Regime Watch: Beijing

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.

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.

In the journal World Affairs, P.J. O’Rourke has a lengthy and interesting first hand account of, as P.J. puts it, “what Chinese think of politics when politics isn’t what they’re thinking of.”

From the piece:

For years I’ve been active in Freedom House, the oldest of the private organizations advocating for international freedom and democracy. We’ve seen progress, especially since 1989. We’ve seen backsliding. And we’ve seen stasis, notably 1.3-billion-persons’-worth of stasis in China. Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.

Yet we at Freedom House cannot be exactly right. A mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will. Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.

One strong indicator of how much a society values freedom is the relative ability of individuals to arrange their lives as they see fit. So how does this work in China…where the economy has been at least partially unshackled from the wretchedness of communism, but where all the other good stuff (think life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) is still tightly controlled by a thuggish Chinese Communist Party.

Here’s a hint:

I talked to people who worked in private enterprise and people who worked in government and people who worked on furthering cooperation between the two. That is, I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it. We need to listen to what they don’t say.

If that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, keep in mind that O’Rourke is not just an astute political writer, but a humorist as well. Read the whole thing and you’ll see what he means.

This blog’s readership continues to grow. And while it may sound silly, I get a thrill when a country shows up on the readership stats for the first time….so a big thank you to the visitors from Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Israel and Romania who found their way to this site…I hope you decide to check back from time to time. As always, comments and e-mails are both welcome and appreciated.

June 1 update: Still more new countries on readership stats. Welcome to visitors from Mexico, Singapore, Brazil and Hungary.

June 2 update: Hello and thanks to new readers from India, Thailand, Poland and Japan.

June 6 update:  Welcome new readers from South Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Austria.

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?

Earlier this month, the World Health Organization assembled in Geneva, and for the twelfth year in a row Beijing and its toadies at the WHO blocked Taiwan’s efforts at meaningful participation by denying Taiwan even “observer” status.

From Rueters (May 19):

The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) assembly again rejected Taiwan’s bid for observer status on Monday, declaring that mainland China had responsibility for health issues affecting the island’s 23 million people.

The decision, taken on the opening day of the WHO’s six-day annual meeting, was the 12th year in a row that the United Nations agency had rebuffed Taiwan’s campaign.

It is quite amazing how willing so much of the world is to appease a communist regime like China at the expense of a representative democracy like Taiwan.

Rueters continues:

A proposal to drop the agenda item calling on Taiwan to be given observer status was adopted without a vote as part of a behind-the-scenes deal to give the issue an airing without devoting too much time to it.

“The reason that no one objected is that we all know what the outcome is,” said one diplomat. The assembly has a built-in majority against Taiwan, which draws support only from a couple of dozen small countries mainly in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific, plus the United States.

Taiwan is a member of the 152-nation World Trade Organisation but is excluded from most other international bodies because of Beijing’s one-China policy.

If we are going to have “international bodies” then perhaps it is time for the liberal democracies of the world to break off from the United Nations and form a new international body that includes Taiwan, but excludes China and the other thugocracies that inhabit the UN.

Ever wondered what life is like under a thuggish African regime?

The Independence Institute has a new video up on You Tube featuring Habtamu Dugo, an Ethiopian journalist forced by the Ethiopian regime to flee his own country.

The editors at gadaa.com, a Horn of Africa news site and portal, wonder if Chinese construction companies in the Ethiopian city of Finfinne (or Addis Ababa, as it is also known) are using the same building standards in Finfinne as were apparently used to build schools in China:

Looking back, it is important to note that school buildings were the most affected by the quake. Thousands of children, who were attending classes, were buried alive underneath blocks of crumbling concrete walls. Whereas government buildings located in the same quake zone as the schools did not even get a scratch (so to say) from the earthquake. Over the past week, this fact has raised eyebrows among many engineers and experts of building safety standards. These engineers and experts ask: why would government buildings stand tall and schools crumble down when both structures were equally hit with the same quake?

Great question.

(Thanks to Habtamu Dugo for the link)

The United States too often kowtows to Beijing’s absurd claim of sovereignty over democratic Taiwan.  One of the more weak and archaic U.S. appeasment policies towards China is a decades old ban by the U.S. State Department on personal meetings between high-ranking officials of the U.S. and Taiwan.  My colleague at the Independence Institute, Dave Kopel, has a great idea for helping to end this silly policy, involving U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama:

By expressing a readiness to meet with Cuba’s Raul Castro, and also to meet with personally with the heads of Iran, Syria, and North Korea, Senator Obama seems to be promising that one of the changes his Presidency would bring is a greater willingness to engage in person with controversial foreign heads of state. Accordingly, there is another head of state with whom Obama should also promise to be willing to meet in person: Taiwan’s new President Ma Ying-Jeou. Inaugurated on May 20 as Taiwan’s democratically-elected President, Ma is a Harvard Law School graduate who speaks excellent English. Unlike some of the other foreign leaders whom Obama has said he would meet, Ma won a legitimate, free election, is very friendly towards the United States, is not working on a nuclear weapons program, does not militarily threaten the U.S. or its allies, and does not sponsor international terrorism. A fortiori, the case for a meeting with Ma is much stronger than the case for a meeting with Castro et al.

As Dave points out, such a meeting would “infuriate the Chinese Communist dictatorship.” But it would be great to have a Presidential candidate express a willingness to engage Taiwan, one of Asia’s most dynamic representative democracies, without regard to what the regime in Beijing thinks.

As Kopel continues:

However, such a meeting might help allay concerns that President Obama would be easily coerced by dictatorships, or that he might be weak in supporting U.S. allies. In any case, given that Obama has answered whether he would be willing to meet with Raul Castro, it would be reasonable for him to state whether he will meet with Ma Ying-Jeou.

Yesterday, regimewatch.com turned one month old, and today surpassed one thousand page views. I don’t really know what that means considering the thousands of other blogs out there, but it sounds like a big number to me. So to everyone who found their way to this site, and to everyone who chose to come back, thanks.

The majority of readers have come from here in the U.S., but regimewatch.com has also enjoyed visitors from Canada in North America; Great Britain, Germany, Italy and France in Europe; China, Taiwan and Vietnam in Asia; and a fair number from New Zealand and Australia.

So again, thanks for taking the time to read this site, and please keep coming back. Also, comments and e-mails (see about author page) are welcome and appreciated.