Regime Watch: Beijing

Numerous sites re-printed my recent Denver Post article on some of China’s other (other than Tibet) captive peoples and nations.  These sites offer a lot of good information about Beijing’s oppression of Tibetans, Uighers, Mongolians, and people of faith in general.

A big thank you to the following, and apologies to any sites left off the list.

Phayul.com:  News, opinion and other information (including travel information) concerning Tibet

Canada Tibet Committee: Website of a pro-Tibet organizatzion in Canada

Uyghur American Association: An Uygher organization in Washington, D.C., USA

China Aid Association: An organization that monitors the persecution of Christians in China

Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center:  An Inner Mongolia human rights organization located in the U.S.

I posted earlier on National Journal’s excellent article on China’s “cyber-militia” penetrating U.S. government and business information systems.   The Heritage Foundation has also been on top of this story.

From the February 2008 Heritage report, “Trojan Dragon:  China’s Cyber Threat” 

The U.S. military has been the primary target of Chinese cyberattacks, followed closely by the Departments of State, Commerce, and Homeland Security.  Academic, industrial, defense, and financial databases are also vulnerable.  Regrettably, American officials tend to be very sensitive to China’s feelings and refrain from public allegations that the attacks are launched by Chinese agents, even though, as one U.S. cybersecurity expert points out, “the Chinese are in half of your agencies’ systems” already.

But it is not just the U.S. under cyberattack by Beijng, the Heritage report has sections on Chinese hacker penetration of systems in the United Kingdom and Taiwan:

According to an offical of Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, in 2006, Taiwan detected 13 PLA [People's Liberation Army] zero-day attacks launched within Microsoft applications and experienced a total of 178 days days of vulnerability between notifying Microsoft of the attacks and receiving  the appropriate patches.

The first paragraph of National Journal magazine’s recent article on the growing threat posed by Chinese computer hackers:

Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.

Sounds like a good plot line for a spy thriller.  Hopefully someone, somewhere in our vast federal government, is working on this.

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.