- Joined
- Mar 7, 2007
- Messages
- 45
I visited China and saw repression for myself. Ive also done some reading since. These are just my opinions:
The problem here is that we talk of China as if it is a unified whole and that the entire population is treated the same. Sorry to try to complicate things, but IMO people commentating about the democratizing effect that Western wealth is bringing to the country are by and large looking only at three or four big cities only at a fraction of the population. The rest of the people are utterly controlled by the government and cannot complain about basic abuses like having their land taken from them or at the high levels of pollution without risking a serious beating. And lets not mention the forced abortions. . .
Maybe increased human rights will begin trickling down to the ethnic Han population, over time. . . but those in Tibet (or more accurately the Tibet Autonomous Region) still live with brutal repression. Their flag and national anthem is still banned, although the ban on religious practices has been lifted (if you work for the government you are banned from attending monasteries). There is a lot of banned literature here, no matter what people supposedly posting from inside China claim. People still get disappeared and jailed for doing what we in the West would not give a second thought.
Im writing this not because Im a single-issue protester, but because I visited Tibet back in 2000, and want to balance the pro-China postings here. You cannot go in as a solo traveler, so I had to join a tour party. You have to stay at designated hotels. I nearly killed our Tibetan guide with one unguarded comment. Talking to him, at our hotel check-in desk, I said that I considered that the days tour to see the nuns was interesting because they had been political. . . he looked over his shoulder in terror to see who was watching and ran out of the room. Literally ran in terror.
I was jet-lagged and my mouth was moving faster than my brain. I did not want to talk about politics. . . that word came into my head when I was trying to say they had been more active in the community. But I learned more about what it means to live in a democracy that moment than in hours of reading about human rights abuses. With one word I made a man run for his life, with a look on his face like Id pulled a gun on him.
I saw other people scatter at other times when officials appeared. Once was during a punch-up between two schoolboys in the centre of Lhasa. They started fighting, people gathered to watch. . . and within two minutes there were guys with uniforms and big hats (you know how, in the communist party, the more important you are, the bigger your hat is) all over the place and people were disappearing without being seen to run away. The practiced art of melting away. There are party spies all over the place, and an atmosphere of fear and distrust.
From what Ive read since, things havent changed that much in Tibet. China is a brutal dictatorship. It may have a couple of Westernized cities, but dont let that fool us into thinking its people enjoy our freedoms.
As has been posted earlier, this will change only through governmental action. But politicians are whores. All the time they can keep us fat, dumb and happy with cheap imports they will not want to change anything. Buying Chinese goods will only ultimately allow more military spending over there, which will result in more opression and more liklihood of some future conflict (hint: oil is going to start running out sometime this century; the only argument is when)
There are many countries with appalling human rights records, so its perhaps unfair to single out China. Personally, Id advocate a special import tax applied to products that come from countries without democracy call it a dictator tax. It would be necessary to remove the economic advantage of treating people like slaves. We talk about capitalism and free markets, but dictatorships have an unfair advantage over us. Why reward these governments? Shouldnt we instead be sending out a message about democracy and freedom?
Sorry to have gone on at length here.
The problem here is that we talk of China as if it is a unified whole and that the entire population is treated the same. Sorry to try to complicate things, but IMO people commentating about the democratizing effect that Western wealth is bringing to the country are by and large looking only at three or four big cities only at a fraction of the population. The rest of the people are utterly controlled by the government and cannot complain about basic abuses like having their land taken from them or at the high levels of pollution without risking a serious beating. And lets not mention the forced abortions. . .
Maybe increased human rights will begin trickling down to the ethnic Han population, over time. . . but those in Tibet (or more accurately the Tibet Autonomous Region) still live with brutal repression. Their flag and national anthem is still banned, although the ban on religious practices has been lifted (if you work for the government you are banned from attending monasteries). There is a lot of banned literature here, no matter what people supposedly posting from inside China claim. People still get disappeared and jailed for doing what we in the West would not give a second thought.
Im writing this not because Im a single-issue protester, but because I visited Tibet back in 2000, and want to balance the pro-China postings here. You cannot go in as a solo traveler, so I had to join a tour party. You have to stay at designated hotels. I nearly killed our Tibetan guide with one unguarded comment. Talking to him, at our hotel check-in desk, I said that I considered that the days tour to see the nuns was interesting because they had been political. . . he looked over his shoulder in terror to see who was watching and ran out of the room. Literally ran in terror.
I was jet-lagged and my mouth was moving faster than my brain. I did not want to talk about politics. . . that word came into my head when I was trying to say they had been more active in the community. But I learned more about what it means to live in a democracy that moment than in hours of reading about human rights abuses. With one word I made a man run for his life, with a look on his face like Id pulled a gun on him.
I saw other people scatter at other times when officials appeared. Once was during a punch-up between two schoolboys in the centre of Lhasa. They started fighting, people gathered to watch. . . and within two minutes there were guys with uniforms and big hats (you know how, in the communist party, the more important you are, the bigger your hat is) all over the place and people were disappearing without being seen to run away. The practiced art of melting away. There are party spies all over the place, and an atmosphere of fear and distrust.
From what Ive read since, things havent changed that much in Tibet. China is a brutal dictatorship. It may have a couple of Westernized cities, but dont let that fool us into thinking its people enjoy our freedoms.
As has been posted earlier, this will change only through governmental action. But politicians are whores. All the time they can keep us fat, dumb and happy with cheap imports they will not want to change anything. Buying Chinese goods will only ultimately allow more military spending over there, which will result in more opression and more liklihood of some future conflict (hint: oil is going to start running out sometime this century; the only argument is when)
There are many countries with appalling human rights records, so its perhaps unfair to single out China. Personally, Id advocate a special import tax applied to products that come from countries without democracy call it a dictator tax. It would be necessary to remove the economic advantage of treating people like slaves. We talk about capitalism and free markets, but dictatorships have an unfair advantage over us. Why reward these governments? Shouldnt we instead be sending out a message about democracy and freedom?
Sorry to have gone on at length here.
