Republicans just want to have fun in China

Anyone hooked on the celestial mysteries of early kung fu movies like “Shaolin Temple” or the classic “The Bride with White Hair” might be tempted to visit China on a lark. But the spoilsports at The Washington Times this week lead with this headline: “Top Republican arranges communist-paid trip to China after RNC rebukes Beijing.”

“Just weeks after the Republican National Committee formally rebuked China, prominent GOP activist Saul Anuzis has been kicking up a firestorm inside his party by soliciting current and former officials to travel with him to Beijing on a junket paid by the communist government there,” they reported. “‘I’m not getting paid, and I expect to have fun,’ Mr. Anuzis, a former Michigan state party chairman, told [the paper].”

{mosads}How conservatism has changed. My old North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms (R) who, like both Presidents Bush, was a friend of the Dalai Lama and an early defender of Tibet, liked to use the phrase “coddling dictators to make a buck” when the issue of communist China came up. Today, conservatives just want to have fun. And Shaolin Temple, with its famous flying kung fu monks, does sound like a barrel of laughs.

But it is an awkward time to be going to China as China brings challenges to American allies on the high seas today with direct territorial threats to the entire South China Sea, which extend as far away as the Spratly Islands, an archipelago which lies between the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, the BBC reported last night.

Note to the fun crowd heading to China: If invited to visit Shaolin Temple, make excuses. The Financial Times reports that the 1,500-year-old temple has advertised for a new media director and chief editor. “The move is the latest attempt by Shaolin’s controversial abbot, Shi Yongxin — known in China [without irony] as the ‘CEO monk — to build the temple’s international brand of spirituality,” they write.

Maybe they should turn to Ketchum, the U.S. public relations firm, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has. According to The Daily Beast, their other clients include “Delta Airlines, Barbie dolls, Cottonelle toilet paper and Haagen-Dazs ice cream.”

The Chinese appear to be using the pop culture popularity of Shaolin Temple and its celebrity monk to counter the influence of Tibet’s leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, enormously popular with leadership in the West, but banned recently from South Africa because of a new friendship with China. The Dalai Lama, who joined economist Arthur Brooks at a two-day summit on “happiness, free enterprise and human flourishing” at the American Enterprise Institute recently, represents freedom in the East and prosperity in the West.

China today demands the submission of its neighbors to its dominion and hates the Dalai Lama above all others for his influence here. We in the West ignored China’s invasion of Tibet and have have shown little interest in the ensuing occupation where, according to journalist Diana N. Rowan, more than 1.2 million Tibetans died in wartime violence, by execution and the effects of long imprisonment, torture, starvation or suicide.

As the West acquiesced to the Chinese conquest of Tibet, so too continuing Western passivity enables China in what they have planned ahead in the South China Sea.

To which the conquest and continued occupation of Tibet may be prologue.

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.