'CHINA-WATCH' ADDED TO TIBETSPACE

An article of faith:  I believe that mindlessly opposing China and Tibet damages the Tibetan cause in the long run, while at the same time hindering movements within China for an open society.

Another article of faith:  I also believe that awareness of human rights violations and our capacity to do something constructive about these violations begins with information.  Clear information, divorced from political motivation, broadens our consciousness concerning human suffering.  Period.  And this, in turn, increases our fundamental stores of compassion.  Luckily, there's a one-stop website that will help us with our task of increasing awareness:  Human Rights Watch.  Stop by often, subscribe to its feed, read its stories, imagine that the characters of those stories are your family members. 

The fact that they happen to be other people's family members, after all, is simply an accident of birth.

To add my own small effort to the global project of raising awareness, I have added a new feature to TIBETSPACE that I have named China-Watch.  Here I will post links that highlight China's increasing use of preemptive anger, the kind of anger that gives rise to those ominous pronouncements promising China's stern disapproval if a certain course of action is undertaken by a member of the international community.  Particularly actions regarding Tibet or human rights.

These threats, of course, reveal many things about China's aging leadership:  their paranoia, their bullying mentality, their neurotic obsession with Tibet and His Holiness--particularly with his universal popularity--and their fear of other countries deciding to support many of the concerns that are central to his platform:  human rights, non-violence, egalitarianism, and compassion. 

And of course these domineering qualities are part and parcel of all totalitarian regimes. 

But in this case, one of the victims of Chinese oppression--the Tibetan people--have something that many such victims do not have.  They have an international voice, and it is in the spirit of deepening the context for that voice that I offer China-Watch.