I'm about to go to sleep so I'll keep this short. I'm Chinese, all my forebears are from HK or the surrounding area, I have immediately friends and family living in HK and I still travel back there often. I am 100% ethnic Chinese, and I married Chinese (I even watch Chinese cable television, if that matters) . I choose the HK icon because I have a cultural, ethnic, personal, and emotional affinity with the place, and that's never going to change. -inlove I know this question is perhaps your way of vetting or validating where my opinion should be (to see where my allegiance should lie based on my cultural heritage), but there in lies the problem; I side for right versus wrong, whether it's US, Chinese, Israeli, Arab, Indian, Pakistani; whatever. In the case of Christies vs the PRC, the art house was clearly in the wrong so I sided with the PRC. In the cases of Japanese denial of war crimes in Nanjing, I side with the PRC; in the cases of Chinese parents bringing attention to shoddy construction vs the PRC, I side with the Chinese parents, in the cases of Chinese parents of children melamine poisoned vs the PRC, I side with the Chinese parents. And of course, the PRC is totally wrong in Tibet. There are many different ways to co-opt a civilization, but the PRC insists on using a bludgeon. I know that many people look upon the PRC government as the same as the Chinese people, and so they argue everything pro-China to stick up for Chinese people, right? But this ethnic affiliation can leave you vulnerable or your views biased. This is the same tactic that the Israeli government (quite successfully) uses in getting American Jews to support Israeli aggression in the mid east. This has helped to perpetuate long standing problems between the US and the Arab world, and at great cost (ie 911). At any rate, there is no difference between the PRC and Israel. I side with the Palestinians; they're not all car bombers and rocket launching terrorist. They're people who are being unfairly treated. :nono: I argue based solely on principles, not on ethnic or cultural affiliation, and despite it being unpopular. It really doesn't matter to me whether this case is consider by many to be China versus the US. It could easily have been Ecuador versus Peru. The central element of right and wrong and fairness is what matters to me most. Without laws and our abiding by them, the world would soon devolve into a cave man state, where the only legal 'right' would exist at the end of a club. :rolleyes2: By blockading a ship that has the right of navigation in international waters, the PRC is acting like a pirate. If this was off the coast of Somalia (where BTW, the PRC navy currently has elements in the antipiracy effort), even Chinese naval units would agree that they would open fire when confronted with such an act. My opening preamble stated that the PRC has started playing a very dangerous game, as this current state of affairs had preexisted for years. The PRC recently decided to ignore years of past practice (for whatever reason) and escalate the friction. -ohmy My bottom line assessment? This was a political gambit to simultaneously test the resolve of the new US administration, while distracting the world and US from the Tibetan anniversary. Sorry, gotta keep this one short... -sleep
oh..I see..a self directed stance on global politics;someone who tries to take no side base on ethnicity nor with their host country and striving for global political correctness. Hurray to you! Works great in theory but can't say the same for the real world. I wish all politicians around the world are like you, this world would be so peaceful. Reality reality check. I admire your heart, dude. Sorry if I overacted. I have encountered westerners in the pass who tried to imperonate themselves as ethnic chinese with the intention to deceive people. I am in the process of cultivating the trust now.
For whatever it is that you want to label it, my position has always been one towards fairness, following the rules; and if the rules are blatantly unfair, then working to change them. I have a particular issue with war crime denial (Armenia, Jewish Holocaust, Khmer Rouge, Nanking, Rwanda, Kosovo etc) and also with the self serving political ambition that leads up to them (eg Darfur, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Tibet, etc). These names and places are but the tip of the iceberg in man's cruelty to man, the majority of the time, arisen from outright personal or state greed and avarice. In a nut shell, you can categorize nearly half of all human history into such a definition. Further, what really pains me most personally, is that as all the suffering that our (I'm assuming you're Chinese too) particular ethnic and cultural forebears endured were typically at the hands of their brethren and not some evil foreign power. My main issue is with poor governence and governments. It doesn't matter where they sit. I disagreed with Bush's little walk in the sand when it started and I took great heat and flak from colleagues at work over it. Now I'm fond of reminding them that only one president ago (when Clinton turned over his office to Bush), the US had the lowest deficit that it ever had in history, and people were talking about what to do with the surplus cash. Then one president later, the country is in financial ruin with an exhausted military, all thanks to Bush (and yes, I will assign responsibility where there is clear indication for such). As it sits now, this latest admin has to deal with extricating itself from an Iraq that we never should have been in, deal with a much more powerful Iran because its ruthless and opposing political and military counterbalance is gone (by our hand no less, and for what? We STILL haven't got Bin Laden). Given the US economic debacle, it seems that the PRC is nonetheless willing to play power chess with it as a litmus of resolve. The problem for the PRC is simple; it wants as little US involvement in the South China Sea so that it would remove the only reasonably powerful contestant (besides itself) from the argument. For the US, its the amount of credibility that it needs to show its Pacific partners that the US will be able to come to their aid against an expansionist China. As such, there is much more at political stake for the US than for China, and China knows this. That is why it decided to up the ante, make the US seem like the bad guy, while it walks away with the righteous air of the wronged partner. This at a time when the Tibetan anniversary arose, and under the watch of a new US administrator. So it kills two political birds with one stone for the PRC. My prediction, the PRC will 'make' the Chung-hoon maneuver aggressively to "force" the smaller PRC units to disengage, allowing the Impeccable to leave. That gives it the perceived moral high ground, drives up domestic support and distracts from China's own brewing ecomonic disaster. The world would then forget about it until the next manufactured confrontation. The danger here for the PRC is not so much a shooting incident with the US, but rather the perception of its neighbors of a ruthless and bloodthirsty China. This would make the West Pac Rim defensively armor up, and countries like VietNam, Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines, even Taiwan, go running back into the arms of the US. Imagine the US fully lock stocked and barreled, back in Subic and Cam Ranh Bay? This would mean US partners in everything from hookers to import export socks. The US would then take the cheaper outsource resource and cut China out of the economic loop while blanketing South East Asia in American influence anew. That is the economic and political nightmare that's causing lost sleep in ZhongNanHai. This side show in the ocean is just that, a side show. However, for the men and women stage players, a very dangerous one.
