Tibet is not China

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polystyle

Well-known member
Olympic torch, 'Nazi', 'Western Axis', 'great Satans'

That Olympic torch continued it's way across Africa , to Nagano Japan to Seoul Korea today.

Previous headlines this week ...

'China says it's ready to meet the Dalai Lama's envoys'

China attempts to tamp down nationalist fervor over Olympic protests,
including plans to boycott French stores in China

'Chinese ship delivering arms to Zimbabwe not allowed to unload'
The frustrated voyage of the good ship An Ye Jiang , dubbed 'Ship Of Shame' , ended when it was allowed to dock - but not unload in Luanda , Angola capitol. The ship is trying to deliver millions of rounds of bullets, dozens of rockets and mortar shells to Robert Mugabe.
Mugabe's ruling ZANNU-PF party calls Britain and US 'The Western Axis' and 'the great Satanists
in response to claims that opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai did win the recent election against Mugabe.

Seoul Korea 'Thousands of young Chinese defending their countries Olympic torch pushed their way through Korean police Sunday , throwing rocks, bottled water, plastic and steel pipes at protesters demanding better treatment for North Korean refugees in China.'
Two N Korean defectors living in S Korea poured paint thinner over their heads and attempted to set themselves on fire.
Chinese flag waving crowd then set upon elder S and N Korean protesters, surrounding them kicking and punching.
Norbert Vollertsen , a German doctot and advocate found himself surrounded by jeering Chinese.
Vollertsen commented that the idea of the Olympic torch dated from the Nazi period Olympics.

Next the torch travels to Pyongyang N Korea where it is set to receive 'an amazing welcome,
with hundreds of thousands of flower waving people'

One Chinese friend say a few weeks that he thought the 'Tibet crisis' would possibly create the opportunity for the Chinese people to realize how much the ChineseCommunistParty controlled news and webinfo coming into the country - and then be so angry they would contribute to the loosening of CCP control but the CCP is still master of manipulation (as are all Gov's),
allowing nationalist anger to rise and then well publicizing their own efforts to 'tamp it down' again.

At some point in the torch world tour, it will arrive on backside of Mt Everest.
In Nepal's recent elections it looks like the Maoists did win a majority !

All 'Axis', many 'Satans' , almost all the time ...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Speaking of despotic regimes in the far east, what the hell is going on in Burma at the moment? Apparently Oxfam reckons the cyclone death toll could rise from 100,000 to 1.5 million if foreign aid isn't allowed into the country. :eek:
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
Right T.
Touched on that a teeny bit in the next thread on the creeping coup in Lebanon.
So much happens on any given day that it's hard to keep up ,
Cyclone Nargis in Burma -
and at least 10,000 dead in China too after that 7.9 quake ...
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
polystyle desu said:
at least 10,000 dead in China too after that 7.9 quake ...
Click to expand...

today CNN is saying 12,000...

just received email from my dear friend who live in Cheng Du confirming that they are OK... but even through the brevity of the email i can sense that they are quite shaken...
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
Surely shaken, it was a big one.
Death toll is close to 15,000 now that they are getting up into the mountains.
25,000 still buried ...
The images I saw from NHK last night showed these tiny human figures in front of this mega giant pile of slate gray rubble.
Just reduced to little bits like kibble.
That school was flattened.
The scale was shocking.
And this happened in an area not known for it's past quakes.
As i used to write in the 'futures' thought thread, the earthquake causing fault systems in Asia have either been activated and more is to come - or this has been a deadly active period that will pass over time.
Earthquakes are scary, like fire, you know you cannot control anything about it when it hits.
Hard for people to understand how big a 7.9 quake really is, but can guess the images that will come out of China in the next days will show us.
Fully expecting big ones still - overdue in Tokyo area,
possibly overdue along the Pacific coast off Seattle - those two can be connected.
China's got it's hands full
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
there was one in Beijing when i was like 3 or 4 years old. must've been around 1978/9... damage wasn't big where we were, parents tell me i loved every minute of it -- got to hang out outside at night in the summer time with everyone else and their kids out in the streets: over joyed. thought it was a big party.

my aunt who is an opera singer (lead alto in Frankfurt opera house now), was not feeling good that night in a close by city, and the theater had to beg her to come perform. she reluctantly obliged -- and coming home after the quake her bed was crushed by a giant piece of the ceiling.
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
Sounds like rare 'fun' and lucky moments during quaketime Zhao ...:)

Last quake tremor event I was in was Tokyo 2005 , 6. something but luckily located North of the city.
Scary how *ucking long it lasted.
Minutes of shaking and wondering 'is this going to get worse or not ?'
Within a couple minutes, and while the quake was actually still going on,
Japanese TV had the alert mode going on and in another few minutes was playing video from various cameras North.
I was just sitting there videotaping everything inside and outside the window in case it all was going to come down.
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
crazy shit. a big one in tokyo would be... fucking horrific... also fulfilling a collective fantasy which existed in fiction for decades...

akira1.jpg


and did you forget the San Andreas fault in California in your list of big ones to come?
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
Naw, Cali's fault's waaay too big to miss !

The sad story of the er founding fathers of San Francisco deciding to build a city there anyway after hearing about the area's geo activity another case of those wit the money having the power to well, do what they want regardless and heedless *uckers ...

Tokyo and Pacific Coast are just a matter of time, sooner or later they are going to happen.
Last time the Pacific coast fault went, tsunami went across to rip Japan.
Komatsu's book Japan Sinks laid out a long struggle to offload citizens and find a place for them to go

Now reading estimated 400 dams in China also got damaged in the quake ...
Some shaky nights out in the rain under tarps around Chengdu ...
Fingers crossed
 
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polystyle

Well-known member
Who knows how high this death toll in China will go ...
Loss of life on a giant scale.

Myanmar's people are dying out there as well, 14 days without food,
soldiers stealing food aid and stockpiling it ?
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
polystyle desu said:
Now the CCP is getting out the Chinese to wave the Red flag and beat on people if they see fit.
$90 if you show up and join in !
This happened in Queens NYC no less ...
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-5-21/70866.html
Click to expand...

Just goes to show the strength of the grip the Party has on so many of its peoples' minds, despite much-heralded modernisation, and even outside the country. When is China's glasnost going to happen, eh?
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Classic modernisation theory views democratisation as a sort of ineluctable telos awaiting the developing world.

But I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions just yet. I think that the median Chinese person has seen very little difference, even as the mean living standard has been brought up slightly thanks to the development of some coastal regions.

And it turns out that democracy and development are not interchangable. There is a form of autocracy that supplies a certain number of public goods at the expense of certain number of other public goods. Clever rulers suppress "strategic coordination" amongst their political opposition (i.e. the sort of activites needed to win power -- meeting together, disseminating ideas, etc), whilst being careful not to suppress "economic coordination" too greatly. General public goods, your health care, primary schools, defense, public transport and infrastructure, are in; "coordination goods", your free speech, free press, right to organise, right to travel, protection of habeus corpus and access to higher education, are out.

Following the logic of "sustainable autocracy", dictators can provide growth and economic development, reducing the pressure for change that stagnation provokes, whilst still maintaining their grip on power.

So, it remains to be seen what China will do (and Russia, Venezuela, Singapore, Vietnam...). Economic development (and perhaps the recent tragedy) might lead China towards democracy (in the true sense -- not just elections), but there is no guarantee, particularly as data shows that economic development combined with the suppression of coordination goods improves the chances of regime survival, at least in the short term.
 
C

crackerjack

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Well there's obviously a very, very long way to go yet, but if that piece is anything to go by, it sounds like cautious optimism may not be unwarranted. And the PRC is nearly as old now as the USSR was when perestroika and glasnost started to enter Soviet politics...
Click to expand...

But the lesson of the USSR's demise was that for 'the Party' to sruvive (with or without communism in anything but name) you can have perestroika, but once you give it a bit of glasnost it's hard/impossible to keep a lid on it. China's policy of the last 20 years suggests they know that.
 
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