Regime Watch: Beijing

This morning regime watch hit two thousand page views. As I said when the blog hit one thousand page views, I don’t really know what this means considering the many thousands of blogs out there…but it seems like a pretty hefty number to me. The majority of visitors continue to come from within the United States, followed by the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. About twelve percent of visitors come from “other” countries. Welcome and thanks to you all.

The first post on regime watch was about my article “Misery: China’s Main Export,” which describes Communist China’s moral illegitimacy to host the 2008 Olympics, and which was first published in the excellent weekly Colorado newspaper, Johnstown Breeze. Here it is, re-printed in its entirety. And again, thanks to everyone who found their way to this blog…hope you come back from time to time.

In 2005, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo introduced a resolution into the House of Representatives calling on the U.S. Olympic Committee to change the venue of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, citing among other things, the “egregious violations of human rights” by China.

And indeed, while Communist China is well qualified to host an international gathering of thugs and tyrants, the regime’s moral legitimacy as host of the Olympics is another matter entirely.

In May 2007, The Hill—a Washington, D.C. newspaper that covers Congress—reported on “a quiet lobbying campaign” in Washington by China in an attempt to “deflect threats that the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing will be boycotted because of what critics say is a Chinese failure to help end genocidal violence in Darfur.”

Actually, far from simply failing to help end the slaughter, China’s outright complicity in the genocide being perpetrated by the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum against non-Arab tribes-people in the Darfur region of Sudan is well established

A March 2007 report from the Washington D.C.-based Heritage Foundation notes that China’s huge investment in Sudan oil in turn helps fund the genocide in Darfur, “Khartoum has doubled its defense budget in recent years, spending 60 percent to 80 percent of its estimated $500 million in annual oil revenue—half from China—on weapons. Some of these weapons find their way to the conflict in Darfur.”

Beijing has also helped subvert international arm embargoes against Khartoum. As the Heritage report continues, “Moreover, with Chinese assistance, the Sudanese government recently built three weapons factories.”

So with China’s help, the Janjaweed militias carrying out the genocide in Darfur are not only well-armed, but have also received military transportation and helicopter gunship support from Khartoum, making the slaughter all the more efficient.

In 2006, China not only abstained from a United Nations Security Council Resolution authorizing the deployment of troops and civilian police into Darfur to provide security against the genocide, but also used its veto power to force language into the resolution requiring the consent of the same Khartoum regime whose mass-murder in Darfur created the need for an international security force in the first place.

But the lobbying campaign didn’t work out as Beijing may have hoped. In May 2007, Congressman Tom Lantos (D-Ca.) released a letter to the Chinese President signed by over 100 members of Congress, including Colorado’s Tancredo stating, among other things, “…unless China does its part to ensure that the government of Sudan accepts the best and most reasonable path to peace, history will judge your government as having bank-rolled a genocide.”

The letter continues, “If China fails to do its part, it risks being forever known as the host of the ‘Genocide Olympics.’ ”

Besides enabling genocide in Darfur, China is also well into its fiftieth year of a military occupation of Tibet. Many thousands of Tibetans—including Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama—are forced to live in exile around the world

Last year, Beijing showed its hyper-sensitivity to having its thuggish occupation of Tibet tied to the Olympics by detaining and then deporting Colorado resident Kirsten Westby and four other Americans for peacefully displaying a banner saying “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.

The slogan was a clever play on Beijing’s own cynical slogan for the 2008 Olympics, “One World, One Dream.”

In addition, Beijing is again threatening violence against the peaceful and democratic island nation of Taiwan, over which China claims sovereignty—even though it is plainly obvious that Taiwan function as an independent state—and that only Beijing may represent Taiwan’s 23 million citizens in international organizations.

In 2005, Beijing enacted an “Anti-Secession Law” which codified China’s already long-standing threats against Taiwan. Article eight of the law mandates the use of “Non-peaceful” means against Taiwan if, among other things, “a major event occurs which would lead to Taiwan’s separation from China.”

After more than a decade of being turned down for United Nations membership under its traditional name “Republic of China,” Taiwan is planning a national referendum this year over whether to formally apply for UN membership under the name “Taiwan.”

Beijing recently stated that Taiwan’s referendum represents the kind of “major event” that would allow the regime to invoke article eight against Taiwan.

So Communist China is desperately trying to put on a friendly face for the Olympics while at the same time threatening one of Asia’s most dynamic representative democracies.

The eyes of the world will be on Beijing for the summer games, making the 2008 Olympics a unique opportunity to shine an international spotlight on the misery China exports around the globe.

Mia Farrow’s advocacy against the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan has been both passionate and relentless.  Here is Mia on You Tube asking Beijing to stop enabling the genocidal regime in Khartoum.

Over at the Independence Institute’s podcast site, ivoices.org, radio host Amy Oliver interviews me on the basics of the “Genocide Olympics”.

It’s from last year, but is just as relevant today. If you want a primer on the relationship between the regime in Beijing and the regime in Khartoum, and how China has not only helped fund the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, but has also armed and given political cover to its perpetrators, give it a listen (MP3 compatible).

The term “Genocide Olympics” refers to the fact that China, the host nation of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, is complicit in the genocide in Darfur, and therefore lacks the moral legitimacy to host the Olympics.

From a recent report by Human Rights First, “Investing in Tragedy: China’s money, arms and politics in Sudan”

Through its growing oil revenues, the government of Sudan has also been able to expand its purchasing of arms, which are being used to sustain the violence in Darfur. For decades China has sold Sudan arms, but its small arms exports to Sudan have increased significantly in the last several years. From 1999 to 2005, a period that includes the start of the Darfur crisis, Sudan’s imports of small arms increased by 680 percent, and from 2004 to 2006, China made up an average of 90 percent of those small arms sales to Sudan. From 2003 to 2006, China sold over $55 million worth of small arms to Khartoum.

In order to protect its client regime, Beijing uses its clout on the UN Security Council to give Khartoum political cover. The report continues:

China has also provided robust political support for the government of Sudan in spite of the violence in Darfur. This is clearly demonstrated in the way China has repeatedly obstructed United Nation Security Council efforts to take action to stop the violence in Darfur by threatening to veto resolutions addressing the conflict. Between 2004 and 2007, the Security Council debated 14 substantive resolutions about Darfur, and China used its power to weaken nine of them. On most occasions, China forced the removal of tough language, including the threat or imposition of targeted economic sanctions.

Beijing and Khartoum, a match made in…well, it sure isn’t heaven.

Human Rights First also has an online petition to stop arms sales to Sudan.

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.

There’s more.

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.

It’s often easy to dismiss celebrities and their causes, think movie stars discussing carbon footprints…just before they hop on the private jet to Cannes or Aspen.

But Mia Farrow’s advocacy for the victims of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan seems the real deal…passionate, articulate and relentless.

It was Ms. Farrow who dubbed the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as the “Genocide Olympics” in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, eloquently laying out Beijing’s economic and political complicity in the mass-slaughter.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported on Farrow’s one-woman protest during Olympic torch ceremonies in Hong Kong:

Actress Mia Farrow urged Beijing today to help stop the killings in Sudan’s western Darfur region, staging a peaceful, one-woman protest on the sidelines of the Hong Kong leg of the Olympic torch relay.

The 63-year-old actress held aloft her own torch, which she said honored victims of genocide, near Hong Kong’s government headquarters — away from the Olympic torch route.

“As the games approach, China has the opportunity to change the course of history,” she said.

Sad, but true. Last May, President Bush cut off certain government-run companies involved in the Sudan oil business, and several individuals suspected in involvement in the slaughter in Darfur from the U.S. banking system. But the fact is that the regime in Khartoum doesn’t really need the U.S. banking system as long as it has the economic backing of Beijing. From the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes in 2007:

Over the last decade, Beijing’s energy firms have invested between $3 billion and $10 billion in the Sudanese energy sector, stuffing at least $250 million a year into Khartoum’s pockets.

The hundreds of millions of dollars from Beijing help prop up Khartoum’s arsenal, making the genocide all the more efficient. Brookes continues:

Beijing also helps arm Khartoum. As a result of its energy profits, Sudan has doubled its defense budget in recent years, spending 60 percent to 80 percent of its oil revenue on weapons - arms mostly made in China.

Moreover, with Chinese assistance, the Sudanese government may have built a number of weapons factories - further frustrating any efforts at a reasonably air-tight arms embargo.

So the power to actually and substantially impact an ongoing genocide lays with a regime that has no interest in exercising that power in any positive way.

The Times piece continues about Farrow:

Farrow, who has dubbed the Beijing games the “genocide Olympics,” said she has lobbied Chinese officials in New York on Darfur.

Recalling one meeting, she said one Chinese official asked her why activists didn’t highlight Beijing’s humanitarian work in Darfur.

Farrow said she replied, “Here in America, when something’s wrong with our car and we take it to the mechanic, we don’t say what’s right with our car. We say what’s wrong with our car.”

She added, “Maybe I’m not the most tactful person … but I’m not a liar.”

Don’t sweat it, Ms. Farrow, this is genocide we’re talking about here and you’re doing great. Tact is for the diplomats who sip cocktails with mass-murderers, and we’ll leave the lying to the genocide enablers in Beijing.

For more on Darfur, see dreamfordarfur.org

Here’s how “both ways” Beijing works. First, the regime vigorously pursues the 2008 Summer Olympics, and the International Olympic Committee makes the horrid decision to grant Beijing the Games. Then when the regime’s world-wide thuggery, such as its military occupation of Tibet, or its complicity in the genocide in Darfur gets put under some scrutiny, the regime cries foul and whines that the Games should not be politicized.

An example from earlier this year:

Zhu Jing, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Olympic organising committee, said: “Linking the Darfur issue to the Olympic Games will not help to resolve this issue and is not in line with the Olympic spirit that separates sports from politics.”

What a load of blather.   Beijing is at the head of the line to politicize the Olympics for its own benefit.  Besides which, when have the Olympics not been politicized?

From an outstanding editorial last year from The Hill, a Washington, D.C. newspaper that covers Congress. This could have been written yesterday and it would still be spot on:

Sports and politics are not kept separate and rarely have been. Nazi Germany most notoriously used the 1936 games in Berlin to grandstand the master race (and Adolph Hitler walked out when Jesse Owens demonstrated what nonsense it was); Tommie Smith and other African-American athletes raised their gloved fists in Black Power salutes while standing on the medal podiums of the Mexico games in 1968; the United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow games to deny the Soviet Union the international acceptance it craved in the aftermath of its 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; the Russian empire struck back by boycotting the 1984 games in Los Angeles — and so on and so forth.

The games have long been used by host nations to showcase their modernity, power, and international prestige. Beijing worked doggedly to get the games for precisely these benefits. By unshackling itself from the economic strictures of communism, China has become a hugely successful international trading power while crushing political and religious freedom at home. It is thus both widely accepted and a rogue.

China wants to wear the games like a testimonial or badge of global acceptance — a rosette allowing it into the enclosure of top nations.

But it cannot have it both ways — inviting praise but complaining that criticism is out of bounds. As Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) noted, “to suggest that somehow it is unfair to ask those questions [about Chinese links to Khartoum] is ridiculous … If China doesn’t like the scrutiny, they can stop tacitly supporting genocide.”

One quibble with Representative Lee…China doesn’t so much “tacitly” support the genocide in Darfur, but rather outright subsidizes, enables and gives political cover to its perpetrators.

Eric Reeves (who runs the great Darfur website sudanreeves.org) from the March 22 Boston Globe:

Though Khartoum’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against Darfur’s African tribes has been authoritatively documented for years, Beijing seeks to obscure this grim reality through distortion, half-truths, and outright mendacity. In turn, nothing encourages Khartoum more than China’s refusal to speak honestly about violent human destruction in Darfur, where growing insecurity has brought the world’s largest humanitarian operation to the brink of collapse.

Why does China airbrush away Darfur’s genocidal realities? Why has Beijing been Khartoum’s largest weapons supplier over the past decade? Why has China repeatedly wielded a veto threat at the UN Security Council as the world body vainly struggles to bring pressure to bear on Khartoum? The answer lies in China’s thirst for Sudanese crude oil.

Though nothing excuses the sheer genocidal thuggery of the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, the members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might as well be alongside the Janjaweed in Darfur pulling the trigger.

The Washington Post is reporting that actress Mia Farrow has been admitted into Hong Kong ahead of today’s Olympic torch ceremonies in Hong Kong.  As Beijing well knows, Miss farrow has been one of the driving forces in bringing attention to China’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The regime in Beijing must really be feeling the pressure.

From Farrow’s excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from last year, The ‘Genocide Olympics’

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an overwhelming majority of Sudan’s annual oil exports and state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. — an official partner of the upcoming Olympic Games — owns the largest shares in each of Sudan’s two major oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

My own piece on China’s enabling of the genocide in Darfur from the Aspen Times here.

With China’s thuggish occupation of Tibet on display to the world, Beijing is showing its true colors. Read the Krause op-ed, “Misery:  China’s main export” on China’s moral illegitimacy to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.  First published in the excellent Colorado weekly paper, Johnstown Breeze.