Let's Not Bow To The Chinese

The United States is making a terrible mistake in the way we are rolling over for the Chinese and allowing them to set the agenda on the global stage at the very same time they are persecuting those calling for freedom and democracy.

In a sham trial on Christmas day, the oppressive communist government in Beijing, sentenced Liu Xiaobo, China's most prominent advocate for democratic rule and human rights, to eleven years in prison.

The severity of the sentence prompted criticism from the United States and Europe, but so what, the Chinese feel sufficient strength these days to ignore the West and harshly clamp down on dissent.

What was the crime committed by Liu Xiaobo? He was one of the key drafters of a manifesto that demanded open elections and the rule of law. The Chinese dictatorship charged Mr. Liu with “incitement to subvert state power” and in a two hour trial in which his lawyers were allowed 20 minutes to defend him, Mr. Lui, now 53, will spend the next 11 years of his life locked in some dismal Chinese prison.

When President Obama visited China recently he pressed the Lui case as have leaders of the European Union and the Chinese response, “gross interference in China’s judicial internal affairs.”

China is now emboldened by the wealth it possesses, the monumental 25 per cent of U.S. debt it controls, a near 95 per cent monopoly ownership of rare earths that produce critical electronic components, its investment in vital natural resources from Africa to Latin America and its significant nuclear arsenal and              growing military might. 

Couple the rise in Chinese power with a weakened Western world mired in a disastrous economic downturn and bogged down by fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and you have a ticket for disaster.

China is growing its gross domestic product at an incredible nine percent clip a year but is doing so on the backs of slave labor, disastrous environmental policies which have poisoned that nation and others and with the highest rate of capital punishment in the world by far with 5000 people executed in 2008.

China, as the saying goes, has become the work shop of the world. In the meantime the U.S. has lost nearly our entire industrial base over the last few decades and Americans are now eating in soup kitchens, living in tent cities and shelters. There is something very wrong here and greed of American corporations looking for cheap goods overseas has been behind this reversal of fortunes for the U.S.

Our government sits on its hands being titillated by corporate lobbyists pushing an exploitative, economic mantra that helps the rich get even richer, and Washington has only been too willing to comply.

So now China thumbs its nose at the rest of the world, imprisons men of conscience like Liu Xiaobo, continues its tyrannical control of Tibet, threatens to take over Taiwan, is able to force the Cambodian government to send back Chinese political exiles and ignores efforts to reduce its noxious emissions to combat global warming.

Nothing compares to the capitulation by Europe to Nazi Germany before World War II but the capitulation by the West to China today while less glaring, less grandiose than marching troops on another land and less subdued about their intentions than the Germans, the end game is the same, absolute power and control over its own people, its neighbors and beyond.

What is clear today is that there is naked aggression taking place by the Chinese and the government in Beijing is crushing the spirit of its own people, as it has since the murderous Tienanmen Square era and before, with its two million man army poised at the ready to combat any foe internal or external.

The democratic nations of the world are going to have to confront China sooner or later before it's too late and we become totally servile to their economic might built on an enslaved people who cannot openly access the Internet or make speeches, or demonstrate freely or they will end up like Liu Xiaobo, locked in a concrete cell..

Why must we buy their products? Let's buy them from China's competitors. Why do we have to sell them our debt and become beholden to them? Let's get our own house in order, balance our budget and do away with monumental levels of interest on our debt service. Let's smother the espionage that goes on by Chinese corporations and their government intelligence services from stealing our intellectual property and turning it against us. Let's redouble our efforts to build and strengthen alliances with the Russians, the Japanese and the Indians as a counterbalance to ascending Chinese power.

Unless the Chinese are willing to join the nations of the world in pursuit of democratic reform and human rights then we should not allow business as usual and we should use every weapon in our arsenal to stop the incarceration of the Chinese people of which Liu Xiaobo is just the most visible symbol.