Man, China really pisses me off. I'm sorry. I already have issues because of being raised Tibetan Buddhist (my mother said we've been brainwashed to hate China), and I guess they have just never totally gone away. I don't like feeling animosity towards an entire country. It doesn't seem right, but I can't help it, and everytime I read something like this, it reinforces the distaste that I feel. It's not the people themselves, it's not racial and it's not the cultural differences, it is the government. It is the arrogance of the leadership. I know it's funny to talk about arrogance in leadership as an American, but China has us beat. ("When asked why China, with its surging economy and rising power, has not yet begun to democratize, its leaders recite a standard line. The country is too big, too poor, too uneducated and too unstable to give political power to the people, they say.")
The situation with Taiwan is another perfect example of why they piss me off. China claims to "own" Taiwan and seeks to barr any attempt by Taiwan to set forth a concrete declaration of independence, despite the status quo, which has been that Taiwan is the most democratic sector in all of "China," that it stands alone and has never actually even been a part of China. Taiwan wants to be free. And even though they are free in practice, if China has its way, Taiwan will never be free of the looming threat of someday being subject to China's laws and government and being claimed as Chinese territory. China fights tooth and nail the prospect of Taiwan declaring its independence.
Though China claims that international law gives them the right to claim Taiwan as its territory, Taiwan's effort to become an independent country conforms to the principle of self-determination widely adopted in international law which says that people have a right, above the territorial right of a state, to found a government that can "truly represent all the people in the said region and not to be subject to oppression as a result of racial, religious, ethnic and other differences."
Another thing that irritates me about China is their age-old preference for boy-children which is affecting their female population due to selective abortions of female babies. Well that's okay. It will come back to haunt them and that really has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about here, I just thought I'd let ya'll know how much that kind of pervasive sexism pisses me off. Back to the subject.
Now there is this whole thing with Cheney going over there for talks and apparently "the topic most fraught with controversy will be talks with China over Taiwan. Perennially a hot-button issue in U.S.-Sino relations, the Pentagon's recent approval of the sale to Taiwan of an anti-missile radar system — which could be used to detect and defend against an attack from the mainland — has raised the ire of Beijing." Meanwhile, let's talk about the weapons China has been setting aside for the purpose of taking Taiwan by force...
But my real question is this: With a population of over one billion people already, what does China need with Taiwan? They don't rule enough people, enough land? They must have the Tibetans and the Taiwanese as well? I think their government is just stubborn like children on the playground who don't know how to share. They just want everything to be theirs and if they can't have it that way, watch out, they'll scratch your eyeballs and pull your pigtails. I can't think of any other rational explanation for their being such bastards.
Posted by Maria at April 8, 2004 05:22 PM