[reversal] China caves to int'l pressure, will meet w/D. Lama reps

1. That is true, but from what i understand, (honestly speaking and realistically), how many people (westerners) do you know that really cares? I mean really really cares about the plight of the tibetan people? My collegues at work are very busy, have a family and other things going on in thier life, they are not going to dig up more objective sources of media. What they have done is watch the default news channel and base thier opinon on that. and That is what they "believe". So basing on that, I am arguing that alot of people that form an opinon against china really havent done the research into the background, which is something that grinds my gear. If you did the research and still believes what you believe in, then its not up to me or anyone else to argue with you.

2. Yes media is controlled like nothing else in china. I am not use to it whenever I go back, so I can clearly see your point here. The chinese culture like most asian cultures such as japan, korea has alot to do with "face" or "pride" or "respect". If they think they lost thier face, which they clearly do, then they might over-react to compensate more for the "lost face" if you know what I mean.

The thing is, China put ALOT of effort into the Olympics, dare I say that they have done more and spent more money on this olympics than any other country in the past. Now, when a few protests suddenly turns the entire western civilisation against china, then I can see why they over-reacted as a "protective measure" to clear thier name. If china was silent and admitted that there are human rights violations, then the western media is not giong to say "Excellent, thanks for admitting you are wrong, we have no problem now". The most likely scenario would have been "much more intense criticism by the western media" which would turn more people away from going to china. Thats my perspective.

3. I cant speak for any other country. But here in Australia, the bus loads of university students that went to Canberra were organised by student societies within universities. I know this for a fact. Students had to pay to go there. They left 1am in the morning so they could get there at 6am. Most of these students grew up in Australia so they were not brain washed as a kid. To the best of my knowledge, I did not hear anything regarding government funded protests.

 

Lol, you mean those PAID PROFESSIONAL activists ? Sammy, try get a cup of fresh coffee and read news from different sources.

 

And what if China said "Yes, there are human rights violations; we recognize that it is a problem, and here's what we're doing to correct them"?

There's a right way for a government to handle criticism, and it isn't by clamping down on the media.

 

Governments are not going to admit they are wrong, seriously speaking, not going to happen

Has america admitted they were wrong with Iraq?
just one of amillion examples

Japan to this date has not apologised to human rights abuses all over asia in the second world war, and its not even the same government

 

Lol, I was reading the news of all 3 NYPD cops got acquitted this afternoon.

 

So your defense of China's human rights violations is that human rights violations happen elsewhere? That they happen here? Oh, that's a really strong argument! (that was sarcasm, in case you didn't "get it.") The case you mentioned was and has been very widely reported in the US, in every kind of media you can imagine. We have a judicial system that this case has worked its way through. There may be appeals. There very well may be a civil law suit against the officers and the city. I hope so. At least we have a system that allows it. Imperfect, yes, but far better than China's oligarchy and its menions.

Yours is a typical response. I wish I could say I'm surprised. I'm not.



Impeach Bush.

 

I dont think he is or anyone is trying to say that two wrong makes a right

But when you have exhausted alll the facts in the argument to no avail, the next most natural thing to do is to say "hey here is an example of something in your system that doesnt work"

We use this with the hope that you can relate with our perspective from a more famaliar event in your environment, not in anyone saying "yes we support human rights abuses".

Obviously, this is a basketball forum, most of us realistically are only casual observers who want discuss this issue or voice thier opinon. We are by no means university professors in modern history who can write a long essay on the issue, and who have done the reserach to show that there are events in america that mirrors this tibetan/china debate. So some of the examples that were used may not be 100% applicable, but I hope you get the gist of what I am tryign to say

 

Chinese student groups are widely known to be infiltrated by CCP operatives in the US. I'd guess the same is true in Australia.

 

not wanting to get involved much in teh China Japan debate, Japan has failed to teach their children the history of WWII. Watch "Hiroshima" documentary. Or "Black Rain"

Even japanese dislike this because they never want to be involved in a war again and they want the young people to understand why.

 

While Chinese government has never apologizes to people in the west that they were wrong and please forgive them, they did say plenty of times that they were trying to improve the human rights in China. And things did improve. Take it for whatever its worth.

Yes, I think China has a very long way to go. And yes, I think Chinese government are a lot of times stupid. They are also leaning to govern. After all, The country has just in this opening up for 30 years, it's unrealistic to expect them to have the same governing skill as those under the capitalist system for hundreds of years.

Chinese government is stupid. For example, the "system" Dechard was so proudly speaking of, would make it much easy to govern. Whether justice can be achieved is another matter. If you are poor and not in "headline cases", I suspect the outcome would be much different.

 

Why China Is Burning Mad

Why China's Burning Mad

Thursday, Apr. 24, 2008 By SIMON ELEGANT/BEIJING

Buzz Like all other foreign journalists in China, I get my share of criticism from Chinese readers, mostly about my stories on TIME's website or my posts on our China Blog. Some of the criticism can be pretty sharp--that comes with the territory. But the opprobrium has taken on a distinctly unpleasant edge in recent weeks as a wave of nationalist anger has roiled China. "Simon, you will be hated by 1.3 billion Chinese," someone wrote in response to my blog post about the chaotic progress of the Olympic torch through London. "Hope someday someone will spit on your face. Your name will be recorded in Chinese history book forever as one of cold blooded, Hitler-type, murder's assistant."

Overkill? Fellow foreign correspondents in Beijing have received much worse, including death threats credible enough to prompt some of them to move offices. The explosion of rage was initially sparked by what many Chinese perceive as biased international coverage of the bloody riots in Tibet on March 14 and the continuing crackdown by Chinese security forces that followed. Then, as the Olympic-torch relay was greeted by pro-Tibet demonstrations in London, Paris and San Francisco, many Chinese felt their national honor had been besmirched. Recently, their ire has been focused specifically on France. Over the weekend of April 19 and 20, thousands of anti-French demonstrators took to the streets in cities across China. They were apparently of the belief that French authorities had deliberately left security lax when the Olympic torch transited through Paris--out of a desire to humiliate China and interfere with Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Games. (Although the relay in London was similarly dogged by protests, the British have not been subject to such specific hostility.) The Paris city council poured oil on the flames by making the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen.

The anti-French protesters are not simply a noisy, hysterical minority; many Chinese are deeply angry about what they see as a global conspiracy to blacken their nation's good name and ruin the Olympics. That makes for a perilous moment for a country that hoped to display its best side to the world this summer, and is now displaying something uglier. Chinese are immensely proud of what their country has achieved in the past two or three decades and of the prestige conferred by the Olympics. But many are still insecure about the permanence of China's new position in the world and haunted by memories of past humiliations by foreigners that have been drummed into them since childhood by a government increasingly dependent on nationalism for its legitimacy.

It's testament to the fever pitch of nationalism that even iconic figures can suddenly find themselves under attack. The Paralympic fencer Jin Jing became a national hero (dubbed "the wheelchair angel" by the Chinese media) for her attempts to protect the Olympic torch from pro-Tibet protesters in Paris. But after she questioned the wisdom of a call by some nationalists on the Internet to boycott the French retail giant Carrefour, Jin found herself the subject of Internet attacks branding her "unpatriotic" and a "traitor."

So, what explains the furor? The ferocity with which the protesters turn on anybody who disagrees with them reminds some older Chinese of the dark days of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which convulsed China from 1966 to '76. Today's protesters have one thing in common with Mao's revolutionaries: years of indoctrination in a highly nationalistic--some would say xenophobic--credo that imagines a hostile and perfidious world determined to undermine China. "Maybe kids today know more about computers, about the Internet," says Dai Qing, an environmental activist who was imprisoned after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, "but when it comes to history, the education they get is the same."

The doctrine was reinforced after the Tiananmen protests. Deng Xiaoping, then China's leader, declared in a speech to the nation's military leadership that the cause of the unrest was that political education had been ignored. In the months and years that followed, the government created new textbooks that emphasized both the glories of Chinese culture and the century of humiliation at the hands of foreigners that began with the Opium War in 1839. That patriotic education extended beyond schools to include television, film and the news media. "Whenever there's a crisis, the same narrative of Chinese history emerges," says William Callahan, an expert on Chinese nationalism at the University of Manchester in the U.K. "Not just in the official statements but now in the popular responses as you saw in Tibet. [The Chinese say,] 'Foreigners can't intervene, because we were humiliated before.'"

Having effectively abandoned the Marxist-Leninist ideology that was once its bedrock, China's Communist Party now draws its mandate to govern from two sources--economic growth and nationalist pride. The trouble with nationalism, though, is that it's difficult to control. What starts as criticism of the foreign can quickly swing to domestic targets. One of modern China's defining events was the May 4, 1919, student protest, which began as an expression of nationalist ire over China's treatment by foreign powers in the run-up to the Versailles Treaty but then turned into an antigovernment movement. Could today's protests take a similar turn? Plenty of Chinese have grouses about their rulers. Huang Jing, a visiting China scholar at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute, says public dissatisfaction could spill over into issues ranging from soaring inflation, the plunging stock market and rampant official corruption. If the government "lets nationalism keep rising unchecked, it could suddenly find its own position threatened," Huang says.

An immediate risk is that China could still be awash in antiforeigner sentiment in August, when Beijing will welcome the world for the Olympic Games. It would take only a couple of instances of violence against foreigners to undo years of official campaigns to make the capital extra-hospitable--coaxing Beijingers to learn English and stop spitting in the streets, for example.

The danger isn't just domestic. Susan Shirk, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of California at San Diego and the author of the 2007 book China: Fragile Superpower, believes that the protests in China radically reduce the room Chinese leaders have to compromise when it comes to international issues. If Beijing is constantly under pressure to show its domestic audience that it is the dominant partner in foreign relations, "it will be difficult for China to go back to being a calm, cooperative, mature, responsible power," says Shirk.

 

That's a dubious link, Dubious!

I read that in Time Magazine and I'm glad you thought to post it.

(here's your link)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1729704,00.html

Here's another interesting read, Dubious...


The New York Times

April 28, 2008
Editorial Observer

Olympic Protests, Then and Now

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

I was in Red Square one day during the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow when some poor protester apparently tried to set himself on fire. We never learned who he was or what really happened because of the amazing reaction of the authorities, which was caught on film by a tourist.

The first frame shows a tall flame and shocked tourists. In the next, a Volga sedan wheels into the square, then a middle-aged man is stuffed into the trunk. But in this and subsequent frames, the attention of the crowd is elsewhere — every fourth man in the area is grabbing a camera, opening it and exposing the film. The tourist whose film I saw had been behind a tree away from the action. I suspect his was the only record of what happened. Most witnesses recalled only the fire and the goons grabbing their cameras.

It was an amazing display of the determination of Soviet authorities to allow nothing that would mar their grand show. “O Sport, You Are Peace” was the ubiquitous slogan on posters, souvenirs and T-shirts, but the Games had already opened under an American-led boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That seemed only to redouble the Kremlin’s efforts to crush the tiniest hint of discord or dissent.

In the end, the 1980 Games revealed a lot more about the paranoia and ruthlessness of an authoritarian state than about its skill at organizing sports competitions — at least to the West. Now, in the same way, we’re learning a lot about China. And just as a lot of Russians then couldn’t see a connection between their state’s policies and the Games, many Chinese today seem genuinely angry and convinced that “foreign enemies” are deliberately trying to ruin their coming-out party.

I suspect that the International Olympic Committee also has not quite understood that a connection might be made between a country’s human-rights record and hosting the Games.

There are limits, of course, to the parallels between the sealed military camp that was the Soviet Union 28 years ago and the wealthy, exploding China of today. But that only makes the similarities in the reactions of the two Communist parties all the more striking.

The West may see China as the economic and military powerhouse of the 21st century, where presidents and magnates go to find a piece of the action. Yet the ruling party has remained remarkably ignorant of the rules of the open societies with which it deals, and remarkably insecure before every Tibetan or Uighur dissident, every human-rights activist and every Western critic. A state that sentences a dissident like Hu Jia to prison for “inciting subversion of state power” by linking the Games with human rights is not a self-confident one.

Reared in a secretive, suspicious, paternalistic and highly bureaucratized culture, the Chinese Communist elite can only presume that the Western elites are like them, that protests over Darfur, Tibet or the persecution of dissidents are all cynical political maneuvers.

The attacks on the torch, thus, can only be the work of “enemies.” And these are everywhere. On April 17, the Xinhua agency carried a report about a German group’s call for protests over Tibet. This, it said, “reinforced an impression about a puppet show going on along with the Olympic torch relay, with the Dalai Lama and his supporters on the stage and anti-China forces behind the curtain.”

Statements like that feed a common notion in the West that protests and boycotts only harden China’s views and rally its people around the party. “Quiet diplomacy,” in this school of thought, is the more useful approach. Certainly it is more useful for governments and businesses seeking contracts in China. But is it effective? A Western diplomat hinting quietly that releasing a dissident would be good for China’s image might only feed the sense that human rights are about public relations.

In the end, debating whether mass protest or quiet diplomacy is more effective misses the point. The protests along the torch’s route, including those on Sunday in South Korea, were not concocted by German think tanks, but were mostly an expression of genuine anger by people in free societies. That may not persuade the Chinese of the value of human rights, but they may learn that the cost of cynicism can be high.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/opinion/28mon4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin


Impeach Bush.

 

We don’t have the scale as US universities. One of my friend is the president of one society, the other is the treasurer or another. None of them got approached by anyone whatsoever.

Australia is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, not a powerhouse like the US..so I doubt the Chinese government is going to bother organise protests in Australia LOL

 

Many, many, government officials have admitted they were wrong in Iraq. Those who are still in the Bush administration, which still thinks or at least claims that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, obviously hasn't done so. However, there has been tremendous pressure from citizens and many legislators to correct that policy, as well as scrutiny from the media. It's not remotely like the way China treats political dissent and other human rights issues.

So America, by and large, has admitted its mistake. Some citizens, media pundits, and government officials (including, unfortunately, the President), have not; however, it's clearly an oversimplification at best to say that America hasn't admitted it was wrong. It's definitely not like China's massive, systematic human rights abuses, which continue with the support of many of the populace and the Chinese media.

Your point on Japan has already been addressed.

Strange, that wasn't something that prompted me to "Lol". The police were tried in a court of law, which found that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the men were guilty. I'm not even sure how to continue, because I'm really not seeing how you can think this is a worthwhile analogy.

Ok, but if you can't support your arguments, which are anecdotal in nature, with facts from the real world, then you shouldn't expect those arguments to be accepted as valid.

 

Does it matter if everyone else except hte government admit they are wrong? Really, does it actually matter? Only when the government admit that they are wrong can there be any change.

 

On the issue of Iraq, a large part of the goverment has made that admission. Plus, the populace is actually calling for change, rather than just sitting back and approving any wrongs committed by the government.

Your analogy just doesn't work.

 

Bucket, an analogy is a form of comparison. Hotblooded, rightly or wrongly, is expressing an opinion.

 

This isn't a comparison?