Forum Post: More Tibetans are setting themselves ablaze in desperate protest against Chinese occupation of their homeland.
Posted 11 years ago on June 2, 2012, 4:50 p.m. EST by AllDieDieStandingUp
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Tibet's burning protest
More Tibetans are setting themselves ablaze in desperate protest against Chinese occupation of their homeland.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/05/201253192951400741.html
Should native Americans do the same?
The Tibetan protest is about Chinese injustice in Tibet, not injustice in America. What right does China have to interfere in Tibet's affairs?
What right do Americans have to interfere in a country 15,000 miles away? Did you know every student that graduates from college is Lhasa is guaranteed a job these days?
Every person in the world has a duty to raise their voice against injustice anywhere in the world. What right does China have to interfere in Tibet's internal affairs?
Originally, Tibet was a feudal theocracy. In the 1950s, its society was like that of Europe in the middle ages. Five percent of the population owned all the wealth, the rest were mostly slaves or serfs. This is according to the American professor, Michael Parenti:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7355
Like you said, the Chinese had a responsibility to raise their voice against this injustice.
Do you also agree with the rest of Dr. Parenti's comments about China?
"Finally, let it be said that if Tibet’s future is to be positioned somewhere within China’s emerging free-market paradise, then this does not bode well for the Tibetans. China boasts a dazzling 8 percent economic growth rate and is emerging as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers. But with economic growth has come an ever deepening gulf between rich and poor. Most Chinese live close to the poverty level or well under it, while a small group of newly brooded capitalists profit hugely in collusion with shady officials. Regional bureaucrats milk the country dry, extorting graft from the populace and looting local treasuries. Land grabbing in cities and countryside by avaricious developers and corrupt officials at the expense of the populace are almost everyday occurrences. Tens of thousands of grassroot protests and disturbances have erupted across the country, usually to be met with unforgiving police force. Corruption is so prevalent, reaching into so many places, that even the normally complacent national leadership was forced to take notice and began moving against it in late 2006.
Workers in China who try to organize labor unions in the corporate dominated “business zones” risk losing their jobs or getting beaten and imprisoned. Millions of business zone workers toil twelve-hour days at subsistence wages. With the health care system now being privatized, free or affordable medical treatment is no longer available for millions. Men have tramped into the cities in search of work, leaving an increasingly impoverished countryside populated by women, children, and the elderly. The suicide rate has increased dramatically, especially among women.66
China’s natural environment is sadly polluted. Most of its fabled rivers and many lakes are dead, producing massive fish die-offs from the billions of tons of industrial emissions and untreated human waste dumped into them. Toxic effluents, including pesticides and herbicides, seep into ground water or directly into irrigation canals. Cancer rates in villages situated along waterways have skyrocketed a thousand-fold. Hundreds of millions of urban residents breathe air rated as dangerously unhealthy, contaminated by industrial growth and the recent addition of millions of automobiles. An estimated 400,000 die prematurely every year from air pollution. Government environmental agencies have no enforcement power to stop polluters, and generally the government ignores or denies such problems, concentrating instead on industrial growth."
Yes, but many of the problems are due to globalization and western corporations as well.
To reduce poverty in China/Tibet, I think the best thing the US can do is to remove the high tech trade ban and export high tech products to China. This would reduce the trade deficit with the US, create lots of jobs for American workers, and help to bring China into the first world.
The ban exists because some US politicians say high tech would be used by the Chinese military, but in its thousands of years of existence, the Chinese have never fought an aggressive war with the west.
The Chinese government has said that it wants to move away from the low wage manufacturing model to a more diversified model.
Another thing the US could do is work jointly on infrastructure development with China, for example, building a bridge or tunnel across the Bering Strait, connecting Alaska to Siberia and from there to all of Asia. This would increase trade and travel, bringing more first world influence into China.
I think the solution to many of China's problems is the same solution to many US problems.
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Suicide is NOT painless. How many more must die so that the global elite have unlimited power, oil and profits?
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-more-us-soldiers-committed-suicide-than-died-in-combat/
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