You ask if I'm defending the Chinese occupation of Tibet? The proposition is ridiculous for the reason that a country cannot occupy its own territority as I made clear in my previous post. When riots and looting broke out after the levees broke in New Orleans, nobody (rightly) described Washington's intervention to quell them as an invasion or occupation because New Orleans is in fact US territory. Unlike the US and many countries in the West generally, China has no history of colonial/imperial intervention and therefore it is hypocritical for the West to demonise China in the way it has in relation to its undoubted human rights abuses.

Very few people doubt the reality of human rights abuses in China, but the crux of the matter is why the Western media is pre-occupied with the province of Tibet? China's main crime is its attempt to modernise and turn a backward feudal society into a modern state capitalist economy by integrating it - through advanced communication networks - with the rest of China. The US and the West ought to be learning these lessons from the Chinese rather than demonising them for political purposes.