i used to live in a large shared house. one of the share-ees was from China. no matter how much you tried he wouldn’t discuss anything relating to Tibet. in his opinion it was Chinese territory.
Sounds about as much fun as traveling halfway around the world to study and then being harangued about Northern Ireland by Chinese students who have listened to a couple of U2 albums.
Agree – and you can assume the Chinese student was just too polite to mention British colonial expansion into Africa, India, Hong Kong etc., not to mention what we did to the indigenous populations of North America and Australia when we arrived there!
In fact, over their thousands of years of history, China has been one of the most benign and least aggressive to its neighbours, of any civilisation. In fact – they have been the ones countlessly invaded and humiliated, right up until modern times, which goes some way to explain their current sensitivity to questions of soverignty.
All of which makes the western politicians tendency to scare-monger about Chinese aggression and expansionism all the more two-faced and unpaletable.
Rant over….