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March 21st, 2008
12:24 am - Enough about Free Tibet already!
I have been fed up with the used of language in the biased western media coverage we've been seeing on the tube about the riots in Tibet and neighbouring provinces lately.
First of all they have already taken the position that the PRC is the occupying power and Tibet is not part of China. All the language about "border between Tibet and China" as if they were separate countries is infuriating. The West has been reporting that 10s of 100s of people have been killed but failed to mention that the majority of them were actually non-Tibetans giving the impression that the PRC did the killings while quelling the riots. The riots have been targetting Chinese AS WELL AS other ethnic minorities. This kind of reporting has nothing but further the separartists' cause. The coverage has also painted the picture that military involvement is an example of oppression. Do you expect any self-respecting country would sit back while a part of it is taken over by separatist riots? You don't think Spain or Canada would stand back to watch Basque and Quebecois separatists causing riots, attacking and killing innocent civilians, do you?
Xinjiang and Tibet are both Autonomous Regions of China that are regions whose raison d'être is to create autonomous areas for ethnic minority population there. There are total of five ethnic autonomous regions of the provincial level in the PRC. In Xinjiang it's for the Uygur and in Tibet it's for the tibetans. The dominant religion in Tibet is Buddhism while in Xinjiang it's Islam. Over the years there have been violence in both of these regions. In Xinjiang the violence has been associated with the East Turkestan Independence movement. Now both the US and the UN has labelled the group as a terrorist group. Do you think that if the religion of Tibet was Islam that the outside world will think twice before branding Tibetans separatist as terrorists? Does buddhism give them a license to violence? If the same riot sparked in Xinjiang the PRC would have used the same force to maintain order, as we have seen just a year or so ago. No one in the West bat an eyelash about it then and even support the "fight for terrorism" there.
I begin to think all these recent popularity about zen, buddhism, yoga and vegetarianism have just made people sympathetic to ANY buddhist causes. Case in point, have anybody heard about Myrammar until they hear about the riots by Buddhists are being quelled? The human rights situation has existed there for decades and no one in the West cared until the monks got involved.
People just do not understand China is a multi-national country, comprised of over 50 officially recognised ethnic groups. Europe has gone through wars since Roman times to establish individual nation-states only to come together again in the form of European Union in the 20th, 21st centuries. Today, there are talks that Mongolia would like to rejoin the PRC. If you do not know the history, Mongolia proper was part of China or at least suzerain to it in Imperial Qing times just like Tibet. Only with the Soviet's intervention did Mongolia became a separate country. Today with the fall of USSR Mongolia economy is light years away from China and is desperately trying to part take the prosperity that is China. It's silly to single out Tibet as a pet cause just because Tibet has a different culture and ethnicity.
The "Free Tibet" cause is nothing but a fad. Most have followed blindly to the cause without knowing the history and social policies of the PRC. I can tell you most are behind the typical anti-Chinese sentiment. Within that movement there is no genuine concern for the overall human rights condition in the PRC. Why Tibet is getting all of these attention is because the Dalai Lama has gained world wide sympathies and respect. Don't get me wrong I respect the man but if Tibet has a spiritual leader like Osama bin Laden you think the West would support the Tibetan independence?
All of these alleged oppression in the past in Tibet happened all over China especially in the context of the Cultural Revolution. That did not only happen in Tibet. The West largely ignored the devastation of Cultural Revolution.
I am sick of the typical double standard of the West. Denmark has Greenland, Spain has Basque, Canada has Québec, Scandinavia has Lapland. It's true that these places are governed by democratic countries but that only came about after centuries of evolution. At least China did not ship Tibetan slaves offshore to work on sugar plantations or in modern context, the oil fields of Sudan. China must be given its chance to leap from the middle age to the 21st century in its own pace. Remember that industrialised China has only came to be just a little more than 100 years ago. China must be allowed to be evolved without Western intervention on its policies.
We have always precieved democracy and a market economy is the be all and end all of society. It certainly does not work for every country nor is it always effective. Given democracy, the majority of the population in the West do not exercise it and therefore do not support it, as evident in consistent low voter turn out everywhere. If the people are ready for democracy they will ask for it. But the truth is most people now are as apathetic as the those in the West. People are enjoying the new prosperity and the new bourgeois class are actually worried. that the country's poor majority will take over if democracy is introduced.
For some reason the democratic model has not worked well in East Asia. It is usually laiden with violence and scandals. Look at the Phillippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. China with a billion of hungry people cannot afford to have this happened. The world cannot afford to have an unstable Chinese economy, nevermind a disintegrated China.
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