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.

No surprise here, but Tibet’s thuggish communist occupiers recently used the Olympic torch relay to “politicize” the Olympics and remind the world of their true colors. From Rueters (June 21):

Chinese Communist Party officials in charge of restive Tibet used the passing of the Olympic torch relay through the capital Lhasa on Saturday to defend their control and denounce the exiled Dalai Lama.

The torch procession ended under tight security below the towering Potala palace after having been run for just over two hours before a carefully-selected crowd, some three months after the region was convulsed by bloody anti-Chinese protests.

“Tibet’s sky will never change and the red flag with five stars will forever flutter high above it,” Tibet’s hardline Communist Party boss Zhang Qingli said at a ceremony marking the end of the two-hour relay through strictly guarded streets.

“We will certainly be able to totally smash the splittist schemes of the Dalai Lama clique,” he added, in front of the Potala, traditional seat of the Dalai Lama, the most powerful figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Associated Press covered the torch passing through Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city. Here’s a part of the AP’s description of how an authoritarian communist regime celebrates the Olympic spirit:

Officers lined the route through the historic city at intervals of as little as 10 feet, while badge wearing onlookers, who had been carefully screened and individually approved beforehand, waved flags and chanted “Go China.”

A few dozen foreign reporters given special permission to cover the Lhasa leg were required to travel in a closely guarded convoy. They were only allowed to cover the opening and closing portions, isolating them from contact with ordinary residents.

Almost all foreign visitors have been banned from the region since the protests, hamstringing the local tourism industry.

These guys actaully get to host the Olympics?

The International Olympic Committee made a staggeringly bad decision by allowing Communist China to host the 2008 Olympics. Here’s a snippet from a recent New York Times editorial describing Beijing’s “list of Olympic dont’s” for international visitors:

On its Web site last week, the Chinese Olympic organizing committee listed a set of restrictions for the 500,000 overseas visitors expected in August. Olympic spectators are being told not to bring in “anything detrimental” to China, including printed materials, photos, records or movies. Religious or political banners or slogans are banned. So are rallies, demonstrations and marches — unless approved by authorities in advance. It also says that visitors with mental illnesses and sexually transmitted diseases will be barred from the country.

We shudder at how those judgments — many of them highly subjective or intrusive — will be made.

The International Olympic Committee has long prohibited political activities at Olympic venues, and we respect the goal of trying to put aside divisions while celebrating a common humanity. But Beijing is using those restrictions for its own authoritarian ends.

The sensitive souls at the Times editorial board seem a bit surprised that an authoritarian communist regime could be granted the Olympics… and then continue to act like an authoritarian communist regime. Shocking.

The Heritage Foundation’s John Tkacik has some advice for the Bush Administration about how to deal with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing:

In August, President Bush and his retinue of more than 500 high officials, aides, factotums, security and communications specialists, and drivers will descend upon Beijing. The President’s presence in Beijing, and all its attendant hoopla and media coverage, will make quite an impression on the world’s newspaper readers and CNN-watchers. In short, he will not have the luxury of anonymity at the Beijing Olympics.

But the President of the United States need not lend his prestige to China’s global debut as host of the Olympic Games—prestige that China craves. If President Bush hopes to influence China’s behavior, not just with Tibetans, but with Beijing’s many friends around the world that are “America’s adversaries,” he must leverage his attendance and that of his family and even his father. He should also have a confidential chat with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who also plans to be in Beijing, and the leaders of other democracies. Nothing flashy need be arranged.

President Bush needs only to let it be known, quietly, that he is rethinking his participation in the Beijing Olympics, and his press spokesmen need only respond to questions with a shrug of the shoulder and a noncommittal grunt.

China will get the message.

Both Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times and I have China related opinion articles in today’s Denver Post. Kristof writes on China’s use of dubious claims of terrorism threats against the Olympics in Beijing to engage in a wide-spread oppression campaign against ethnic Uighers in China’s Xinjiang region. There is no Post link for the piece, but here is the link to the Times edition.

My piece is on the other (other than Tibet) captive nations in Beijing’s imperialist empire. Here is the article re-printed in its entirety:

The international attention being focused on China’s thuggish military occupation of Tibet in the run up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is well-deserved, but it should be remembered that Tibetans are by no means the only group in western China living under the heel of the Beijing imperialists.

The Mongol people of Inner Mongolia and the Uighers (pronounced “wee-gurs”) of China’s Xinjiang region are also oppressed by Beijing. But unlike the Tibetans, they have neither a Dalai Lama nor sympathetic celebrities to present their problems on a world stage.

In 1949, the newly formed People’s Republic of China “peacefully liberated” by force the Uigher nation of East Turkestan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was formed.

Like many Tibetans, many Uighers are seeking independence from their oppressors, but their efforts are under-reported. For instance, while world press attention focused recent Tibetan protests, few papers reported on a pro-independence demonstration by the Uighers. Similarly, most of the world failed to notice when expatriate Uighers held anti-China protests during an Olympic torch ceremony in Turkey in early April.

Like the Tibetans, the Uighers have a large diaspora, which has been forced to flee Chinese rule. Yet escaping China does not necessarily mean escaping China’s censorship power. The Associated Press reports: “In the late 1990s, the Chinese leadership exerted strong pressure on Turkey to silence and withdraw any government support for these advocates in an effort that was said to be largely successful.”

Speaking off the record, one American expert described China’s policy as “The only good Uigher is a dead Uigher.” Testifying before the U.S. House Committee on International Relations in 2001, Yemlibike Fatkulin, a Uigher asylum seeker, described Beijing’s population control tactics against ethnic Uighers including forced abortions, forced sterilization and heavy fines for “unauthorized” children.

Islam is the dominant Uigher religion. A 2005 Human Rights Watch report on Beijing’s religious repression of Uighers describes clerics being forced to listen to speeches by Communist Party and government officials. The reports notes the oppressive government regulations “pertaining to religious activities, Party doctrine, and positions on separatism.”

Inner Mongolia’s subjugation by Chinese communists began in 1947. While the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia are forced to live under rigid communist rule, the rest of Mongolia (sometimes called “Outer Mongolia”) is an independent nation that has moved from communist rule as a Soviet satellite to a sovereign parliamentary democracy.

During Mao Zedong’s genocidal “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s and early 1970s, many thousands of Mongolians of Inner Mongolia were tortured, maimed and killed in a vicious campaign by Chinese communists against an alleged Inner Mongolia independence movement.

Today the Inner Mongolia People’s Party (so named in remembrance of the slaughter of the Cultural Revolution) actually exists as an organization of Mongolian expatriates based in New Jersey. Well outside the reach of Beijing, they affirm their goal of “establishing an independent state of Inner Mongolia.”

One of the historical affinities between Tibet and Mongolia has been Buddhism. Like Tibetans, the captive people of Inner Mongolia saw many of their temples destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Today, as in Tibet, the practice of Buddhism in Inner Mongolia is strictly “regulated” by the state.

Due to a massive re-settlement campaign by Beijing, Han Chinese now make up nearly eighty percent of the population of Inner Mongolia. Chinese imperialism has made Mongolians a minority in their own land.

Westerners eager to appease China tend to dismiss the rights of the captive nations in the Chinese empire. In an April 26 interview with the Financial Times, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge called on the west to be patient with China. Noting that the People’s Republic of China has only been around since 1949, Rogge compared contemporary China to past colonial powers such as Belgium, France and Portugal, “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers. It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Rogge admitted that China may not be a “role model” in the west, but “we owe China to give them time.”

Actually, if anyone is “owed” anything, it is the Tibetans, the Uighers and the Mongolians. They are all owed their inherent human right of self-determination. After more than half-century under the jackboot of the regime in Beijing, they have been patient long enough.

Weeks after burma was devastated by a cyclone, the generals who run Burma’s military dictatorship have finally begun approving a few visas for foreign aid workers, while at the same time whining that the amazing generosity offered by countries around the world just isn’t enough (or, to read between the lines, not enough to adequately line their own pockets while still pretending to care about their subjects).

From the associated Press:

Myanmar’s ruling junta lashed out Thursday at aid donors who promised millions of dollars for cyclone relief, saying survivors didn’t need “bars of chocolate.”

State-run media criticized donors for only pledging up to $150 million — a far cry from the $11 billion the junta said it needed to rebuild.

The Myanma Ahlin newspaper, a government mouthpiece, said cyclone victims from the hardest-hit areas could get by without foreign handouts.

“People from the Irrawaddy delta can survive on their own, even without bars of chocolate donated by the international community,” it said, adding they can live on “fresh vegetables that grow wild in the fields and on protein-rich fish from the rivers.”

Wow, the Burmese junta is a truly despicable regime. But one dependent on the support of other regimes, especially from Communist China. In a January 2008 report from the Washington, D.C. based Heritage Foundation, Steven Groves notes:

To repress a population of 47 million continually and successfully, the military junta must be well armed, and China is Burma’s primary arms supplier. The junta’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in August 1988 caused international aid and development assistance to all but dry up. With limited revenues, the regime turned to China for the arms and armor that it needs to sustain itself. China, which cracked down on its own pro-democracy rally in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, readily agreed and has given the junta $2 billion to $3 billion in military aid since the early 1990s, helping the regime to expand its army from 180,000 to 450,000 soldiers.

And yes, the regime in Beijing actually gets to host the Olympics. Wonder if the Burmese generals will have box seats at the games?

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.

I turned my May 3 post on “Both Ways” Beijing into an op-ed piece for the Independence Institute.  Here is how “Both Ways” Beijing works:

First, China’s communist government 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 domestic and world-wide thuggery–such as its brutal military occupation of Tibet, or its complicity in the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan– gets put under some scrutiny, Beijing cries foul and whines that the games should not be politicized.

“There is a handful of people who are trying to politicize the Olympic Games,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told reporters last year. “This is against the spirit of the Games. It also runs counter to the aspirations of all the people in the world, and so their aims will never be achieved.”

What a load of blather. Since Beijing is at the head of the line to politicize the Olympics for its own benefit, it is perfectly reasonable for those who care about human rights to take advantage of the Olympics and help shine a light on one of the world’s great human rights violators. And given the scope of the misery that Beijing heaps not only on its captive nations at home, but also exports around the world, there is no shortage of causes to take up.

And indeed, Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics offers a target rich environment of human righs abuses, including several of China’s captive nations that get much less attention than Tibet:

Like Tibetans, The Uighers (pronounced “wee-gers”) of China’s Xinjiang Province (or what was called East Turkestan before China took it by force) and the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia have lived under the thumb of Beijing for a half-century, suffering similar religious persecution at the hand of Chinese communists and likewise having their national identity steadily wiped out by the large-scale and deliberate re-settlement of Han Chinese into Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia by Beijing.

As I conclude in the article, if you care at all about human rights, go ahead and “politicize” the Olympics in Beijing to your hearts content.  China really has no room to complain.

Entire article here.

From MountEverest.net:

Alberto Peruffo, of the global campaign Sad Smoky Mountains, announced Sunday 11th May, at 13 local time as the first simultaneous ignition of red smokes as a protest action against the violation of human rights and Chinese repression in Tibet.

More than 100 summits are now involved: during the last few days the Sad Smoky Mountains project was joined by summits such as North Table Mountain (Colorado, USA), Rittner Horn on Süd Tirol Alps, Corno Grande, Corno Piccolo and Pizzo Cefalone on Gran Sasso (Apeninnes), Nanos on Dinaric Alps (Slovenia), Mount Giovo and Rondiniano (Modena Apeninnes), Puy de Manse (France) and also historically important summits such as Col Moschin and Summano (near Vicenza and Asiago) where a large number of soldiers died during World War I.

This comes only days after Beijing (and its toadies in Nepal) used the Olympics as an excuse to turn Mount Everest into a high-altitude police state.

While I’m pretty sure the very cool picture shown above is a photoshop job (since the Sad Smokey Mountains website posted it prior to the protest date) created for visual impact …..there are actual pics of climbers popping smoke in protest here.

It is being reported that a Chinese mountaineering team carrying a symbolic Olympic torch has summited Mount Everest.

Prior to the ascent, the government of Nepal announced that protesters would be shot:

Nepal has given its security personnel permission to shoot pro-Tibet demonstrators during China’s Olympic flame climb to Mount Everest’s summit early next month.

“About 25 soldiers and policemen have established camps on the mountain and they have been ordered to use force if necessary to stop any anti-Chinese activities,” Mod Raj Dotel, spokesman for the home ministry, said Sunday. “This could mean shooting if necessary.”

Security personnel will also check mountain climbers for non-essential expedition materials, Dotel added.

“If anyone is found with anti-Chinese material their permit will be canceled and returned from the mountain,” he said.

So in keeping with the international spirit of the games, Chinese communists and their toadies in Nepal have turned Everest into a high altitude police state.

Update: some reaction to the Olympic torch atop Everest from climbers.

From newclimber.com

in climbing news today, china torches mount everest to distract the world from beijing’s oppressive occupation of tibet.

From MountEverest.net

“The moment I saw the torch lit on top of Mount Everest I felt very hurt,” a Tibetan told Reuters and his feelings were shared by many around the world.

More from MountEverest.net

After 50 years of occupation, characterized by systematic and gross abuse of human rights, the Chinese propaganda fire is burning hot on top of Tibet’s sacred Mother Earth.