FACSIMILE

I promised I would start tumbling again.
Now I have to follow through.

Chinese boycott KFC in anti-tibet protest

There is an article today in the new york times about anti-tibet chinese activists who are planning a boycott of french retail stores and american fast food restaurants. The protests are bein organized by bloggers and through online tools like QQ, an online messaging service. The boycotters aim to make U.S. and French companies feel the pain for their protest of the olympic torch relays. These pro tibet protest have managed to put out the olympic flame several times and in San Francisco the protests had to be skirted by secreting the olympic torch into a warehouse and then onto a plane to its next leg. It’s kind of funny that the chinese are trying to protest us, for protesting them. Apparently most Han chinese( the majority ethnic group) approve of the governments brutal repression of tibetans. They consider Tibet part of their country, and thus an internal affair which the world community should not interfere with. This seems to be the worst part about chinese foreign policy. They prefer not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, while simultaneously propping up governments like sudan and zimbabwe with weapons and oil money, even though the international community has withdrawn financial support for these regimes. If that isn’t interfering with internal affairs of a country, providing tacit financial support for brutal regimes, I don’t know what is. China is full of such contradictions, and there isn’t much that can be done about that, but it is pretty unnerving that the entire global community is more interested in their own financial concerns than the protection of an ethnic minority that has been opressed since the 50’s. In case you don’t know, Tibet was it’s own countryfrom around 1912 to about 1951, when the PRC invaded and may have killed as many as 800,000 tibetans in the first few years of their rule. The CIA helped Tibetan rebels until 1972, when support was abruptly withdrawn. Since 1951 Tibet has been a supposedly autonomous region of China, however religious and cultural freedom of ethnic tibetans has been seriously curtailed by the chinese government. For it’s part, China claims that tibet was a backward serfdom until the Chinese came and lifted them out of poverty. However it is widely known outside of China that the region has been inundated by Han Chinese who have set up an apartheid system with Han Chinese ruling over the Tibetan people. The Government in exile of Tibet is not recognized by any nation in the world, and currently resides in Darhamasala India. The Dalai Llama has repeatedly said that he does not want Tibet to secede from the PRC but rather an end to the brutal crackdown and displacement of his people. The recent protests in Tibet were initiated by Tibetan monks in response to the 2008 Olympics. I remember in 2001 or the campaign against China’s hosting the olympics, mainly people were upset over their Human Rights record. China made several promises to the Olympic Committee before it was given the games, including an improved Human Rights record and unfetterd access for Journalists, during and preceding the games. Obviously with the brutal crackdown, arrests, curfews and a complete media blackout by china with the compliance of U.S. companies like Google etc as well as their blocking journalist access to the region, is the opposite of these concessions. China is awful, and it’s people seriously mislead. The Chinese believe that Tibetans are rioting against the Han chinese because they want to secede, when in reality these people are rioting just like black South Africans rioted to protest their own country’s apartheid. People forget that there are second class ethnicities in china like the Uighurs(muslims who live in the very northwestern corner of china) and Tibetans, but this is very much like the civil rights protests of our own nation. Just as china is going rapidly through an industrial revolution there is a great social upheaval brooding just below the surface. China has developed at a breakneck pace economically while remaining an intensely repressive society politically. The China model that many people talk about today is a method of development that puts economics before politics. whereas our own country has a progressed with intense political and economic change hand in hand, we were also founded on a principles of freedom of speech and religion. China has emerged from communism with a government that does not recognize personal freedoms, and this is probably just the first of much internal strife to come.