China’s money blinds many to danger
February 10, 2006, Sydney Morning Herald
*Olympic Dam Uranium Mine - South Australia.
www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/chinas-money-blinds-many-to-danger/2006/02/09/1139465796018.html
It is wrong to trust the regime when it says it will not use Australian uranium for weapons, writes Yu Jie.
FOR the past few years, Western countries have gradually lost their
vigilance toward the Chinese Communist Party regime. Western countries
investing in China have become the greatest help to the maintenance of
the Chinese Communist Party’s economic growth.
This is particularly the case with the lopsided development of Shanghai,
whose economic bubble is for the most part driven by Western
investment.
Western government and business circles are like the ostrich, pretending
they cannot see the reality of China’s political system, pretending
they don’t know the appalling human rights catastrophe now happening in
China, such as the ruthless persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and
the Christians worshipping in household churches – more than 100 million
citizens pursuing freedom of belief.
This kind of persecution didn’t just happen in the Middle Ages; it’s happening in China today.
The Western policy of appeasement is driven by economic interest. In
order to sell China Airbuses and high-speed trains, the French
President, Jacques Chirac, when he visited China, shamelessly said the
Tiananmen incident belongs to the past century and we should let bygones
be bygones.
In the greatest rebuke to him, not long after Chirac returned to France,
the Chinese communist authorities opened fire on villagers in Dongzhou
in Guangdong province. The Tiananmen incident remains China’s bloody
reality.
The French and German governments have for a time energetically
campaigned for the European Union to lift the embargo on selling weapons
to China, but the regime is one that maintains its political rule by
killing people.
I can be regarded only as a nominal citizen. I am 32 this year, but I
have never participated in an election – not an election of the head of
state nor an election of the mayor. Not even once.
The legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party rule does not come from
elections; it comes from military might. The founder of the party, Mao
Zedong, once openly declared: “Political power comes from the barrel of a
gun.” There has not been any change in this principle today.
One aspect of the party authorities’ foreign policy is to politely
propagandise the foreign policy of China’s peaceful rise to the people
of the West.
Another aspect is to deliberately let Zhu Chenghu, the head of the
National Defence University’s Defence Academy and a People’s Liberation
Army major-general, issue an aggressive threat to the whole world, in
asserting that China can launch a nuclear war on the West, particularly
the United States.
Zhu Chenghu is a crown prince of pure lineage, the grandson of the
founder of the Chinese Red Army, Zhu De. According to the Chinese
Communist Party ruling principle that “the party commands the gun”, it
is not possible for a mere major-general to issue this kind of
individual opinion on his own.
Even in a Western country with freedom of expression, a high-ranking
military general cannot indiscreetly make his personal views about a
nation’s nuclear policy known in a public forum.
Zhu’s views must therefore have received silent approval from the
highest authorities – even from the nation’s President, Hu Jintao. It’s
just like a master unleashing a fierce and vengeful dog to threaten the
neighbours.
But Australian authorities blithely plan to export uranium ore to this
highly dangerous regime, one side willingly believing a series of
agreements, which China signed, that this uranium ore will not be used
for military purposes.
But when have the Communist Party authorities genuinely respected international agreements?
The European Union should not lift the weapons embargo against China, and Australia should not export uranium ore to China.
This shortsighted behaviour can in the short term bring a definite
economic benefit. But in the long term it will inevitably endanger world
peace.
Yu Jie, the co-founder and vice-president of Independent Chinese PEN
Centre, is a writer and intellectual based in Beijing. Translation by
Chip Rolley.