August 07, 2008
Internal affairs
The Chinese have been huffy recently about meddling, as well they might, given the last couple of hundred years of Western and Japanese treatment of a proud and ancient civilization. In the last half century, Chinese foreign policy has been based on a simple and just principle, namely that no nation has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another.
Westerners may not understand how this simple, reciprocal, honorable, and just rule of conduct applies to real events, especially as the world has become so interdependent and complicated, but the RBC is pleased to clarify.
The savagery in Darfur, perpetrated from Khartoum, is internal. Chinese enabling of this behavior, and protecting the Sudan government from attempts by western powers to stop mass rape, starvation, and murder there, is not external interference.
Climate change all over the world caused by Chinese coal power plants is not interference in the affairs of other countries, though any attempt to dissuade the Chinese from filling the atmosphere outside China with CO2 is.
Poisoning foreign guests, athletes and spectators, invited into China, with air pollution that would be rated unhealthy anywhere else but "good" in China, is an internal Chinese matter. Jacques Rogge, of whose whose public health and medical credentials we were previously unaware, understands this and assures us that the air is safe; that filthy haze you see is just fog.
A worldwide flu epidemic is an internal matter for the country that allows it to get started.
If you conquer a country whose people speak a different language, don't share your religion, and would prefer not to have been conquered, everything that happens there is henceforth internal and no meddling is allowed. In cases like this, having opinions is tantamount to meddling.
Buying endangered creatures from outside your country, and timber from trashed rain forests in foreign lands, is an internal matter, and anyone giving you grief is an imperialist hegemonic Bad Person and should shut up about it.
If these carefully chosen examples don't clarify the principle, you simply can't be reasoned with Michael Corleone understood it, Tessio and Roth understood it, and they weren't Chinese, why can't you? "It's strictly business!"
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