The Congressional hearings on Wednesday in the Senate were informative. CSPAN aired this and I’m sure anyone can find it at their website. But one needs to interested in facts. As today the Chinese govt. says it will meet with an envoy of the Dali Llama in a few days. What needs to be watched is if it is being used to settle the Olympic Torch problem only —and the talks bring no solutions or cooperative discourse. It is the Ancient Chinese that designed the warring strategy of Promise and Delay, which we’ve seen our own govt. do for decades at least. My bet it is a ploy and this is a bet I’d celebrate if I lost it! But the Chinese (especially men) have a huge ‘face’ they don’t want embarrassed or disagreed with. And another question in my post 9/11 paranoia: Why is it all of a sudden our govt. is takin’ interest in Tibet? Our people always have but certainly not the govt. I’m smellin’ a skunk and hope the Tibetan leaders are watchin’ our Govt. as close as they are the Chinese Govt.

What Whoopi said! I will never forget when they were able to get the troop who had been stationed in Tibet to take the place of the nearby troop who refused to fire at their own people and the killing began. I turned off CNN and never paid for it again. Too many butterflies - the souls of the dead crying for freedom.

I started studying Chinese back in the Cultural Revolution days, when we had to memorize a lot of Commie nonsense just to read the simplified-character primers coming out of Beijing: “heroic comrade Lei Feng” 雷鋒同志 and “Learning from DaZhai” 农业学大寨 and Mao’s wife’s favorite opera “The White-Haired Girl”, etc.. I still believe that the Communists started using simplified characters so that ordinary Chinese people wouldn’t be able to read anything easily from the pre-Communist era. We also had to learn the traditional characters, and several different Romanizations. It was a labor of love to learn Chinese back then, and the careerists all studied Japanese— in those days, Americans couldn’t even go to China. I have kept up my Chinese over the years, mostly reading classical poetry. I visited China in 1982 and it was so poor it was heartbreaking. But I am glad I got to see Hangzhou, Suzhou and Huangshan in the old days. I lived in Taiwan for a while and loved it; it’s the only place in the world where the real, old China was allowed to continue, without the huge disruption of the Cultural Revolution. Nowadays I read Google News in Chinese sometimes, and occasionally watch CCTV (Chinese Central Television)— which shows almost exclusively either gleaming spanking-new architecture or beautiful uncrowded pastoral landscapes, untouched since the Tang dynasty…. I have a very different point of view from most of you about Tibet and China. I too would prefer to see Tibet an independent country. The Tibetans are not happy with Chinese rule. (I have relatives who know the country well and speak Tibetan.) But the Chinese, without exception, are taught that Tibet has been an integral part of Chinese territory since the 1600s. They have also been fed a diet of Tibetan horror stories (Tibetan monks were all slave traders, the Dalai Lama was a dictator, ordinary people were all miserable dupes, etc.— ask any Chinese person and they will tell you this). While we may think they’re wrong, that is where they’re coming from. They do not have access to the information we do (even on the net because of the Great Firewall of China). Huge protests in the West will not make Tibet independent. As you have seen from this very comments page, the Chinese people would not stand for a government that gave in to Western pressure on Tibet. That is just not in the cards.The most likely result if the protests continue is that the Chinese government will accelerate Han Chinese immigration into Tibet and solve the Tibetan problem by drowning the locals in sheer numbers. The only hope of avoiding this is quiet negotiation by Western powers in support of the Dalai Lama’s efforts to get some autonomy for Tibet within China, while trying to stave off further Han Chinese immigration. And this is a long shot. As for China’s lack of human rights: during the Cultural Revolution, I don’t recall any protests at all in the West about China’s lack of human rights. China probably has the best government now that it has had in 4000 years. It has brought more people out of abysmal poverty faster than any country in world history. No one, no country, can do more than what is possible. It is not possible for a nation to go from intense inhumanity and torture in the early 1970s to being a world model for human rights and rule of law in 2008. But China is doing an amazing job of pulling its own citizens out of misery. This needs to be acknowledged before we complain about the abuses that certainly do continue. The average grown-up Chinese person has seen huge changes for the better within her own lifetime. So understandably she is a little skeptical that it is just now… now, when Chinese human rights are in their best condition so far in Chinese history, and steadily improving (under the glare of the internet)— that we westerners are all of a sudden so concerned about Chinese human rights. To Chinese people, it looks very much as if there is an ulterior motive. Setting up the U.S. and China as enemies is the worst possible thing for our countries’ future. I hate to see people promoting this hatred and fear. I see the wave of young Americans going to China to study Chinese as a wonderful thing, and I see that young Chinese no longer feel they have to stay in the U.S. to have a good life. China’s progress is good for the world. On another issue— I feel so sorry for the Olympic athletes this year. One of my old boyfriends was chosen as an Olympic athlete to go to Moscow. His long years of work and hope went down the drain when Carter ordered the boycott of the Moscow Olympics. I would like to see the Olympics stationed permanently in their original home in Greece and taken out of the political realm, for the athletes’ sake. My two cents’ worth.