Word: communists
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What were the communist party cadres in Beijing feeling as they watched Lhasa burning in mid-March? Anger certainly. And worry about how the staging of the Olympic Games in August could be affected. But they were also surprised, shocked at how Tibetan resentment over Chinese rule had suddenly exploded into widespread rioting - not just in Lhasa but throughout regions with major ethnic Tibetan populations - spoiling what was supposed to be a positive, peaceful run-up to the Games...
...Then, when the reaction did come, it was straight out of the standard communist playbook, phrased in language reminiscent of the worst excesses of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. The violence was blamed on that "jackal dressed in monks' robes," as one official described Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Another official said the "Dalai clique" had organized suicide squads as part of its "sinister aim of splitting China." Thousands of paramilitary troops were rushed into Tibet and the extensive ethnically Tibetan regions of China. Journalists were barred from entry and the few already inside troubled areas were...
...kept out of the Games, it is not as though American boycotts of the Olympics are unprecedented. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response, the United States and most other NATO nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics the next year. By reducing the Olympics to a contest between Communist nations, the West was able to express its anger at the Kremlin’s misdeeds. If a host nation’s aggression against a neighbor warrants a boycott, surely a host nation’s aggression against its own people warrants one as well...
...month ago, American diplomats, journalists and sundry high-ranking North Korean officials sat together in a concert hall in Pyongyang, listening to the New York Philharmonic orchestra perform for the first time in the communist capital. Television audiences around the globe caught snippets of the televised event and saw a friendlier side to the least understood nation in the world...
...country is merely regaining its former glory. The Chinese have been pulling gold from the earth since the Song dynasty 1,000 years ago. But after the communist takeover in 1949, mining went dormant for decades. Personal ownership of gold was banned as a bourgeois extravagance, and production rarely broke 20 tons a year. That started to change with economic reform in the 1990s. Small wildcat operations began to proliferate, and these relatively unsophisticated outfits dominate the sector today. While countries such as South Africa, Australia, the U.S. and Canada get most of their production from a few dozen large...