Today, in what is considered by some to be retaliation, many Chinese web users tried to get to Western websites like Google, Yahoo and YouTube to find those websites blocked or that they were redirected to Chinese equivalents. This comes on the heels of President Bush awarding the Dalai Lama the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The problem China has with this is likely a repressed conscience about illegally and imperialistically occupying Tibet and killing at least 1 million people. Perhaps the anti-war left in the West could take a break from the hysterics of protesting a minor war in Iraq and focus on the real atrocities in Tibet and inside China itself. The Dalai Lama, the legal head of state of Tibet, opposes this occupation and the human rights horrors it brings. For his struggles for the human rights of his people and for their freedom, President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom to which China cried foul. They've said it has drastically strained relations.
It is no secret that China (and Russia for that matter) is not precisely a friend of the United States. They long to be on equal power footing with America but simply aren't there. They can't seem to run naval joint China-Russia naval exercises without sinking their boats and having to call the United States Navy, for instance. In 2001, one of China's fighter pilots crashed into an American spy aircraft and blamed the incident on the Air Force intentionally trying to ram their fighters. We'll skip past the absurdity that they claim their territorial waters extend virtually all the way to Australia.
The fact is, China can do very little to the United States directly so they are left with indirect and sometimes petty alternatives (the current case included). Their general foreign policy is to obstruct legitimate American activities, encourage and bolster direct adversaries of America and to allow those inside their country to attempt to undermine the American economy. They are, in fact, engaged in a shadow war of attrition with us; one that, luckily for now, does not appear to be very successful. For instance, they allow their own hackers to have free reign to attack the United States to which we cannot respond. The United States, however, prosecutes any American hacker it can find that attacks China. That's the legacy of globalization, the United States acts in good faith and few other people do. This attempt to block Western websites (that their users will get to anyway) justs shows them to be petty and childish. The American Ambassador to China should respond with two words, "Cry more."
Article comments
1 - Lee Richards
"Perhaps the anti-war left in the West could take a break from the hysterics of protesting a minor war in Iraq..."
A minor war that has cost thousands of dead and wounded American troops, who knows how many Iraqi lives, and hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars (to be paid by our childen and their children and...)
It takes an hysterical mind divorced from all reality to see that as "minor."
2 - Dave Nalle
Lee, hard though it is to see at this point when it's so close, history may well class it as a fairly minor war, at least based on the level of casualties.
Hell, the Russo-Japanese war is considered a minor war and it had a single battle with half a million casualties.
As for why the left is so wrought up over the war, that's simple - they see it as an opportunity to gain poltiical advantage. The death of innocents and promoting further chaos in the middle east means nothing to them if they can weaken the US and advance their interests.
dave
3 - bliffle
Ironically, it's the usurpers masquerading as 'conservatives' who have undermined the US most by halving the value of the dollar, leaving our successors with a trillion dollar debt, and carelessly discarded the US leadership position around the world with a bootless display of bragadoccio in a lost vanity war that has invited podunk countries with infantile satraps to openly defy us.
Ptooey!
All the socialists in the world couldn't have done more damage to the USA than these jokers that have been assiduously defended by their lackeys in the press on TV and on the internet, like several bozos we can all name on BC.
4 - bliffle
Aside from that, the Chinese will fail to control the internet, because the underlying design was to set users free, which is the exact opposite of monoliths like IBM, political parties, the US government and chinese bureaucrats. They seek to control people, but the internet will not allow any enduring control.
Right now technicians are planning and implementing the next step (not the stupid "web 2.0" which is nothing more than a commercial plan to introduce control points into a free system) which will involve Mesh Networking and Disseminated Data and many other interesting technologies, born out of the Free Software movement and dominated by people committed to making people free instead of prisoners of a monopoly.
5 - Clavos
"All the socialists in the world couldn't have done more damage to the USA than these jokers that have been assiduously defended by their lackeys in the press on TV and on the internet, like several bozos we can all name on BC."
When your argument is devoid of fact and reason, the best strategy is to resort to name-calling and ad hominem attacks.
One bozo.
6 - Dave Nalle
Ironically, it's the usurpers masquerading as 'conservatives' who have undermined the US most by halving the value of the dollar,
To be fair they've only reduced it by about 30%.
leaving our successors with a trillion dollar debt,
Actually, the debt passed a trillion dollars in 1992.
and carelessly discarded the US leadership position around the world
I don't think the real leadership position is that hard to get rid of. It's based on something more substantial than the irritation of a bunch of self-appointed socialist opinion makers.
with a bootless display of bragadoccio in a lost vanity war that has invited podunk countries with infantile satraps to openly defy us.
Who's defying us right now, again? What are we trying to dictate to anyone that would prompt them to defiance?
Dave
7 - Cindy D
Put your children in Iraq and then decide if it's a minor war. Some people find it easy to expend casualties when they are not really people.
8 - Dr Dreadful
It would be interesting to compare this calculated bit of political mooning by Bush with the other one currently in the news: the Congressional vote on the Armenian genocide.