You all ought to know
There were two very distressing news items this week. One was footage of Chinese Australians demonstrating in Sydney against Tibet, and another was a New York Times article about Grace Wang, a Chinese student at Duke University who became Public Enemy No. 2 in China because of her efforts to mediate an on-campus Human Rights demonstration and a pro-China rally.
What was really horrifying was that the participants here are, in the former, Australians, and in the latter, university students with access to information and seeking to be educated in a system that values pluralism and reason. If those Chinese demonstrators cannot see the irony of the situation or refuse to apply their critical thinking skills dispassionately, I have a message for them.
First, to the Chinese Australians: Why have you all naturalized and pledged your allegiance to Australia and then gather en masse to wave the Chinese flag and demonstrate your solidarity to China?
Are you all just there to take advantage and freeload off the kindness of a country that embraces people without regard to their race, religion or ethnicity? Or are you there because you earnestly believe that rights otherwise denied would improve the quality of your life?
Here’s the ironic part. Why are you all exercising freedom of assembly and freedom of speech in Australia to espouse support for a policy in China that denies such a right?
Is it because as Australians you cherish such a right so much that you could justifiably and selfishly guard it jealously from ever burgeoning in China? Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction to support Chinese Communist Party policies that permit freedom of speech and assembly only when it suits its purpose?
To the Chinese students in the US: You all have no excuse for your ignorance. In this country your Web sites are not filtered, you can access most information you want in your libraries and you have a legal right to almost all government documents thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. Don’t lose your critical reasoning skills — there’s some truth to what you perceive to be negative reporting of your country.
Will you ignore the entire message simply because you have a problem with the delivery? Go look up texts on human rights and learn what it actually means! The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 explains two fundamental ideas underlying the intellectual and substantive concept.
First is that the will of the most powerful is not and can never be the final and valid justification for actions that affect the vital interests of individuals.
Second is that simply being a human being is sufficient in and of itself to allow claims for particular goods that are basic for a life of dignity and autonomy.
In the pursuit of knowledge, you must realize that you cannot understand why you are right until you understand why you could be wrong. You have the right to be ignorant and misinformed, but I strongly suggest that in light of what you consider to be a concerted effort to make China look bad in recent weeks, you all would do well to moderate and educate yourselves on the grains of truth embedded in the criticism.
Mark Du
Miami, Florida
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