Yellowswift


Reviewer yellowswift should realise that his ideas apply more to the Chinese than anyone. Who is occupying the place, forcing everyone to their beliefs, denigrating the local culture?

The idea ' it is none of your business if we mistreat our women' is interesting. How far does it go? Practising slavery, torture, cannibalism? The old imperialists were not so far wrong in some things. But it is is a genuine question; how does non- interference balance against universal values? If there are no such things, then let us by all means disband the UN commission on the status of women, the London Anti-Slavery Society ( now known as 'Anti-Slavery International') and forget about those silly anti-apartheid demonstrations a while ago. We could also honor slave traders for their multi-cultural respect for local institutions, as opposed to those interfering missionaries and secular do-gooders who tried to interfere with age- old custom and force their narrow ideas about 'Liberty' and 'equality' on people.

Not that everyone who claims a universal value has it, and that is the problem. The Chinese Communists ruled Tibet for decades in the name of 'modernisation', in the style of Josef Stalin; their successors rule Tibet in the name of the superiority of China over everyplace on earth, as in the old days. I don't have a final answer. But reflexive anti-western feeling of the sort on display here is not helpful; it seems more like a display of the writer's personal problems than a serious reflection if he is Australian, or a reflection of Big Han Chinese chauvinism if he is a Chinese resident in Australia.

Speaking about Chinese nationalism, I think that is what this movie is about. Down with the foreigners, us Chinese got to stick together! Even if you are not Chinese at all, but a Tibetan. The movie is designed to promote that ultra-nationalist line by Beijing, and should be viewed in that light. Note that 'yellowswift' warns against 'fragmenting China', his way of describing the movement by non-Chinese peoples to free themselves from rule by Beijing. Defending imperial rule by appealing to anti- imperialism; it is novel, anyway.

reply