My neighbor’s political analysis.
I was just hanging around with the Dog Man the other day, chewing the fat, and I asked him if anything interesting had gone on in the neighborhood lately. He said that nothing had, and the only interesting thing lately was the situation in Tibet. I was surprised that he had brought it up himself, out of the blue, so I asked him, “So, because you are a Han person, how do you feel about all of this?” His reply was really interesting, because it seemed to be based on his own ideas, not on anything I’ve seen in the media.
He said that he thinks the US had a lot to do with instigating the unrest. To back this up, he told me that there is a really large US navy buildup in the waters surrounding China right now, and their appearance basically co-incided with the start of the trouble. He also said he thinks the US would like to break up China into pieces, because then it would become less powerful. He believed if Tibet were allowed to separate, then Hong Kong and Macao would want to be totally separate too. If this happened, China might cease to be a strong economic and political rival for the US, just as the breakup of the Soviet Union caused Russia to become way less powerful than before.
Really, this makes a lot of sense. If there is more ethnic or regional unrest in China, it will hurt the economy because it will disrupt manufacturing, natural resource gathering, etc. It will also discourage foreign investment in China, since nobody wants to invest in someplace unstable. If Hong Kong totally separated (although I don’t think Hong Kong would ever do that; I think they are smart enough to see that their economy would not be able to survive now without strong links to China), that would be a really huge blow to China’s economy and financial sector.
He concluded what he was saying by telling me, “Bush is bad!”
It was a very interesting thing to hear, and pretty astute analysis from someone with a 9th grade education.
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
For ordinary men here in China,the fodder for gossip is always solidly “political Analysis”.
As you have noted,some of the times they did touch on the real spots.
if u dig deeper,they would tell you something so un-heard-of that you think you could turn out a bestselling thriller if you write well enough…
I recently heard that Taiwan issue would have long been solved were it not for this son of one of the founding fathers of PRC who sold a helluv lot of intelligence to Taiwan,crumbling the whole plan….
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:15 pm
I never heard that! Is that true, or just one of those unverifiable rumors?
I am still pissed off about all the bullshitty reporting on China in western media.