Bill Stewart wrote...

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> To: Justin <justin@soze.net> CC: cypherpunks@ssz.com Subject: Re: China (was Mike Hawash) Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 23:04:21 -0700

At 02:27 AM 05/02/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:

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At 2003-05-02 00:25 +0000, Bill Stewart wrote:

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Interesting. I've recently been reading a book by a guy who spent much of the mid-90s illegally tramping around the ethnic areas of western China (particularly the Tibet/Burma borders with Sichuan and Yunnan) trying not to get thrown out of the country too often.

Is that sort of like documented immigrants (not undocumented _citizens_ like Mexicans who live within earshot of the border, speak no english, pay no taxes, and think they're part of Aztlan

No, it's more like the US in ~1870 or 1890 - the big neighboring territory had pretty much been conquered, though a lot of them still spoke Spanish, and the other big neighboring territory had been reconquered, but a lot of larger minority ethnic groups like the Navajo hadn't been totally wiped out, though the smaller tribes were gradually getting killed off or having their land stolen and getting forced onto smaller reservations and having US military forts put in the middle to govern them (which was bad) or whatever the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent out to "help" them and "civilize" them (which was ultimately more devastating), and there was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the local economy (there's no real equivalent to killing off the buffalo, but periodically "taxing" all their livestock is sort of similar.)

Well, I'd say it's more complex than that. Until recently, the view in China towards minorities was that Minorities are fine and dandy as long as they don't exhibit traits that are too obviously non-Han while presenting a threat to Han-dominated areas. Now, it's more like "Hum...how can we turn a profit with these folks? Tourism? Manufacturing?" Overall, the Chinese have never seemed to have the bloodlust that western countires had...they'd always prefer to absorb another culture rather than kill it outright. And yes, while in China I tried to travel to Tibet with a Japanese buddhist monk, but Tibet was suddenly "closed" due to the 80s riots in Lhasa (and look on a map...that's a LARGE area to simply declare "closed", but it was fairly enforceable due to the few viable routes into Tibet). IN addition, in 1988 there were many cities closed to foriegners. But that's mostly all gone now, as joint foerign-market-oriented factories proliferate in more and more parts of China. Right now, you'd have to say that China was fairly "free" from an economic standpoint, and not free politically, with all other areas somewhere in between. _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail