NYC Junta

Good Junta last night, I’ll leave it to Rindy to post some of the highlights, but for me that was what the Junta was all about: a bunch of dudes sitting around drinking and having good, engaged conversation about real topics.

Relevant to last night, and other Junta topics, is the continued rioting in Xinjiang.  I’ve enjoyed reading about how the tone-deaf Chinese government tried to set up a PR tour through Urumqi. Apparently they didn’t learn anything from when they tried to usher journalists around Tibet when there was rioting there. Hahaha, I like the opening paragraph from the Gawker story below about this:

http://gawker.com/5309212/china-learns-the-yin-and-yang-of-pr

Anyway, I am following this story with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I love seeing the Chinese government, and generally the Han Chinese, getting their comeuppance. What they are doing in Xinjiang, just as in Tibet, is cultural genocide. The government provides incentives for Han Chinese to move to these frontier states, which have historically been independent as much as they have been a part of China, overtly favors the Han with jobs at the cost of the locals, and doesn’t provide anywhere near the proper safeguards to protect local culture. The clear goal is to change the fundamental character of these places. This is just a more patient, and very Chinese, form of ethnic cleansing and I really feel sympathy for the Uighurs and the Tibetans.

On the other hand, China is not Serbia or Kosovo. It is the only major economy that is growing and it’s stability and continued growth is absolutely essential to any sort of incipient recovery to the global economy.

So, I’m hoping that the rioters get their message out, possibly affect a change of policy, and that China loses huge face. But I also hope that it doesn’t get too bad. Maybe that can work out?

In the News china, discrimination, nationalism, politics, protest, religion, uighurs

I don’t know that I can even come close to providing the quality overview of the discussion that Rindy provided. The China discussion came second and everyone was pretty into the whiskey at this point and the conversation became a bit more free-wheeling.

What I wanted to get was a sense of what people expected/hoped for from the upcoming games. What I was hoping for was that the games would be a success but that China would be embarrassed at least a couple of times, hopefully on Tibet and the environment. I just wanted to see one group drop a FREE TIBET poster outside one of the stadiums before an event, not have some fanatic disrupt the opening ceremony at the Bird’s Nest; I wanted to see just one marathon runner from an inconsequential country, like Turkmenistan, keel over during a race, not die just fall over in front of a gang of press photographers, chocking on Beijing’s noxious smog.

Didn’t happen. The games went extremely well for China with no big PR snafus and the Chinese coming away with more medals than anyone. It’s probably a good thing too–the Chinese, in particular the youth, are so nationalistic these days that if anyone messed with their Olympic experience they would have completely freaked out.  Maybe they will now start to truly get over their past grievances about colonialism and national humiliation. But then again, Red Sox fans have not stopped being whiny bitter donkeys even after they stopped losing and complaining about Babe Ruth.   Sometimes groups just don’t want to give up being the underdog.

What was amazing was that even though the games were successful and the country is doing a great job of developing its soft power, it still remains paranoid and rigidly authoritarian. It was really outrageous that the Chinese government encouraged people to apply for the right to protest in designated areas and then arrested those who tried to, simply setting a trap for those brave enough to want to vent genuine grievances. Even Septuagenarian women were deemed a threat by the Chinese government.

Meetings china, nationalism, olympics