Chinese protests

This past week, the Dalai Lama has been at the University of Washington, and there have been an interesting series of protests. Most notably, Chinese students who seem to be historically in-active in American politics, have shown up in big numbers to protest what they see as Anti-Chinese sentiment, and a mistreatment of the facts by Tibet and the American media. I was never really sure what this all meant...

There are a lot of issues under the surface here. China is one of the biggest, fastest growing, most prosperous countries in the world; but yet the US people seem to hold a certain stigma against the country as they reap the benefits with another hand. While we throw around phrases like "imperialists" and "human rights violators", the Chinese (government controlled media) does a pretty good job of stifling these stories. Meanwhile, the US has the same allegations against us (rightly so). Well, amidst all this, there are quite a few Chinese people in my class and they all seem really good on a personal level.

Point being, the NY Times put a pretty decent article about this up today, which shed some light on the issues. It still remains to be seen, though: is this just the process of disillusionment of Chinese expatriates with their gov't, or is this a valid rebuttal to US sentiment? (Some of the anti-Tibet arguments: the Daily Lami is a Nazi and China has put a lot of money into the infrastructure of Tibet) That last one reminds me of Iraq.... I think China and the US have a lot in common, so we should be better friends, no?