America's Tortured Policy with China

By Maura Moynihan, AlterNet. Posted May 14, 2009.

Many heads of state are bending to Beijing's will. Support for Tibet is eroding, as foundations, academies and governmental agencies discreetly cancel funding for projects linked to the Tibetan government in exile. The Dalai Lama's popularity does not translate into tangible support for his people; the Tibetan refugees hang by a slender thread, which cannot hold indefinitely.

The disastrous misreading of the nature of the Chinese regime has Western powers ensnared in a policy morass. A new report from the European Council on Foreign Relations states: "The E.U.'s China strategy is based on an anachronistic belief that China, under the influence of European engagement, will liberalize its economy, improve the rule of law and democratize its politics. Yet … China's foreign and domestic policy has evolved in a way that has paid little heed to European values, and today Beijing regularly contravenes, or even undermines, them."

For decades Chinese soldiers have slaughtered men, women and children in Tibet while heads of state looked away in uncomfortable silence. China's barbarous treatment of a helpless civilian populace in Tibet exposes the uncomfortable truth that China remains a rigid totalitarian state. Thirty years of market capitalism and foreign investment did not nurture democracy; it made the Chinese Communist Party rich and powerful.

America spent billions to fight communism in the former Soviet Union, while investing billions in the People's Republic of China. America has become the Chinese Communist Party's chief enabler and ally.

As the economic crisis threatens the supremacy of the Western powers, China is poised to become global emperor and will likely accrue more power in the Maoist way; from the barrel of a gun. How will the United States and other NATO powers respond should China strike hard on India, Taiwan, Japan or the West? What cards will the Western powers have to play, when it was Western corporations who handed China our computer codes and surveillance cameras in the quest for profit?

Chin Jin, of the Federation for a Democratic China, journeyed to Dharamsala, India, to stand with the Dalai Lama on March 10, 2009, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising.

On his last day in India, Chin said: "I was a teenager in Shanghai in 1972 when Nixon came to China. An elderly friend of my father's started to cry when Nixon came, he said, 'Now the USA has come to the rescue of the Communist Party, and this will prolong the suffering of the Chinese people for many more years.' He was right. If the Western powers don't use their leverage to promote political reform in China, if they keep this dictatorship in power, it will be a tragedy not only for the Chinese and Tibetan people, but the world."

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