By Andy Howlett '10
Columnist

I had a column already written for this week called “The Forever War” – a dual reference to Joe Haldeman’s excellent book and McCain’s dangerous Presidential candidacy. But in light of national attention and recent protests related to the Chinese Olympics and the situation in Tibet, I decided to scrap it; the Iraq war will be here next semester and well beyond, but by then the Olympics will have come and gone. I write in part out of general interest and in part as a response to my Chinese friends and colleagues who are outraged that the US and other nations would consider boycotting the Beijing Olympics. First, I’ll explain why (at least in part), and, second, I’ll outline how the US should respond.

The Chinese have a phrase, zhou er fu shi, which means “and yet the cycle begins again.” I would liken it to a saying with which we’re more familiar: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

These protests began to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising against the PRC and they are fueled by the same concerns that have been present virtually since the annexation in 1951. Invasion, occupation, the desecration of holy places, the depopulating of one ethnic group and repopulating of another, political and social repression, cultural hegemony, and so on.

The problem, as my Chinese friends point out, is that this is nothing new. Nicholas Kristoff put it quite nicely when he characterized the relationship between America and China as one of competing narratives, but the narratives also are, to a degree, cyclical.

To start from the beginning, just as white Europeans claimed the whole of the American continent by virtue of their “discovery” (see, e.g., Johnson v. Mc’Intosh), the Chinese Government repeats what the world should now know as an equally cheap lie, that Tibet always has been and presumably always will be a part of China. Both outlooks chauvinistically ignore long periods of unadulterated autonomy.

Similarly, just as the Chinese have been systematically driving the Tibetans out of Tibet and repopulating the region with the Han minority, in seeming violation of the Geneva Convention, so too did the Americans reduce the population of the Midwest to make room for white settlers. If China needed a blueprint for the 1951 Seventeen Point Agreement (which affirms Chinese sovereignty over Tibet), it could have used the 1861 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had a similar stated purpose of “ensuring the civilization” of a subservient group. In reality the 1868 Treaty was part of a systematic campaign of the US government, which also included the extermination of the Buffalo and outright massacres to assert its dominance over the land, resources, and people (at least the few that remained).

It is further no surprise, then, that just as China justified its incursion into the rooftop of the world as necessitated by a need to overthrow backwards “Tibetan feudalism” and revolutionize the economy, so too did the US justify the aforementioned treaty “to ensure [the Sioux Indians] a means of surviving their transition from the nomadic life of the hunt to the agrarian lifestyle Congress had chosen for them.” That quotation is from the majority in United States v. Sioux, which recognized, at least a century too late, that the oppression of a nation’s native people was a bad thing.

In any event, the argument runs on in such a manner to conclude by accusing America of colossal hubris and hypocrisy in attempting to tell China what to do with its indigenous inhabitants. One might object here to say that temporal comparisons are irrelevant because we fixed our problems in this area and China is committing human rights violations now. But precisely why the current criticisms of China’s approach to Tibet, broadly construed, may ring hollow: the US didn’t fix its approach to its native people so much as dispatch them horrifically and nearly completely, and try to remedy the survivors with a hodge-podge of inconsistent and often ineffectual progressive remedies that came too little and too late to prevent or substantially alleviate massive cultural loss, suffering, and brutality. As a Chinese friend put it, “In spite of everything, the Tibetans have their autonomy, their land, their livelihood, their culture and language, and the opportunity for advancement. And what do the American Indians have?”

Can America criticize China without being tainted by its own genocidal past? The answer is, of course, that it can and it should – but the rebuke needs to be one based in a understanding of universal human rights with an appreciation of its own history, and less of an instance that China need to “be more like America” when it comes to treatment of its indigenous people. If the US boycotts the Olympics unilaterally, we can expect a rebuke of our historical hypocrisy. That said, the fact that America has sinned egregiously in the past does not mean that we as a nation forfeit our right or our obligation to speak out against human rights violations around the world.

With all that in mind, then, I propose that America and the world, through the auspices of the United Nations and other international NGOs, pay close attention to China’s behavior (all the while continuing to speak out against wrongs where they occur—including China’s role in the Darfur situation). A catholic and forward-looking approach to the situation is one that puts the People’s Republic “on notice” that, just as protesters cried out at Tiananmen square, the “world is watching,” so too will the world do what it did not do in 1936 – hold the host of the Olympic games accountable for the unacceptable effects of its national policy.

Depending on how things play out, then, a boycott might not be necessary or appropriate. A harsh look at the political realities of China by a cantankerous international media might serve the purpose better —with the Olympics giving Tibetans the world’s attention to vent their grievances and reopen negotiations for a better chance at peace, human rights, and autonomy.

Email: ah8gu@virginia.edu