CmdrFenix.org

That long golden road to China
In the past several decades, China’s economy has moved at an amazing pace. Unfortunately, their progress has caused us to leave the moral ground for basing our foreign policy on the economic ground.

Back on Feb 2nd, The US proceeded with a normally scheduled arms shipment to Taiwan. Per the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, we have supplied defensive arms to Taiwan. This of course has rubbed China the wrong way. Now back when this treaty was signed, China’s economy was strong, but still developing. It made sense for them to agree to this since it limited the arms to a major enemy. Now with the economic pressure they could leverage, you see all sorts of objections over the same arm sales we’ve done for 31 yrs, and for which we have never broken that treaty.

Trade relations between the U.S. and China appear to be hitting a rough patch, with China publicly threatening to impose sanctions on U.S. companies participating in the arms sales to Taiwan, leading some observers to express concern over the growing war of words between Washington and Beijing.

Back in Jan, Google refused to abide by the search engine filtering that the chinesse gov’t was mandating. It looked like for once, a corporate entity was standing up to them. That was until China launched a pre-emptive strike against Google. Let’s not mince words. I don’t think anyone has any doubt about who did the attacks. No they didn’t use missiles, bombs, or aircraft carriers…

Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming conclusion that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

“… There is always a way in!!!” (C&C Generals – Chinese hacker unit)

Now of course, the filtering on google’s engine was turned back on. They rolled over and the “attacks” have stopped. Amazing how that works, eh?

Most recently, this past week, Pr Obama met with the Dalai Lama in a very low key and quiet fashion, which was of course followed with another round of protests from China.

President Barack Obama personally welcomed the Dalai Lama to the White House Thursday and lauded his goals for the Tibetan people, but he kept their get-together off-camera and low-key in an attempt to avoid inflaming tensions with China.

At the risk of angering Beijing, Obama did tell the exiled spiritual leader that he backs the preservation of Tibet’s culture and supports human rights for its people. He also gave encouragement to the Dalai Lama’s request for talks with the Chinese government.

Good to see the president has a pair of balls and would keep to his campaign promise of doing “that which was right” even in the face of opposition. I guess he should have amended that to say, “… as long as it doesn’t piss off China”.

At some point, someone is going to have to draw a line in the sand and say no more. The human rights violations, the oppression, and the downright aggression against anything they disagree with at some point will need to be addressed. I just hope something gets done BEFORE China has the power to throw a switch and collapse our economy because we can’t get our $0.15 widgets from them since we have no cost effective domestic production. Why can’t we get effective domestic production? We have labor unions that help drive up the cost of production. We have higher cost of living over here and higher cost of doing business thanks to taxes and other contributing factors. In short, they have us by the short hairs at this point and without a sec of balls, I doubt we’ll do anything to stop it.