Sometimes, as an overseas ethnic Chinese with deep roots and an abiding cultural affinity to my ancestral land, I can't fathom the inscrutability of Chinese officials tasked with explaining China to the western world effectively. But I do have a clue which I will explain later here.
Take the Tibet riots. I can't think of any worse posture than to close off and simply clamp up when China has the moral "high ground" when the ruffians, rogues, and "political monks" who rampaged through Llasa, began killing innocent civilians and shopkeepers and looting their stores.
The ECONOMIST was the Only Western News Media who Accurately reported the Llhasa Tibet Riots
We saw those photos and videos which did not lie about what happened. They did not lie about the stoning and the lynching of innocent old people and women. We also read the Economist and its reporter, Mr. Miles' reporting of the violence by certain, and I must qualify this to say only a small number of indiginous Tibetans who were involved in these ugly riots.
What subsequently transpired with China's officialdom shutting off foreign press access to the scene of the riots underscored to me a high "cultural divide" between how Chinese officials look at this decision compared to Westerners and the Western press.
For Chinese officials, perhaps, the fear of "secret" spies and agent provocateurs, given the history of the CIA in Tibet and the exile government of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala was clearly a significant factor in deciding against allowing foreign access. And in my own gut, I honestly suspect that there is more than meets the eye in terms of foreign governments in the West and perhaps their complicity in creating, financing, and staging these events.
I don't have the "smoking gun" yet. But I smell powder. Why ?
The footprints smack of "dead rats" and malodorous signs masked by French perfume from the West. Especially with the timing and massaging of the din of protests, recriminations, and denunciations being amplified in the Western press.
And especially timing the whole eruption close in time to the Taiwan elections. Was Ah Bian from Taipei and the Dalai Lama from Dharamsala talking to each other ?
I am a Chinese-American lawyer. I have been educated and conditioned in the American system of law, in theory and in practice. I have been in American courtrooms observing great trial lawyers perform their acts.
There is an often-promoted story among practitioners of courtroom law that validates the proposition that "if you see don't have the facts, just keep arguing the law."
What I am seeing in this Tibet riot narrative here in the Western world is that other than the Economist report by Mr. Miles, their field "eyeball" reporter, talking about the facts, and what he genuinely saw and thereafter reported, almost every other Western reporter and news media are talking not about the bare facts and stick with the bare facts. They are talking about the law.
Why ? Because these western news media don't have much facts. Thus, they are arguing the "law." The law of a free press. The right of access to cover the story.
I feel their righteousness. But you know, all said, after seeing how many "agent provocateurs" there are in the China bashing "Team Tibet-Shangri-La' narrative here in the West, including groups like "Reporters Without Borders" or "fake" reporters posing as news media and Western journalists, I can now also undertand the cautiousness and deep suspicion of Chinese authorities to allow foreign journalists access.
FAKE WESTERNERS POSING AS LEGITIMATE NEWS REPORTERS
Just look at what the "fake reporters" from "Reporters Without Borders" at the opening ceremonies in Greece. Or what they did in Paris. These are professional rabble-rousers and provocateurs out to undermine and stabilize China. And there is clearly a question about who is or are financing their antics and action.
The Western press has to understand that they too have to clean up their own acts.
There's just too much fakery, duplicity, and phoniness within their own news media organizations.
In fact, I know. Many Western officials have a tendency to talk from both sides of their mouths.
Our San Francisco mayor, for example. "On the one hand," he said, "I am for the Beijing Olympics and welcoming the Olympics torch to San Francisco."On the other hand, "I am against allowing the torch goes through the Himalayas and through Tibet."
Pardonez mois ? Did I hear you, the honorable Mr. Newsom ? Aren't you talking from both sides of your mouth ? And you are broadbrushing us Chinese as being "inscrutable"?
I know. I have been in the forefront of this battle to engage the Chinese peoples and the members of the Western world in a healthy, respectful dialogue beyond the din of the blame-game, the stridency of the accusations against China for "human rights abuses," and worse the ignorant China bashing and demonization.
Another good illustration of this is our own American Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, supposedly representing my city, i.e. San Francisco.
In my view, Pelosi, who is the 3rd highest official in the U.S., after President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, is the almost archtypical "do-gooder" inspired and motivated by the "White Woman's Burden" to provide relief and rescue heroically the "poor masses of the Third World," i.e. especially young women and children, elderly and religious folks.
Her depth about Asia and China, in particular, is based on Hollywood movies like Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth," and the slew of movies which validate and reinforce the "White Man's Burden."
The "yellow hordes," in this type of Hollywood narrative, are just faceless, amorphous, and deaf-mute-dumb backdrops in Hollywood movies, acting as backdrops and extras. And Speaker Pelosi is the star a la "Mother Theresa", the white woman in a white dress coming to the rescue of the oppressed downtrodden. Damn you "Fu Manchu" villians, you devils in the high officials of the imperial court ! That appears to be her beef based on her "cultural dark glasses" Louis Vitton labeled, please.
Jane Fonda once did that too in Vietnam. And many war veterans from Vietnam never forgave her for this demagoguery. But Pelosi is from the same era, along the same mold, with good intentions but suffused with naivite, ignorance, and worse, obsessed with the oppression happening "over there." And to her, Chinese officials are just bad. Dead wrong. And dead evil.
When Pelosi went to India to stoke the flames after the Tibet riots, accompanied by right-wing known zealots on one side, and ultra-liberal "do-gooders" within the U.S. Congress, to demagogue her obsessed "China bashing" to do a "photo-op" with the Dalai Lama, she was really only "grandstanding" it without really thinking through that good intentions sometimes end with disastrous consequences.
As had been the case in America's quaqmire in Vietnam; and now in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And here we are, in the middle of stiffening positions. Chinese officials enraged by this Western bashing being orchestrated jointly from Europe and North America. And European officials such as Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, all suffused with "the White Man's Burden" to come to the rescue of the poor oppressed people of China, and especially in Tibet.
How naive. How myopic. And indeed, how ignorant.
The only Western leader, I suspect, at this time is Aussie Premier Kevin Rudd. This is one man who at least bothered to learn the Chinese language and Chinese history.
The rest reminds me of the William McKinleys of our times. President McKinley was the late American president who did not know where the Philippines was located in a map. And at the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, when the U.S. ended up inheriting the colonies of Spain and ceded to the U.S. its colony in the Philippines, he knelt on the floor for divine guidance and prayed for God to give him some assistance to uplift the brown savages, the native Filipinos.
We are living in a world of globalization; yet notwithstanding all those doors opening, and what Mr. Friedman, the columnist of the New York Times kept dramatising, "The Earth is Flat. The Earth is Flat."
Peoples in the West, and especially their public officials, are still stuck in the mental "time-warp" of the past, and can't see whether or not they are coming or going in and about China. And worse, they still think the world is "round" after Mr. Friedman convincingly proved to us Asians that it is flat, and absolutely flat, metaphorically and actually. :-)
We can do better. And the Beijing Olympics games must go on, with or without Western leaders such as Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown, and Harper attending.
God forbid if Beijing officials lose their "photo ops" this summer with Sarkozy's new gorgeous wife, the First Lady of France. But with Chancellor Merkel ? Nah. Nah. Who would want to have their picture taken with her anyway ?
