External Affairs: The Globalization of China’s War on Tibet

Abstract

“Human rights” is a set of attitudes and sometimes laws and other agreements that exist in relation to political economy. Speakers from various countries such as Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States are nervous about China’s emergence in the twenty-first century as a world power. Occasionally heads of state and various pundits express concerns about human rights and the rule of law, but as China’s economy has grown human rights issues have more frequently taken a back seat to lucrative economic opportunities. China is not shy about doling out economic punishments to smaller nations that displease it. The neoliberal justification for looking the other way when dealing with politically repressive regimes has been that open markets lead to open societies, but this calculation can no longer be made with the presumption that liberal democracies are economically more powerful than the totalitarian regimes, as was the case throughout the twentieth century.¹ What happens when non-democratic societies without strong records regarding rule of law or the protection of human rights play with a much larger pile of chips? Attention to the Tibetan situation as it relates to PRC public relations efforts on a global scale provides some indicators of where China’s “Asian values” and so-called soft power initiatives lead, politically²