Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Lapdog.
Lapdog Hu?
Yes, comrade.
We've seen a lot of bowing to China in recent years, and a lot of bumbling, awkward denials from democratic countries too proud to admit they hang out with the non-democratic kids on the bloc.
Still, their lame excuses never cease to entertain me, so I was charmed last week by Canada's fumbling after the Democratic Progressive Party kicked up a fuss over its rejection of Yu Shyi-kun's visa application. On the Johnny Neihu Scale of Excuse Credibility, "a typhoon blew it away" scores even lower than "my dog ate it" or "my pet koala thought it was a eucalyptus leaf." Next time just say it fell in the toilet.
But flirting with Beijing requires a delicate balance. Bow too low and you're liable to get smacked on the back of the head. So the US and EU make a show of engaging in ritual and loud criticism of Beijing's naughtier habits, such as torturing Hong Kong journalists until they confess to being Taiwanese spies.
How pleasant, then, to see a head of state receiving the Dalai Lama, which is precisely what German Chancellor Angela Merkel did in Berlin on Sunday -- despite China chucking a fit.
The question is: What is China so worried about? Lately I've done some reading about Tibet on state-sponsored Web sites -- and it turns out that the place is a paradise, and has been ever since the People's Liberation Army rolled into town and did what people's liberation armies do: Liberated it. At gunpoint.
So Beijing should just tell certain killjoys to take their Nobel Peace Prizes and stuff 'em. China's credentials in Tibet are outstanding, and it can prove it.
China has given its deprived Tibetan didi things they never dreamed of. As I write this, the breaking news on Tibet.cn (run by the China Tibet Information Center, which reveals Tibet's "true face" without harming "national interests") tells all: "Scientists develope [sic] natural edible fungus food."
Who cares if you've been forcibly removed from your pastureland when you've got fungus?
Oh, and reports of human rights violations are usually just misunderstandings. Take this example.
Last week six Tibetans were detained when they petitioned authorities over the relocation of their street stalls. They were concerned the new location would affect their livelihoods, Radio Free Asia reported.
But what would Radio Free Asia know? Surely these stallholders realized that the migrating Han masses have a legitimate claim for lebensraum?
Now, NGOs usually get all hot and bothered over this kind of thing, but that's just because they've missed the beauty of the system. The point of the petitioning mechanism isn't to let people appeal official decisions that may be discriminatory or violate laws. It's to identify ungrateful subversive types and remove them, thus making the streets of Lhasa a safer place for everyone.
But wait, there's more. Freedom of religion in Tibet has soared to impossibly high levels. Sure, its illegal to carry a photo of the Dalai Lama in your pocket, but that's only because pornographic images are illegal in China.
Beijing says Tibetans have 100 percent religious freedom. But Radio Free Asia quoted the official Ganzi Daily News as saying -- after a tense stand off between thousands of Tibetans and police last month over calls for the Dalai Lama to return -- that "flexible measures will be taken to ensure the religious freedom of the local nomadic people ... so that the campaign to criticize the Dalai Lama will truly be effective."
Sounds like Tibetans have got even more religious freedom coming their way. I reckon this will put them at, say, 115 percent freedom of religion. That's way more than Jesus Christ ever had.
Beijing's feat shows up the widely believed myth that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and religion are incompatible. People who believe this tend not to have paid attention to developments in the Central Kingdom since the Cultural Revolution. So let me fill you in.
With the Cult of the Great Helmsman going stale, China went through a spiritual crisis that involved a lot of soul-searching, finally giving birth to the five-way split personality official Catholic-Buddhist-Daoist-Muslim-Protestant Mutant Super Temple of the Born Again Patriot.
Once again, China leaves the rest of us in the dust. While some countries may have a measly single state religion, China has five officially controlled and sanctioned spiritual paths. Beijing's on intimate terms with the whole damn pantheon.
The Mutant Super Temple is in a class of its own. Through enlightened superpowers granted to the Keepers of the Little Red Book, the CCP is closer to Jesus than the pope, knows who the real Panchen Lama is and can write the Koran from right to left or left to right -- something not even the Prophet could do.
The CCP has improved on religions that had otherwise stagnated for centuries by bringing efficiency to spirituality -- Deng Xiaoping's (
So Beijing doesn't waste time searching for reincarnate Lamas on the sparsely populated Tibetan Plateau. The Bureau for the Redirection of Souls into Patriotic Comrades takes care of that.
As far as I can tell, Tibet got a sweet deal. China cleared the streets of riff-raff petitioners, streamlined the inconvenient reincarnation process, boosted religious freedom to semantically impossible levels and developed "columnar agroc cayenne catsup" from "economic fungus" (economic fungus? I thought that was Wang You-theng (
I know what you're thinking. With all these swell perks, what are we doing fighting "glorious reunification?"
Something's rotten in the state of Xizang, dear reader. Why are thousands of Tibetans so desperate to leave their homeland that they'll risk their lives to get out of there? Each year, a few thousand Tibetans hotfoot it out of their homeland to join the 130,000-plus living in exile.
You wouldn't think it possible to hotfoot it over snow-capped Himalayas, but then, I guess you've never tried escaping over the 5,800m-high Nangpa Pass to Nepal while trying to avoid a bullet in the chest and losing a couple of toes to frostbite.
Maybe they're just sick of living on the Roof of the World. Hard to breathe up there, you know. Like those two Tibetans that died in Chinese custody last year due to "lack of oxygen."
But, hey, what do I know? For a country with 1.3 billion people, a few thousand deserters here and there isn't bad. Maybe they're just off investing in LCD factories like some Taiwanese do. Or smuggling some of those lucrative fungi.
But why is China so desperate to keep Tibetans from leaving? It's so frantic to control its population that it's performing forced abortions in some parts of the country, yet it would rather shoot would-be refugees as they flee Tibet than lose them to Nepal. You'd think they'd be paying people to leave.
Now, before I go and devote an entire column to Tibet, it's only fair to keep in mind my president's latest words of wisdom.
"Taiwan's human-rights situation deserves as much attention as, if not more than, the international community gives to Tibet," A-bian (
And who did he say this to? An international conference on human rights in Tibet. Nice work, prez.
Does Tibet get more attention than Taiwan? I performed another one of my scientific and highly accurate studies to find out. A quick search on BBC News online turned up 10 articles about Taiwan since Sept. 1 but only one about Tibet. Taiwan wins.
But I don't think Chen was hoping for the kind of attention given to us in stories like "Anger over Taiwan's `heaviest pig.'"
Some things Chen should be more worried about include Darfur (24 articles since Sept. 1), foot-and-mouth disease (110) and the weather (10 gazillion). In Chen's next appearance at a human rights forum, expect him to say: "What's all the fuss about Darfur? It doesn't have one single Chinese missile pointed at it."
Still, to soothe Chen's worried mind, I'll dedicate a few final lines to news from home.
Legislators across party lines have signed a draft amendment to the immigration law that would make discrimination against foreigners illegal. Legislators are also proposing scrapping the law that bans foreigners from doing any work other than the job designated on their work visa.
That's fantastic news for South Koreans making a little extra cash on the sly by trashing Taiwan's economy in Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) TV ads.
Heard or read something particularly objectionable about Taiwan? Johnny wants to know: dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com is the place to reach me, with "Dear Johnny" in the subject line.
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