China says "don't interfere"

Free Tibet Flag
Originally uploaded to flickr by Gromit Lad

I just "love" China's government telling Bush that one country shouldn't be meddling in the internal affairs of another country.

"The Chinese government puts people first, and is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens' basic rights and freedom"

"We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues."

--Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, Bush chides Beijing over rights: BBC News

I'm sorry... did I read that right?

Tibet was a country in its own right long before China decided to rewrite history and claim otherwise. Is there a greater form of "interfering" than forced occupation and ethnic cleansing?

The Chinese government claims that the regions they occupy really want to be assimilated, and that anyone who claims otherwise is a splittist or a terrorist. Why do people buy into this when it is a country with known serious human rights "issues" and no true freedom of speech or the press is saying it? If a husband said this of the wife he had been seen beating; a wife who finally struck him back and then been publically beaten again for daring to so, we would be ashamed of ourselves if we blamed the real victim for her plight. Especially if we knew that the battered wife had been forced into her marriage in the first place.

H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama has long since stopped asking for complete indepencence, and asks now only for the Autonomous Region of Tibet to be allowed self-government as pertains to domestic matters, and a guarantee that they would be allowed to mantain their culture and control their natural resources in peace. These are all things they were promised they would be allowed decades ago when the Chinese occupation began. After all they've been subjected to, H.H. offers to stay "married" to China as long as the beatings, exploitation and oppression stop. For this he is called a subversive.

China "is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens' basic rights and freedom"?

How are we supposed to reconcile that with their oppression by the PRC in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Tibetan Autonomous Region? How many people in these so-called "autonomous" regions have been killed or displaced from their homes, or been tortured and/or imprisoned for their cultural expressions and spiritual practices?

The irony is flabbergasting. I only wish it were surprising.

I hope either Stewart or Colbert will pick up on the irony of all this because no one else in the media seems to have noticed.