Hello Romain,
You have the right idea condemning China and their brutal repressions of human rights, but your response to these crimes is far short of what is necessary.
Turning your TV off for the opening ceremonies will not help.
Turning your TV off for the whole Olympics will not help.
Boycotting the entire Olympics will not help.
Boycotts hurt only the athletes anyway.
It
is very important to the Chinese to pull this sucker off, but not important enough for them to make concessions on Tibet/Darfur/Taiwan/freedom in general.
To illustrate why this is so, here is an excerpt from an excellent article from
Maclean's magazine:
Why does China overreact so badly? Why does the government care so much
about such small and insignificant groups? Why does China never get it, never
seem to understand what our inevitable reaction in the West will be? And the
answer, too, is always the same, or at least it will be so long as the Chinese
Communist party controls the country: China overreacts, cares so much, and
never "gets it" because it can't do anything else.
"Over there, it's different," reports Maclean's contributor John Fraser.
"Tibetan monks, unchecked, could replace party cadres as moral leaders in at
least three major areas of China." And, against such a threat, the bleatings
of the West are merely ripples in an ocean. Because it lacks the confidence of
its own people, the party's endurance is based on never underestimating the
power of small but dedicated protest groups. Because the party knows from its
own successful experience 60 years ago that a small but dedicated protest
group can take over and control an entire country, it can never let its guard
down. Not once. Not ever.
For more on why Communist China will never change, turn to this week's
Maclean's.
I believe the only thing short of war that will do anything to reform communist China is serious diplomatic and economic pressure.
The Chinese public has had their appetite wheted for the good life enjoyed by Westerners, and they are clamoring for more. If the West wants to remove the communist regime, (which is what it will take to improve the situation) we will have to pursue aggressive economic sanctions, starving the Chinese public of the luxuries they so desperately want. After a while, the public will start to realize that the communist government is not meeting their needs and wants, and they will reform the government from the bottom up.
I agree completely with you about China, but if we want to accomplish something meaningful, we need to concentrate our energies on something that will do some serious hurt to the Communist regime.
Write to your Member of Parliament, Member of Congress, or whatever your system is, and tell them you want a foreign policy on China that has teeth.
Thanks for listening to my rant everybody. I'll let somebody else have a turn now.
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