Skip to main content

The sleeping giant of Asia is awake . . . and whining

China is whining over growing international calls to link protest actions against the Bejing Olympics to the PRC taking some sort of positive action to help end the Darfur genocide. From Al Jazeera:

The Chinese government has condemned efforts to link the Beijing Olympics with the violence in Darfur as "irresponsible and unfair".

The statement, issued by the Chinese embassy in Washington, came as Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief, joined calls for China to do more to put pressure on Sudan.

It also came as US film-maker Steven Spielberg severed his links with the Games over China's ties to Sudan's government, accused of mass killings in its Darfur region.

"As the Darfur issue is not an internal affair of China, nor was it caused by China, to link the two together is utterly unreasonable, irresponsible and unfair," said the statement published in Thursday's Global Times, run by the Communist party's People's Daily....

"The vast majority of Chinese people have expressed bafflement and outrage at the Western pressure. In their view, it's absolutely absurd to place the Darfur issue, so many thousands of miles away, on the head of China."


The people of China--that bastion of free political speech--have spoken and, surprisingly, expressed exactly the same outrage as that felt by senior government officials. Wow, that one was unexpected.

Yeah, poor helpless misunderstood China:

Chinese sales of assault rifles and other weapons to Sudan have grown rapidly during the conflict in the western Darfur region despite a UN arms embargo, according to a US-based rights group.

Human Rights First said on Thursday that a study of Sudanese and UN trade data showed that China was virtually the only supplier of small arms to Sudan.

Khartoum pays for the weapons it buys from Beijing with its growing oil revenues, the rights group said.


For those who have a problem distinguishing totalitarian governments from authoritarian corporations, this might be a good starting place.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Steve, The Irony here is that just as our news is censored to a large degree by social controls of corporations whose tone is set by government policy, the same is true in China so the people's bafflement here at NATO's reaction to us say, is the equivalent of people's bafflement in China. We are not as different from each other as some might think. We simply have a different set of things we restrict polite conversation on. If it in any way threatens our "vested interests" we rarely hear a peep about it. The same is true in China. Fox News, CNN and others work in Asia as well as America in the same way.
March 14, 2008 at 8:36 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...
44 comments
Read more

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...
22 comments
Read more

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...
26 comments
Read more