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Reuters, 9/10:

Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said on Wednesday that "cultural genocide" was taking place in his homeland, with a wave of ethnic Chinese migrants making Tibetans a minority in their own region. "Some kind of cultural genocide is taking place," the Nobel Peace Prize winner told a conference in Madrid. "The culture (in danger) is very relevant to today's world."

Ethnic Chinese now outnumber Tibetans in most large towns and probably overall in the Tibet Autonomous Region, he said, adding that it was difficult to get reliable data. The Dalai Lama, who has run a government-in-exile from India since fleeing Tibet following a failed uprising in 1959, says he wants greater autonomy, not independence, for the Himalayan region...

China, whose troops marched in to Tibet in 1951, says the Dalai Lama is using his religious prominence to try and split Tibet from the motherland.

I've been speaking about the invasion and brutal supression of Tibet for years, but I never realized that Tibetans themselves were now a minority in their own nation. What's especially sad is that governments and megacorporations are accepting Mainland China, its cheap labor and ready consumer market with open arms. It's one of those areas where I thoroughly disagree with both Clinton and Bush, though at least the former wasn't as hypocritical as the latter about where major world threats lay.

Your opinions, pro or con?

Pro or con what?

Chinas policies towards Tibet or the wests lesse faire attitude?

I am sure you mean the latter.

I used to have a good Chinese friend that I unfortunately lost contact with after a heated debate about Taiwan. (I was heated he was calm).
I now think that I could have been more diplomatic but if you have read my posts you will know I rarely express my opinions with less than total conviction. Anyway, China’s policies in a number of arrears is one of the things that both makes me really angry and at the same despondent. The sad fact is that I see very little scope for coercing Chinas ruling elite into something they don’t want to do. They have ballistic missiles and of course a well developed nuclear weapons program – soon they might send their first astronaut into space. In short they are a power to be reckoned with.

Sanctions are often proposed as a solution but I can’t see them working although they certainly hit the poor in china very hard. But if somebody can make a suggestion how to make china behave that stands a chance of succeeding I shall be happy to march on the Chinese Embassy.

The way to get China to do anything isn't through force or intimidation; as our friend Tom shows us, they've got more than enough firepower to fight (and probably win) a land war in Asia.

In order to coerce China into any policy change is to threaten them with bankruptcy. The largest source of outside income in China is American companies that use the cheap labour force to make Nikes, Reeboks, Pepsi, Levi's and all sorts of other goods. If these companies were to leave and deprive China of a tremendous source of income, it would get someone's attention in Beijing. Of course, this also means those same companies abandoning a 1.2 billion person market, which is not something American capitalists are prone to do.

The bottom line unfortunately hinges upon the bottom line. Americans don't care about Tibetans any more than we care about Liberians; unless they have something we want (oil, cheap labour, hookers) we're not going to bat for them.

hi there HLD

Good to see you back.

Perhaps sanctions can work as HLD says; china would be hard hit and we are seeing a far more pragmatic approach, in some arrears, by the Chinese government. As for any European or US government having the guts to implement any kind of sanctions I seriously doubt - the economic market at the moment is still dazed after the knocks it has taken.

The future looks bleak for the indigenous Tibetans – in fact the future is almost always bleak for people that gets referred to as indigenous.

Originally posted by Tom
Perhaps sanctions can work as HLD says; china would be hard hit and we are seeing a far more pragmatic approach, in some arrears, by the Chinese government. As for any European or US government having the guts to implement any kind of sanctions I seriously doubt - the economic market at the moment is still dazed after the knocks it has taken.

Sanctions won't be done. They would require not merely the will to sacrifice some economic wellbeing for an ethical imperative, but the union of all potential economic partners to make it work. And we know, from past experience, that the lure of the world's fastest growing market would prove too great. Any nation would just love for most of the others to cut Mainland China off--so many more contracts for the others who keep the contact going.

There's also the niggling suspicion that the Chinese Communist Party won't give it to any pressure, no matter how thoroughly it's applied. All Chinese governments in recorded history have proven both hostile and extremely resistant to foreign demands of any sort. Negotiation isn't truly on the agenda, and never has been.