A disgraceful demonization campaign is currently being waged against the People’s Republic of China. It is being planned and orchestrated by the same governments and press organizations that are determined more than ever to endorse the never-ending martyrdom of the Palestinian people, and always ready to incite and support preventive wars, such as that in Iraq, which has already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, whilst leaving millions as refugees.
The flag of independence (sometimes disguised as ‘autonomy’) is being waved frantically for Tibet; but if this objective were to be achieved, then the same cry for independence would ring out also for Greater Tibet (an area three times larger than that of Tibet proper), and for Xingjiang, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and numerous other regions. The reality is that imperialism, in its insane project for planet-wide domination, aims to dismember a country that for many centuries has been both multicultural and multiethnic, and which today hosts some 56 ethnic groups. Not by chance, this modern-day Crusade is certainly not being promoted by the Third World – which looks upon China with sympathy and admiration – but only by the West, which, from the time of the Opium Wars in the mid-seventeenth century, has constrained this great Asian country to underdevelopment and appalling tragedy, from which its population – amounting to one-fifth of all humanity – is only now finally escaping.
On the basis of slogans similar to those being shouted out against China today, the dismemberment of several European countries could also be promoted. Such countries include England, France, Spain, and not least Italy, where cries for the ‘liberation’ and secession of Padania (roughly, Northern Italy) are far from lacking.
The West, which poses as the Holy See of religion and human rights, has not uttered a single word about the anti-Chinese pogroms in Lhasa, on March 14, 2008, which claimed the lives of innocent civilians, including women, children and elderly people. While it proclaims to be at the forefront of the struggle against fundamentalism, the West transforms and distorts, in the most grotesque manner, the Tibet of the past (founded on theocracy, slavery and mass-servitude), prostrating itself in front of a God-King who is busily establishing a State based on ethnic and religious purity (a mosque was also attacked in Lhasa), whilst annexing territories that are inhabited by Tibetans but which have never been administered by a Dalai Lama: it is the fundamentalist project of Greater Tibet, so dear to those who wish to upset the multiethnic and multicultural character of the People’s Republic of China, in order to be able to dismember it more effectively.
At the end of the nineteenth century, posters with the words “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” were often to be seen at the entrances of Western buildings in China. Such posters have not disappeared altogether: they have merely been changed slightly, as demonstrated by the campaign to sabotage or belittle, in various ways, the Olympics in Beijing – hence the slogan “Ban dogs and Chinese from the Olympics”. The anti-Chinese Crusade now underway is fully consistent with a long-standing and infamous imperialist and racist tradition.
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The events in Lhasa
To Paulo Macry, who is shocked by the fact that the appeal promoted by me, and endorsed by renowned intellectuals, speaks of an “anti-Chinese pogrom” (Corriere della Sera, 12 April, 2008), I would like to recommend that he read an article by Jim Hardley (International Herald Tribune, 25 March), who writes, once again in relation to the incidents in Lhasa of 14 March: “The absence of the police emboldened the Tibetan crowds, who terrorized Chinese residents, toppled fire trucks and hurled stones into Chinese-owned shops.” The violence raged in particular against the shops, which were set on fire, together with their owners and staff. It should be made known to everybody that, for their commercial enterprise, and for the resentment that such enterprise has a tendency to provoke, the Chinese minorities in the countries of South-East Asia are often likened to the Jewish Diaspora; and as can be read in any history book, the pogroms against the “Jews” of Asia are a rather frequent fact. And if Macry should still believe that the followers of the Dalai Lama are immune from such earthly evils, he would do well to read, in his own newspaper (Corriere, 10 April), the words of Sergio Romano, who writes of the “devastating fury” shown by the “Tibetan monks” of Lhasa, which “took the police force completely by surprise”. But then, why go so far to witness such events? In recent weeks in Paris, demonstrators “for human rights” tried, with force, to wrench the Olympic torch from the hands of a disabled torch-bearer (Jin Jing), constrained to a wheelchair after having lost her right leg to cancer in early childhood. That is to say, following the pogrom in Lhasa we are now seeing acts of anti-Chinese mobbism in the West.
Domenico Losurdo
