I want to past an article
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 cliché. 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. I tried, in vain, to point this out to her, but she just shook her head, cut the conversation short, and was on her way…
As it turned out, the supervisors voted for a meaningless, toothless resolution, stripped of provocative rhetoric, much to the dismay of the far-lefties who argued for a stronger statement. The initiative for this effort was made by supervisor Chris Daly, an obnoxious left-liberal with delusions of grandeur, whose pose of self-righteousness is both grating and characteristic of his sort.
Prior to the vote on the Daly resolution, which was vociferously supported by the supposedly pacifistic supporters of the Dalai Lama, the Chinese consulate was… firebombed. This is what the War Party would like to do to China.
Fortunately, there are a number of restraining factors that get in the way: in the meantime, however, our preening politicians demagogue the China issue, and none so brazenly as Speaker of the House 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. Pelosi and the unions she depends on for political support despise all things Chinese for the simple reason that China, today, is more capitalist than the U.S. – in spite of the Chinese Communist Party's ostensible commitment to Marxist ideology. Thinly veiled racist-chauvinist bilge is routinely directed at the Chinese people by union bosses and right-wing paleo-protectionists, who stupidly claim that the "chinks" (or, as 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. Like hell it is.
Lucrative trade and cultural exchanges between China and California, as well as the fact that many Chinese in her congressional district have continuing ties to the mainland, have – so far – failed to deter Pelosi and her fellow Know-Nothings: politics, as they used to say during the Cultural Revolution in China, is in command.
These Sinophobic protests, engineered behind the scenes by leftist union bosses and God knows who else, are focused on the passing of the Olympic torch, which is slowly but surely making its way to Beijing, where the games are scheduled to be held Aug. 8-24. Here in the Bay Area, activists in the "Free Darfur" movement announced they were mounting demonstrations urging China to "extinguish the flames of genocide" in Darfur in San Francisco on April 9, the day the flame passes through the city.
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. As such, the worldwide protests and political posturing of preening politicians – from Pelosi to Nicolas Sarkozy – are bitterly resented and have been met with increasingly shrill 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. Indeed, the exact opposite is closer to the truth. 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.
We saw this when the U.S. "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during Clinton's Balkan War of Aggression, and again when that American spy plane went down over Hainan island. 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. "They are worried about a larger number of things and they are worried about keeping the lid on," 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. Remember the Red Guards? 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 U.S., 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" (i.e., subordinate) place in the global scheme of things.
After all, what if Chinese government leaders constantly reminded the world that the American Southwest was stolen from Mexico? Imagine the Chinese and Mexican ambassadors to the U.S. demanding independence, for, say, California – or better yet, its return to Mexican sovereignty! Shall the Olympics be forever barred from Puerto Rico, which was forcibly incorporated into the U.S. "commonwealth" in the invasion of 1898?
