People's Republic of Excuses

The furor over the Tibetan riots in the West has a familiar ring: Free Tibet! Boycott the Olympics! And predictably, these Western reactions and coverage in the press has a lot of Chinese people angry at the "biased" and "uninformed" rantings of Westerners who simply don't understand China.

Tom Doctoroff wrote a long article on the Huffington Post, saying it would be counterproductive to boycott the Olympics:

The rise of an Olympics-worthy China validates the Middle Kingdom's entire worldview and confirms, in no particular order, the ebb and flow of history, the cyclical essence of yin and yang, as well as a renewed Mandate of Heaven. Beijing 2008 represents a vindication of Han culture.

In other words, we should try to understand China better (See full article on Huffington Post.)

All this mumbo-jumbo about the Chinese view of life is simply apologia for the indefensible. Let's look at the facts, shall we?

If Western articles on the riots are uninformed, then surely the Chinese government takes most of the blame, since it refuses to allow journalists to visit Tibet, or in fact, any place in China, without minders. And pardon me for dismissing Chinese residents' claims about the riots, since all news is effectively controlled by their government, so they quite literally don't know what they are talking about. The People's Republic of China consistently ranks near the bottom of the press freedom index complied every year by Reporters Without Borders (see 2007 rankings).

No amount of cultural sensitivity can gloss over the fact that the single-party government of the People's Republic of China is an abomination. The government does not release figures, but Amnesty International estimates that China leads the world, by a very long shot, in the number of people executed every year. Latest 2007 estimates will be reported by Amnesty on April 15th, but the previous year, sixty-four percent of executions world-wide were at the hands of this regime (see 2006 report). How can anyone defend these people?