Just Execute Them, or Welcoming a Chinese Superpower

Responding to ongoing protests against authoritarian dictatorship, the Chinese government has threatened to execute protestors who are being denied their human rights -- twice over.  First because they are denied freedom of speech, assembly, religion and residence, and second because their inalienable right to protest the denial of these core rights is met with the promise of a death penalty.  It's nice to see how many Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, are so eager to cozy up to China for whatever advantages it brings, and how the same Pakistanis who protest the unfair treatment of Afghanis, and attacks on Afghani civilians (through a discourse that is, too often, extreme in its assumptions and conclusions), are silent when it comes to their great ally's actual attitude to one of its most substantial Muslim populations. 

There are legitimate reasons for disagreeing with and protesting many American policies and actions in many parts of the world; why, then, is that sometimes fierce displeasure not shared for other places where Muslims are crushed underfoot, such as Arakan or East Turkestan?

Avari, still angry. 

It's funny, and sad, that whereas the Chinese government warned America away from internal interference in Iran, there is no assumption that America might have a hand in this.  Because even that would be too absurd to believe.  Just as the hardline establishment in Iran claims to believe the West has a hand in ongoing protests -- I do think they know this to be a falsehood, but find it politically beneficial -- they cannot ascertain if their own population really is fed up.  Because dictatorships do not understand, in the absence of a free media, how to gauge how their populations feel -- and any place where media becomes less free becomes itself less free.  I should like it if the Muslim world paid more attention to such incidences when choosing their allies; if and when China becomes dominant over the Middle East, what is to prevent a far larger, nearer hegemon from meddling far more severely in the internal affairs of those countries?  Right now, it is in China's reading of its own interest to help Iran and Pakistan, and smash the Uighurs.  In twenty years, the picture may be the opposite. 

Comments

[svend]

I'm no more impressed by the sophistication of Pakistani political discourse, but in fairness to Pakistan it doesn't have many friends these days and India's influence is only growing. It has little choice but to coozy up to Beijing.

If one state has earned a white-hot Islamist insurgency, it's China with its decades-long brutalization of the Uyghurs. It would be poetic justice for Beijing's ironfisted treatment of the hitherto peaceful Uyghurs to push them to widespread militancy.

Too bad China would have no compunctions about mowing down the whole native population if necessary. And it would probably get away scot-free if it did. Depressing.