Attacks on unarmed Tibetans caught on tape

Europeans climbing Mt. Everest seem to have caught some extremely disturbing footage of Tibetans being picked off by Chinese soldiers while trying to make a pilgrimage to see the Dalai Lama in India. According to the narrator, the national Chinese news agency was broadcasting news that Chinese soldiers had been attacked by Tibetan pilgrims while trying to nonviolently persuade the Tibetans to return. I can't vouch for the video's authenticity, but I do see that it was produced by ProTV, which is the most popular channel in Romania, so I doubt that it's fake. On the upside, at least someone was watching.

Update: This is apparently an old story from 2006.

Tibet protests a reaction to meat prices?

In an article from AsianWeek about the roots of the discord in Tibet, the author puts forth the thesis that the agrarian nature of Tibet has clashed with rising demand for meat and grains worldwide. Raising livestock across the fertile Tibetan Plateau is the primary economic activity of Tibet, and China's voracious appetite for meat means that controlling the fertile lands of Tibet is important to the Chinese Communist Party as a means of controlling food prices, which if left unchecked could engender discontent among China's billions. Prices for meat are already highly distorted thanks to Western countries' farm subsidies, transportation subsidies, and ethanol subsidies, and the Chinese economy is hobbled by the remnants of a socialism.

It's no wonder that these two highly anti-market forces would conspire to oppress the average Tibetan, who is at the mercy of Beijing thanks to the lopsided economic outcome of the Communist Party's foray into pseudo-capitalism. It also explains the attacks on noodle shops in Tibet as a form of protest:

Tibetans were buying a leg of lamb for the price of a whole animal, and few would ever stop to consider the inflated price of fuel and truck leasing for the Muslim middleman. In the first day of the Lhasa riots, most of the casualties of arson were Hui Muslim noodle restaurant workers, who migrated to the newly prosperous provincial capital over the past decade — just as Mexican immigrants have gone to major cities to work as dishwashers.

And in other, slightly-related news, on Intrade, futures in any EU country officially boycotting the Olympics are trading at 45%.

Crashing the party in London

It looks like the Chinese government is taking the heat in London. The Communist Party's big PR bungle (thinking the Olympics would impress the world) is mounting. It's a good sign for those who hope that China's big coming is ruined (I count myself proudly among them), because there are still four months until the start of the Olympics, and the world is simmering with protectionist disconnect. The Democratic primaries and ensuing presidential race don't help matters, as Clinton and Obama are already falling over themselves to suck up to the ghost of John Edwards. Given McCain's absent understanding of economics, I'd be surprised if he and Obama (or, in the case of an inconveniently-timed Black Panthers endorsement, Clinton) don't start arguing over who can protect American jobs as well as they do in Gaza.

Communist party PR: who can, who can't

China has reaffirmed its total ineptitude with handing PR on an international scale in claiming the Dalai Lama is orchestrating suicide attacks. It looks like China will be spared a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, but I doubt the Tibet crisis will be the last one before the end of the games in late August. I think China has grossly overplayed its hand in hosting the Olympics – at least in America, China is the villain du jour because of the latest anti-globalization backlash provoked by the longer-than-ever presidential election season. Europe has a similar antagonism, divided between intellectuals who look down on their human rights abuses and lack of freedom, and those who have been riled up by protectionist sentiment. The CCP has become so sure of its propaganda techniques at home that thinks that they'll work against world audiences. The truth is that they probably don't even work in China – the threat of the state coming down is strong enough to coax people into either apolitical or pro-party stances. I don't see this at all helping China anywhere where it matters (i.e., advanced democracies). In the rest of the world, the power and money is in the hands of people who aren't particularly concerned with China's big coming out party.

China ought to take a page from Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's totalitarian dictator. The Soviets had taught him well, and he turned on the Soviet Union (at least publicly) and managed to be the only communist dictator to secure Most Favored Nation trade privileges from the US. He knew that identifying a common enemy was key to obtaining favors from the West (at least till he went too far and squandered it all in the late '80s), and that allowed him to do some pretty terrible things. Essentially, Ceaușescu courted the West by railing against the Soviets, all in order to cover up behavior that was for more anti-liberal than anything in the USSR after Stalin.

Putin used the same model, and anti-terrorism was what he used to get Bush to look into his eyes and "get a sense of his soul" – and it was a good sense. Meanwhile, it's likely that Russia fabricated a lot of the attacks that were supposedly perpetrated by "Chechen terrorists." The apartment bombings that were the direct cause of the Second Chechen war were most likely black flag operations by the KGB FSB. Moscow theater crisis, too.

Of course, dictatorships have no monopoly on disingenuous PR. America has clearly provoked, if not intentionally, a lot of Islamic terrorism against itself, all in the name of rooting it out. Thankfully for Americans, it doesn't do nearly as well with PR than the dictatorships.