Tibet Crisis

Sadly for Tibet, Washington, bogged down in two wars, with its economy troubled and its currency debauched, views China as a major threat, not just in Asia, but in Africa and Latin America as well. Richard M Bennett, an intelligence and security consultant writing in Asia Times observed that, “it would be rather surprising if the CIA was not taking more than just a passing interest in Tibet. For Washington this may seem a heaven-sent opportunity to create a significant lever against Beijing, with little risk to American interests. The Chinese would receive worldwide condemnation for violating human rights and it will be young Tibetans dying on the streets of Lhasa rather than yet more uniformed American kids.”

So, as HDS Greenway wrote in the Boston Globe, “If Tibetans are encouraged to further resist, it will be as with the Hungarian uprising, or the call for Iraqis to rise up during the first Gulf War - a hollow gesture that will lead to more repression in which the United States has no intention to intervene.” Writing in the

Guardian, Parag Khanna quoted a Chinese intellectual, "The Soviet Union collapsed because they experimented with glasnost before they achieved unity among the peoples." Khanna observes that, “Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeks illustrate, China is determined not to waver.”
Western globalization's discourse today is so filled with self-referring, self serving ideological constructions, that contemporary China's radical pragmatism seems mysterious. The authoritarian Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of China has taken China on a path that has little to do with Marx but quite a bit to do with Lenin. Lenin himself defined “Communism” simply as “state power plus the electrification of the whole country.” If we change the word “electrification” for “development”, we have a very workmanlike description of today’s China. DS