CHINA OLYMPIC THEME One World One Dream PROBLEM WITH THE TRUTH

HUMAN BEINGS SHAME

CATS IN CHINA
AND TIBETANS
Please read the article China Kills 500,000 Cats- in Death Camps. If anyone has read my blog posts, you know that I don't reserve my criticsm for countries other than my own. But, this post that I am directing you to is about China. China will have the Summer Olympic Opening Ceremonies August 8, 2008. Protestors disrupted the Olympic Flame Ceremony which was related to the Chinese crackdown continuation in Tibet. An article, Protests China should stop using force against Tibetans is printed in an Indian paper from Geneva, Switzerland.

Protesters picket Chinese consulate
Toronto, Canada STAR

A Pragmatic Solution for China in regards to Tibet

CHINESE TORTURING ITS OWN
FOR SPEAKING OUT
China Rights Activist Sentenced to Jail

By ANITA CHANG –

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese activist who had petitioned for land rights was sentenced Monday to five years in prison and then shocked with electric batons when police scuffled with his family, his lawyer said.

Yang Chunlin had gathered more than 10,000 signatures for an open letter titled "We want human rights, not the Olympics." Most of the signatures came from farmers demanding redress for land taken from them by officials for development.

Yang, a former factory worker, was convicted of subverting the power of the state, a charge that authorities commonly use to clamp down on dissidents.

Family members tried to talk to Yang as he was escorted from the courtroom, but police pushed his son to the ground, his lawyer, Li Fangping, said. When Yang tried to intervene, he was repeatedly shocked with electric batons, the lawyer said.

"Since we haven't seen him, we don't know how he's doing," Li said.

Yang's sentencing came as China tries to stifle activists whose criticisms might tarnish the Beijing Olympics, which begin Aug. 8.

...The Jiamusi City Intermediate People's Court in northeast China's Heilongjiang province handed down Yang's five-year sentence Monday afternoon, court clerk Nie Lei said. Yang can appeal, he added.

Yang, 54, has maintained his innocence and called the legal proceedings against him illegal because freedom of speech is supposed to be guaranteed in China, his lawyer said.

"But he's said before that he would not appeal because he has lost confidence in China's judicial system," Li said.

To rally support, Yang had posted his letter on the Internet. It was not clear for whom the letter was intended.

He was detained in July in Heilongjiang and formally arrested a month later. His sister said in October that during his detention Yang was tortured, including having his arms and legs stretched and chained to the corners of an iron bed... Full article

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Trouble for China

DARFUR
The five year old genocide in Darfur, Sudan is also connected to China. In an article written August 5, 2004, the following was written:

"China is Sudan's largest trading partner and the main foreign investor in Sudan's oil industry. China National Petroleum Corp. has a 40 percent share in the international consortium extracting oil in Sudan, and it is building refineries and pipelines, enabling Sudan to benefit from oil export revenue since 1999.

Although most Western oil companies have withdrawn from Sudan under pressure from human rights organizations, Chinese companies have turned a blind eye to the brutal way in which Sudan forced 200,000 to 300,000 of its citizens from oil-rich lands without compensation. Nor have these companies shown concern that Sudan uses oil revenue to purchase arms for its wars against its black African population.

...Were China to use even a small part of its leverage to call Sudan to account, it would go a long way toward saving lives in Sudan.

In an interview with Mia Farrow the Chinese Olympics and the genocide of the Darfuri people is discussed rfaunplugged. Here is a small portion:

Q: what prompts you to use the Beijing Olympics to pressure China on Darfur?

MF: Well, we’ve seen now - it came to my attention in the past year - that China has two immense oil companies pouring billions of dollars into Khartoum. And, noboby knows exactly how much money, but 60 to 80% of that money - it’s a good guess - is being used to attack civilians in Darfur. So, we have hoped that the government and leadership of China will now assume a more responsible role. It has a unique point of leverage.

I just saw this week a poll - a very important opinion poll - by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and World Public Opinion, and it showed that 58% of Chinese citizens polled thought that the UN Security Council has the right and the responsiblity to authorize an intervention, even, to stop the killing in Darfur, and this is higher than almost - ah - many many countries of the world. So, we see the people of China feeling as frustrated and distressed, I’m sure, as the rest of the world, or certainly as the Western world at the suffering in Darfur.

It remains for big business when you see this amount of money; we look at a big Monopoly game going on where the people of Darfur just seem to be the expendable chips. But we would look to our leadership and to our businesses to assume responsibility here, and China has that power.

Now with the Olympics coming it really is a unique time for China to uh say to - it seems to us in the West it seems a sort of calling card - China wants to be included in the rest of the negotiating world, well it is …but it isn’t just One World, One Dream, which is the slogan for the Olympics, but there is one nightmare that is Darfur.

Q: “The Genocide Olympics”: was this word coined by you?

MF: No, it wasn’t coined by me. By the time I wrote the piece together with my son, this saying was going viral amongst advocacy groups and I was even given a T-shirt, but it has “Genocide Olympics” with a question mark after it, because it need not be the Genocide Olympics, and indeed our piece - I hope it was clear in the piece that we wrote - that it is a call to the leadership of China and the sponsors of the Olympic Games and everyone to say: “before we can say ‘One World, One Dream’, let us make it true. And I would really hope that you know we would see the kind of leadership we would hope for from China to say whatever they have to do in Khartoum behind closed doors to stop the suffering, to stop the genocide in Darfur...."

Like the United States of America with multitude of lies about Iraq,

rendition, (heroes of rendition),

Abu Ghraib,

Nineteen Videos of Abu Ghraib,

Guantánamo Bay

and our history of human rights abuses including the indigenous peoples and the slaves,

China needs a mirror to see some reality of itself. The problem is that countries like the United States of America and England who claim to stand for human rights have hypocritical legs to stand on to hold up the mirror for China. And even if I as a citizen of the United States of America stands up against China for what it is doing in any or all of the above issues, I get criticized by people who point at what the USA has done and is doing.

So, what do we do? Be still, hide our disgusts?

Our leaders let us down. And we must not cower and let fear of criticism make us shrink.

The USA media is so narcissistic, which is a huge hole in the answer of simply spotlighting abuses. There are hours and hours of cable news shows which never mention anything but what is going on in the USA. There is shame in that.

So, as a human being who has a simple blog, a voice, I spotlight China.

ONE DREAM, ONE WORLD ~ the Beijing, China Olympics theme is hypocritical.

HERE IS MY ONE VOICE TO SAY SO.




Pictures (except the hunger strike one in Canada) are from Athens, Greece where the Olympic Torch was lit. Source: Sky News