By MORTON KONDRACKE
Monday, June 11, 2007
LHASA, Tibet — Every bit on a par with questions about Iraq, terrorism and immigration, interrogators of 2008 presidential candidates ought to be asking: What are you going to do about the challenge of China?
That’s because, I’m convinced after spending three weeks in China and Tibet, unless the United States gets its act together, our grandchildren will be living in a world dominated by the People’s Republic.
China is simply inexorable in its pursuit of wealth, growth and power. It cares little about human rights, democracy, labor protections, fair trade rules or the environment. It is relentless in advancing its national interests.
What’s going on here is pure colonialism. China invaded Tibet in 1950 — ostensibly to free it from Buddhist “feudalism” — and treated it brutally for a quarter-century.
Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans — along with an estimated 30 million Chinese — died in Mao Zedong’s maniacal collectivization campaign, the “Great Leap Forward.” Almost all Buddhist temples were sacked and burned during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
In the past 30 years, the level of violence is down, but China is simply dominating Tibet economically and politically — and the presence of huge military bases emphasizes the futility of resistance.
However, much of what’s happening here is impressive. The Chinese have built roads, schools, power lines, irrigation systems and communications in a country that still farms with plows pulled by yaks and whose rural people rarely bathe. Cell phones work better in Tibet — even at the base camp of Mount Everest — than in Washington, D.C.
The Chinese have rebuilt many of the Buddhist shrines they destroyed in the 1960s, both to promote tourism and pacify the deeply devout population. But they’ve limited the number of monks, and monasteries reportedly are heavily infiltrated by spies.
I think it’s useful for celebrity-backed Western organizations such as the Free Tibet Campaign to alert the world to Chinese abuses, but there’s no realistic chance the Chinese are ever going to release their hold on Tibet, which is the source of three of China’s major rivers, supplies it with natural resources and serves as a missile testing base.
China as a whole reminds me of the United States in the 19th century — minus democracy. Labor protections, environmental considerations, the popular will — all are secondary to economic advancement.
The Pentagon just reported that “China’s ability to sustain military power at a distance, at present, remains limited,” but it is developing forces that could offset U.S. strength in the future, particularly in Asia.
What to do? It is a critical question. U.S. presidential candidates must say, in detail, what they’d do about the China challenge.
Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
