one-and-a-half-million helpless Cambodian civilians while they were at it. They're also the main, if not only, supporters of the Burmese military dictatorship. So, they either support neighbouring mad dictatorships or fight other neighbours, even if it takes invading a neighbour to move their empire's border for the next border war!
Just how aren't the chinese communist regime's invasions and annexations of their non-chinese neighbours Mongolia, East Turkestan and Tibet expansionist aggressions???
And wtf is "traditional Chinese/Tibetan culture", especially in that context when before the chinese invasion there were no chinese anywhere near the Indo-Tibetan border? What comes to the British Imperial McMahon Line, it was accepted by the Tibetans, and the Tibetans also had their own state border with China far, far away which was mutually agreed upon but which the chinese just didn't feel like respecting.
When the Communist Party needed to find an iron-fisted successor to the likes of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng - someone with blood on his hands as a guarantee to his "faithfulness to the Party doctrines" - they found a loyal Party executor in Hu Jintao, the Butcher of Tibet.
It greatly saddens me that some western, supposedly freedom-loving and democratic, leaders invite such murderous dictators to a state visit. Meanwhile some self-appointed moral guardians like Tony Bliar refuse to even meet the Dalai Lama, the representative of occupied and exiled Tibetans and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as not to offend the brutal dictators of China! Dubuya Bush has been a catastrophy to the world but at least he dares to expose his face to the Dalai Lama in person, even if he isn't willing to help the oppressed Tibetans with actual deeds.
That someone like Billy Gates would be the first in line to host and toast the Butcher of Tibet should come as no surprise to anyone. But the representatives of free and democratic states...?
I wonder if there was a national referendum in the US about welcoming the murderous Hu, with a fact-sheet of his crimes attached, would the people still welcome the Butcher to be wined and dined as the nation's guest of "honor"?
The US continues to trade with and indeed support many despotic regimes, but at least they nominally support change towards more democracy. China on the other hand *prefers* to deal with despotic rulers. For instance, China vetoed UN intervention in the Darfur genocide as they had lucrative oil and business deals with the military regime there.
The mad regime in North Korea only stays in power because Beijing finds it in their interests to prop it up for strategic reasons. Same with Burma.
Chinese state-owned military companies have certainly "disseminated" nuclear and missile technology to other despotic regimes to win influence there, with the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear programme proliferating Chinese and North Korean technology further yet. Not to the democratic India though, which China sees as a strategic competitor to be contained (thus Chinese support to both Pakistan and Burma, and the invasion and militarization of occupied Tibet).
While China isn't invading Middle Eastern states (yet?), it has *annexed* several neighboring states and peoples by military force (Tibetans, Uigurs and Mongols to name the most prominent ones). The expansionist policies of the most murderous dictator in human history, Mao Zedong, still persist and the dictator continues to be hailed as *the* national hero.
Living in China for a short period (probably in the more liberal Han-Chinese areas as well) and having some Chinese friends doesn't necessarily give one any knowledge or insights into the policies of the ruling regime there. I have closely followed the developments in China, both from inside and outside, since the 1980s, besides having familiarized myself with their contemporary and dynastic history, and still don't consider myself as an expert on China. The vast majority of Chinese, however, only get to "learn" what their regime wants them to believe and never get to understand China's foreign policy in other than glorious patriotic terms.