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By Tiger Tong, Contributor
This year is set to be a landmark
year for China. The well-anticipated 2008 Beijing Olympics is the
great arena for China to showcase its economic achievements in the
past three decades. However, it is also possible for China to be
humiliated.
The recent riots in Tibet and
violence in neighboring provinces are certainly perfectly timed. It
is the most serious riots in Tibet since March 1989. (Hu Jintao,
China’s president, made his name by being decisive and determined
to crack down on the 1989 Tibet riots during his term as the
Communist Party’s head of the autonomous region.) In early March,
the Chinese media reported that a crew thwarted an attempt of one
ethnic separatist from Xinjiang to crash the plane flying to
Beijing.
Furthermore, on March 18, Ma
Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s newly elected president, had called Wen Jiabao,
China’s prime minister, “overbearing, unreasonable, arrogant and
stupid,” after Wen appealed to Taiwanese voters to vote down two
referendums on membership of the United Nations. The two referendums
were set along with the recent presidential election.
In addition, Ma had said he will
not rule out the option of boycotting the Beijing Olympics “if the
Chinese authorities continue to suppress the Tibetan people and the
situation in Tibet worsens.” It is rare for Ma, who always looks
gentle in public, to hurl such a harsh verbal attack on Wen.
Among all the three potential
threats, in the past, only Taiwan stood out as a real threat to
China. To some extent, China has to thank one person—Chen
Shui-bian, Taiwan’s outgoing president, who had made things much
easier for Beijing. The deeds of Chen in his two terms have
successfully shaken the foundations of the pro-independent
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), a party used to be viewed as
upright and occupied the moral high ground.
More importantly, the economic
power between the Straits has been reversed. In 1996, Guangdong, the
biggest economy in the mainland, was only 27 percent of the size of
Taiwan measured by gross domestic product (GDP). In 2007, however,
Guangdong had surpassed Taiwan. At the same time, the economy of
Taiwan has been highly connected with the mainland, more and more
people realized that cooperation, rather than confrontation, is the
way of the future.
Ma’s harsh words might be in
part rationalized as election-campaign language with the intention
to lure middle or former pro-DPP voters as his supporters know well
that Ma wants to maintain the status quo, which is also in the
interests of Beijing.
For the problems of Tibet and
Xinjiang, from the political point of view, they are much simpler
than Taiwan as they are under the sovereignty of Beijing, and there
is no single country that recognizes their independence. However, in
part because of China’s unrefined public relationship skills on
the international stage, it is easier for Tibet, and to a less
extent Xinjiang, to create a backlash against China. Claims such as
“China terrorizes Tibet” may be far from the truth. From
episodic online report leakages, it is revealed that it is ordinary
Chinese civilians who were killed by riots.
9/11 has shown us cultural and
ethnic problems could be far more threatening to ordinary citizens
than direct political conflicts. Moscow was attacked, so was New
York and London, and there is no reason why other metropolises,
including Beijing, can stay immune from similar attacks.
In the past two decades, China
has been by and large stable socially and economically, and 2008
could be the toughest year since 1989. Probably it is about time for
ordinary Chinese to embrace a different world. As the old Chinese
saying goes, people earn their name by facing adversity.
Tiger Tong is an analyst with
China Knowledge, a premier provider of trade and investment
information on China.
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