“Disabled groups reacted with outrage yesterday to an official guide for assistants at the Beijing Olympic Games that describes them as unsocial, stubborn and defensive.”

Read the whole thing here:

http://tinyurl.com/5jurv8

I think attitudes towards the disabled have come a long way in China, but clearly there is room for improvement. Let’s hope the Paralympics in September help people to review their prejudices.

May 28, 2008 @ 9:39 am | Comment

Interesting. In the article is a link to another good one

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/simon_barnes/article3723595.ece

May 28, 2008 @ 11:11 am | Comment

Interesting. Next to that article is a link to another good one:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/simon_barnes/article3723595.ece

May 28, 2008 @ 11:12 am | Comment

Stuart, for an interesting perspective on this story, be sure to see this post.

May 28, 2008 @ 2:24 pm | Comment

I have read through the guide itself. It’s an sincere effort at preparing the volunteers to provide the right service to people with disabilities, even if the writing itself is not exactly artful or politically correct. If any of you decide to take a look at the link provided by Stuart, please check out the comment section. I was heartened to see many comments being supportive of Beijing in this case.

May 28, 2008 @ 4:47 pm | Comment

DJ - I agree, it’s good to see that most people are not jumping on the ‘outraged’ bandwagon.

“Stuart, for an interesting perspective on this story, be sure to see this post.”

Yes, his points are well taken, especially those related to language.

Also from the Times article:

The advice reflects decades of discrimination in China against mentally and physically disabled people, who total 83 million – equivalent to the population of Germany.

The Communist Party’s desire for a healthy nation, characterised by the one-child policy, fostered deep prejudices that extended to forced sterilisations, bans on marriages between disabled people and abortions of abnormal foetuses.

Now, before anyone starts screaming that the Times are just stirring the pot here, consider this policy shift aimed at the parents of earthquake victims:

Couples whose only child was killed, severely injured or disabled in the quake can get a certificate allowing them to have another child, the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee said Monday.

Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/26/asia/child.php

On the one hand I think this is a very reasonable and appropriate measure. However, I also think it is partly indicative of an attitude towards the disabled in China that regards them as something ‘less than’ non-disabled citizens.

May 28, 2008 @ 6:06 pm | Comment

Stuart, you have made some reasonable points. However I think that in a poor country like China, it is recognized that having children has some utilitarian value. A child will support parents in their old-age, will be able to help out on the farm. Obviously a child who is disabled will find it harder to do these things. So allowing parents with a disabled child to have another one takes this into account.Of course the able-bodied child will be expected to not only take care for his parents in old-age but also care for his/her disabled sibling - if that assistance is in fact required. I don’t think that the policy has anything to do with regarding the disabled as inherently less ‘worthy.’

May 28, 2008 @ 6:36 pm | Comment

“So allowing parents with a disabled child to have another one takes this into account.Of course the able-bodied child will be expected to not only take care for his parents in old-age but also care for his/her disabled sibling”

Yes, I accept that point.

A further concern is that the arrival of an able sibling would spell the end of education for the disabled child.

May 28, 2008 @ 6:53 pm | Comment

A Proposal To Establish A Corpse-Processing Team

After this Wenchuan earthquake, I am glad to say that most of the relief response and post-disaster work has been superior, and the best in human history, admitted even by Western media and UN officials.

But, in some areas, the work of removing the corpses of the dead has not been so great. The way it works now is that they just pile large piles of corpses in a courtyard or a street, and the families come to identify them by looking through thousands of corpses, some are totally rotten that the faces are unrecognizable.

Therefore, this post suggests that in the future, there be a “corpse-processing team” established by each nation’s government. This team will have a regulated and systemic method of processing large amounts of corpses from natural disasters like this one. Corpse processing is very very important, without a proper method, the corpses will start to stink. I’ve heard that a stinking corpse smells 100 times worse than human feces, and will help other diseases spread.

I believe there must be several steps in processing a corpse.

1) Full body photography of the corpse, especially of the face. This will help the families identify the victims. So the processing team’s members must be well trained in “corpse photography”. Also, most of today’s digital cameras also have voice-recording technologies, so the team members can speak into the microphone and describe whatever they see as they are taking the photo. For example, they can say “this photo is taken at XXX place, during XXX hour, the situation is XXX”, etc. This is important, because taking notes by hands take much more time, and in any post-disaster work, time is critical.

2) DNA collection. There should be large DNA collecting containers, and team members should be trained in DNA collection. I think it is better to use hair, because it is something that’s very easy to collect from the body. Also, there should be some methods of preserving the corpses, perhaps putting salt or other chemicals on the corpses, and moving them to a secure room. This method of preservation is similar to the Chinese way of preserving pork to let the flavors sink in. This method is superior to freezing, because if you freeze the corpses in fridges, there could be a power outage (electricity supply is unstable after a natural disaster). In summary, we want to ensure the corpses can be preserved as long as possible, so families can arrive and identify the victims.

3) After the post-disaster work and corpse identification, the corpses must be either burned or buried. This is also a complex issue. If burning, how should they be burned, what fuel should be used? If burying, then how deep should the holes be dug? The team members must be also equipped with such tools as shovels. Of course if there can be a automated process, using automatic digging machines, then that probably is the best way.

The above things may sound very unpleasant, but some people will have to do those unpleasant things. If you don’t want to do it and I don’t want to do it, then who will do it? Don’t you agree?

In conclusion, this “corpse-processing” team must be as well trained as a fire fighting team or a SWAT team. There should be frequent exercises and training sessions. Especially for populated countries like China, USA, Russia, Japan, natural disasters may cause massive deaths, so having such a team is very necessary.

Finally, one thing we can get away from this earthquake is that perhaps death is not so fearful. Every person will die sooner or later, dying sooner is dying, dying later is dying just the same. If you can think through that, then it’s best to look at death with a calm heart.

May 29, 2008 @ 12:53 am | Comment

Let’s hope things improve

God Bless.

May 29, 2008 @ 8:08 am | Comment

@Wayne & stuart
“However I think that in a poor country like China, it is recognized that having children has some utilitarian value. ”
Point taken. It is true that kids have an utilitarian value, specially in rural societies or countries with low or non existent social security net.

On the other hand, my own experience with children with disabilities in similar countries made me be aware of the following problem. I was once in a orphanage with disabled children, they just classified them all as “disabled”, but there were old kind of disabilities, from seriously ill children, different mental disabilities, malnutrition to deaf children. Some of the “disabled” children were exceptionally bright. I remember specially some deaf children that were amazing.

The lack of means but specially the social prejudice against disabilities in general make that a family (and society) lost a quite useful person.

I remember specially a case of a blind girl, met her an her teachers by chance in a park. Could see the progress they made with her in just two weeks. People there were surprised to see a blind girl being teached how to use a stock

May 29, 2008 @ 12:46 pm | Comment

@Wayne & stuart
“However I think that in a poor country like China, it is recognized that having children has some utilitarian value. ”
Point taken. It is true that kids have an utilitarian value, specially in rural societies or countries with low or non existent social security net.

On the other hand, my own experience with children with disabilities in similar countries made me be aware of the following problem. I was once in a orphanage with disabled children, they just classified them all as “disabled”, but there were old kind of disabilities, from seriously ill children, different mental disabilities, malnutrition to deaf children. Some of the “disabled” children were exceptionally bright. I remember specially some deaf children that were amazing.

First think to do is try to put the means to help each kind of disabilities.

The lack of means but specially the social prejudice against disabilities in general make that a family (and society) lost a quite useful person.

I remember specially a case of a blind girl, met her an her teachers by chance in a park. Could see the progress they made with her in just two weeks. People there were surprised to see a blind girl being teach how to use a stock and become more independent. We were in an open park, it was quite a show. His brother and herself where amazed at the results.
From being closed at home and forbidding to go out, she was able now to go by herself abroad. She told us how proud she was the first time she was able to visit her neighbors for the first time all by herself.
From something that had to be kept hidden and ashamed off, her volunteer teachers made of her something that now is more “useful” and not so shameful to her family.

A little education can make a big difference. Here help organization can be more useful. Just need to do a little. When people there realize that the disabled son or daughter has more it store than it seems, no much more encouragement is needed to convince the rest, neither the society to start to put some attention to their education.

Hope to meet the (not so) blind girl and her teachers this summer again to see how far has she improved.

May 29, 2008 @ 12:57 pm | Comment

Ecodelta, yes China certainly does need a huge awareness boost with regard to people with disabilities. People are not malicious, but there needs to be the awareness that disabled people wish to be treated just like any able-bodied person, and not just be the objects of curiosity, pity or even well-intentioned sympathy.

This is an area where people from other countries can come in and make a good contribution. It is an area which is not that politically sensitive, and provided advice is provided in a well meaning way, things can be improved I am sure.

One example of an overseas activist who has done great things without assuming a position of moral superiority and indignation is Jill Robinson of Animals Asia Foundation. She has relieved animal suffering, raised awareness and her work and has worked constructively with the central government. Other would-be activists would do well to follow her example.

May 29, 2008 @ 5:29 pm | Comment

Ecodelta,

Frankly, I see this training effort for volunteers as not a bad start. It’s about seeding such understanding in the population, isn’t it?

May 29, 2008 @ 11:41 pm | Comment

@DJ
“It’s about seeding such understanding in the population..”

One person can help maybe two persons, two persons can help four persons, four persons can help eight persons, eight persons can help sixteen persons……

If you do this thirty two times, you get 2^32 = 4 294 967 296 which is 2,6 times the size of CH population.
You get the idea.

Foreign help volunteers advantage is that they bring new solutions. The difficulty is not to implement a solution, but to know that a (better) solution exist.
And in reverse. Local help volunteers also provide solutions to foreign volunteers.
It works both ways.

May 30, 2008 @ 3:48 am | Comment

Ecodelta,

Are you trying to explain to me what I meant in my comment?

May 30, 2008 @ 4:10 am | Comment

http://business.smh.com.au/rivers-of-money-not-flowing-to-tibetans-20080525-2i1r.html

The rioting Tibets in Lhasa and the unhappy Sichuanese who lost a child in the collapse of a substandard school have something in common, and it is not just irritation with emotionally immature and factually challenged fenqing.

May 30, 2008 @ 5:03 am | Comment

Maybe they can send the racial and ethnic nationalists to burn down the homes of the “Sichuanese invaders” to settle their grief.

Opportunists..

May 30, 2008 @ 5:41 am | Comment

@DJ
“Are you trying to explain to me what I meant in my comment?”

I was just divagating….

May 30, 2008 @ 5:48 am | Comment

That Sydney Morning Herald article makes out as if this is some dramatic new take on things. It is just common sense. The Central government has been pouring funds into the region, but in the end the wealth will end up with the Han. But this is not due to discrimination, it is due to cultural differences. You have exactly the same problem in Fiji where Indians dominate indigenous Fijians economically, in Indonesia where Chinese are similarly dominant in business. And moreover in these two places, the economically group is actively discriminated against.

The Dalai Lama and his supporters on the one hand whine that Tibetans are losing their culture and way of life, and on the other hand bitch about not getting enough of the money coming in. But surely a Tibetan nomad who does not speak much Chinese, or a Tibetan whose ambition is to be a monk, will never be able to compete in a modern business environment. The Dalai wants his cake and eat it too.

Tibetans are losing their culture - not by ‘cultural genocide’ - but by a process called ‘modernizatin.’

I urge everyone to go to the following link:
http://www.blackandwhitecat.org/2008/04/01/separatism-and-tibet/

and read the wonderfully nuanced post of one Mark Anthony Jones. Describes the situation pretty much as it is.

May 30, 2008 @ 8:52 am | Comment

The Dalai Lama more or less just has to hedge his bets and take any kind of support he can get.

He has to balance the demands of ethnic nationalists and moderates, so it’s really unclear what his demands are.

May 30, 2008 @ 9:39 am | Comment

The Dalai Lama and his supporters on the one hand whine that Tibetans are losing their culture and way of life, and on the other hand bitch about not getting enough of the money coming in. But surely a Tibetan nomad who does not speak much Chinese, or a Tibetan whose ambition is to be a monk, will never be able to compete in a modern business environment. The Dalai wants his cake and eat it too.

What utter bilge. Many people who “don’t speak much Chinese” manage to compete in a “modern business environment”, as long as the said business environment is not managed by the Chinese government. The vast majority of Tibetans are not monks. Yet more rubbish from a Chinese apologist.

May 30, 2008 @ 9:28 pm | Comment

Rohan- you are the one talking ‘bilge.’ It would be difficult to get ahead in business or work without English in the US. Similarly without a good grasp of Mandarin one will find it difficult to secure a decent job or successfully manage a business in China. Indeed China’s policy of encouraging minorities to preserve their language and culture (so unlike what whites did to American Indians and aborigines- they simply exterminated them) has meant that some of these minorities have become disengaged from society at large.

A US State Dept report has admitted to as much:

“For example, there is a two-track school system in Tibet, with one track using standard Chinese and the other teaching in the Tibetan language. Students can choose which system to attend. (The same dual system is used in Xinjiang and other provinces with large non-Han populations.) One negative side effect of this policy, which is designed to protect and maintain minority cultures, has been reinforcement of a segregated society. Under this separate educational system, those graduating from schools taught in languages other than standard Chinese are at a disadvantage in competing for jobs in government and business, which require good spoken Chinese.”
http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/bureaus/eap/950907WiedemannTibet.html

May 30, 2008 @ 10:06 pm | Comment

Is anyone currently in a dominant-submissive relationship with the Han?

Any stories?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6lizS3fzM

May 30, 2008 @ 10:25 pm | Comment

Is anyone currently in a dominant - submissive relationship with the Han?

Any stories?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6lizS3fzM

May 30, 2008 @ 10:27 pm | Comment

as long as the said business environment is not managed by the Chinese government.

Oh, so now you want China to not only subsidize Tibet by billions every single year, you want them to simply turn over their businesses and gift investment money to them too?

Great idea, why don’t the expat “colonists” in Shanghai simply hand me Wal-Mart corporation in a neat package with a bow?

Fucking ridiculous.

May 30, 2008 @ 11:29 pm | Comment

.”And it was a big lesson to me, that some times you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who are not nice to you. And that’s a big lesson for me…”

May 31, 2008 @ 12:21 am | Comment

sharon stone apparently said that the Tibetan earthquakes were “karma”…

May 31, 2008 @ 2:41 am | Comment

Sharon Stone is a big whore and is very stupid.

May 31, 2008 @ 5:26 am | Comment

Sharone Stone’s remarks were certainly insensitive and stupid, but this (Chinese) woman’s remarks takes insensitivity to the next level:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/146171

May 31, 2008 @ 7:42 am | Comment

Great idea, why don’t the expat “colonists” in Shanghai simply hand me Wal-Mart corporation in a neat package with a bow?

Haha great point. But it should not stop there. China, and many other non-white countries, have a really good case for reparations from the West for past colonial depredations. The West better pull its head in, because one day some chickens are going to come home to roost. Sorry but Chinese people will never return to the days of the Opium War and extraterritoriality. People like Rohan just can’t stomach the rise of the first great independent non-white power in living memory. But that’s fine Rohan - just carry on in similar vein give yourself more stomach ulcers.

May 31, 2008 @ 8:09 am | Comment

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20080531_6948.php

May 31, 2008 @ 9:17 am | Comment

Pekingduck, it seems, is now blocking our posts in favor of ferin and his ilk.

May 31, 2008 @ 10:28 am | Comment

Hmm…

Sharon Stone is claiming that she didn’t (and don’t intend to) apologize

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/fashion/01stone.html?ref=fashion

May 31, 2008 @ 10:39 am | Comment

Do you think that Han attempts to dominate the foreigners will prevent the foreigners and Chinese from making beautiful music together?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esl2NNOtHQE

May 31, 2008 @ 11:47 am | Comment

Wayne wrote:

“People like Rohan just can’t stomach the rise of the first great independent non-white power in living memory.”

Good ‘Ole Boys like Wayne and ferin would make ideal members of the KKK.

May 31, 2008 @ 11:54 am | Comment

@Wayne

It would be difficult to get ahead in business or work without English in the US. Similarly without a good grasp of Mandarin one will find it difficult to secure a decent job or successfully manage a business in China.

Quite true (except still partially in Hong Kong, I have a friend who has had a decent job there for years and speaks no Chinese). But you’re missing the point, which is that this is exactly why the Tibetans aren’t interested in being part of China.

People like Rohan just can’t stomach the rise of the first great independent non-white power in living memory. But that’s fine Rohan - just carry on in similar vein give yourself more stomach ulcers.

Like many Chinese, Wayne likes to live in a fantasy world. One of the elements of his is that everyone who disagrees with him is a ‘gweilo’. Apologists for genocidal autocracies like this man will get the rude awakening they deserve.

@ferin

Oh, so now you want China to not only subsidize Tibet by billions every single year, you want them to simply turn over their businesses and gift investment money to them too?

No. You’re missing the point, namely that Tibet’s business environment is in Chinese only because of the Chinese occupation. Once the Chinese go home, it will be in Tibetan or Chinese or English, according to what the Tibetans want, not what the Chinese want.

May 31, 2008 @ 1:54 pm | Comment

Lindel.

Please get a clue. The comments on the post about Xujun Eberlein and her new book had very little to do with Xujun.

I posted an open thread so you all could say your piece, as stupid as some of those pieces tend to be.

Uncle Jed, I did not block your comments. It’s possible that they ended up in a spam filter. I have only started deleting comments because quite frankly, I am bored at what passes for conversation here at times. But I have not deleted any of yours, to my knowledge.

Ferin: speaking for myself, I don’t give a rat’s ass about a “non-white power” rising. That’s perfectly fine by me. I do care about oppression wherever it happens to occur and how power is wielded, and I’ve made plenty of comments in the past about the sins of my own country.

Your racist generalizations are tedious.

Honestly, a bunch of you need beating with the clue stick.

May 31, 2008 @ 3:10 pm | Comment

Uncle Jed, a bunch of your comments (and other folks’ as well) were in the spam filter. I don’t know enough about this new platform to tell you why. I also don’t know what you are getting at with your Dueling Banjos clip, but I went ahead and approved it, even though I expect this is intended as an insult of some sort. Whatever.

The other youtube link, I don’t have time to look at it now, so it is still awaiting moderation.

May 31, 2008 @ 3:20 pm | Comment

Quite true (except still partially in Hong Kong, I have a friend who has had a decent job there for years and speaks no Chinese). But you’re missing the point, which is that this is exactly why the Tibetans aren’t interested in being part of China.

I should have said the following:
“It would be difficult to get ahead in business or work without English in the US. Similarly without a good grasp of Mandarin one will find it difficult to secure a decent job or successfully manage a business in China - unless one is a parasitical white in East Asia

May 31, 2008 @ 4:22 pm | Comment

Apologists for genocidal autocracies like this man will get the rude awakening they deserve

Roha: you are either a ‘wong pei gau’ or a ‘baak pei jue.’
Either way you will get your come uppance sooner rather than later when China’s military might will reach right into your front door. You can be assured of more than a ‘rude awakening’ my friend.

May 31, 2008 @ 4:58 pm | Comment

@Wayne

Nice try, but the chap in question is brown, Indian and married to an overseas Chinese. Keep your racist assumptions to yourself, and get your parasitical Chinese friends out of Tibet.

May 31, 2008 @ 4:58 pm | Comment

@Wayne

You are either a ‘tsage’ or a ‘ka ksew’. It’s just as likely that China’s military might will be blasted into teeny tiny pieces the next time they try to pick a fight with a real army over Taiwan.

May 31, 2008 @ 5:04 pm | Comment

Rohan,

China will not need to fight Taiwan. Taiwan has come to its senses. What will happen is China will further democratize, continue along the path along economic growth, and Taiwan will eventually settle for something along the lines of one-country two-systems - but with perhaps more autonomy. American military technology provided to Taiwan will of course be transferred over to the PLA - to the great chagrin of the West - but thats just too bad. Blood is thicker than water.

As for the Tibetans, well Tibetans are Chinese just as Han are Chinese - no more, no less. And most are happy to remain Chinese as their region continues its massive economic growth, literacy and life expectancy continues along the same old pattern since 1950 of rise and rise and rise. Of course those former slave owners and theocrats will shake their fists and rage at the machine - but hey you can’t please everyone.

Rohan - perhaps you should turn your interest to that giant basketcase of a country to the south of Tibet - the land of your ancestors. By sucking up to the white man in order to get plaudits for being the world’s largest ‘democracy,’ India still has to contend witht the revolting caste system (the communists would have swept it away - just as the Maoists in Nepal will wipe the floor with the monarchy there), a life expectancy ten years lower than China’s and literacy rate of 60percent compared to China’s 92percent.

But I wish India well.They also suffered from the depredations of the colonial powers. But I thank god that China was lucky to have a take no shit communist government who defies the edicts of the West and finds its own indepedent path to modernization. That is why the West fears China but not India.

May 31, 2008 @ 5:23 pm | Comment

I think the new Tawanese president said it best when he called for China to introduce ‘freedom, democracy and prosperity for all people’. That’s what the Chinese need, not this Communist gulag, deluded teenage cheerleaders aside.

May 31, 2008 @ 5:39 pm | Comment

Haha Rohan - by describing China as a gulag you show how ignorant and hopelessly out of date you are. In fact the country most befitting of the title Gulag is of course the US which has by far the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. Americas incarceration rate of 1 person for every hundred in 2008 (about 7 times the rate of China)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.html

An incredible one in 36 Hispanic men is behind bars, one in 15 black men is behind bars. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html

I don’t know the Tibetan incarceration rate. But even in my current ignorance I would be willing to bet my left testicle that it is of several orders of magnitude lower than the overall American one.

May 31, 2008 @ 5:51 pm | Comment

From this month’s CSM:

——————————————————–
I was tortured in a Chinese prison. Now I’m marching for freedom.

When it comes to human rights, silence is not golden.

By Yang Jianli

from the May 7, 2008 edition
E-mail Print Letter to the Editor Republish del.icio.us digg

Boston - Silence is golden, goes the aphorism. But consider the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Instead of walking away from the Olympics, which would have removed any tacit approval of Hitler, leaving him less emboldened – possibly even changing the course of history – the world was silent.

We stir up trouble by speaking out.

But I am speaking out. Because the people inside China cannot speak out, and because thousands of brothers and sisters in prison need a voice.

I served five years as a political prisoner in China, from which I was released only last year. I was tortured, both physically and psychologically, and put in solitary confinement for the first 14 months. I was charged with “espionage,” a crime of which I was innocent, and one that can mean jail for life or result in the death sentence.

My family hired a prominent Chinese lawyer in February 2003, after I had been detained. But it was only after the US House and Senate adopted resolutions calling for my release in June 2003 that I was finally allowed to meet with this lawyer.

The pressure from the US eventually made a great difference in my prison experience – I was given more freedom within the prison, and no longer tortured. The fact is that without the leadership of the US, I might never have been freed.

Even when I was finally released from prison, the Chinese government kept me in China, preventing me from uniting with my family in America. If it were not for Congressman Barney Frank and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson working on my behalf, I would not have been able to come home in August 2007.

I am just one man. But I know I need to speak out for the thousands of political prisoners languishing in jail without hope and support, including dozens still serving time for the Tiananmen Square student democracy movement in 1989; for those lawyers seeking to gain human and civil rights for their clients, for those prohibited from practicing their religion, and for those who are afraid to speak out because of the grave consequences consistently doled out by the Chinese government. I need to speak out for the invisible – the abducted, or those placed under house arrest for no other reason than for attempting to exercise their basic human rights.

So on May 4, I began walking 500 miles. It should take over 32 days to make my way from Boston to Washington, DC. I am calling my walk GongMin, which means “Citizen” in Chinese. I’m walking for “citizen power” in China. I’ll walk through Providence, New Haven, Bridgeport, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. My walk will conclude on June 4, the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, where there will be a large gathering and remembrance in Washington.

I’m walking 500 miles as a free man, to draw attention to the struggle for freedom and democracy of Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongolians, and people of all ethnic groups. And I’m walking to call for the US to continue its moral leadership.

The best option is for the US to continue to pressure China to enter a dialogue with human rights advocates around the world.

Human rights are what this great country was founded upon – they cannot, and should not, be commodified or weighed on a scale of pros and cons.

Silence, in this case, is not golden. Silence, as in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, is deadly.

• Dr. Yang Jianli is founder of Initiatives for China, dedicated to empowering the citizens of China by giving voice to their struggles for a peaceful transition to democratic China. He is a former political prisoner in China.

May 31, 2008 @ 6:00 pm | Comment

Rohan cannot win an argument so he just goes ahead and posts the supposed personal history of one person who suffered in China. How pathetic.

Rohan, you are an abject excuse for a human being, warped by envy of and hatred for another coloured country which is doing far better than your own.

How about just reciting the tragic personal histories of every single innocent killed by US (and UK) foreign agression in the past few years? Dwarf any suffering allegedly caused by the Chinese government.

Rohan, be a man and stop trying to run round being a modern day step’n fetchit for your white masters.

May 31, 2008 @ 6:21 pm | Comment

Rohan - instead of writing bile against the Chinese people - a people who have never done anything to harm you - except provide you with a wife, how about using your time constructively to satisfy that wife of yours. Maybe go to the gym more, work off that gut, and overdose on Viagra.

May 31, 2008 @ 6:25 pm | Comment

What other minorities are in a dominant-submissive relationship with the Han?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6lizS3fzM&feature=related

May 31, 2008 @ 7:12 pm | Comment

Pekingduck is blocking my posts in favor of the racist vitriol of ferin and Wayne.

Why can’t we see video clips of Germany in the 1930s? The parallels are astounding.

May 31, 2008 @ 7:18 pm | Comment

China’s All Seeing Eye

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1

May 31, 2008 @ 7:22 pm | Comment

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008 by The Nation
Regime-Quakes in Burma and China
by Naomi Klein
When news arrived of the catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan, my mind turned to Zheng Sun Man, an up-and-coming security executive I met on a recent trip to China. Zheng heads Aebell Electrical Technology, a Guangzhou-based company that makes surveillance cameras and public address systems and sells them to the government.

Zheng, a 28-year-old MBA with a text-messaging addiction, was determined to persuade me that his cameras and speakers are not being used against pro-democracy activists or factory organizers. They are for managing natural disasters, Zheng explained, pointing to the freak snowstorms before Lunar New Year. During the crisis, the government “was able to use the feed from the railway cameras to communicate how to deal with the situation and organize an evacuation. We saw how the central government can command from the north emergencies in the south.”

Of course, surveillance cameras have other uses too — like helping to make “Most Wanted” posters of Tibetan activists. But Zheng did have a point: nothing terrifies a repressive regime quite like a natural disaster. Authoritarian states rule by fear and by projecting an aura of total control. When they suddenly seem short-staffed, absent or disorganized, their subjects can become dangerously emboldened. It’s something to keep in mind as two of the most repressive regimes on the planet — China and Burma — struggle to respond to devastating disasters: the Sichuan earthquake and Cyclone Nargis. In both cases, the disasters have exposed grave political weaknesses within the regimes — and both crises have the potential to ignite levels of public rage that would be difficult to control.

When China is busily building itself up, residents tend to stay quiet about what they all know: developers regularly flout safety codes, while local officials are bribed not to notice. But when China comes tumbling down — including at least eight schools — the truth has a way of escaping. “Look at all the buildings around. They were the same height, but why did the school fall down?” demanded a distraught relative in Juyuan. A mother in Dujiangyan told the Guardian, “Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad…. They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children.”

That the Olympic stadiums were built to withstand powerful quakes is suddenly of little comfort. When I was in China, it was hard to find anyone willing to criticize the Olympic spending spree. Now posts on mainstream web portals are calling the torch relay “wasteful” and its continuation in the midst of so much suffering “inhuman.”

None of this compares with the rage boiling over in Burma, where cyclone survivors have badly beaten at least one local official, furious at his failure to distribute aid. There have been dozens of reports of the Burmese junta taking credit for supplies sent by foreign countries. It turns out that they have been taking more than credit — in some cases they have been taking the aid. According to a report in Asia Times, the regime has been hijacking food shipments and distributing them among its 400,000 soldiers. The reason speaks to the threat the disaster poses to the very existence of the regime. The generals, it seems, are “haunted by an almost pathological fear of a split inside their own ranks…if soldiers are not given priority in aid distribution and are unable to feed themselves, the possibility of mutiny rises.” Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, confirms that before the cyclone, the military was already coping with a wave of desertions.

This relatively small-scale theft of food is fortifying the junta for its much larger heist — the one taking place via the constitutional referendum the generals have insisted on holding, come hell and high water. Enticed by high commodity prices, Burma’s generals have been gorging off the country’s natural abundance, stripping it of gems, timber, rice and oil. As profitable as this arrangement is, junta leader Gen. Than Shwe knows he cannot resist the calls for democracy indefinitely.

Taking a page out of the playbook of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the generals have drafted a Constitution that allows for elections but guarantees that no future government will ever have the power to prosecute them for their crimes or take back their ill-gotten wealth. As Farmaner puts it, after elections the junta leaders “are going to be wearing suits instead of boots.” The cyclone, meanwhile, has presented them with one last, vast business opportunity: by blocking aid from reaching the highly fertile Irrawaddy delta, hundreds of thousands of mostly ethnic Karen rice farmers are being sentenced to death. According to Farmaner, “that land can be handed over to the generals’ business cronies” (shades of the beachfront land grabs in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the Asian tsunami). This isn’t incompetence, or even madness. It’s laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.

If the Burmese junta avoids mutiny and achieves these goals, it will be thanks largely to China, which has vigorously blocked all attempts at the United Nations for humanitarian intervention in Burma. Inside China, where the central government is going to great lengths to show itself as compassionate, news of this complicity could prove explosive. Will China’s citizens receive this news? They just might. Beijing has, up to now, displayed an awesome determination to censor and monitor all forms of communication. But in the wake of the quake, the notorious “Great Firewall” censoring the Internet is failing badly. Blogs are going wild, and even state reporters are insisting on reporting the news.

This may be the greatest threat that natural disasters pose to repressive regimes. For China’s rulers, nothing has been more crucial to maintaining power than the ability to control what people see and hear. If they lose that, neither surveillance cameras nor loudspeakers will be able to help them.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).

May 31, 2008 @ 7:36 pm | Comment

Otherlisa wrote:

“Uncle Jed, a bunch of your comments (and other folks’ as well) were in the spam filter. I don’t know enough about this new platform to tell you why. I also don’t know what you are getting at with your Dueling Banjos clip, but I went ahead and approved it, even though I expect this is intended as an insult of some sort. Whatever.”

No—web links never used to be “filtered” until now. And I see that the web links of posts by Chinese people are getting through. Please stop this new method of censorship. The Dueling Banjos Clip is not an insult. It’s called humor—”Chinese and foreigners making beautiful music together”. Get it?

May 31, 2008 @ 8:30 pm | Comment

Uncle Jed,

Can’t you come up with your own ideas?

Quotations, or short extracts should be OK, but Lisa, please stop people from choking up the board with cut and pastes of entire articles uplifted from other websites. Surely Lisa, we want to hear the original views of those who post here. If people want to draw attention to someone elses stuff surely they can just provide the link. Cut and paste really does compromise the quality of the discussion here.

Seems like this idiociy is carried out almost exclusively by the anti-China freaks - they have not an original thought in their empty heads, know only how to regurgitate platitudes and other peoples work.

May 31, 2008 @ 9:04 pm | Comment

No. You’re missing the point, namely that Tibet’s business environment is in Chinese only because of the Chinese occupation.

No it’s not. It’s Chinese people Chinese investors come with capital and open up shops and services. The Tibetans outside of the higher, dryer areas of Tibet have no problems starting up their own businesses because they actually have a base to build on, but in the farflung areas of Tibet they need investment money.

How stupid are you? Speaking of Gulag, India has 40 million bonded laborers and 350+ million who are chronically undernourished.

Ferin: speaking for myself, I don’t give a rat’s ass

That isn’t me.

The parallels are astounding.

They don’t exist. There are no similarities whatsoever. If anything, America is most like Nazi Germany.

May 31, 2008 @ 10:15 pm | Comment

*It’s Chinese people that come with capital and open up shops and services.

May 31, 2008 @ 10:17 pm | Comment

@Wayne

How about just reciting the tragic personal histories of every single innocent killed by US (and UK) foreign agression in the past few years? Dwarf any suffering allegedly caused by the Chinese government.

Nonsense. China operates the entire country of Tibet as a gigantic prison. It is full of informers, spies, police and military watching everyone. The entire country is a gulag. The few tourists who are usually allowed there are heavily restricted and now, of course, there are none. Nobody knows what terrible crimes are being committed there by the Chinese, but going by the past history reported by survivors from Chinese prisons, we can easily guess.

@ferin

How stupid are you? Speaking of Gulag, India has 40 million bonded laborers and 350+ million who are chronically undernourished.

Which has what to do with Chinese oppression of the Tibetan people? You sad miserable adolescent, try stringing together a nargument that makes logical sense for once in your chronically whingeing life…

June 1, 2008 @ 1:21 am | Comment

@Wayne

If people want to draw attention to someone elses stuff surely they can just provide the link. Cut and paste really does compromise the quality of the discussion here.

There is no possibility of quality discussion involving you, my friend. You are entirely removed from reality and living in la- la-land. Anything you say which is actually true is usually purely by accident and incidental to the vast heaps of garbage that make up the majority of what you call ‘discussion’. Adding a few elements of factual points in between the usual diet of lies, innuendo, insults, childish tantrums and ad hominem arguments with which you and your friend Ferin fecally deface this unfortunate forum is really not going to do anything to improve the quality of discussion. Sending you to a re-education camp, of which your beloved People’s Republic has no shortage, for ten or fifteen years, would be the only really effective way to improve the quality of ‘discussion’ here, but only for a short time, since I’m sure there are lots more pimpled, logic-strapped, ill-bred, stupid and socially maladjusted only children where you came from.

June 1, 2008 @ 1:29 am | Comment

with Chinese oppression of the Tibetan people?

Oh please you big whiny baby. China doesn’t oppress the Tibetans specifically and your cheap attempts to create racial conflicts between them are failing.

It’s more a problem that both the Han and the Tibetans share together. Btw the Tibetans have a standard of living infinitely better than “democratic” India.

It has everything to do with the argument because you are a brainwashed “democratic nationalist” who is arguing for the racial and ethnic division of Tibet (of course, India would just annex it like they did Arunachal and Himachal) when you wouldn’t accept the same for your own country whether it’s the British colony called America or India.

June 1, 2008 @ 2:26 am | Comment

Wow, it’s amazing that this conversation has degenerated into Tibet and India-bashing by a group of fenqing, interspersed with insults and chest-beating.

June 1, 2008 @ 8:49 am | Comment

It has “degenerated” because it went from the ever-frequent and 100% accepted China bashing (to the lows of comparing China to Nazi Germany).

All I did was rattle off a list of facts about democratic India. It isn’t bashing. I don’t hear anyone bashing Tibet either.

Everyone who won’t join in the orgy of hatred for China is a fenqing!

June 1, 2008 @ 9:32 am | Comment

Rohan,
Rohan:

China under ‘dictatorship’ has done far more for its people than Indian ‘democracy’ has.

Just two statistics: female literacy rate: China 87%, India 45%, Under-5 malnutrition: China 12.1%, India 45.8%!

Malnourished children is a far greater human rights problem, both qualitatively and quantitatively. than the imprisonment of a few dissidents.

China outperforms India in many other ways as well, as this article “India is China’s economic equal? Bah!” details: http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/sep/27china.htm

Of course the compensating factor for India is that it gets to be regularly praised by the West as the world’s ‘biggest democracy.’ Kudos from the white man, I suppose, is more important to people like Rohan than the health of 1/2 of all of India’s children.

June 1, 2008 @ 10:24 am | Comment

to Rohan

look other way around, British invaded tibet in 1904 leading by a colonial official Younghusband, but failed in 1906 because of fighting back by Tibetan and chinese qing dynasty, and Britain signed Lahsa Treaty with Qing Dynasty, so if tibet was not part of china, why the hell Britain signed that Lahsa Treaty with Qing Dynasty in the first place, but another possibility, if it were not Qing Dynasty helped Tibetan to fight back British, maybe british would have sold tibetan as slaves to america already, don’t you think its a possiblity??

and bear in mind, Britain and some other european countries caused all these problems in africa and asia when colonizing these area, there were no clear countries ideas in africa, only because european colonized these places, put different tribes in its own territory, now caused so many historical ethnic, political, religious etc problems, also between India and Parkistan etc.

and don’t forget, who invented colonization, racism, communism, nazi, world war, genocide???? who brought all these evil inventions all over the world??

would you call american and british culture genocide many other cultures in the world? as there are so many people now speaking english? watching english films and tv? including us using english here??

June 1, 2008 @ 10:53 am | Comment

…and don’t forget, who invented colonization, racism, communism, nazi, world war, genocide???? who brought all these evil inventions all over the world??

I’m not sure they can be classified as inventions. Did China invent ‘cyber warfare’?

http://cupofcha.com/2008/06/01/did-china-cause-2003-american-blackout.html

June 1, 2008 @ 11:26 am | Comment

of course, who invented cyber??? good answer, Stuart, congrats, your IQ is just as excellent as Sharon Stone, lol

June 1, 2008 @ 11:32 am | Comment

If Pekingduck starts to engage in censorship, particularly if such censorship is in favor of the nationalists, then Pekingduck has lost all credibility.

The psychology of ferin, Wayne, et. al is definately fascist—lack of individuality leading to nationalism, preoccupation with race and power; the desire to dissolve oneself into the group.

June 1, 2008 @ 11:50 am | Comment

Uncle Jed - get a grip. No one is censoring your posts. Several got caught in the spam filter. This is a new platform for TPD and I barely know my way around it. Plus I’ve been on a plane for the last six hours.

Wayne is banned for his disgusting comment earlier. Go away, Wayne, and don’t come back until you have learned how to behave like a grownup.

June 1, 2008 @ 4:49 pm | Comment

And, yes. Please do not cut and paste entire articles in comment threads. A link and a paragraph or two is sufficient.

I’ll try to get a better handle on all this tomorrow, barring jet lag. But honestly, skimming these comments - and it’s all I can do to skim them - is seriously depressing.

June 1, 2008 @ 4:55 pm | Comment

Lisa - I suppose you mean the comment about Xujun Eberlein. Yeah, that was inappropriate. It won’t happen again. Wayne

June 1, 2008 @ 5:42 pm | Comment

hi

June 2, 2008 @ 12:55 am | Comment

The psychology of ferin, Wayne, et. al is definately fascist—lack of individuality leading to nationalism, preoccupation with race and power; the desire to dissolve oneself into the group.

Actually that sounds exactly like you and the other 219,129,352,534,735 anti-China trolls accounts.

Acting as an individual, most of my points just happen to coincide with someone else’s.

June 2, 2008 @ 1:22 am | Comment

This is ridiculous. What has happened to TPD?

June 2, 2008 @ 5:17 am | Comment

I don’t know, t_co, it’s really depressing. Richard doesn’t have time to post, and I haven’t either - I’ve just been trying to keep the comments under control.

June 2, 2008 @ 8:39 am | Comment

ferin wrote: “anti-China trolls”

So you claim to speak for all Chinese people in the same way that the KKK claims to speak for all “White people”?

June 2, 2008 @ 1:31 pm | Comment

Shoot me now….

June 2, 2008 @ 3:32 pm | Comment

So you claim to speak for all Chinese people

Acting as an individual

Learn how to read.

June 2, 2008 @ 4:31 pm | Comment

Whee! Silly insults, a banning, and ye olde nationalists/racists/redneck bickering contest! Lisa, if you’ll just retitle the thread “stupidity contest” it will all make more sense.

June 2, 2008 @ 5:12 pm | Comment

What ever happened to Sharon Stone?

The last I heard Xinhua declared her “the enemy of mankind”. Did they deliberately use the word “mankind”, or did they mean men and women?

Jed Shu Shu

June 2, 2008 @ 7:57 pm | Comment

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=vHhSo0Y8xeo&feature=related

June 2, 2008 @ 8:19 pm | Comment

Sam_S - yep.

June 3, 2008 @ 2:38 am | Comment

Guys, while you think about how to sort out the site, I’d just like to say that under Firefox something slows down typing into the “Leave a comment” box to about one third my normal typing speed, so that I have to wait agonisingly for the words to catch up with the typing. Didn’t happen with the old layout, and it’s annoying.

June 3, 2008 @ 4:02 am | Comment

I just saw this article for the first time and thought it was a striking expression of a different and important point of view…

http://www.tibetcustom.com/article.php/20080602090418110

“Why cant you understand that people have different values? While you believe in brainwashing, the power of a gun and of money, there is a spiritual belief that has been in their minds for thousands of years and cannot be washed away. When you claim yourselves as “saviors of Tibetans from slavery society,” I am ashamed for your arrogance and your delusions. When military police with their guns pass by me in the streets of Lhasa, and each time I am there I can see row upon row of military bases… yes, I, a Han Chinese, feel ashamed.”

June 3, 2008 @ 4:13 am | Comment

Yeah Rohan, that’s a good one for sure. I like it because the author seems so relaxed. She doesn’t seem afraid of whatever the truth may be. She is not irrational and fanatical like some who will block their ears and yell LIAR!!! and wave the fist in the air, indulging in cultural revolution chant down. There are Chinese who care about whats true and there are Chinese who care about feeling as if they are glorious and correct no matter what lies and violence they condone.

Of course this is an example for all people, but in China the image is intense, China is intense that;s why I like it and I learn a lot about human behaviour, good and evil from Chinese history and current events..

What I have witnessed recently in the mobs of fanatic ignorant Chinese is a relentlessness, like how Mao declared that the proletariat could move the mountains, command the sun and all sorts of pompousness like that. The people seem to still believe that nationalism is above truth, is above wisdom and is above the very things that would would deem a people to be glorious. Without wisdom and virtues, how can one be proud, anyway, enough from me, I don’t know the Chinese language and I am not Chinese so surely there are many many Chinese people who are wise enough to think of these fundamental issues on their own and are working towards improving it all.

June 3, 2008 @ 8:59 am | Comment

Rohan and Snow: both of you are transparent fools. Apart from the monotonous, self-hating twaddle this woman has written, the thing that absolutely leaps out to t me is how she is currently in Israel teaching at Tel Aviv University.
Perhaps she should spare her homily not for her own people, but for her adopted state which actually kicked out most of the original inhabitants, and completely marginalized the remaining, who rain cluster bombs down on innocent civilians and deny statehood to a truly proud people- the Palestinians.Of course such irony would be completely lost on bitter little mediocrities like Rohan and Snow.

June 3, 2008 @ 9:32 am | Comment

so who’s on trial here? Chinese nationalism? fair enough. How about we make a deal, You europeans and yankees get rid of ur nationalism first, no more “support our troops” bumpers (support ur troop to do what, murdering?), ger rid of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Fox News, remove Ann coulter’s books from the shelf … then after 100 yrs, we chinese will get rid of our nationalism. white people started invasion, exploration, genocide, pulluting 200 years before us, it’s not too much to ask for u to get rid of ur nationalism first dont u think?

June 3, 2008 @ 9:44 am | Comment

Chinese ‘nationalism’ is not really ‘nationalism.’ It is simply patriotism. Chinese don’t claim any land anywhere in the world which is not rightly China’s.
Furthermore, there is no territory which China currently holds, or claims, which the rest of the world does not recognize as part of China.

The Chinese claim to Tibet is morally and legally unassailable. The Chinese claim to Taiwan is morally and legally unassailable.
That is why virtually all countries in the world support Tibet as part of China, support Taiwan as part of China.

So Chinese ‘Nationalism’ does not talk of the ’superiority’ of the Chinese race. It does not advocate the invasion or subjugation
of foreign peoples for selfish national interest. So it is not really ‘nationalism.’

Unlike the US and UK China does not invade other countries and slaughter hundreds of thousands of non-combatants for oil.
And there is no so-called Chinese ‘Nationalist’ who would advocate such an immoral action.

So the Chinese form of ‘nationalism’ is wholly benign and moral.

June 3, 2008 @ 10:23 am | Comment

Typing here is like trying to do gymnastics in water.
I have resorted to typing in notepad first then cutting and pasting.

June 3, 2008 @ 10:27 am | Comment

Go to the Guardian newspaper website.

See “There are CCTV Cameras Everywhere”.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/audio/2008/jun/03/dennis.klein

June 3, 2008 @ 11:10 am | Comment

Go to the Guardian newspaper website.

See “There are CCTV Cameras Everywhere”.

June 3, 2008 @ 11:11 am | Comment

The Chinese claim to Tibet is morally and legally unassailable.

No. The Chinese claim to Tibet rests on force alone, not on any moral or legal claim. If there were a referendum in Tibet tomorrow, China would lose overwhelmingly.

June 3, 2008 @ 5:48 pm | Comment

Rohan: Tibet was part of China way before California, Texas, New Mexico were part of the US.
Problem is you would not be able to take a referendum of the original inhabitants of those areas - they have all been killed off.
Tibet as part of China is not just the business of the 6 million people who live in that place.
It is the business of all Chinese people. Tibet is part of the Chinese nation. Chinese of any ethnic or racial group have the right to live in Tibet. It is not for just those people who live in Tibet now to decide whether or not only they have the right to that region.
Just as it would be outrageous for people in Shanghai or Guangzhou to suddenly declare those cities off-limits to outsiders - so they can enjoy the relative wealth of those places for themselves.

Rohan of course is advocating the ethnic cleansing of Tibet - of not only Han Chinese but of Asians in general.
White people own a share of the earth’s landmass well out of proportion to their actual numbers.
If you say that 1.3billion Chinese should be denied 1/4 of their landmass - and hand this landmass to just those few favoured by the West, that is akin to making that place off-limits to East Asians (the presence of a few Tibetans notwithstanding)

It is just the same as China asking all Americans to depart the eastern seaboard to west of the Appalachians - except for those of indigenous Indian heritage.
This would in effect be an act of ethnic cleansing and an effective depopulation of those areas.

Yet this is what scum like Rohan want for China.

June 3, 2008 @ 6:02 pm | Comment

By the way Rohan, Tibet was recognized as part of China by the West way before the so-called 1950 ‘invasion.’Here is a link to a fascinating WWII US propaganda which includes Tibet as part of China. Also included is all of Mongolia (as also claimed by the Nationalist govt on Taiwan up to very recently)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWnRl16H1mY

In fact, Dr Sun Yatsen himself said that Tibetans were one of the five ‘fingers’of China - the others being Han, Mongolian, Uighur and Manchu.

Tibetan ‘independence’ movement would be a dead duck by now if not for the meddling of the West, which included the instigation of the 1959 ‘uprising’ of Tibetan nobles upset over the loss of their lands and slaves.
And I am 99percent sure that those riots a couple of months ago were stirred up by Westerners.

June 3, 2008 @ 6:11 pm | Comment

Of course in the sickening scenario advocated for by Rohan, the Dalai Lama would return as a living God, whites like Richard Gere and Sharon Stone (self-declared ‘good-friend’ of the Dalai) would treat Tibet like their playground - along with other Western sex tourists and paedophiles (as described by Ferin in earlier post)
.
Yet the good hard-working people of China would be denied access to a region that has rig