Tibet: Well, I Sure Feel Better Now
All is well. Our President has called for dialogue:
US President George W Bush has urged China to begin dialogue with Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
Mr Bush called his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao to raise his concerns about the unrest and to urge him to ease access for journalists and diplomats.
He’s expressed concern. This thing’s over for sure.
Or maybe not.
Yes, that’s unfair. I know. Frankly, any President in this situation wouldn’t be able to do much of anything other than “express concern” given China’s iron grip on Tibet. I’ll grant you that.
But maybe his concern would carry a little more diplomatic weight if the Chinese hadn’t pretty much owned him since the first months of his administration (remember this deal?) and if they didn’t hold a ton of our debt and if he hadn’t reduced our diplomatic legs to a single bloody stump… He could, of course, boycott the Olympics, but that’d bring up an association with the last guy who did that. Trust me, that’ll factor into his thinking.
Eh, I’m really just venting, since it’s a horrific situation and there’s not much of anything anyone on this side of the globe can do.
In the absence of anything else, people make gestures:
…and try to figure out what’s really going on, from sources such as this and this and this…
…and watch, and wait, and hope, and hang signs on statues and grumble about Presidents…
Sigh.
Tags: China, George Bush, Olympics, Tibet, Tibet Uprising
March 27, 2008 at 7:00 am
I am Chinese and have never thought much about people in Tibet. But I also have nothing against them. I do respect their language, culture and religious practice. But now I am not feeling quite well with their hate against the Chinese, I think it is a kind of racial and nationalist motivation behind their actions now. And I didn’t get this impression through Chinese media. I saw the exile Tibetans demonstrating in Europe with banners which said: “Go out your Chinese”. I don’t know what will happen if Tibet should be left alone to the Tibetans, perhaps the Chinese there will be driven out of this part of land or even be killed. Who knows? The same will happen to the Chinese like what happened in Balkan or to the Germans in Slovenian after the second world war. And now everybody says these things are unjust. But now Tibetans are injuring Chinese, nobody said anything against it except the Dalai Lama the Holiness himself, who condemned it expressively, for which I respect him, but not one western person. But now the Chinese government are acting against them, everybody in western cries “we will show the Chinese”. I think the western people are somewhat unjust. And who can judge correctly the actions of both parties, before it is commonly known what really happened? I think it is a good way to do dialogs and to solve the problem peacefully. But I do beg you western people also to think a little about the normal Chinese, who are innocent.
March 27, 2008 at 8:02 am
It is mostly the Chinese government that we question, not the Chinese people at whole. We question our own government, too, believe me. If a free Tibet is achieved, it should not come with a cost of innocent lives on either side. Unfortunately, things don’t always work out that way.