China, the real threat - Boycott China!

This is an excellent piece by Roland Watson of Dictator Watch reminding everyone to keep our focus on China and to boycott the 2008 Olympics.

Excerpt: Diplomats are still ignoring the reality in North Korea, that a modern day Hitler has nuclear weapons, as a means to avoid their personal failure to stop the proliferation. Further, international business is the single driving force behind diplomatic engagement. The main reason why no one has stood up to North Korea is that they don't want to imperil business relations with China. Jacques Chirac just visited China, and was obscenely given a 21-gun salute at the 1989 killing ground, Tiananmen Square. He received billions in business contracts, and pledged to end Europe's weapons trade ban. (The E.U. also recently sent a delegation to meet President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, responsible for the genocide in Darfur.) American businesses want a piece of the pie as well (one recalls Bill Gate's April 2006 house party for President Hu Jintao), and lobby Washington to ignore China's serial human rights abuses. They call it diplomatic engagement, but what is really happening is that the politicians and businessmen have been blinded by greed. "It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched by Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." "The greatest danger of all would be to do nothing." The United States has announced that it will defend Japan, and also South Korea, against North Korean aggression. This is insufficient. President Bush, personally, should declare that any detonation of a nuclear device, anywhere in the world, will be met by swift and decisive retaliation against North Korea – and China.

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The challenge, of course, is how to help the North Koreans win their freedom. A good place to start is to force China to end its support for Kim. Without China to lean on, his regime would fail. Conclusion It is not only nuclear proliferation for which China is responsible. The country, including through its leaders and companies, commits all manner of abuses. It continues to develop chemical and biological weapons. The repression and colonization of Tibet has accelerated. Taiwan remains under threat. Its factories are sweatshops, and the rivers, land and air are poisoned. (Chinese air pollution even reaches North America.) Dissidents, including religious adherents and the followers of Falun Gong, are imprisoned and killed, as are rural and worker protestors. China also reportedly executes more prisoners than the rest of the world combined. Beijing says that it disagrees with the West on the issue of human rights, but this is a mischaracterization. The subject is not open to debate. China is wrong. It's treatment of its own people, and derivatively of the people in the repressed societies that it supports, is wrong. The country backs many of the worst regimes on the planet, including North Korea, Burma, the Sudan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. It consistently blocks Security Council action on such countries. China is not a member of the U.N. to help it achieve the organization's goals; it only uses the U.N. as a means to its own ends. Through its veto power, it is effectively the dictator of the Security

To repeat a long-standing Dictator Watch imperative, China must become a democracy. The best and certainly the least violent way to trigger this is to disrupt its economy. It is hard medicine, but it's what the patient needs. Boycott China! (more)