Tiananmen 2.0

[bluemonday]

Tibet.

Another Tiananmen Square style massacre in the near future?

Lots of soundbite condemnation but little else - not the first time either.

[Skeddan]

If so, could be a Moscow style Olympics with major boycotting. (Which is why this protest is happening now). I think China are wised up enough to know how to handle it for 'legitimate restoration of public order' vs. massacre. Even that will be given a lot of leeway - boycotting countries would be in danger of souring important trade relationships with China.

 

It's even easier for trade-partner governments to paper over when there is little or no news footage to bring it to life in the living room. If nothing else Tiananmen should have brought home the power of media images. As I see it, in 2.0 the authorities get the upper hand.

 

Apart from a very unlikely Olympic boycott there'd be little action - it all would be down to the UN - and Security Council all have their 'Tibets', i.e. territories where their administration is very questionable under UN Charter e.g. Chagos Islands, Tahiti etc.

[bluemonday]

West turns a blind eye to China’s brutal vision

If anyone knows where Teng Biao is, could they give his family a call? He was bundled into the back of a police wagon in Beijing recently and nobody has seen him since. He’s a human rights lawyer - which, in China, makes him about as popular with the authorities as an alcoholic Jew in Riyadh.

 

Teng is just one of the Chinese lawyers who have disappeared recently, or been roughed up by police thugs. The difficult journalists are in prison already - this vile, totalitarian country has by far the largest number of prisoners of conscience in the world. Protesters over China’s brutal repression in Tibet hope the world will sit up and take notice, with the Olympic Games in Beijing about to kick off.

 

Not a chance: western companies connive in Chinese censorship, the athletes agree not to criticise their hosts and western governments cravenly beg for trade and mention human rights only sotto voce. Those Olympic races will be run beneath a literal and metaphoric cloud of filth - Tibet, Teng Biao and thousands of others will remain imprisoned.

Rod Liddle in todays Sunday Times.

[Chinahand]

This is hugely sad - how many people have died, and how many will be aritarily imprisoned or face torture in the round ups to follow?

 

The Economist's correspondent is actually in Lhasa at the moment and is cautious about the death toll. But it is unlikely that this will be the end of things - huge tensions, on both sides of the ethnic divide remain.

 

This Chinese blog has pictures of Lhasa and shows something of the scale of the crackdown.

 

I'm not sure what to make of the Dali Lhama's phrase "Cultural genocide". There's no doubt that the Chinese are making a concerted effort to reduce the influence of Tibetan traditional culture - is that genocide? Bit of a loaded term, but there are deliberate efforts to break the power of the monastries.

 

Forced modernization, a destruction of language and traditional ways of life - rural depopulation and mass imigration of Chinese outsiders. Its a recipe for huge tensions - the chinese authorities are reaping what they have sown at the moment.

[Albert Tatlock]

£5 says this gets so bad that China decides to 'cancel' the olympics.

[Bananaman]

£5 says this gets so bad that China decides to 'cancel' the olympics.

 

 

I'll see your £5 pound sir and raise it by five.

 

The only reason I say this is - do you know how hard it is to get new fences at the moment? All the world's raw materials are going into China. Too much at (pardon the pun please) stake.

 

The world corporates will not let such an opportunity lie.

 

Let's have a closer look at how the worlds press run it compared to personal bloggs?

[Tarroo Ushtey]

I'm not sure what to make of the Dali Lhama's phrase "Cultural genocide". There's no doubt that the Chinese are making a concerted effort to reduce the influence of Tibetan traditional culture - is that genocide? Bit of a loaded term, but there are deliberate efforts to break the power of the monastries.

 

As you say yourself Chinahand "the Chinese are making a concerted effort to reduce the influence of Tibetan traditional culture", so yes, it has to be cultural genocide surely.

[Skeddan]

.... a concerted effort to reduce the influence of ... traditional culture

....

Forced modernization, a destruction of language and traditional ways of life - rural depopulation and mass imigration of ... outsiders.

Err - isn't that what we call simply coming under the influence of the dominant culture. At least that's what it's called when the UK did these things to IoM. 'Cultural Genocide' - nah. Superior culture mate.

[Chinahand]

West turns a blind eye to China’s brutal vision

If anyone knows where Teng Biao is, could they give his family a call? He was bundled into the back of a police wagon in Beijing recently and nobody has seen him since. He’s a human rights lawyer - which, in China, makes him about as popular with the authorities as an alcoholic Jew in Riyadh.

 

Teng is just one of the Chinese lawyers who have disappeared recently, or been roughed up by police thugs. The difficult journalists are in prison already - this vile, totalitarian country has by far the largest number of prisoners of conscience in the world. Protesters over China’s brutal repression in Tibet hope the world will sit up and take notice, with the Olympic Games in Beijing about to kick off.

 

Not a chance: western companies connive in Chinese censorship, the athletes agree not to criticise their hosts and western governments cravenly beg for trade and mention human rights only sotto voce. Those Olympic races will be run beneath a literal and metaphoric cloud of filth - Tibet, Teng Biao and thousands of others will remain imprisoned.

Rod Liddle in todays Sunday Times.

 

Its great that Liddle is covering this sort of thing - but Teng was released on the 9th of March - so this is really disengenuous journalism to claim he's missing on the 16th!

 

There is a general crack down going on at the moment not just in Tibet, but all over China - those working for Human Rights, sympathetic with the downtrodden getting recognition, and working with them to achieve that, etc are at great risk of just disappearing for a day or so for a quiet chat with the PBS - sometimes with a fist or two or electric shock treatment to help them understand.

 

Nasty.

 

Plus all of this makes a total mockery of the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi who recently said: "People in China enjoy extensive freedom of speech". David Milliband was standing next to him smiling while he spouted this lie - so much for an ethical foreign policy hey!

[Lonan3]

£5 says this gets so bad that China decides to 'cancel' the olympics.

A similar massacre in Mexico City in 1968 didn't have any effect on the Olympic Games being held there.

[Chinahand]

The wider implications of China's crack down are how Google et al will cooperate, or not, with the censors. CLICKY

 

The web is being more and more controlled by authoritarians who are forcing corporations to bend to their will or loose their contracts.

 

Google's slogan - do not evil - well given their cooperation in restricting speech in China that's no longer true. Don't expect to many Youtube videos to break the through the Great Firewall of China.

[bluemonday]

China blames Dalai Lama for riots

Clicky

Well they would do, wouldn't they...........

[Skeddan]

Chinahand – can you shed any light on the relationship between China and Tibet. As I understand it the ‘autonomous region’ is the PRC’s equivalent of a Crown Dependency – i.e. Tibet is neither a country, nor part of China per se, and China is responsible for defence and good government. Is it one of those obscure ‘wriggle room’ relationships, or is there some clear basis to this?

 

Pictures of military in the street do not mean the government is not justified in taking such action – look at the LA riots – would those have been better without intervention? If, (very hypothetically), there were illegal unauthorised marches and protests in IoM with arson attacks etc. would you not expect the UK to take firm action to restore law and order and arrest those responsible? Why in your view should China’s response be seen as anything different?

 

However much concern members of the public might feel, is there any basis for governments to actually take any action over this? Has China actually done anything contra to its international obligations? Other countries like Egypt, Kuwait, Singapore, etc. do not have great human rights records – but those are ‘domestic matters’ which other countries cannot interfere with unless they are violations of treaties or international humanitarian law (i.e. crimes against humanity, genocide). If governments took sanctions (boycotting Olympics etc.), how would this not be unjustified interference in China’s domestic affairs? If China has not technically done anything wrong, would concerns over the human rights of ‘agitators’ be enough to warrant what might lead to a cold war? (which apart from anything else would be counter-productive to human rights progress).

 

IMO the legal relationship between China and Tibet is key. If it is a ‘domestic matter’ that is one thing. If Tibet is a country under subjugation (as was Afghanistan under Soviet Union, Kuwait under Iraq), the whole issue changes radically. I suspect the ‘wriggle room’ or ‘constructive ambiguity’ in the relationship between Tibet and China allows other nations to not take action which might lead to conflict with China.

[Lonan3]

As I said before, there is a definite sense of Déjà vu about this.

 

In 1968 Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was determined to stop the student demonstrations demanding greater freedom and, in September, he ordered the army to occupy the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the country's largest university. Students were beaten and arrested indiscriminately. Rector Javier Barros Sierra resigned in protest on September 23.

 

Student demonstrators were not deterred, however. The demonstrations grew in size, until, on October 2, after student strikes lasting nine weeks, 15,000 students from various universities marched through the streets of Mexico City, carrying red carnations to protest the army's occupation of the university campus. By nightfall, 5,000 students and workers, many of them with spouses and children, had congregated outside an apartment complex in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco for what was supposed to be a peaceful rally. Among their chants were ¡No queremos olimpiadas, queremos revolución! ("We don't want Olympic games, we want revolution!"). Rally organizers did not attempt to call off the protest when they noticed an increased military presence in the area.

 

The massacre began at sunset when police and military forces — equipped with armored cars and tanks — surrounded the square and began firing live rounds into the crowd, hitting not only the protestors, but also other people who were present for reasons unrelated to the demonstration. Demonstrators and passersby alike, including children, were hit by bullets, and mounds of bodies soon lay on the ground. The killing continued through the night, with soldiers operating on a house-to-house basis in the apartment buildings adjacent to the square. Witnesses to the event claim that the bodies were later removed in garbage trucks.

 

The official government explanation of the incident was that armed provocateurs among the demonstrators, stationed in buildings overlooking the crowd, had begun the firefight. Suddenly finding themselves sniper targets, the security forces had simply returned the shooting in self-defense.

 

In October 1997, the Congress of Mexico established a committee to investigate the Tlatelolco massacre. The committee interviewed many political players involved in the massacre, including Luis Echeverría Álvarez, a former president who was Díaz Ordaz's minister of the interior at the time of the massacre. Echeverría admitted that the students had been unarmed, and also suggested that the military action was planned in advance, as a means to destroy the student movement.

 

At the time, it received little or no attention from the world's press and media, who were much too concerned with the success of the Olympic Games to worry about a few dissident deaths. Nothing much has really changed.

[Chinahand]

Skeddan as you say there is a lot of wriggle room in this - for more detail I recommend The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama [reviewed in part here: plug plug!].

 

The short story is that Tibet for centuries was within China's sphere of influence - there were times when Tibet was stronger than the weakened empire and so the Chinese emperor gave tribute to the Dala Lama, but most of the time it was the other way round.

 

Towards the end of the Qing empire China was so weak Tibet became defacto independent - various western powers set up missions in Tibet recognising its independence from China, but China never accepted this.

 

As China weakened further over the first quater of the 20th century and nationalist politics became important in Asia moves to formalize Tibets independence were made by its rulers, but these did not amount to much, and with the take over by the Communists Tibet faced a much more assertive neighbour who insisted Tibet was an inalieneable part of China. The Communists invaded and brought in the Leninist systems of control they'd used in China proper - since then political control has always been with the Communist party.

 

China is not a federal state, but strongly centrally controlled. The so called Autonomous Regions in fact have less autonomy than the standard provinces and political power remains under a Han, not Tibetan, CCP chief.

 

Always remember it is the Communist party position and not the government position where power really lies.

 

Tibetan independence is almost an impossibility. What the Dala Lama wants is a similar situation to Hong Kong and Macau where Tibet can control immigration and have genuine autonomy, but under Chinese soverignty: one country, many systems. That is vetoed and the repression of dissent massive. Saying its an internal matter and so not able to be debated by outsiders is a standard Chinese party game; and one I believe is utterly bankrupt.

 

I admit I am fascinated by the difference in coverage between the riots in Lhasa and the riots in Kosovo.

 

Skeddan, I don't hold your world view about the difference between countries under occupation and internal affairs. States are constructs - if an area that hasn't had strong self deterministic tendencies historically develops one this is no reason to say their claims are not legitimate and what a treaty said in 1620 or whatever can have very little relevence.

 

Tibet has a culture totally seperate from that of the Han Chinese, they have maintained that culture over thousands of years and have been ruled as a part of a feudal empire. Beyond that historical position it is highly likely that a majority of the current population wishes to either be totally independent, or very strongly autonomous, of China and are willing to risk life and liberty to push for that. Tibet's current position within the PRC gives it no autonomy or ability to protect its culture or population from massive immigration.

 

Skeddan I presume you have a stong opinion on work permits etc, but you think the legal relationship between Tibet and China is crucial - but crucial to what? Whether the Chinese are justified in being oppressive in Tibet? Ignoring these particular riots - and yes stopping people throwing petrol bombs at you is difficult - the situation in Tibet is oppressive, and very very complex - I cannot agree with the idea that the consitutional position of Tibet within the PRC - enforced by arms in 1950 - is particularly relevent.