Exposing the truth behind China’s occupation of Tibet
China has brutally occupied my homeland for over 50 years but my people continue their courageous resistance. Follow this blog, as I share what I see, feel, and experience... leaving Beijing wide open.
Raise the Flag!
April 1st, 2008
Please help us send the truth about China’s torch far and wide around the world. With your help we can convince the IOC to cancel plans to take the Olympic torch through Tibet while Tibetans are suffering under a violent military crackdown.
Pass it on…like a baton!
In the Beijing Olympics, Yingsel is the Tibetan cartoon mascot, but there is also a human Tibetan mascot, his name is Phurbu Gyal (Pubajia) and he won the Chinese idol contest in 2006.
What a shame he brings to the suffering of the tibetan people to be used in this propaganda!
http://blog.sina.com.cn/pubajia
I am left to think, what will happen once the Olympics are over, as it surely will be. The Olympics has been a great opportuinity for Tibet as it is for China. We have to agree that although there has been a great deal of attention on Tibet recently, the great majority of people in the West did not pay any attention. I think that it should come as a complete surprise to everyone with America’s support for Tibet. There was never this kind of active support for Tibet ever. I think, I will wait and see how things will cool down after the Olympics.
And another thing. This is probably the best time we are ever going to have in some time to do something for the Tibetan cause. With that, god speed!
I am passing the link to your blog to just about everybody in my bloglines feed and hope it helps. I have already signed and I’ve also sent an email to our Mayor asking him not to go to China this month….ciao
Monday 17 March 2008
Using Tibet to settle scores with China
Tibetans want to be free. But they’ve been given a green light to riot by Western elements driven more by spite and envy than a love for liberty.
Brendan O’Neill
The grainy, sneaked-out footage of Tibetans rioting in Lhasa and in parts of China itself clearly reveals one thing: Tibetans want more control over their daily lives and destinies. Frustrated with living under illiberal and undemocratic Chinese rule, they are lashing out against what they consider to be symbols of Chinese domination: Han Chinese businesses and buildings owned by Chinese officialdom.
But there’s another story behind the images of instability being broadcast around the world, a more complex, dangerous and difficult-to-spot story of cynical, spiteful political manoeuvring. Elements in the West have effectively encouraged Tibetans to riot, not because they are committed to democracy and liberty, but because they fear and loathe the Chinese. Western encouragement of Tibetan instability may dress itself in the rallying cry of ‘Free Tibet!’, but its real motivation is to ‘Humiliate China!’
The Tibetan protesters’ angry outbursts reveal their deep-seated dissatisfaction with life under the Stalinist regime. Yet the protests can also be seen as a physical, violent manifestation of Western China-bashing, which is increasing in intensity as the Beijing Olympics approach. For the past three months, Western officials and commentators have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encouraged Tibetans and others to ‘use the Olympics to humiliate China’ (1). Taking their cue, at least in part, from Western culture’s feverish fear and suspicion of China, Tibetans have launched protests that seem designed as much to please Western observers as to push through real, meaningful changes in Tibet and China.
In both their timing and their presentation, the protests seem more a product of Western cajoling than of an independent, groundswell demand for liberty amongst Tibetans. It is no coincidence that the protests, reportedly the biggest amongst Tibetans since the late 1980s, have erupted in the run-up to Beijing 2008. Vast numbers of political entrepreneurs and activists are trying to transform the Olympics into a platform for moral posturing and China-bashing. According to the International Herald Tribune, such is the frenzied politicisation of the Olympics by Western officials and campaigners that athletes are becoming confused about which cause to support. They have found themselves ‘overwhelmed by menu choices’ and also by numerous ‘wardrobe decisions’: should they wear a ‘China, Please’ armband to protest against China’s links with Sudan, or a yellow ‘Livestrong’ bracelet to indicate their support for a ‘pollution-free games and lead-free toys’? An American triathlete has complained: ‘Every time you turn around, there is someone trying to make a statement about something.’ (2) The relentless politicisation of the Olympics by Western elements, the widespread discussion of Beijing 2008 as an opportunity to ‘humiliate China’, has helped to create a volatile atmosphere in the more restive parts of China and its surrounding territories, including Tibet.
Presentation-wise, the protesters’ use of English slogans and their speedy dissemination of mobile-phone footage suggest the demonstrations are aimed very much at a Western audience. In the march of the Tibetan monks in northern India last week, and during the more fiery protests in Tibet and China over the weekend, Tibetans carried placards with English-language demands such as ‘Tibet Needs You’. They wore headbands saying ‘Free Tibet’ - the favoured slogan of Western middle-class and even aristocratic pro-Tibet sympathisers, such as Prince Charles (3). Tibetan monks in Dharamsala, India (where the Tibetan government-in-exile resides, led by the Dalai Lama) have put up English posters saying ‘Beijing 2008: A Celebration of Human Rights Violations’ (4). One British newspaper has celebrated Tibetan protesters’ use of ‘the most dangerous weapon in the world - the cameras on their mobile phones’ (5). Many Western observers who cheer Tibetans for using this ‘weapon’ to beam images of their struggle around the world would probably feel very uncomfortable if Tibetans used real weapons to force their Stalinist rulers to make changes or concessions.
The protests seem orientated very much towards the outside world. They appear to gain their legitimacy and fire from today’s widespread China-bashing, and they seem designed, in some ways, for Western consumption. This shows the extent to which Tibetans have become caught up in a global tug-of-war between the West and China. No doubt some people feel genuinely inspired by the Tibetan unrest, but many of the Western elements cheering the Tibetan cause and encouraging the Tibetans to ‘humiliate China’ are motivated less by a genuine commitment to liberty and democracy than by a deep and cynical desire to make life difficult for the Chinese.
Today’s Tibetan protests are taking place in a broad, quite sinister political context: the West’s transformation of China into a cultural and political target. In recent years, China has inexorably, and in some ways unconsciously, been transformed into a whipping boy for the West. Anti-Chinese sentiments cut across the political divide: on both the old right and the new left, attacking China for its economic growth, human rights record, environmental destruction or suppression of the Tibetan people has become de rigueur. There is an unspoken consensus today - amongst Western officials, commentators and radical activists - that China is a global threat which must be put back in its place with a short, sharp dose of humiliation. Far more than the demonisation of the Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire’ during the Cold War era, the labelling of China as a dirty, uncontrollable, violent beast enjoys widespread, unquestioned support throughout political circles in the West.
On the right, China-bashing has become a way of settling old scores from the Cold War. American right-wing thinkers and officials seem to take comfort in the familiar feeling of standing up to an ‘old communist foe’. Robbed of the ‘Evil Empire’ in the East by the end of the Cold War, and thrown by the unpredictability of global affairs more broadly, old right elements cling to China as an old-fashioned enemy from an era when politics was simpler and international affairs were more black-and-white; they are trying to recreate that era with a new ‘yellow-and-white’ divide between barbaric China and the civilised USA (6). Last week, the Pentagon made a splash with its annual report to US Congress on the threat posed by Chinese military power. It was hard not to nod, at least in partial agreement, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman who accused officials in the Pentagon of being consumed by ‘Cold War thinking’ (7).
There is also an element of palpable jealousy in right-wing attacks on contemporary China. As America’s economy spins from one crisis to another, becoming reliant in many ways on East Asian cash to bail it out, traditionalist economic thinkers are discussing Chinese growth as a problem and a threat. Using the language of environmentalism - clearly sensing that old-fashioned protectionism would not go down very well today - establishment publications in the US publish essays with headlines such as ‘Choking on growth’; they argue that if China is to reduce its carbon emissions (that is, slow down its growth) then there will have to be a ‘wholesale mindset change’ amongst the Chinese people (8). Books such as The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future are snapped up and celebrated by traditionalist American thinkers and economists (9).
Amongst left-leaning campaign groups and writers, China has become the No.1 International Bogeyman because of what they see as its ceaseless industrialisation. Westerners who find the idea of growth so nineteenth-century openly discuss China as a poisonous nation that is killing its own people and possibly the planet. Liberal green writers see only the ‘dust, waste and dirty water’ in modern China; they describe the economic progress there as the ‘mass poisoning of a people and the ecological devastation of a nation’, which is a product, apparently, of greed - ‘ours and theirs’ (10). Those greedy Chinese, getting jobs in the city and buying cars and TVs… why don’t they go back to the paddy fields where they belong? Green campaign groups call on Western nations to cut their political and economic ties with China, and instruct Western consumers that ‘If it says “Made in China”, don’t buy it’: only then, they argue, will ‘The World’s Biggest CO2 Emitter’ and ‘The World’s No.1 Consumer of Coal’ (that’s ‘China’ to those of us who don’t think and speak in the dehumanising language of trendy China-bashers) be forced to change its ways (11). They fancy this as a radical stance, but in today’s Great China-Bashing Consensus, greens are merely the protesting wing of the backward, fearful, protectionist politics of a West worried about the ‘Chinese threat’.
In many ways, campaigners and commentators in the West are projecting their own disgust with ‘the Western way of life’ on to China. They see in China everything that they doubt or loathe about modernity itself. That is why commentators frequently tell China not to make ‘the same mistakes that we made’. On everything from economic growth to sporting competitiveness, from the use of coal to the building of skyscrapers, today’s China-bashing is motivated by Western self-loathing, as well as by spite and envy towards the seemingly successful Chinese. Ironically, this means that China is now seen as ‘the Other’ precisely because it appears too Western: it is China’s ambition, growth, its leaps forward - things that a more confident West might once have celebrated - which make it seem alien to Western observers who today prefer carbon-counting to factory-building and road tolls to road construction. China-bashing is underpinned by a crisis of belief in the West in things such as progress, growth, development.
It is the sweeping consensus that China is dangerous and diseased that has attracted Western observers to the issue of Tibet. Both left and right elements in the West are exploiting the Tibet issue as a way of putting pressure on China. They are less interested in securing real freedom and equality for Tibetans, and for the Chinese people more broadly, than they are in using and abusing internal disgruntlement in China and nearby territories as a way of humiliating the Chinese government. That is why Tibetans can symbolise different things to different people. For conservative commentators, the Tibetans are warriors for freedom against a Stalinist monolith; their protests are a replay of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 (12). For greener, more liberal campaigners, Tibetans are symbols of natural and mystical purity in contrast to rampant Western and Chinese consumerism. As one author puts it, Tibetan culture offers ‘powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to Western egotistical lifestyles [and] our gradually more pointless pursuit of material interests’ (13). Various political factions in the West are using Tibetans as ventriloquist dummies in order to mouth their own complaints against modern China. They are promoting Tibetan unrest not to liberate Tibetans but in the hope that the protests will represent their own personal disgust for China in a real-world, physical manner.
There is a long history of Western politicians and activists using Tibet as a stick with which to beat China. In his fascinating book Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald S Lopez Jnr shows how, in the Western imagination, ‘the invasion of Tibet by [China] was and still is represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits… Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman.’ (14) Today, too, pro-Tibetan activism often disguises a view of the Chinese as subhuman. Indeed, in the current, all-encompassing right/left consensus about China, even left-leaning campaigns can employ old right tactics of demonising the Chinese. A poster for the trendy campaign group Free Tibet shows Tibetans as serene and peaceful and the Chinese as smog-producing modernisers with distinctly slitty eyes and goofy teeth (15).
spiked is no friend of the Chinese regime. Yet those promoting self-serving internal unrest in the run-up to the Olympics, encouraging Tibetans and others to bash China for real where the West only does it with words and propaganda, are playing a dangerous game indeed. Such a strategy of cynical destabilisation could unleash yet more violence in China, and have repercussions around the world. And the biggest losers, at least in the short term, are likely to be Tibetans themselves: they will not win liberty or equality by being transformed into performing protesters for the benefit of Chinaphobic Westerners.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here.
(1) China feels the heat of its Olympic ambitions, Los Angeles Times, 13 February 2008
(2) Athletes face dizzying choice of causes, International Herald Tribune, 15 August 2007
(3) See Australia won’t support boycott of Beijing Games: Olympic chief, The Citizen, 17 March 2008
(4) See Australia won’t support boycott of Beijing Games: Olympic chief, The Citizen, 17 March 2008
(5) Dalai Lama attacks ‘cultural genocide’, Independent, 17 March 2008
(6) China condemns Pentagon’s Cold War thinking, Reuters, 4 March 2008
(7) China condemns Pentagon’s Cold War thinking, Reuters, 4 March 2008
(8) Economy: China’s ability to tackle greenhouse gas caps, Council on Foreign Relations, September 2007
(9) The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, Elizabeth C Economy, Cornell University Press, 2005
(10) See Polluting minds, by Brendan O’Neill, Comment Is Free, 25 July 2007
(11) See Enough is Enough’s Boycott China campaign here
(12) Could Tibet achieve the impossible dream of independence?, Vancouver Online, 16 March 2008
(13) See Why Western Tibetophilia won’t set Tibet free, by Brendan O’Neill
(14) See Why Western Tibetophilia won’t set Tibet free, by Brendan O’Neill
(15) See Why Western Tibetophilia won’t set Tibet free, by Brendan O’Neill
reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4880/
Related link: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4880
Tebit is not one country, it is just a province of china. I do not understand your protest that is unmeaningful
Can you just stop imposing prejudice onto China? Did you ever realize that the ‘FREEDOM’ you are advocating is not what the current Tibetans want(at least most of them don’t think sp). It’s just something Dalai and his followers want because they will get the highest power and what ever they want when Tibet is “freed” from China. Do you know how much money the Chinese government had invested in Tibet? Do you know the social status of Tibetans (other than gerentocratics) changed? Did you ever tell other people that more than 95% of the Tibetans were slaves before it got controlled by the current Chinese government in 1950s? Do you know being a natural fortress, Tibet will be actually controlled by India or US once it’s not a part of China anymore?
Please, please stop misleading people who don’t know the truth. I understand that a lot of people don’t like China, especially the Chinese government, therefore they assume everything it does is bad. Whenever there is a debate, it must be the fault of China??! Please be FAIR and OBJECTIVE. What if somebody say “Free Quebec from Canada”? Would you deal with it in the same way you did to China?
Just in case you are wondering, I am not communist nor do I like it. The government has done some wrong things before like the Tiananmen event in 1989 and some collision in Tibet around 1959. However it is getting much better! Please stop exaggerating, stop blaming everything on China!
PS I heard you you went to Tibet and got involved in the riot. Don’t you know that it’s really bad to set stores on fire and throw rocks on other people? Please respect other people, and yourself.
I don’t think the Olympic game is a great opportunity to help Tibet to declare independence at all. If that is what the Tibetan activists want, our American people are then taken advantaged of by them. We did that once in 1980, and we realized that it were us Americans who suffered the loss or were fooled. We will not do that again. I support the decision of our government–the US should join the Olympic 2008.
On the whole, it appears to me that the recent riots in Tibet does only harm to your cause. Though on the surface, indeed, you gained “attention” from the west, that “attention” you craved so much for has always been there (I have to admit Dalai Lama is a great salesman, something those stoic Chinese communist party bosses would never be able to do). Since the communist regime in China doesn’t want to appear weak, situations for Tibetans inside China who advocate independence would only get worse. Worse still, the propoganda you instigated during and after the riot have now caught the attention of average Chinese who before the incidence might have had some sympathy for you but now nevertheless have been so antoganized by the brutality shown by your so-called “peaceful protesters” in the streets of Lhasa that they support the communist regime on this particular issue. By the way, don’t ever think average Chinese are all ruthless commies. The truth is we don’t like the totalitarian regime, but on the Tibetan issue, we are behind it.
Hi,
I’m a red blooded american that is married to a wonderfully intelligent woman from China.
Tibet is and always has been a part of China. I think many people don’t realize this simple fact. It’s been a part for THOUSANDS OF YEARS.
Ask yourself this simple question. What if California wanted to succeed from the American Union?
Do you believe our Government would let them?
Hmmmm, maybe China feels the same way.
I have spend much time in China and as I said, I am married to a Chinese woman and have heard opinions from the other side of the fence.
I have my own pinions about this and respect the thoughts of my wife. we disagree on some but see eye to eye on others.
Maybe more people should read “The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet” and then offer up an opinion after educating themselves.
As I see it, Our government has once again stirred up another Hornets nest and many people are unwittingly playing into The American governments hands.
It’s quit the delima.
I certainly dont claim to know all thing nor do I expect to change anyone mind. I only hope to give some food for thought.
Thanks for your time.
Renobartender
I read “Using Tibet to settle scores with China” by Brenden O’Neill several times to correctly understand it. His whole argument is that America and other western countries are behind the recent protests in Tibet, and that conservative Republicans are afraid of the growing economic and military might of China and the threat it poses to America, and the liberal Democrats are incensed that China is polluting the environment with its “ceaseless industrialization.”(2)
He interestingly is not against Tibet in any way but he is merely against America and the West for going after China. His only claim is that America is behind the protests in Tibet and that both liberals and conservatives in America hate the very guts of China for their own reasons. We should have been mad if he said that Tibet is and has always been a part of China or if he made similar incendiary statements, which he has not.
After reading the article, he just comes off looking like traitor. The arguments he makes portray China as victim and he victimize his own country, America. He could have easily turned the argument on its head and made an even better argument in the other direction. But he goes on to prove how the “old right” fears China’s might and how the “new left” despises “progress, growth, development.”(3) Now that is really none of our business.
I think that we can all agree with his central idea that the America is simply helping us to “humiliate China” before the world stage. Take another look at the two articles that Brenden O’Neill has written and pay close attention to the subtitles. You will see that he is only anti-West, and nothing more. “Using Tibet to settle scores with China, Tibetans want to be free. But they’ve been given a green light to riot by Western elements driven more by spite and envy than love for liberty.” Second: “Tibetoplillia won’t set Tibet free, Western pro-Tibet campaigning is driven less by a passion for freedom, than by disgust with modernity – and a view of the Chinese as ‘subhuman’.
Well, to give a little background of what has been going on between the two counties: There was this whole problem with the value of the RMB, the Chinese currency which is also called the Yuan. The American government has been pressuring China to raise the value of the Yuan, which was set at a very low artificial rate. Check out today’s NYT article “Seeing the Sights of Industrial China: 2 Factories, 2 Futures.”(April 5, 2008) The article is about the changes wrought about by the rising Yuan. China does not want to the world’s factory producing cheap toys and goods anymore. It has bigger ambitions. From the article: “When you travel around China these days and listen to businessmen and analysts, there is a phrase you hear again and again. They all talk about “moving up the value chain.” By that they mean they want their businesses to gravitate toward more complex, higher-value goods – the ones that bring in bigger profits, are less dependent on rock-bottom costs and are more immune to currency fluctuations.”
Mr. Li Xian Shou is “the founder and chief executive of a company called ReneSola, which makes the silicon wafers that are used in solar panels…. He employs 3,300 people, up from 20 in 2005, and pays his line operators upward of $500 a month. From a standing start three years ago, ReneSola is among the world’s top five suppliers of solar wafers.” In 2007 it made $53 million in profit, which was almost double what it made the previous year. So, China is going about changing it wants to do business and we will see more and more of this. Although China made its money producing cheap goods, it is defiant to go in a different direction. Well, another effect of the rising Yuan has been that Chinese businesses have more purchasing power. The last sentence of the articles reads: “As the Chinese say, Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Paulson.” Mr. Paulson is the treasury secretary of the United States.
There is also this threat that America perceives from China to its satellites. I read that in a different article in the NYT and other publications. China shot down one of its satellites not long ago, before if you care to remember America shot down a NASA satellite. The problem with this is that China has the know-how to shoot down American satellites. Since just about everything is online these days, and satellites are a vital part of it, the Chinese have now the potential to disrupt life in America, not to mention cripple its military. There have also been accusations by the American government of Chinese hackers penetrating and peeking into the secret databases of the American government. Not long ago, the pentagon was hacked and it was notified that no serious breeches were made. It was also reported that the pentagon and other government branches are a constant daily target of hackers. Hackers are a threat to national security, to state the very obvious.
So, these are two very explicit examples of political maneuvering and tension between America and China. Of course there is the issue of the environment. China admits that pollution is a big concern to the overall health of the national economy. But that is a whole different issue.
I read “Using Tibet to settle scores with China” by Brenden O’Neill several times to correctly understand it. His whole argument is that America and other western countries are behind the recent protests in Tibet, and that conservative Republicans are afraid of the growing economic and military might of China and the threat it poses to America, and the liberal Democrats are incensed that China is polluting the environment with its “ceaseless industrialization.”(2)
He interestingly is not against Tibet in any way but he is merely against America and the West for going after China. His only claim is that America is behind the protests in Tibet and that both liberals and conservatives in America hate the very guts of China for their own reasons. We should have been mad if he said that Tibet is and has always been a part of China or if he made similar incendiary statements, which he has not.
After reading the article, he just comes off looking like traitor. The arguments he makes portray China as victim and he victimize his own country, America. He could have easily turned the argument on its head and made an even better argument in the other direction. But he goes on to prove how the “old right” fears China’s might and how the “new left” despises “progress, growth, development.”(3) Now that is really none of our business.
I think that we can all agree with his central idea that the America is simply using Tibet to “humiliate China” before the world stage. Take another look at the two articles that Brenden O’Neill has written and pay close attention to the subtitles. You will see that he is only anti-West, and nothing more. “Using Tibet to settle scores with China, Tibetans want to be free. But they’ve been given a green light to riot by Western elements driven more by spite and envy than love for liberty.” Second: “Tibetoplillia won’t set Tibet free, Western pro-Tibet campaigning is driven less by a passion for freedom, than by disgust with modernity – and a view of the Chinese as ‘subhuman’.
Well, to give a little background of what has been going on between the two counties: There was this whole problem with the value of the RMB, the Chinese currency which is also called the Yuan. The American government has been pressuring China to raise the value of the Yuan, which was set at a very low artificial rate. Check out today’s NYT article “Seeing the Sights of Industrial China: 2 Factories, 2 Futures.”(April 5, 2008) The article is about the changes wrought about by the rising Yuan. China does not want to the world’s factory producing cheap toys and goods anymore. It has bigger ambitions. From the article: “When you travel around China these days and listen to businessmen and analysts, there is a phrase you hear again and again. They all talk about “moving up the value chain.” By that they mean they want their businesses to gravitate toward more complex, higher-value goods – the ones that bring in bigger profits, are less dependent on rock-bottom costs and are more immune to currency fluctuations.”
Mr. Li Xian Shou is “the founder and chief executive of a company called ReneSola, which makes the silicon wafers that are used in solar panels…. He employs 3,300 people, up from 20 in 2005, and pays his line operators upward of $500 a month. From a standing start three years ago, ReneSola is among the world’s top five suppliers of solar wafers.” In 2007 it made $53 million in profit, which was almost double what it made the previous year. So, China is going about changing it wants to do business and we will see more and more of this. Although China made its money producing cheap goods, it is defiant to go in a different direction. Well, another effect of the rising Yuan has been that Chinese businesses have more purchasing power. The last sentence of the articles reads: “As the Chinese say, Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Paulson.” Mr. Paulson is the treasury secretary of the United States.
There is also this threat that America perceives from China to its satellites. I read that in a different article in the NYT and other publications. China shot down one of its satellites not long ago, before if you care to remember America shot down a NASA satellite. The problem with this is that China has the know-how to shoot down American satellites. Since just about everything is online these days, and satellites are a vital part of it, the Chinese have now the potential to disrupt life in America, not to mention cripple its military.
There have also been accusations by the American government of Chinese hackers penetrating and peeking into the secret databases of the American government. Not long ago, the pentagon was hacked and it was notified that no serious breeches were made. It was also reported that the pentagon and other government branches are a constant daily target of hackers. Hackers are a threat to national security, to state the very obvious.
So, these are two very explicit examples of political maneuvering and tension between America and China. Of course there is the issue of the environment. China admits that pollution is a big concern to the overall health of the national economy. But that is a whole different issue.
I would really like to know where does the SFT receive its funding for its stunt like protests and how do they bail those activists out of jail..
Coffee sippers who think it might be a good idea to free Tibet from China are about 58 years too late. China is not going to free Tibet, and Western encouragement of Tibetan resistance will only get people killed needlessly.
Tibet was part of China for centuries. In 1913, when China seemed to be falling apart, the British Empire encouraged Tibet to declare its independence. It did, and that lasted until 1950, when, at the end of the Chinese civil war, China invaded and reclaimed the area. By then, the impotent British Empire was in no position to help anyone even if it had been so inclined. America chose to do nothing.
If you are not willing to make your way to the Tibetan plateau and face Chinese guns and prisons, then you certainly should not sit around some coffee shop and urge Tibetans to do so. Tibet is a strategic area of China, and the Chinese government is not going to give it up or grant it independence or even autonomy. To paraphrase a famous outlaw, it is enough that we know that China will do what it has to do.
As for us, we should do nothing. Tibet is part of China, and what happens there is an internal affair of China. The rest of the world has no right to interfere, and other than bloviating for a while, I seriously doubt that it will. Unfortunately, in this age of global communications even bloviating can cause bad things to happen to people.
Boycotting the Olympics is a foolish idea by a tiny minority of fanatics. The Olympics have nothing to do with Tibet, just as they had nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Boycotting the games would be a cruel blow to athletes who have been sweating and training for four years. It would accomplish nothing. It would further politicize the games, which should be encouraged to return to their amateur status.
China was awarded the Summer Games in a fair international competition and has spent a lot of money getting ready for them. Any attempt to spoil the games will do a great disservice to the athletes, the Chinese government and the Chinese people. It will do nothing positive and will only harden attitudes and end up making the world even more dangerous than it already is.
Americans in particular should keep in mind that we are currently engaged in mismanaging two occupations of two countries that we illegally invaded. Neither enterprise is going well. Neither is our economy. In short, we have enough on our own plate without trying to steal a bite off of China’s plate. We should make sure that Afghanistan and Iran are the last wheezes of the sick American Empire and shut it down and return to our republic.
I don’t know why some Americans seem to have trouble realizing that the days of the European empires are over. Part of the problem is that we have way too many vocational intellectuals and way too few real intellects. A vocational intellectual is someone who makes a living writing or talking. Such people tend to live inside their heads. Delusions of grandeur and fantasies about the real world are constant occupational hazards for such people.
No country in the world has to do what we tell it to do. Certainly that’s the case with the big powers like China, Russia, Japan and India. As you can see every day in your morning paper, even a little country like Iraq can cause us more trouble than it’s worth. It’s a crime against humanity that our sons and daughters are dying in the desert dust while fat politicians cavort about in Washington. Don’t encourage Tibetans to die in some futile fantasy about independence. They are not independent. They are part of China, and part of China they will stay.
Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China
by F. William Engdahl
April 10, 2008
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8625
Washington has obviously decided on an ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing’s by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet just at this sensitive time in their relations and on the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of an escalating strategy of destabilization of China which has been initiated by the Bush Administration over the past months. It also includes the attempt to ignite an anti-China Saffron Revolution in the neighboring Myanmar region, bringing US-led NATO troops into Darfur where China’s oil companies are developing potentially huge oil reserves. It includes counter moves across mineral-rich Africa. And it includes strenuous efforts to turn India into a major new US forward base on the Asian sub-continent to be deployed against China, though evidence to date suggests the Indian government is being very cautious not to upset Chinese relations.
The current Tibet operation apparently got the green light in October last year when George Bush agreed to meet the Dalai Lama for the first time publicly in Washington. The President of the United States is not unaware of the high stakes of such an insult to Beijing. Bush deepened the affront to America’s largest trading partner, China, by agreeing to attend as the US Congress awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal.
The immediate expressions of support for the crimson monks of Tibet from George Bush, Condi Rice, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel most recently took on dimensions of the absurd. Ms Merkel announced she would boycott attending the August Beijing Summer Olympics as her protest at the Beijing treatment of the Tibetan monks. What her press secretary omitted is that she had not even planned to go in the first place.
She was followed by an announcement that Poland’s Prime Minister, the pro-Washington Donald Tusk, would also stay away, along with pro-US Czech President Vaclav Klaus. It is unclear whether they also hadn’t planned to go in the first place but it made for dramatic press headlines.
The recent wave of violent protests and documented attacks by Tibetan monks against Han Chinese residents began on March 10 when several hundred monks marched on Lhasa to demand release of other monks allegedly detained for celebrating the award of the US Congress’ Gold Medal last October. The monks were joined by other monks marching to protest Beijing rule on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.
The geopolitical game
As the Chinese government itself was clear to point out, the sudden eruption of anti-Chinese violence in Tibet, a new phase in the movement led by the exiled Dalai Lama, was suspiciously timed to try to put the spotlight on Beijing’s human rights record on the eve of the coming Olympics. The Beijing Olympics are an event seen in China as a major acknowledgement of the arrival of a new prosperous China on the world stage.
The background actors in the Tibet “Crimson revolution” actions confirm that Washington has been working overtime in recent months to prepare another of its infamous Color Revolutions, these fanning public protests designed to inflict maximum embarrassment on Beijing. The actors on the ground in and outside Tibet are the usual suspects, tied to the US State Department, including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA’s Freedom House through its chairman, Bette Bao Lord and her role in the International Committee for Tibet, as well as the Trace Foundation financed by the wealth of George Soros through his daughter, Andrea Soros Colombel.
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the latest unrest to sabotage the Olympic Games “in order to achieve their unspeakable goal”, Tibetan independence.
Bush telephoned his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, to pressure for talks between Beijing and the exiled Dalai Lama. The White House said that Bush, “raised his concerns about the situation in Tibet and encouraged the Chinese government to engage in substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives and to allow access for journalists and diplomats.”
President Hu reportedly told Bush the Dalai Lama must “stop his sabotage” of the Olympics before Beijing takes a decision on talks with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
Dalai Lama’s odd friends
In the West the image of the Dalai Lama has been so much promoted that in many circles he is deemed almost a God. While the spiritual life of the Dalai Lama is not our focus, it is relevant to note briefly the circles he has chosen to travel in most of his life.
The Dalai Lama travels in what can only be called rather conservative political circles. What is generally forgotten today is that during the 1930’s the Nazis including Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and other top Nazi Party leaders regarded Tibet as the holy site of the survivors of the lost Atlantis, and the origin of the “Nordic pure race.”
When he was 11 and already designated Dalai Lama, he was befriended by Heinrich Harrer, a Nazi Party member and officer of Heinrich Himmler’s feared SS. Far from the innocent image of him in the popular Hollywood film with Brad Pitt, Harrer was an elite SS member at the time he met the 11 year old Dalai Lama and became his tutor in “the world outside Tibet.” While only the Dalai Lama knows the contents of Harrer’s private lessons, the two remained friends until Harrer died a ripe 93 in 2006.1
That sole friendship, of course, does not define a person’s character, but it is interesting in the context of later friends. In April 1999, along with Margaret Thatcher, and former Beijing Ambassador, CIA Director and President, George H.W. Bush, the Dalai Lama demanded the British government release Augusto Pinochet, the former fascist dictator of Chile and a longtime CIA client who was visiting England. The Dalai Lama urged that Pinochet not be forced to go to Spain where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity. The Dalai Lama had close ties to Miguel Serrano2, head of Chile’s National Socialist Party, a proponent of something called esoteric Hitlerism. 3
Leaving aside at this point the claim of the Dalai Lama to divinity, what is indisputable is that he has been surrounded and financed in significant part, since his flight into Indian exile in 1959, by various US and Western intelligence services and their gaggle of NGOs. It is the agenda of the Washington friends of the Dalai Lama that is relevant here.
The NED at work again…
As author Michael Parenti notes in his work, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, “during the 1950s and 60s, the CIA actively backed the Tibetan cause with arms, military training, money, air support and all sorts of other help.” The US-based American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA front, publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in the group. The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA in 1951. It was later upgraded into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet, according to Parenti.4
According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the late 1990s, “for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama.” 5
With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India where he lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars in backing today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding CIA front organization, funded by the US Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been instrumental in every US-backed Color Revolution destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global public relations campaigns to popularize their pet opposition candidates.
As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the US Government is fanning the flames of destabilization against China by funding opposition protest organizations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980’s, on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan’s Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting President of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” 6
American intelligence historian, William Blum states, “The NED played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North’s shadowy “Project Democracy.” This network privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. In 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED “run Project Democracy.” 7
The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State Department officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft. 8
Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.
The SFT was among five organizations which this past January that proclaimed start of a “Tibetan people’s uprising” on Jan 4 this year and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.
Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had “videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by BBC.” The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt organization whose main funding is from the NED.9
Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama’s exile base at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for “information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet,” also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
In short, US State Department and US intelligence community finger prints are all over the upsurge around the Free Tibet movement and the anti-Han Chinese attacks of March. The question to be asked is why, and especially why now?
Tibet’s raw minerals treasure
Tibet is of strategic import to China not only for its geographical location astride the border with India, Washington’s newest anti-China ally in Asia. Tibet is also a treasure of minerals and also oil. Tibet contains some of the world’s largest uranium and borax deposits, one half of the world’s lithium, the largest copper deposits in Asia, enormous iron deposits, and over 80,000 gold mines. Tibet’s forests are the largest timber reserve at China’s disposal; as of 1980, an estimated $54 billion worth of trees had been felled and taken by China. Tibet also contains some of the largest oil reserves in the region.10
On the Tibet Autonomous Region’s border along the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is also a vast oil and mineral region in the Qaidam Basin, known as a “treasure basin.” The Basin has 57 different types of mineral resources with proven reserves including petroleum, natural gas, coal, crude salt, potassium, magnesium, lead, zinc and gold. These mineral resources have a potential economic value of 15 trillion yuan or US$1.8 trillion. Proven reserves of potassium, lithium and crude salt in the basin are the biggest in China.
And situated as it is, on the “roof of the world,” Tibet is perhaps the world’s most valuable water source. Tibet is the source of seven of Asia’s greatest rivers which provide water for 2 billion people.” He who controls Tibet’s water has a mighty powerful geopolitical lever over all Asia.
But the prime interest of Tibet for Washington today is its potential to act as a lever to destabilize and blackmail the Beijing Government.
Washington’s ‘nonviolence as a form of warfare’
The events in Tibet since March 10 have been played in Western media with little regard to accuracy or independent cross-checking. Most of the pictures blown up in European and US newspapers and TV have not even been of Chinese military oppression of Tibetan lamas or monks. They have been shown to be in most cases either Reuters or AFP pictures of Han Chinese being beaten by Tibetan monks in paramilitary organizations. In some instances German TV stations ran video pictures of beatings that were not even from Tibet but rather by Nepalese police in Kathmandu. 11
The western media complicity simply further underlies that the actions around Tibet are part of a well-orchestrated destabilization effort on the part of Washington. What few people realize is that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was also instrumental, along with Gene Sharp’s misnamed Albert Einstein Institution through Colonel Robert Helvey, in encouraging the student protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The Albert Einstein Institution, as it describes itself, specializes in “nonviolence as a form of warfare.” 12
Colonel Helvey was formerly with the Defense Intelligence Agency stationed in Myanmar. Helvey trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they were to use in the Tiananmen Square incident of June 1989. He is now believed acting as an adviser to the Falun Gong in similar civil disobedience techniques. Helvey nominally retired from the army in 1991, but had been working with the Albert Einstein Institution and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation long before then. In its annual report for 2004 Helvey’s Albert Einstein Institution admitted to advising people in Tibet. 13
With the emergence of the Internet and mobile telephone use, the US Pentagon has refined an entirely new form of regime change and political destabilization. As one researcher of the phenomenon behind the wave of color revolutions, Jonathan Mowat, describes it,
“…What we are seeing is civilian application of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “Revolution in Military Affairs” doctrine, which depends on highly mobile small group deployments “enabled” by “real time” intelligence and communications. Squads of soldiers taking over city blocks with the aid of “intelligence helmet” video screens that give them an instantaneous overview of their environment, constitute the military side. Bands of youth converging on targeted intersections in constant dialogue on cell phones constitute the doctrine’s civilian application.
“This parallel should not be surprising since the US military and National Security Agency subsidized the development of the Internet, cellular phones, and software platforms. From their inception, these technologies were studied and experimented with in order to find the optimal use in a new kind of warfare. The “revolution” in warfare that such new instruments permit has been pushed to the extreme by several specialists in psychological warfare. Although these military utopians have been working in high places, (for example the RAND Corporation), for a very long time, to a large extent they only took over some of the most important command structures of the US military apparatus with the victory of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld.14
Goal to control China
Washington policy has used and refined these techniques of “revolutionary nonviolence,” and NED operations embodied a series of ‘democratic’ or soft coup projects as part of a larger strategy which would seek to cut China off from access to its vital external oil and gas reserves.
The 1970’s quote attributed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a proponent of British geopolitics in an American context comes to mind: “If you control the oil you control entire nations…”
The destabilization attempt by Washington using Tibet, no doubt with quiet “help” from its friends in British and other US-friendly intelligence services, is part of a clear pattern.
It includes Washington’s “Saffron revolution” attempts to destabilize Myanmar. It includes the ongoing effort to get NATO troops into Darfur to block China’s access to strategically vital oil resources there and elsewhere in Africa. It includes attempts to foment problems in Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and to disrupt China’s vital new energy pipeline projects to Kazakhstan. The earlier Asian Great Silk Road trade routes went through Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Almaty in Kazakhstan for geographically obvious reasons, in a region surrounded by major mountain ranges. Geopolitical control of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kazakhstan would enable control of any potential pipeline routes between China and Central Asia just as the encirclement of Russia controls pipeline and other ties between it and western Europe, China, India and the Middle East, where China depends on uninterrupted oil flows from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.
Behind the strategy to encircle China
In this context, a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations analysis in their Foreign Affairs magazine from Zbigniew Brzezinski from September/October 1997 is worth quoting. Brzezinski, a protégé of David Rockefeller and a follower of the founder of British geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, is today the foreign policy adviser to Presidential candidate, Barack Obama. In 1997 he revealingly wrote:
‘Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world’s population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia’s potential power overshadows even America’s.
‘Eurasia is the world’s axial super-continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy….’15 (emphasis mine-w.e.).
This statement, written well before the US-led bombing of former Yugoslavia and the US military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or its support of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline, puts Washington pronouncements about ‘ridding the world of tyranny’ and about spreading democracy, into a somewhat different context from the one usually mentioned by George W. Bush of others.
It’s about US global hegemony, not democracy. It should be no surprise when powers such as China are not convinced that giving Washington such overwhelming power is in China’s national interest, any more than Russia thinks that it would be a step towards peace to let NATO gobble up Ukraine and Georgia and put US missiles on Russia’s doorstep “to defend against threat of Iranian nuclear attack on the United States.”
The US-led destabilization in Tibet is part of a strategic shift of great significance. It comes at a time when the US economy and the US dollar, still the world’s reserve currency, are in the worst crisis since the 1930’s. It is significant that the US Administration sends Wall Street banker, former Goldman Sachs chairman, Henry Paulson to Beijing in the midst of its efforts to embarrass Beijing in Tibet. Washington is literally playing with fire. China long ago surpassed Japan as the world’s largest holder of foreign currency reserves, now in the range of $1.5 trillions, most of which are invested in US Treasury debt instruments. Paulson knows well that were Beijing to decide it could bring the dollar to its knees by selling only a small portion of its US debt on the market.
Related link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8625
A Peacefull Demonstration will take place in Bangkok on Saturday the 19th April 2008 (When the Olympic Torch will be here). show up, show that you care.. for more info go to notorch.blogspot.com
There will be a peaceful Demonstration in Bangkok on the afternoon of Saturday 19th April 2008. for more info go to notorch.blogspot.com or contact us at [email protected]