TIBET-ENVOY • EUROPE

Beijing’s Fragile Swagger

New America Foundation

Confucius said ‘The superior man is firm in the right way, and not merely firm.’  From a Chinese perspective, the same can probably be said about other nations.

When Hillary Clinton was running for the US presidency, she encouraged then President George W. Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to signal US frustration over China’s treatment of Tibet and lack of cooperation on Sudan.

Her posture, reversed since she became Secretary of State, was remarkably un-presidential as any serious geopolitical analyst would have noted that the United States needed China’s support on virtually every one of its major international objectives—from redirecting Iran’s nuclear aspirations to climate change to stabilizing a global financial system near meltdown.

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Rights group: China used force at Tibetan protests

» full HRW report

By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, July 22, 2010; 9:54 AM

BEIJING — The New York-based group Human Rights Watch, in a report released Wednesday, said Chinese security forces used “disproportionate force” against peaceful, unarmed protesters and “acted with deliberate brutality” in suppressing widespread rioting in Tibet in March 2008.

The 73-page report accuses the security forces of engaging in “a pattern of deliberate brutality” against the protesters, and then systematically torturing detainees in prison while seeking evidence that exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama was behind the uprising. Human Rights Watch accused China of violating international law in quelling the protests.

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Blogs, Democracy and China’s Future

Zhang Wen at My1510.cn

The former information officer at the French embassy in China, Mr. Henuo (transliteration of name into Chinese) recently grouped me alongside Han Han, Xu Jinglei, Wang Xiaofeng and Hong Huang as the five most famous Chinese bloggers in a French magazine.  This is somewhat embarrassing for me.

Strictly speaking, Wang Xiaofeng and I are media workers who share the same concerns.  While we have different writing styles, it makes some sense to put us side by side.  But I am basically not on the same “path” as literati such as Han Han and especially Hong Huang and Xu Jinglei.

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The death of the China lobby?

Foreign Policy, Posted By Daniel W. Drezner

The Financial Times has been working overtime to discussing an emergent trend: multinational CEOs in Europe and the United States ripping into China.

In some ways, this started earlier this year. There was Google’s complaint, of course. And, as TNR’s James Mann noted, “Both the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing and the European Chamber of Commerce in China have issued reports in recent months conceding that the business climate for foreign companies there has steadily worsened.”

Things have been heating up in July, however. First, as Guy Dinmore and Jamil Anderlini report, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt ripped into China while in Europe:

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The New Face of U.S.-China Relations: “Strategic Reassurance” or Old-Fashioned Rollback?

Peter Lee, Japan Focus (The Asia Pacific Journal)

from: http://japanfocus.org/-Peter-Lee/3385

The Obama administration took office in 2009 determined to move beyond might-makes-right-makes-might unilateralism of the Bush years, and reassert America’s global influence as the most principled and powerful guarantor of rule-based multilateralism.

With respect to China, this approach was presented as a doctrine of “strategic reassurance”.

However, the policy has not yielded the systemic breakthroughs that the Obama administration hoped to achieve on climate change, non-proliferation, Middle East security, still less on U.S.-China relations.

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No room to talk in ’stable’ Tibet

By Damian Grammaticas BBC News, Lhasa

The Potala Palace, once the seat of the Dalai Lama before he fled into exile, glows in the evening light.

Its huge red and white walls, rising above Lhasa, are spot-lit against the deep blue hues of the Tibetan sky.

Across the road, Chinese tourists throng a huge open square. Patriotic Han Chinese music, about developing the western reaches of China, blares from loudspeakers.

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