www.antiwar.com/justin/j032608b.html
March 26, 2008 Why They Hate China Well, you have to hate someone by Justin Raimondo China's continuing crackdown on Tibetan pro-independence protesters is a big, big issue here in San Francisco. Why, just the other day, I was coming out my front door, and there was one of my neighbors a very nice woman in her fifties, albeit an archetypal limousine liberal, typical of the breed. So typical that she might almost be mistaken for a living, breathing, walking, talking clich. She hates George W Bush and the neocons because she's against the (Iraq) war, but she's eager to "liberate" Darfur and, lately, Tibet. That morning, as she earnestly informed me, she was on her way to a meeting of the Board of Supervisors (our town council) to exhort them to vote for a resolution condemning the Chinese government's actions and calling for "freedom" for Tibet. What she doesn't realize, and doesn't want to know, is that she and the neocons the very ones who brought us the Iraq war are united on the Tibet issue.
Nancy Pelosi, my congressional representative, who is merely Chris Daly writ large. Traveling all the way to India, at taxpayers' expense, Madam Speaker visited with the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala and announced that if Americans don't speak out against Beijing's repression in Tibet "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world." Pelosi is a longtime opponent of Beijing not just the Chinese government, but China itself.
John McCain would put it, the "gooks") are stealing "American jobs" as if Americans have a hereditary right to the very best salaries on earth, a "right" that doesn't have to be earned by competitive business practices but is conferred on them by virtue of their nationality.
Pre-Order this Book The hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing is the focus of much pride in China, seen by the people as well as the ruling caste as symbolic of the nation's arrival in modernity.
denunciations by the Chinese state-controlled media a sentiment that probably understates popular resentment of Western criticism in the Chinese "street." I know we are supposed to believe that the vast majority of the Chinese people are groaning under the weight of Commie oppression and sympathize (albeit silently) with the downtrodden Tibetans, but that is hardly the case. Every time the West gets up on its high horse and lectures the Chinese government about its lack of "morality," the tide of anti-Western Chinese nationalism rises higher.
In Beijing today, they are worried about the upcoming Olympic celebration, which will provide a platform for a wide variety of groups including ultra-nationalist Chinese students, whose street antics have augured internal regime change in the past, and could do so again.
according to Arnold Howitt, a management specialist who oversees crisis-management training programs for Chinese government officials at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The same Associated Press article cites an unnamed "consultant" to the Games, who avers: "'Demonstrations of all kinds are a concern, including anti-American demonstrations,' said the consultant, who works for Beijing's Olympic organizers and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to talk to the media." Any indications that Beijing is compromising Chinese pride and honor by appeasing the West are likely to be met by demonstrations that are both anti-American and anti-government initiated, once again, by Chinese students, who have often been the agents of political transformation.
Mao used them to initiate his own "Cultural Revolution," but was forced to rein them in when they started talking about overthrowing the Chinese state. The memory of that dark and chaotic era haunts China's contemporary rulers, threatening to spoil their dream of a thoroughly modernized industrial powerhouse that is both the forge and the financial capital of the world economy. The Beijing Olympics represent the entry of China onto the world stage as a first-class power, right up there with its former adversaries: the US, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. A Chinese nationalist cannot be faulted for seeing the organized campaign to spoil that debut as a deliberate and unforgivable insult. Viewed from this perspective the perspective, that is, of the average citizen of China the very idea of Tibetan independence might easily be seen as a rather obvious attempt to humiliate Beijing and remind it of its "proper" (ie, subordinate) place in the global scheme of things.
Yet the Americans and their international amen corner are daring to criticize China for preserving its own unity and sovereignty. It's a double standard made all the more insufferable by the self-righteous tone of the anti-China chorus, whose meistersingers are mainly concerned with celebrating their own moral purity. Yes, Tibet was forcibly incorporated into the Communist empire of the Han, but this was just an episode in the long history of Sino-Tibetan relations for the greater part of which the Tibetans held the upper hand.
at its height, extended from northern India to the Mongolian hinterlands and came at the expense of the conquered Chinese and Uighurs. A key factor in this complex narrative is that Mongol hegemony over China was greatly aided by the Tibetans, whose conversion of the Mongol nobility to Buddhism legitimized Mongol rule. Today, pro-Beijing historians point to this period as proof that Tibet has "always" been a part of China proper, yet the truth is that both were slaves to the Mongols the Tibetans as their collaborators, the Chinese as their helots. In short, the popular narrative of the pacifistic Buddhist Tibetans as the good guys and the Han Chinese as the bad-guy aggressors is the stuff of pure myth, pushed by union propagandists, lefty Hollywood do-gooders, and trendy sandal-wearing Western camp followers of the Dalai Lama, who has become a secularized yet "spiritual" substitute for Mother Theresa. If the Chinese are wrong to hold on to their province of Tibet, then Lincoln was wrong to insist that the South stay in the Union and we ought to immediately either grant the American Southwest (and California) independence, or else give it all back to the Mexicans. The same goes for Taiwan China's rulers are no more likely to give up their claim to that island than Lincoln was inclined to let the Confederacy hold on in, say, Key West, Fla. China is an adolescent giant: clumsy, unused to exerting its will beyond its borders, and wracked by self-doubt. Emerging into the company of world powers, it is thin-skinned like any adolescent and prone to wild mood gyrations. During the 1960s and '70s, the Chinese were in a distinctly bad mood as they wrestled with the ghosts and demons unleashed by Mao The triumph of the "modernizers" over the ultra-left Maoists in the 1980s signaled a new mood of optimism and inaugurated an era of unrivaled economic growth.
Ayn Rand meets Chairman Mao (or, rather, Confucius) and the result is capitalism-on-steroids. That's why, in spite of the sclerotic Marxoid ideology that still reins in and retards the natural entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese people, China is moving forward by leaps and bounds. That's also why comrade Pelosi and her union boss buddies have launched this odious Sinophobic hate campaign because "their" jobs and sense of entitlement are going up in smoke. For decades, the US government has preached the virtues of free enterprise and urged formerly Communist nations to adopt the free market and now that the Chinese have taken them up on their offer, Western politicians are attacking them! The closer China has moved toward our own system relaxing totalitarian controls over the economy and allowing a far greater degree of ideological diversity than was possible during the Maoist era the more hostile the US government has become.
US debt the resentment and growing hostility of the Americans is all too palpable. Why do politicians of Pelosi's ilk join hands with neoconservatives in a concerted campaign to antagonize China, and even threaten sanctions and possible military action when the occasion gives rise to the op...
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