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Apr. 25, 2008 Yet again reports of protest in China. This time it is the Tibetan’s agitating for more autonomy. China claims that Tibet is an integral part of China. (It is not, it was forcefully incorporated in to the Mongol Empire by Kublai Khan).All of this seems a long way away from the days of the Cultural Revolution where the western media idealized Mao. Will it one day be denouncing Deng Xiaoping, Jiangzemin and the present dictator, Hue jintao? No longer it seems does the western media pay mindless lip service to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A US Author while attending a conference in Beijing ,standing in for a Chinese activist who was unable (refused permission) to attend , was about to give his presentation when he was set upon by police, one of them asking pointedly whether he would be allowed to ‘hurt the feelings’ of American citizens in the US in the same way as he was now hurting those of the Chinese people. A US diplomat who was present replied for him that: 'he would be allowed to say anything he pleased in the US'; to no avail as he was forced from the meeting room by plainclothes men and then imprisoned in an upper room of the hotel. At the time a Japanese camera man had forced himself into the room as they were pushing Terrill through the door, this action eventually convincing the Chinese security apparatus to release him who put him on a plane the next day,but not until, as Terrill has pointed out in his book -The New Chinese Empire; and what it means to America - first confessing to ‘spreading harmful hate propaganda against the Chinese people’.The 'confession' is an integral part of the Chinese judicial process, in much the same way as it is within in the Catholic Church.The CPP is infallible ,and, if not deriving its power from God, goes one better in that it gets it's from Karl Mark . Terrill is of the opinion that China is now just as autocratic as it was during the Tang dynasty. (This was the one set up by a northern people after the fall of the Han and the Sui.) He argues that the Tang could be said to represent an autocratic form of government with its dogmatic insistence regarding Confucian ideals. The Song dynasty was just as idealistic as the former Tang, but as a lot of the population did not really believe whole heartedly in Confucianism, there was a toning down of the rhetoric. In Terrills opinion China was at its most liberated following the republican revolution in 1911-12 of Sun -Yet sen. He argues that in 1919 Chiang kai sheck returned China to what it has always been: an autocracy .Mao, because of the lack of any central authority, re-imposed the ancient dynastic system. Mao has compared himself to the first emperor Qin- shihuang. However there are similiarities between the two . This is ironic as Qin shihuang united China in 221 BCE with great cruelty and a complete disregard for any type of human rights, one of the prevailing official beliefs being that the cause of every crime was the lack of a suitable deterrent. The first emperor had divided society into groups of ten, each person within a group responsible for reporting on those within the group disloyal to the emperor, the he penalty for not reporting the sawing in half of the culprit at the waist.
Ross Terrill is one of an ever growing breed who is not about to be fobbed off
from speaking of the realities of present day China ,no matter how 'uncool' it
might seem to be to do so to some.
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