No surrender from the French
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has met the Dalai Lama in Poland, despite angry threats from Beijing.
China had warned France that multi-billion dollar bilateral trade deals could be harmed if the meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader went ahead.
Beijing cancelled an EU-China summit last week which France, current holder of the EU presidency, was to host. Read more.
His Holiness gave us all a timely reminder in a speech a few days ago about the dangers of appeasing tyranny. So it was pleasing to read the BBC article this morning over cornflakes, because the Chinese attitude toward the robed one is petty in the extreme, even by their own tantrum-inclined standards. On this occasion the French stood firm, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the EU. Good for them.
You really need to be in China to get some sense of the vitriolic propaganda thrown at the Dalai Lama, and the revulsion the people consequently feel for this man and his followers. Only in China. Quite literally; only in China. Such is the nature of the constant media onslaught against the good monk, the only question people stop to ask is “why do westerners love a poor, crazy, splittist champion of serfdom and terrorism?” Beijing’s propaganda department has the answer for them: “Because western governments hate China, want to split China, want a weak China, have fooled their people with anti-Chinese propaganda.”
Stop a Chinese student anywhere in the world and ask them about their views and they’ll parrot the same message drilled into their heads by a thousand state-controlled media and classroom messages. There’s simply no desire to explore such matters further; they’ve been warned about the lies they will encounter in the west. There are always going to be a few diehards that believe the Earth is flat. But an entire nation of 1.3 billion people?
Anyone who believes that this state of mass group think is going to enhance the prospects of a more tolerant and peaceful world as China begins to cut itself an increasingly larger slice of world pie, has veered rather too close to the abyss at the end of their own flat Earth.
Sooner or later, one would hope, the CCP are going to have to allow their populace a deeper and more nuanced understanding of world affairs (both historical and current) than that which is provided by the “what you think is what we tell you” straitjackets presently forced upon the media and the national curriculum.
If not, the silly tantrums by Beijing that drive nationalistic sentiment among Chinese will eventually spill over into something worse. Perhaps the greatest irresponsibility of the Chinese government is that they don’t seem to care if it does. The world could do without another bully at the head of the table, and the only way to prevent it happening is to stand up to it. Vive la France !!