Olympics-Worthy Actions?

We at SFT have said for some time that China’s occupation of Tibet makes it unworthy to host the Olympic Games. For people uninterested in Tibet per se, the Chinese government’s brutal actions there serve as a useful proxy: if it is capable of such crimes in Tibet, what does this say about its overall responsibleness?

We were therefore unsurprised to read a BBC report that the Taliban in Afghanistan are obtaining Chinese-made weapons, including “surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft guns, landmines, rocket-propelled grenades and components for roadside bombs.” (No mention of toxic toys or other dangerous Made-in-China goods.)

There is no suggestion that the Chinese government is directly selling weapons to the Taliban, but China is accused of “selling arms to Iran which Iran is then passing on to insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Whatever the circumstances, China has an obligation to responsibly ensure that its products do not end up in the hands of terrorist groups. Much like its obligation under international law not to use state-sanctioned violence against civilians in Tibet. Apparently, the Chinese government is not fulfilling either of these obligations.

At the same time, we were definitely not surprised that the US and German governments have accused the Chinese government of orchestrating cyber attacks against the US Defense Department and German government ministries.  (The Economist discusses this issue in depth here.)

Tibet groups, including SFT, have often been targeted by China-based hackers who are in all likelihood organized by the Chinese government. Which is why we laughed when we read the remarks of Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu, who claimed that “The Chinese government has consistently opposed and vigorously attacked according to the law all Internet-wrecking crimes, including hacking.”

Funny, Comrade Jiang, you should speak with your government’s hackers — we can provide you their IP addresses.

Whether you look at the Chinese government’s actions in Tibet, in China, or in the rest of the world, one thing is clear: that government does not deserve to host the Olympic Games.

NY Times on China’s Orwellian Impulse

SFT has always said that the Chinese government is using the Beijing Olympics to whitewash its image. Now China scholar Ross Terrill has analyzed the Chinese government’s Olympics strategy in the context of its Orwellian desire to sanitize the “truth.”

In an op-ed in the New York Times (also carried in the International Herald Tribune), Mr. Terrill writes about the drive to erase China’s famously garbled English, or “Chinglish”:

Yet behind the attack on Chinglish lies an Orwellian impulse to remake the truth. Banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other “troublemakers” who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.

This system of control is centered around the Communist Party’s monopoly on the “truth,” still alive and well all these years after Mao:

Truth and power are both headquartered in the Communist party-state. “Truth” (socialism sparkles, people adore the party) is not only enforced by the party-state but created by it. Stamp out Chinglish; ban “unhealthy thinking”; just keep the picture pretty — or else.

This is right. Any Tibetan who has ever had to fly a Chinese flag from his home, or display a poster of Mao/Deng/Hu on her wall, or sign a statement denouncing the Dalai Lama as an evil separatist (”or else…”) will understand this twisted system of control.

Mr. Terrill then describes why the Chinese government desperately needs the Olympics to be a success:

A regime may be at stake. With Marxism largely evaporated and Leninism fraying at the edges, the Chinese Communist Party’s fate hinges on 10 percent annual economic growth and visions of national glory.

For years, the party hopes, it will be able to flaunt photographs of Tibetan farmers cheering at a Chinese gold medal in table tennis, videos of Muslims in Xinjiang Province fainting with joy as the women’s high jump goes to China by half an inch over Japan, and documentaries in which Beijing taxi drivers speak in perfect English to tourists from New York.

And yet after describing how an Orwellian regime is manipulating the Olympics to prop itself up, Mr. Terrill then perversely warns others against “politicizing” the Games:

Politicizing the Olympics in any fashion is shortsighted… Disrupting it because of China’s Orwellian fictions would not free the political prisoners.

The Chinese state, for better and for worse, knows exactly what it’s doing… Still, a brilliant Olympic Games will be no more of a clue to the future of Chinese Communist rule than the spectacular 1936 Berlin Games were a sign of Nazism’s longevity. Correct language, like a gold medal, is desirable in itself. But neither guarantees glory for a state that pursues them for political ends (ask the Soviet Union). Sport should just be sport. The democracies should insist on that and leave political manipulation to the dictatorships.

Would Mr. Terrill have Tibetans and Chinese dissidents silence themselves, just to avoid “politicizing” the precious Olympic Games? Even after he himself recognizes how the Chinese regime has been exploiting and politicizing the Games to the utmost?

Mr. Terrill is right that the 1936 Olympics didn’t guarantee Hitler’s longevity. But the resulting international prestige emboldened the dictator further down his crazed and genocidal path.

Conversely, if Tibetans and others do their utmost to deny the Chinese government the prestige it so desperately seeks to wring from the Olympics, wouldn’t that temper its ability to act unconstrained and viciously in Tibet and China?

We should expose the Chinese government for the repressive regime it is. In this way, we can show that the Chinese government is shaming the Chinese nation by treating its own citizens as if they were children who cannot be trusted, and keeping the Tibetan people under a brutal occupation no better than Imperial Japan’s occupation of China. 

Lhadon’s Amazing Video

To see Lhadon’s amazing video of the barbaric “Racist Park,” please click here or read more on her blog.  It’s enough to leave one speechless and nauseated.

Lhadon in China’s “Racist Park”

Lhadon wrote a heart-wrenching blog post about her visit to the “Racist Park” in Beijing (now called the “National Ethnic Minorities Park”). She described the sickening, imperialist, and, yes, racist attitude that the Chinese government takes toward Tibetans and other “minority” peoples (check out Lhadon’s video and photos):

Seeing this twisted place firsthand has only stoked my rage and passion to fight until Tibet is free from China’s occupation.

The park showcases what China calls its “56 ethnic minority nationalities” like animals at the zoo. There are different sections dedicated to different “minorities.” Brief descriptions of each species are accompanied by photographs describing their strange habits and unique customs. If the visitor is lucky, he or she will arrive when the animals are dancing and singing and get a close-up look at these weird and wonderful creatures.

To the Chinese government: have you no shame? Showcasing the temples of a culture you actively and violently tried to destroy in a genocide?

China’s political agenda is clear in showcasing Tibetans as happy, dancing “minorities.” We previously wrote about what China is doing in Tibet today: turning Tibet into an ersatz theme park showcasing commodified Tibetans, stripping Tibet’s natural resources, and filling Tibet with increasing numbers of Chinese colonists.

But beyond Beijing’s political motivation, what does this barbaric, offensive theme park say about the Chinese government’s relationship to the non-Chinese peoples that it rules, such as the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians?

Ironically, the best explanation is Edward Said’s writings on Orientalism, which he described as a way for the West to dominate non-Western peoples particularly in Asia and the Middle East:

“My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge.“ (Orientalism, p. 204).

Woser, the foremost Tibetan writer in Tibet or China today, said in an interview that she was “strongly influenced by the works of Edward Said… Said’s theory of post colonialism particularly gave her a new framework for looking at China’s rule over Tibet.” According to Woser, the Chinese communist party’s literary and art workers had “revised Tibet, repainted Tibet, resung Tibet, redanced Tibet, refilmed Tibet, resculpted Tibet.”

The Chinese government is, at heart, no better than the Western imperial powers that Said was describing. No better than the Western and Japanese imperialists that Chinese government propaganda still denounces to whip its people into a nationalistic fervor. And actually it may be worse, since the Chinese government is not content with controlling Tibetans’ land, but wants to snuff out their independent culture and identity too. Moreover, China’s overt, violent imperialism still goes on today.

Just ask a Tibetan.

Bird’s Nest Soup

UPDATE 08.08.08: For the latest, high-resolution images of the Bird’s Nest, including photos from the banner protest just two days before the Opening Ceremoies, please visit http://freetibet2008.org/globalactions/birdsnest/

Bird’s nest soup is an expensive delicacy in China. It uses the nest of a swiftlet, a swallow-like bird that builds its home out of its own hardned saliva. To a Tibetan used to a diet of yak meat and tsampa (roasted barley), eating avian spittle sounds funny to say the least. But no one ever says Tibetans and Chinese are the same… oh wait, the Chinese government does! But we digress…

Yesterday Lhadon visited a different kind of bird’s nest, the new Beijing Olympic Stadium nicknamed so because it resembles a huge nest. She wrote:

There is a common, psychological theme running through all of these projects including the Bird’s Nest: all of them are meant to communicate China’s technological progress and prowess. However, these project’s architectural scale and engineering sophistication cannot gloss over the absence of the two most basic rights of China’s people: freedom and democracy.

This brings to mind a similar kind of imposing, impressive, and oppressive building style: Nazi architecture. In Hitler’s Germany, “The very face of the land was to be transformed… The new buildings must proclaim to the world and to the unconverted German that the era of the thousand-year Reich had dawned. Obviously, then, in seeking to influence the foreign visitor with its overpowering representative edifices, the Third Reich was didactic and theatrical.”

We can’t help thinking of Comrade Hu Jintao coming up with the idea for the stadium while sitting down to a meal of avian spittle. But as much as we like that idea, that surely didn’t happen because the Bird’s Nest wasn’t designed by Chinese. The crown jewel of Beijing’s Olympic architecture was designed by foreigners (Herzog & de Meuron), just like its new airport (Foster and Partners) and China Central Television headquarters (Rem Koolhaas).

Can’t the Chinese government even do its own triumphal architecture? With all its nationalist bluster, isn’t it embarassed it needs to rely on foreigners? Tibet’s Potala Palace was built over 350 years ago by Tibetans themselves. A photo of it graced the office wall of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who considered it an inspirational masterpiece.

So looking at the noxious sky above the Bird’s Nest, Lhadon thought to herself:

“And this is the country that claims to develop Tibet for the better?” I said to myself, as I imagined the vast, blue, blue, blue sky of my homeland Tibet.

We ask ourselves the same question. China’s modernity and its wealth are made possible by foreign knowledge and foreign investment (and the sweat and toil of ordinary Chinese). What gives the Chinese government the right to tell Tibetans how their country must be run? If Chinese want to eat bird’s nest soup that’s their business. But Tibetans will stick with tsampa.

Beijing’s Toxic Air

James Fallows of The Atlantic has a post up about Beijing’s air quality and the Olympics that is making the rounds in the blogosphere.  It has some scary photos of the near-toxic levels of air pollution that the citizens of Beijing have to contend with. 

Mr. Fallows asks: “To the obvious question — how could you possibly have a major athletic competition in conditions like these??”  Chinese officials have promised to clean up the air in the coming year so althetes won’t risk destroying their lungs (apparently it’s not so bad if this happens to ordinary Chinese).  There are limits to what even the most draconian methods can accomplish in a situation like this, so we shall see how successful they are. 

If we were athletes preparing for the Beijing Olympics, we would be very concerned… and upset at the International Olympics Committee (IOC) for making us compete in such conditions.

See: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/now_377_days_to_the_olympics.php 

China Gets Spooked! - Part 3

In the dark sea of international espionage, China’s preparations for the Beijing Olympics keep making waves. We previously discussed China’s spying and infiltration efforts against groups it considers hostile to its interests, as well as China’s widespread economic espionage. Today’s Taipei Times carried a piece by J. Michael Cole, who was involved with security for the Athens Olympics. He writes that the Beijing Olympics will involve “a whole new, genre-defining level” of security. What will be different about Beijing, moreover, is that the security will be targeted not just at terrorism, but at:

“enemies of the Games” as varied as Chinese Muslims, US Christian groups, human rights advocates, environmentalists, Tibetan independence supporters, critics of China’s role in Darfur’s genocide in the making — in all, anyone, state-based to nongovernmental, that dares criticize Beijing.

Mr. Cole is less concerned with China’s own spying, since this is nothing new. Instead, he worries that China will exploit the normal international security cooperation for all recent Olympics in order to use foreign intelligence services as its proxies.

The consequences of this decision will be that intelligence services the world over will become proxies of the Chinese apparatus, whether they like it or not. Beijing will send what are known as “trace requests,” or requests for information on suspected individuals to its sudden international allies, who will look into their database, perhaps launch investigations of their own, and whatever information is found will find its way back to Beijing. Through this process, flags will be affixed to the files of countless individuals who will either be barred from entering China or, if they do, face the risk of imprisonment.

In the name of cooperation, in the spirit of the Games, various intelligence agencies will thus become complicit in repression. Terrorism will be redefined, if only temporarily, as anything that opposes the authoritarian practices of the government in Beijing. Unless the world’s security services take the moral path — a very unlikely possibility, sadly — those will be Games for individuals who have given in to tyranny.

The marathoners will run, the swimmers will swim and the cyclists will cycle, but around them, cheering, will be the architects of a repressive regime and an army of hollow men, leaning together.

This is a very real concern.

For example, last month the US Federal Bureau of Investigation announced it is “offering its expertise to Chinese authorities who will provide security for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.” This even as the FBI is simultaneously fighting Chinese espionage in the US! According to Thomas Fuentes, assistant director of the FBI’s Office of International Operations, “There are tremendous issues of security as to who’s entering the country and what backgrounds they may have, whether they intend violence at the Olympic Games for any variety of reasons.”

Let us hope that the FBI indeed only provides the Chinese government with information on violent threats. It would be inexcusable if US taxpayer money were spent to supply the authoritarian regime in Beijing with information on American citizens who are nonviolently exercising their basic human right to free expression. If it turns out otherwise and the FBI helps China spy on peaceful US citizens, there will be an uproar like nothing else from liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike.

China Gets Spooked! - Part 2

Yesterday we wrote about China’s efforts to spy upon and infiltrate organizations supporting human rights, Tibet, Darfur, etc. in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Of course, there is also the case of Chen Yonglin, a recent Chinese embassy defector who described covert efforts by the Chinese government to spy upon and infiltrate Falun Gong groups and others deemed enemies of the state.

Now, USA Today reports that China is also “among the most active nations” conducting industrial espionage in the US. The report continues:

Beijing’s goals aren’t limited to traditional national security interests. The world’s fastest-growing economy operates a shadowy technology bazaar where individuals offering trade secrets find a ready buyer. About one-third of all economic espionage investigations are linked to Chinese government agencies, research institutes or businesses.

As the Chinese government attempts to improve its image, it finds that reality keeps interrupting its plans.

A year without “Made in China”

A columnist for the Boston Globe tried an experiment for personal reasons that many of us have done as a political statement:

For all of 2005, my family swore off Chinese imports. People figured we were standing up for Tibet or protesting lost American jobs, but our reason was personal, not political. It was an experiment. We wanted to test our connections to China’s vast economy in a meaningful way. More to the point, we wanted to know if it could be done, and what it would be like to try.

There is definitely an increasing trend in awareness of “Made in China” as an issue related to health and the U.S. economy, which is promising. However, it is also disappointing that issues of human rights and cultural genocide are not enough for most Americans to make changes in their consumer habits.

In the end, she came up with a sobering conclusion: “we are so deeply tied to China that I can’t envision how we could step back now.”

You can read the full article at http://www.boston.com

Unraveling “Made in China”

Carcinogenic shrimp? Lead-laced children’s toys? Toxic toothpaste? Defective car tires? We are shocked, shocked to see that “Made in China” goods turn out to be substandard, dangerous, or even deadly. Yet the stories keep coming, unraveling like the end of a “Made in China” sweater.

Who knew that Chinese goods are cheap for a reason? How could we have been expected to connect the dots between an unaccountable government more than willing to use force against its own people and against Tibetans, corrupt and unelected officials out to enrich themselves, a political-judicial system that protects the powerful and censors free speech, and a development strategy aimed at making money above all else, even at the expense of killing people and wrecking the environment?

Yes, we’ve heard of Chinese children dying from tainted antibiotics or fake baby formula. We vaguely recall corrupt Chinese officials routinely using the coercive power of the state to suppress workers’ rights. We’ve heard that seven of the ten most polluted cities in the world are Chinese. Maybe we know that Chinese environmental activists are beaten by government-sponsored thugs and thrown in jail on trumped-up charges. We’ve read that China’s newest high-speed railway is unsafe because of fake construction material. And the well-informed among us know how China is treating Tibet as its colony, dumping its excess population while stripping the land of resources to feed Chinese factories. But the idea that the dark side of modern China could be exported to our stores along with cheap consumer goods? Unthinkable!

But should we really be surprised that a government committing slow genocide in Tibet and supporting quick genocide in Darfur also presides over a system that looks the other way when corners are cut and ordinary people get hurt? Is it really so shocking once we unravel the connections? Yes it is in China’s overall economic interest to reform. But should we really believe that the Chinese Communist Party can fundamentally reform Chinese industries when it cannot root out massive endemic corruption in its own midst?

Many Tibetans have been calling for a boycott of “Made in China” for years. Perhaps we should have listened. Perhaps we should have better considered the repression in Tibet, because China’s treatment of Tibet is like the proverbial canary in the coal mine that shows what evils the Chinese government is truly capable of under all the facade.

Unfortunately, the problems with “Made in China” goods are not unforeseeable flukes. Rather, they’re exactly what one should expect from the government, economic system, and development strategy of China today. The recent unraveling of “Made in China” is entirely predictable. As with the mounting pressure surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympics, we’re seeing how the Chinese government is utterly failing when the system it has created is held up to close scrutiny. As the Beijing Olympics approach and as China gets closer to its big “coming out party,” expect more stories to emerge of the dark side of life in China and Tibet.