Tibet & China, freedom of press & understanding why.

The Riots in Lahsa had been going on since a few days before I got to read about it on the foriegn new sites. Yes, surely in the beginning, it was not such an issue here in Beijing. And if the Chinese governement could have hidden it for the public, they probably would've.

By writing this posting I would be condemning my blog to only being able to be read abroad, but that's already the case with all blogs at blogger.com. Things even got worse in the past weeks, no youtube, some proxyserver tools blocked, ... the internet in general slowed down, which is terrible when all your work is online (wiki, CRM, ...).
It's a terrible thing, that there's no freedom of press in China. And for sure helps the government to keep the situation under control.
It is not acceptable and the question is how to change it.

I've had several discussions here with people shouting out loud that China has to become a democracy, tomorrow, even if it takes a revolution.
Chinese laugh at such opinions, saying those laowai (foreigner) really do not understand the Chinese culture and way of doing. And it's true ! But it's hard to blame those laowai, except for not being open minded enough, too sure about the only one good Western way ... "a billion Chinese can't be all wrong". My setting was one of first trying to understand why they do it this or that way before condemning it. Many don't have that patience, but it's needed to understand this totally different world.

Forcing the Western ways into Chinese politics is never going to work, and that's good ! Because the Western "democracies" have proven many times before how wrong they can tackle certain problems. (starting with colonialism till most recently Irak).

Working a lot with Americans I feel there's a general tendency in the US to say that everything from China is bad/wrong. People don't even want to buy the product anymore because they think it's all made by exploited workers in polluting industries.

I've decided to step into the discussions with my blog, there will be several posting to interesting websites with opposite points of view.
The Tibet-riots brought to the surface so much issues on the above, that now is the time to try to explain it to people.