Wow! It is amazing that we do not consider this a human rights violation. Oh well, gotta keep them prices low at Walmart!
The way Tibet was Incorporated into China, the nature of the Tibetan resistance, the way China governs Tibet, the reason China wants Tibet, the reason China represses Tibetans are all very very different from what's happening in Judea and Samaria. The Israeli Arab conflict is perhaps the most unique of all time.
The better analogies perhaps are some of the separatist leaning Russian Republics or India's Jammu and Kashmir
There's a long, long history of China controlling Tibet, back at least to the Tang dynasty. The ChiComs are nastier about it than most of the previous Chinese governments, but that's what you get when you refute the old mandate of heaven/chakravartin mashup of political legitimacy espoused by the old empire for ... what justification do the ChiComs give for their political legitimacy? Having the biggest boot and the willingness to murder millions and imprison more, I suppose.
Well, it's right there in art. I of their own Constitution, I think: "The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants."
It might have its problems (will the country forever have "workers" and "peasants"? Does the working class include peasants? Who does a democratic dictatorship actually dictate to? etc etc) but it's still better than divine mandate, tbh, which might explain why it's not been toppled yet.
Or the Pacific islands or South China Sea (where things are going bad fast). Even calling Tibet part of China is interesting. Ukraine is Russian now by that logic.
On the ground, for the people, the real justification are different. It used to be the liberation of common Tibetan people from a regressive serfdom and a brutal theocracy, not unlike the communists' justification for themselves elsewhere in China. Similarly, after Deng, the justification is more about improving people's economic status and living conditions.
I hope this is supposed to be a joke. There is the small difference that citizens of Nevada, California and Colorado elect their representatives in the Congress and other institutions where the decisions on how to share the resources are made.
While Israel just takes what it wants by force, and the West Bank Palestinians have no say in it.
> Isn't that the nature of almost every conflict with an ethnic context? If there's no clear weaker and stronger you usually end up with two independent states.
Your statement is sort of weird in the above. It presupposes that subjugation of a weaker ethnic group by a more powerful ethnic group is acceptable -- that is how these conflicts are resolved. It is counter to the idea of universal human rights that arose because of the the atrocities that arose because of the ethnic issues in WW2. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_human_rights#After_...
Your point of view, the powerful ethnic groups win and the weak lose and that is how the world works, justifies slavery, South African apartheid, and many other situations where one ethnic group is more powerful and wishes to impose its wishes on the less powerful. That is an allowable perspective, but that is antithesis to universal human rights.
1. Stronger vs Weaker is a common pattern in such conflicts.
2. Tibet vs China :: Palestine/Arab states vs Israel differ in almost every other feature.
3. There's places in the world that better mimic the Tibetan situation.
4. Hence the analogy isn't very good.
Or a legal system, where blacks are hugely over-represented, the takeover of native american land, Puerto Rico, etc.
"Universal human rights" take usually less precedence to "my country, right or wrong".
Except there was no ethnic cleansing by the Tibetans like in Kashmir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Kashmiri_H...
All of it doesn't matter. Nobody's willing to fight for Tibet, or for Atheists, or ... Fight, as in "fight, kill and die", credibly, against the dictatorship that rules China, against, well let's be honest here : against most Muslims, and I'm sure there will be occasionally some slight effort required against a Christian too.
Looking at a map of 1950's, finding China, and looking at China now will make anyone scared.
Can someone point me to a good Mandarin course ?
J&K is a territorial flashpoint - with ethnic unrest that is funded.
As for that, I'm all in favour of giving Palestine high precision missiles and an Iron Dome system.
> Doesn't Tibet lack a certain penchant for poorly aimed rockets and human shields in a way that detracts from this analogy?
Tibetians have tried various tactics, including violence, to oppose Chinese rule but none of them have been effective:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_and_uprisings_in_Tibe...
This gets back to what I say in my original post, slow and steady achievement of the stronger ethnic groups goals over a period of decades in the face of ineffective resistance by the weaker ethnic group.
Be warned those that the BDS movement is under attack though because it is viewed as a bigger threat to Israel's occupation than terrorism. Israel actually bars the top non-violent pro-Palestinian activist from leaving Israel recently as the BDS movement has had too much success.
Great interview by Glenn Greenwald:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/13/interview-with-bds-advoc...
Also, "fight back in a wrong way" is a very curious way to label brutal attacks targeting civilians that go on non-stop for the last hundred years — long before any of alleged grievances that you would be "fighting back" against even began.
Those go on non-stop from BOTH sides.
And statistically the side you seem to be siding with has caused 100 times the casualties --doing those "brutal attacks targeting civilians" with full military force, not ad-hoc weaponry (plus they have amassed all this land areas they didn't use to have). Or is that just a minor detail?
So if I unjustly imprison you, and the only way for you to escape is by killing me, will you willingly stay imprisoned forever? It's an... admirable stance, although so unpopular that you'll likely find not even Gandhi on your side.
(honestly, historical trivia is relatively irrelevant to the whole Israel/Palestine debate, which has great moral issues to argue -- if your people suffered apartheid and holocaust, are you justified in doing the same to others "in self-defence"? How long does it take for populations to forego ethnic grievances and land claims? Will nations ever renounce ultimate sovereignty to the UN? etc etc)
Completely wrong analogy. The killing doesn't help you escape at all, it just angers the jailer (who you can't touch anyway).
In the meanwhile, Israel keeps expanding its illegal colonies in a foreign territory, the West Bank, contravening to the international law. It also unilaterally annexed the whole city of Jerusalem, also contrary to international law. And it unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights, demolishing over a hundred Syrian villages and giving the land to Israeli settlers, also against the international law (as was recently reaffirmed by the UN Security Council).
As of 2016, 750000 Israelis, about 10% of the whole population of Israel, lives in illegally occupied territories. This number has been steadily growing for the past 60 years.
Let me clarify the concept if these numbers seem a bit abstract. Israel is stealing houses and fields and destroying villages and driving out native populations, by economic and military oppression, in a quest for lebensraum for its own population. This is completely unacceptable by any modern western standard.
It would also not hurt to stop with the constant demonization of "China" as a whole, which just serves to downplay criticism as bigotry.
That would definitely be an interesting experiment. I suspect prices would rise slightly and we'd find out just how dependent we really are.
After a week or two there would be a joint statement of the leaders of the Western World that they have unanimously decided to support the Chinese action, in fact they'll come to help to cart rubble personally.
I could certainly see leaders in certain countries such as France who have been actively selling weaponry to China going "to help cart the rubble personally" but there's no way Obama or his next successor would do that.
Yes, we are utterly co-dependent at this point in time.
Cutting trade with China would take a decade or more if it can be done at all at this stage.
But I could finally buy decent pliers made in the USA, like I once could 25 years ago.
This belief is clearly a failure of imagination.
Why not? Prices would rise marginally if at all. There'd be some supply issues for a while.
It was ok to sanction Iran, Iraq and South Africa and so on but not now in this globalised world? We put up with any old abuse from Israel and China because they're approved in some way?
I'm no diplomat, but there should be some consequences of significance.
It would harm the bottom 50% in the US the most. That's enough reason to look at other options first.
There'd be a diplomatic tit-for-tat leading up to sanctions, they wouldn't just be turned on at 00:00 tomorrow. So there'd be perhaps a year. Sanctions tend to start with specific items and scale up. So it's a process, with a timeline, over perhaps 2 - 10 years.
Plenty of time for significnt amounts of trade to move to india, Vietnam and the other developing economies.
That's not how 3rd world countries work (I know because I live in one...)