News that China and the Dalai Lama have resumed talks could be a signal of Chinese worries. Recent news articles have suggested that China's Politburo has concluded that their Tibet policy of assimilation, through Han Chinese immigration and development, is failing. Resuming talks with the Tibetan exiles might be a way to explore how to bring the restive region under control. Or the talks might just be another dead end, with the Chinese side delivering one-way lectures to the Tibetan delegates about the benefits of Chinese rule, while refusing to discuss at all Tibetan demands for autonomy. According to one delegate to the talks with whom I spoke in Dharamsala in 2008, this is the pattern. China invites a delegation. The delegation listens while the Chinese lecture them. When the Tibetans try to raise their issues, the Chinese refuse to discuss them. Most likely, the same thing is happening now. Perhaps the Chinese are trying to persuade President Obama there is no need to meet with the Dalai Lama in Washington next month. For evidence that China is in trouble, everyone who has an interest in the issue should read Dr. Derek Scissors' article on "10 China Myths for the New Decade." Here's the link:

http://www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/bg2366.cfm  

Martin Walker is a senior correspondent for UPI. He appears often on the nationally-televised "McLaughlin Group" as a guest panelist. Today he published a news report on the growing backlash against China's unfair trade practices. What makes this piece interesting is that much of the backlash is in Asia, notably from India, Malaysia, and other countries supposedly part of the recent ASEAN free trade negotiations. It turns out that enthusiasm for trade with China is far from universal. You can read his piece here:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/2010/01/25/Walkers-World-Ganging-up-on-China/UPI-90411264436842/

In closing, Walker points out that support for trade tariffs against China is growing in Europe, too.  

Great article in today's Washington Post by Robert Samuelson. This article demystifies China's $2.4 trillion in reserves, and explains why they result from unfair trade. Here's the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/24/AR2010012402299.html

The real issue, which Samuelson doesn't address, is what will Obama do about it? And if he won't, will the next Congress that gets seated after the 2010 mid-term elections take action to pass tariffs against China? The U.S. is going to have a 10% or higher jobless rate until we get tough with China and make it play by fair trade rules. Tell that to your friends who are out of work. Their jobs are in China. If they want them back, they need to wake up politically.     

Martin Luther King's birthday gave me pause to wonder. Will there be a national holiday for the Dalai Lama in China someday? The parallels are compelling. King fought for a repressed minority. He used non-violence as his tactic. His goal was equal rights and equal treatment for people looked down upon because of prejudice against them by the majority. He launched his struggle a little more than fifty years ago, at a time when it would have been considered outlandish to speculate that one day there would be a black President and a Martin Luther King holiday.

Now consider China. The Han Chinese ethnic group are the dominant people in the country. They look down on the Tibetans as backwards, ignorant, superstitious lama-worshippers, uneducated former serfs. They have deprived them of their basic human rights, taken away their political freedom. Tibetans in China today are treated as badly as African-Americans were treated in America in the 1950s, when King's human rights struggle began. Like King, the Dalai Lama counsels non-violence in the face of Chinese repression. Both men were inspired by Ghandi's anti-colonialist freedom struggle in India.

Now I know that China in the 21st century is not America in the 1950s. Imperfect as American society then was (and is in some ways still) tanks were not rolled out to crush King's civil rights marchers as they progressed through American cities. Unlike the massacre at Tiananmen Square, when King spoke to a crowd of hundreds of thousands in Washington the military did not turn out to crush the protests. There is free speech in America, freedom of assembly, freedom to protest, and an independent judiciary -- all imperfect in practice, as the treatment of the Selma marchers and attacks on civil rights organizers and King's assassination itself showed -- but sufficiently strong rights so that even when some tried to deny these tools to the civil rights movement, the movement nonetheless prevailed. In China today there are no such rights. Protests are met with force. Speech is monitored and any speech the Communist Party disapproves of is punished, often by lengthy jail sentences. Petitioning for change, as with Charter '08, results in jail sentences, too. So China is much more dictatorial in the 21st century than America was in the 1950s, and that makes it harder for a non-violent movement to succeed in changing conditions. 

Still, I am optimistic.     
 
I know it seems preposterous, but I am willing to bet that there will be a Dalai Lama national holiday in China -- sooner than we may think. Change has a way of mainfesting when you least expect it.      

There was a great column about Google and Tibet in today's Huffington Post. It was written by Josh Schrei and really says it all. You can read it here. www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-schrei/the-war-over-words-why-go_b_422518.html. 
Sergey Brin deserves the credit for Google's action. According to the Wall Street Journal, his experience growing up in the now-defunct USSR has made him suspicious of collaborating with China. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, argued against pulling out of China, because he's smitten with dollar signs and thinks the market will be lucrative for Google over time. Call the White House at (202) 456-1414 and tell President Obama to stand by Google and protest China's cyber-aggression!   

After high lead content was found in toys imported from China, the U.S. introduced tough new lead standards. So how did Chinese toymakers respond? By substituting cancer-causing cadmium for lead in toys made for American store shelves, especially Wal-Mart! The offending toys are costume jewelry for kids, including charms and charm bracelets, made of toxic cadmium. Merely touching this metal provides exposure to the carcinogenic properties. Sucking on it or swallowing it provides deadly doses. This outrage was uncovered by investigative reporting by the Associated Press (sorry, bloggers, there's no substitute for real journalism!) and published in yesterday's Washington Post. That's where I read it.

Here's the real question: is this just more unbridled greed by Chinese companies? After all, Chinese executives will poison their own children with melamine, a pesticide, in infant formula. Or is this more nefarious? Is this payback for the Consumer Product Safety Commission's and Congress' action on lead -- is China deliberately poisoning American children with cadmium to give them cancer? And why didn't Wal-Mart and other retailers test these products before putting them on store shelves? Class-action lawyers, take note: if a wave of cancers materialize, Wal-Mart is the deep pockets firm to sue.

Google says today it may pull out of China because China 's Gestapo hacked email accounts of democracy activists. They do this to get the goods to throw them in jail, after monitoring their networks. China treats democracy activists like other countries treat terrorists. Hitler Jintao (my new name for the consummately evil Hu Jintao) is the greatest menace to freedom on the planet, far more of a threat to all of us than Bin Laden. Hitler Jintao is a terrorist with the power of a nation-state at his disposal.

The New York Times' editors butted their heads against the wall publicly today by appealing to China to voluntarily change their export-dependent strategy for growth and revalue theur currency -- in the name of fairness. LOL. I think I'll buy crash helmets for the Times editors to they don't knock out what little is left of their brains with this ill-fated head butting. Appealing to the Chinese sense of fairness is like smacking your head on the Great Wall. You can do it for a long, long time before making a dent on anything but your own noggin. Just ask the Dalai Lama how long he's been slogging away at China in the name of fairness! Read the editorial here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opinion/12tue1.html

In truth it encourages me. The Times has lurched into the obvious: if China won't change its ways, the world's only recourse is protectionism. That means tariffs, which we've been calling for her for over a year now.

Is the world waking up? Google gives me hope, and if it takes China's toymakers putting carcinogens into kids' toys to wake up America's middle class, well, maybe then we can get some steam going behind raising our own Great Wall -- a Great Wall of tariffs and boycotts to keep Chinese imports stacking up in warehouses in China!         

This news story about Dhongdup Wangchen being sentenced to six years in prison for making a documentary highlighting Tibetan anger with Beijing policies shows the real face of China. There is no freedom of speech in China. Nor any proper human rights. Speak out and take action today.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/07/china-jails-tibetan-filmmaker

What a great start to the New Year! Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who writes a column in the New York Times, thinks China is wrecking the global economy's chances for recovery. In  a January 1 column, Krugman endorses retaliatory trade measures against China. You can read what he says here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01krugman.html

Krugman thinks protectionist measures against China are called for. This is a real evolution in his thinking. But he's right on target. Write a letter or post a comment on the New York Times site praising Krugman and let others know about this important development. As more and more insiders start to turn against China, a movement will build -- and that will create the conditions for democracy in China and in Tibet.