--Phillip
GLOBE EDITORIAL
Chinese shadows
ALTHOUTH THERE never was an axis of evil, there are murderous dictatorships in the world today that have one thing in common: support from the People's Republic of China. In Sudan, Burma, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe, China has become an enabler of evil.
Although Beijing's bosses rule in the name of communism, their motives for backing tyrants have nothing to do with the doctrines of Mao Zedong. Their reasons for helping the genocidal regime in Sudan avoid meaningful United Nations Security Council sanctions, or for voting against a Council resolution to censure the military junta in Burma, are more capitalist than communist. China's foreign policy is not driven by any quaint notions of solidarity with the wretched of the earth.
Being the world's fastest-growing consumer of energy and having almost no oil of its own, China wants to ensure its access to oil and protect its large investments in foreign oil fields and oil-producing consortiums. So China has partnered with governments that kill their own people, using its state-owned companies to acquire interests in oil or natural gas reserves around the world.
It is known that the China National Petroleum Company owns the largest slice of Sudan's two major oil consortiums and buys more than half of Sudan's oil exports. It is less well known that after Uzbekistan's despot Islam Karimov massacred protesters in the town of Andijan in 2005, China's foreign ministry said it staunchly supports Uzbekistan's "striking at the three forces, which are terrorism, splittism, and extremism."
This was China's way of equating Karimov's repression with Beijing's campaigns against autonomy for Tibet, independence for Taiwan, and political activism by Muslim Uighurs in western China. Shortly afterward, Karimov was received for a state visit in Beijing, where he signed a $600 million joint venture to develop oil fields in Uzbekistan.
Because China fears any outside interference, particularly on the issues of Tibet, Taiwan, and the Muslims of Xinjiang province, the government has elevated noninterference into a sacrosanct principle justifying its commercial and diplomatic partnerships with dictators such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Thus far, China seems unpersuaded by the economic argument that it is a waste of money to pursue energy security by buying stakes in oil reserves in Sudan or natural gas pipelines in Burma. So the best way to deter China's rulers from being the principal enablers of genocide in Darfur or forced labor and ethnic cleansing in Burma is to name them and shame them as often as possible. The last thing China's rulers want is to have the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing branded with the name that many are trying to apply: the Genocide Olympics.
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