How do you even begin to summarize, in just a couple of paragraphs, the various thugocracies subsidized, or otherwise enabled by Communist China, or the sheer scope and breadth of the misery Beijing props up around the world?
If you are Christopher Hitchens, you do it something like this:
Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China. It was this way when President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein. And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of any international rescue.
China also maintains territorial claims against India and Vietnam (and, of course, Taiwan) and is building a vast army, as well as a huge oceangoing navy, to back up these ambitions.
Hitchens actually started out talking about Beijing’s cozy relationship with the vicious military dictatorship in Burma. With the recent news that swaths of Burma have been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, the ineptitude of dictatorships in dealing with natural disasters (as opposed to their specialty of creating man-made disasters) will sadly be on display to the world, and in fact may have already begun.
From yesterday’s USA Today:
U.S. and international aid groups scrambled Monday to send help to victims of what could be Asia’s worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami, but roads were closed in the low-lying delta region that was hardest hit.
First lady Laura Bush said the U.S. government had rushed $250,000 to aid organizations operating in Burma. However, she said further aid could be delayed because Burma’s government, one of the world’s most isolationist military regimes, has not yet agreed to allow a U.S. disaster response team into the country.
Maybe the junta in Burma is waiting for marching orders from Beijing first.
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Hitchen’s refers to the “the embrace of China”. What I’m not getting the purpose of this “embrace”? Am I naive in asking if it is merely blind, indiscriminate trade? I’m assuming there is a larger strategic motive?
Nicky,
My best gues is that by “the embrace of China’ Hitchens is referring to China’s propensity for, as you put it, “indiscriminate trade” with governments that much of the rest of the world wants little to do with (unless it involves oil, such as the U.S./Venezuela relationship). China places no conditions on its trade other than to ask for some loyalty ( or to break of diplomatic relations with Taiwan) and in return, China makes no judgements on the conduct of their trading partners. This makes China and Burma a match made in…well, not quite heaven.
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