4U2Play said:
The fact that Mao's government policies led to the death of tens of millions of Han Chinese is completely irrelevant to today's Tibetan uprising and possible boycott of the Beijing Olympics. I don't think you understand how to stick to the subject.
Comparing the cultural genocide of the Tibetans to "chocolate" as simply "a term from the western world" is strange. I realize English is your second language, but perhaps you could expand on this pearl of wisdom.
Your claim that nationalism among the Han "originally do not exist" is funny. The Chinese are among the most nationalistic people on the planet, in my experience. This idea of yours that the Han are "victims" is true only in the sense that everyone in China is subject to a brutal, repressive regime that brooks no dissent. However, for the Han to view Chinese minority groups as "first class citizens" is simply ignorance on their part. Any Han who knows the basic facts of what is happening to the Tibetans, Uighurs and others would never trade places with them.
Violence solved the Japanese Imperialists in WW2, really. Lucky for China.
Is there anything related to Mao? I don't think I made any reference to him...
If you know how much people in China still hated Japan somehow, and how some Japanese people still try to deny the terrible crime they commited, you probably won't say violent have settled them down. It did solved the urgent issue, but it didn't change the nature of the nation.
About the culture genecide and chocolate, I didn't mean to make any comparison, it was only a list of things come from the west that initially didn't exist in China, and not everyone good at applying them in their daily life. I'm sorry, if that phrase caused your confusion.
Culture genocide, have never been considered as a problem, even the emperor probably had done it many times. Took Qing dynasty as an example, the Qing was ruled by Manchu, and emperors has forced down Manchu cloth, hair style..etc aross the country. Western people definitely would say it's a genocide to the native Chinese culture. However, Manchu integrated with Han people, and the Chinese language itself gained a new development by adopting quite lots of new words which was initially from Manchu language. People see it as a development of both ethnic culture. Therefore, when western people throw terms like culture genocide to criticise the modern development in Tibet, ordinary Chinese people were like "
"
And in China, people can openly discuss the strengh and weakness of different human race, which probably would make a westerner very nervous and uncomfortable, but for Chinese people as long as the discussion was objective, no one would ever consider it as racism.
Actually, a lot of Han Chinese did trade their place with people from minority groups by changing their ethnic group information on their ID. I was unfortunate enough to born in a place that only 3 hours drive away from Confucius's home town, and high school kids from my province will have to face the highest entry requirement of the entire country in the state wide University entry exam. With the huge population base, 5 marks would put down hundreds, however, if one are from the minority groups, he can have 10 extra mark added to the final result. And the entry requirement is vary from province to province, Tibet has the lowest entry level. The kid in Tibet who can go to the best Uni in China would have no chance to do any higher education at all, if he was born in my province. *sigh*, the year I went to Uni, two kids commit suicide in my city, one day before they got the result of the exam. Guess if they had a chance to choose the place they were born, where it would be?
Anyway, I think without spending reasonable amount of time living (not just a sight-seeing tourist) in China, it's really hard to for you to understand the whole culture thing. Even the foreigners who lived in China for 5-6 years, sometimes got all confused and misunderstood sometime.
However, if you wanted to see and experience the country, welcome.
Back to topic:
Tibet problem has a already messy enough history, now with more and more involvement of Tibetan Youth Congress, who's president shamelssly admit that he doesn't care about the cost of life, and would use any way, include terrorism to fight for the independency of Tibet. And he also expressed his dissatisfaction with Dalai Lama's peace approach. It seems that the condition have the potential of getting out of control, from both Chinese government to Dalai Lama. I think Dalai probably somehow related to the riot, but he might didn't expect the see the violence. He send his representitives to talk to beijing in a quite often routine, for the time and effort he spend in the dialogue, it just doesn't make any sense if he now order someone to screw it all up.