Sam:
Now you mentioned religious persecution incident in Texas, I would agree with you that China is not a Confucian country. If China were, shouldn’t Hu Jintao protest the inhumane treatment of women and children and breaking their families apart because of different belief system? What Mencius would comment on the the Waco incident, what action he would advocate to address the injustice? Clearly he mentioned the right to revolution somewhere to such acts of tyranny. … but here people just regard it as soap opera…

Something interesting always happens in Texas. Here is a very interesting piece written by a Texans in Atimes and I wonder what is his heritage and I find his reflection on East-West communication as relevent to some of the discussions here.

All the moral indignation coming from Westerners about China and Tibet and human-rights violations [China bunkers down behind its great wall Apr 16] made me wonder: How would Western countries have fared in the good ol’ days of wanton imperialism? So I imagine some of the headlines in the 19th century: “Chinese Emperor Denounces Slaughter of Red Indians by US Army”; “Siamese King Decries Manufactured Excuse for US War with Mexico.” How about “Lynching of Blacks in American South Criticized by Ethiopian Emperor Menelik?” And the list could go on and on. The point is, what country has not had its period of turmoil, created by ethnic conflicts, economic disparities and religious antagonisms? I dare say if we compared how many indigenous North and South Americans were exterminated by European-descended peoples, the numbers would far exceed those of any non-white nation. And it appears the Westerners concerned about these rights transgressions have selective tastes and memories; the Sudanese conflict has been around for more than 20 years before this sudden outburst of George Clooney-inspired activism, and the Buddhist majority’s repression of Tamil rights in Sri Lanka has been assiduously avoided by these so-called human rights activists for the 30 years that civil war has been going on. Perhaps the latter is because the typical Western liberal has been brainwashed into equating Buddhism with peace and love and social equality (the myth that has got them so juiced up about Tibet.) That China’s possessions of Tibet and Xinjiang have been recognized for decades by all nations and is totally within its rights to suppress civil disturbances seems not to matter a whit to the Western white who still has images of Mongol hordes and Yellow Perils lurking in their collective zeitgeist. But since China is the latest substitute for the Soviet Union (al-Qaeda just can’t quite cut the mustard in this regard), any excuse to pillory them and deflect attention from Western violations of international law and humanity comes in quite handy. China is successful internationally precisely because it has chosen a different path than the militaristic pseudo-diplomacy of the West, yet Westerners want them to violate that success strategy and engage in Western-style interference in the Sudan conflict. This level of hypocrisy staggers the imagination. Perhaps the West should be more like the East, not vice versa. But that philosophy will never fly in the Western know-it-all mindset that all good things originate in their hemisphere. The bottom line is the Western modality of thinking is fundamentally racist and two-faced; Asians will always be perceived as slightly less than human, with only the thin veneer of civilization cloaking their barbarism, and that any analogous behavior on the part of whites is merely their way of spreading Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman values, which everyone knows is the guiding light of the universe. …
Hardy Campbell
Houston, Texas, USA (Apr 22, ’08)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Letters.html

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