What an interesting week. China told the Dalai Lama's delegates they don't represent any Tibetans except for the Dalai Lama, thus concluding the inconclusive "talks" between Beijing and the Tibetans. So much for dialogue. With China, everything is a one-way street. China also announced it will punish US companies that are involved in arms sales to Taiwan. China also threatened other unspeficied repercussions against America. US Ambassador John Huntsman (a billionaire whose family fortune in the chemical business depends heavily on trade with China) was called in by a Chinese official for a dressing down.  Another Chinese official flatly rejected America's demand that China start consuming more, and allow its currency to appreciate, in order to balance global trade. Now President Obama is going to host the Dalai Lama in the White House. The Chinese consider this open defiance. And Google has teamed with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a cooperative research agreement to try to find out exactly what happened with China's cyber-attacks against Google. Read the New York Times account of the deal between the NSA and Google here: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/science/05google.html?hp

Privacy advocates in America (with whom I generally concur) are alarmed at the prospect of data-sharing between Google and the NSA and have filed suit for disclosure of the details. In this instance, I'm not alarmed about the potential privacy issues. The real threat to privacy here is China, not America, and Google will need our government's high-tech resources to get to the bottom of China's cyber-Gestapo tactics.

More power to Sergey Brin. He realizes that when you pick a fight with dictatorship, you are in a struggle to the finish. Either you finish off the dictatorship -- or it will finish off you.   

This may be the week the wheel starts to turn, and the world  starts to see China for the dangerous aggressor it truly is. The sooner the Beijing regime is consigned to the dust-bin of history, the better off we all will be.    

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.