China's reaction to the Melbourne film festival is childish and stupid, exactly like the childish and stupid response by some in the Muslim world to the Danish cartoons.
The Melbourne film festival is scheduled to show The 10 Conditions of Love, a film about Rebiya Kadeer, (pictured) international Uighur spokeswoman. But apparently because China believes she had something to do with the Uighur riots that killed 197 people last month, everyone needs to hunt her down and quickly deliver her to a glorious Chinese revolutionary court that is as fair as it is swift.
The Chinese are insisting that Australia ban the film and force it to be pulled from the film festival, echoing the sentiments of pointless Muslims demanding that the State of Denmark take responsibility for the actions of a private Danish newspaper. They've also expressed "supreme dissatisfaction" with both Japan and Australia for even granting Ms. Kadeer a visa to enter the country.
This is a good thing, though, because it provokes reflection on how readily we've accepted China so far as a major power player in the world. China's already terrified the Melbourne City Council by threatening to revoke its sister-city status with Tianjin, and its influence will only grow.
If China keeps ordering civilised countries to do retarded things like ban films for no reason, Chinese economic clout will mean that even if they can't treat us like their hapless subjects, they will have the means to force us into a reluctant self-censorship.
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2 comments:
This should give you an insight into the psychology of the CCP. They are paranoid and utterly devoid of good faith, but they are not entirely stupid. What superficially appears to be a counter-intuitive reaction, in my view, simply restates the "bottom line" or, as some other analysts have defined it (see the RAND report on Chinese military power) the "red line". Drilling the same point across regardless of how gauche it sounds generates internal consistency for what is already a system riven with contradictions. The sort of 1984 argument that if I tell you there are three lights where there are four, the oft-repeated falsehood will become truth.
The CCP believes that any attempt to back down will be viewed as a sign of weakness of tacit concession to groups it views as separatist. Indeed, the CCP's vision of the world is fundamentally Machiavellian/Legalist inasmuch as it believes, not without reason, that most other states, given a chance, would act in equally bad faith. In effect, the PRC still believes that it operates in a Bismarckian international system and behaves accordingly.
On a final note, that Kadeer character is not entirely wholesome either - very few international personalities are, including your Magic 'Gro Obama. If you carefully read the counter-propaganda the World Uyghur (oddly, often pronounced as Wigger) Congress churns out, you will find feeble attempts to claim that Uyghurs are Indo-European people to try to drum up sympathy in the West. Also, read Ms. Kadeer's revealing interview with "La Stampa" (www.lastampa.it
--> search "Kadeer").
tl;dr
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