Chinese Spy Caught, Too Late

Washington Post reports: (If this doesn't disturb you, there's a problem.)

Prosecutors called Chi Mak the "perfect sleeper agent," though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.

Eventually, Mak's job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China -- fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.

And it seems that there have been a whole slew of recent arrests of Chinese agents, posing as students, scientists, and more. Some of them have been here for years, seemingly totally assimilated to American culture.

The president, both the current one and the next, must deal with this situation. There needs to be a lot more caution about Chinese nationals in the United States and a lot more caution regarding classified technological information. Mostly, we need to use, publicly, language of moral reproach toward the People's Republic. Call them by name; tell the world what they are. Perhaps there is also an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone: for example, cancel $500 million in federal debt to China for every spy that is discovered. We need some concrete way of phasing out economic ties with them, or more moderately to use economic pressure to achieve the goals of releasing political prisoners, ending the persecution of Christians and Falun Gong, backing away from Taiwan, and giving incrementally more autonomy to Tibet.

Now that I think about it a bit more, I think the Beijing Olympics are going to be a good thing. We need to use them to continue to step up reporting on China's crimes against humanity, their imperialism, their aggression. Drew Sharp mentioned that we failed to recognize the British monarchy a hundred years ago in the Olympic Games in London; let's go, show them up, and have our athletic contingent publicly disrespect China's overlords for their heinous crimes.

Sissy Handwringing Over Serious Problems

My first instinct when I saw this was: It sure is nice for SOMEone on the Left (or, really, even on the Right) to notice China's human rights abuses--although merely persecuting Christians hadn't been enough:

Sen. Barack Obama said he is conflicted about whether the U.S. should be a full participant in this summer’s Olympics in Beijing because of China’s human rights record.

“I am of two minds about this,” the Democratic presidential hopeful said in an interview aired Wednesday on CBS’s “The Early Show.” “On the one hand, I think that what has happened in Tibet, China’s support for the Sudanese government in Darfur, is a real problem.”

Still, Obama said, “I am hesitant to make the Olympics a site of political protest because I think it’s partly about bringing the world together.”

Awww. That reminds me of an old Coke commercial. Anyway, then I thought, who the heck cares? Ominously, Drew Sharp:

It's time for people to see the separation of sports and politics as it really is -- an Olympic myth.

And it's time the U.S. tells the Chinese government that it will not tolerate the heightened subjugation of government dissidents in the months leading up to biggest moment in recent Chinese history -- the Beijing Olympics.

And if it continues, the Americans must boycott the Games.

Our state's worst sports writer goes on, naturally, to moralize about the evils of corporations, Big Macs, and Coca-Cola. Maybe he and Obama should chat.

In any case, it's maybe not such a good idea for Obama's foreign policy to hearken back to Carter's. Jimmy Carter, of course, is our best ex-president (in the sense of having been the person most qualified to be made an ex-president) and the last president to boycott the Olympic Games. They were held in the Soviet Union; the USSR had just invaded Afghanistan. Carter figured, hey, the Soviets will probably feel really bad if we deprive our hard-working athletes, who have been waiting for this moment their whole lives, of the chance to earn an Olympic medal. So bad that they'll probably give up that whole war thing! It worked so well that Americans decided to give Carter a nice, long vacation and turned to Ronald Reagan to maybe finish the job. He, famously, armed the native Afghanis, leading to the USSR's demoralizing defeat there.

No one loves a good symbolic act more than liberals, but it's hard to say what exactly the effect is on Communist regimes, who have always tended to be ends-justify-the-means types. On the other hand, it's fairly easy to tell what the effect will be on American morale. Oh, good, no Olympic games for us this year. Guess we'll wait for our star tracksters to age another four years. Too bad there's only a short window for a lot of these players, who have remained amateurs solely to earn the Olympic gold, to compete at the highest level.

Of course, we notably slapped an infamous tyrant in the face during the Olympic Games in 1936, when black athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals on Aryan-supremacist Adolph Hitler's home court. But you're right; boycotting is much better.

Human Rights, Canadian Diplomacy Style

Canada's Conservative government will embrace a One China policy, according to United Press International:

Canada's minority Conservative government is moving to assure China it supports a "one-China" policy including Tibet and Taiwan, the Globe and Mail reported.

Foreign affairs experts told the newspaper Canada has officially held the policy since establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing since 1970 but in recent weeks, Canadian officials have stopped using couched terms regarding Taiwan or Tibet.

You know, this gives me an idea. Guess what, Canada? We're going to annex you. Don't try to stop it; our military is far vaster than yours, even with our Iraq commitment. And why not? You're white-majority, we're white-majority. We're a former British colony, you're a former British colony. Oh, and when we come we're going to have a colonization policy by which we move Texans and Southerners into every one of your cities. Aren't you happy to be part of the Motherland? (We forgot, we'll also enforce an official Christian faith on you, of course. You don't have any small, harmless, unorthodox religious sects, do you? Because we hate people like that.)

The free world cannot shirk its responsibility to marginalize tyrants and murderers like those in the Chinese Communist Party. We must do our best to ensure the freedom of Taiwan against their would-be oppressors. We must speak out publicly about the horrors being perpetrated against Christians, Falun Gong, and Tibetans. The PRC are the real imperialists here, and we must stop kowtowing to them.

China Clarifies Human Rights Record

BBC News has the story:

Clashes between protesters and security forces in Tibet's main city of Lhasa have left at least two people dead, according to reports.

An emergency official told AFP news agency that many people had been hurt and an unspecified number had died.

The US-based Radio Free Asia quoted witnesses who said they had seen at least two bodies on Lhasa's streets.

Rallies have continued all week in what are said to be the largest protests against Beijing's rule in 20 years.

Well, at least this time they had the decency to kill Tibetans instead of students. After all, the students wanted democracy; the Tibetans just want to have their own country. You know, like they did before China conquered it a number of decades ago. Looks like all those "Free Tibet" stickers weren't quite as efficacious as people might have wanted. Well, but it's the thought that counts. In any case, in the story, the Chinese dispute that Tibet has ever been independent. Seriously.

Richly, yesterday the Chinese government "hit back" on human rights, accusing the Americans of perpetrating the worst human-rights abuses in modern times. Here's a bit:

The report comes in response to the US State Department's annual survey of human rights across the world.

Although the report accuses China of denying its people basic freedoms, the country is not listed as one of the world's most systematic rights violators.

And...hmmm....

"Stop exercising double standards on human rights issues and wrongly meddling in the internal affairs of other countries," said ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

He added that China's achievements on human rights had been "widely recognised by the international community".

Evidently not widely recognized enough. But come, their victims are only crazy religious people like, you know, practicing Christians and Falun Gong members. Still, the bit about meddling in other people's affairs is a bit much, considering that not only did they ruthlessly invade and subjugate the independent nation of Tibet, they also want to take over the utterly unwilling citizens of the free nation of Taiwan. Just WHO is the imperialist aggressor here? I wonder if the "imperialist" charge is used against the United States because it deflects that criticism from the truly imperialist powers, for example the old USSR, today's Russia, and the "People's" Republic of China.

Americans may not care much about Taiwan, but it would be a serious blow to freedom in the world if the nefarious PRC is allowed to subjugate that bastion of freedom, as well.