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April 17, 2007

Crossette: Red China's Growing Footprint

 

Barbara Crossette, former New York Times UN Bureau Chief now writing for the United Nations Association of the United States posted an article today about China’s emerging role as world human rights savior.

Crossette proffers, "But a groundbreaking new poll shows that China's official policy may have been out of line with public opinion among the Chinese people, who strongly support action anywhere human rights abuses are severe"  [Emphasis added]. One could certainly say that.

Crossette in her article makes note of a recent poll taken in China for which over 70% of respondents said they would like to see both the UN and China take a more active role in preventing genocide and other atrocities in places like Darfur, Sudan, among others; however, we are left wondering why even as Crosette doesn't appear even to understand the weight of the facts about which she is writing.

The Chinese public's endorsement of Security Council action was even more pronounced when asked not specifically about Darfur but more broadly about UN action to stop abuses. China led all nations with 76 percent of those polled saying that the council has the responsibility to protect people from severe rights violations such as genocide "even against the will of their own governments." (74 percent of Americans agreed.) And 72 percent of Chinese said the Security Council "should have the right to authorize the use of military force…to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide."

It is curious the way in which only polls that further the already-decided-upon policies of the Chinese Communist dictatorship are given an unusual blessing by that regime and allowed to even take place:

Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland (PIPA), which publishes WorldPublicOpinion.org, said that while it hasn't always been easy to poll in China, for this survey "we were able to ask all of the questions that we wanted without any interference at all." Kull, who is also the editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org, works with the polling firm Globescan in framing surveys.

"We're always asking questions about the reliability of the data we're getting, particularly when we're dealing with authoritarian governments," said Kull, who called the Chinese results in this poll "striking." PIPA has also done polling in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where there was initial resistance to public opinion polls.  

Given China’s own horrible human rights record however (read: millions of political prisoners, tortured, murdered, thousands having their organs harvested, the export of arms to rogue or terrorist regimes and organizations), it is also strange that Crossette would not spend more time discussing the apparent hypocrisy of that regime and begin to question its motives for both allowing the poll and pushing forward with enlarging its footprint in global affairs.

Beijing and its axis vision of globalization is seeking its own hegemonic role in the world, and as much wishes to become a state which is seen as a leader at the UN particularly in the UN Security Council and particularly in pushing for intervention through force. While China has built ties with African and other troubled spots around the world in the past (China was very cozy with the Rwandan regime that massacred hundreds of thousands in that country’s genocide in 1994), China has been recently moving more aggressively to play more of a force-related role through various pretenses, in classic early-adventurist style.

So it should be no surprise that the regime known for gagging all public opinion with which it does not agree would be willing today to allow such a poll to be conducted under its watch. Yet, what does the poll really tell us? Kull is also struck by the popularity in the poll for a stronger UN:

"We have an extraordinary set of questions here about [what people think] about the UN and what they want the UN to do," said Kull. "It's really quite amazing: virtually universal support for a much stronger UN, a much more robust UN with a standing peacekeeping force, regulating universal arms trade, go into any country to inspect for human rights violations….It's quite a story."

As for popular Chinese support for a stronger UN, there really is a story behind the story: namely the pronounced desire of the Chinese people to see themselves freed of the tyranny that binds them. Given the abuses that continue all across China at the hands of that regime, their support for a stronger UN can almost certainly be seen as a cry for help.

 

 

Posted by Martin at April 17, 2007 08:51 PM

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