Tag: China

‘There have been efforts to move to an independent Asia’

Noam Chomsky: (AFP)
Noam Chomsky: (AFP)

Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned linguist and philosopher, was a vocal advocate for formerly occupied East Timor (now Timor Leste) and continues to be a proponent of the Papuan struggle for self-determination. He spoke recently with The Jakarta Post’s contributor Prodita Sabarini in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, on the impact of US foreign policy on Indonesia and how Southeast-Asian countries should be more independent.

Question: What do you think are the main factors enabling impunity on cases of abuses such as in the 1965 communist killings, the war crimes in East Timor and continuing human rights violations in Papua?

Answer: There’s a very simple reason for it. The US supported it all, every one of them. The US was ecstatic in 1965. In fact, the support was so overwhelming that it was just public. The New York Times and other journals were euphoric about it. They didn’t suppress it. They described the massacre as wonderful. Same in Britain. Same in Australia.

What happened in East Timor was because the US and its allies supported it for 25 years. West Papua is the same. As long as the US primarily and its allies as well — the Western powers — support atrocities, they are carried out with impunity, just like their own atrocities are. I mean, the Vietnam War was the worst atrocity in the post-World War II period but nobody’s [found] guilty for it.

Indonesia’s election is just around the corner. How do you see the potential shift from the desire for more political freedom to a return to the old powers in Indonesia?

Same as everywhere else, the powerful win. I mean the overthrow of the dictatorship in Indonesia was important. Part of the reason [for the overthrow] was Soeharto not carrying out roles that the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the US demanded. And in fact, Madeline Albright, the [then] secretary of state at one point said that the US was dissatisfied with what Indonesia was doing and they ought to think about real change. About four hours later, Soeharto resigned. I don’t know if there was a causal connection but it was awfully suggestive. It is the great powers who decide. Mainly, the US in recent years decides what happens.

What can citizens do to guide where their country’s heading, given these external forces?

Well it’s not hopeless. In fact there are changes. Striking ones. Take Latin America. Ever since the beginning, for 500 years Latin America has been under control of Western imperial power. But now, South America is pretty much liberated. Just in the last 10 years, the changes are enormous.

When the spying scandal broke, Brazil was by far the most outspoken opponent. And in general, Latin America has witnessed a stark change. They’ve pretty much freed themselves, not totally, but largely from imperial control.

There’s recently a study of rendition of which country cooperated: all of Europe — Sweden, France, England, Ireland — Canada and the Middle East of course because that’s where they send them for torture; and Asia mostly cooperated.

One region refused to cooperate: Latin America. And if you think, Latin America not long ago was just the backyard, they did whatever they were told. That’s a pretty astonishing change. I think that should be kind of a model for what could be achieved.

So it’s not hopeless. Latin America was the last place one would have expected to find real independence, given its history, and now it’s maybe the most independent area in the world.

Do you think Indonesia should look into the experiences of Latin America?

You can’t carry over the model. Latin America doesn’t have security problems. Outside of the US there’s no real threat to Latin America. Indonesia does. China’s there. All countries in Southeast Asia have to be concerned with Chinese power.

What do you think of the role of ASEAN is in terms of resisting China’s power?

My feeling is that there have been efforts to move to an independent, non-Chinese Asian system. Like Asian Development Bank for an example. Most have been blocked by the US in the past.

There was a Japanese-based effort to form a kind of Asian Development Bank, but the US undercut it. They want the World Bank, which is US-run, to handle it. But those things can be done and it has to be done in a way which doesn’t form a part of an alliance against China. I don’t think it’s impossible for Southeast and East Asia to become a sort of independent bloc in world affairs, separate from China, separate from the United States.

They’re not doing it now. They’re becoming part of the US system but that’s not good for anyone. That could lead to major serious confrontations.

The US is now strengthening their relationship with Asia.

Pivot to Asia. Well, unfortunately it’s being done in a way which is really threatening to China. I mean, China is not a nice government. They’re not going to be nice to people, but they do have their problems. They’re surrounded and contained.

Take a look at the conflicts between the US and China now. The conflicts are mostly over the seas near the China coast. The US wants to have free rights to send military vessels into those waters and China wants to control those waters. So that’s a confrontation.

There’s no confrontation over the Caribbean or over the waters near California. That would be inconceivable. That tells you about the balance of power.

China is encircled. There’s a ring of military bases from Japan, South Korea, Australia. These are hostile bases and they just surround China. In fact that’s one of the reasons why China is moving to Central Asia where they don’t have these barriers.

If East Asia and Southeast Asia move toward more independence in world affairs, they have to be careful not to be just part of a ring of military containment around China, preventing it from exercising pretty legitimate rights to have free access to its own maritime [sources] in the area.

The Jakarta Post | World | Wed, March 19 2014, 11:31 AM

Ma Jian: A note to remember

JP/Stanny
JP/Stanny

Chinese writer Ma Jian, 57, whose works are banned in his home country, never tires of reminding people of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which took place more than 20 years ago.

His latest book, Beijing Coma, recounts the story of a young student activist who falls into a coma after being shot during the Tiananmen protests. Through Ma’s protagonist Dai Wei, the reader finds out what it must have been like to grow up under communist rule.

For Ma Jian, who was present during the 1989 protests, his protagonist’s comatose state is a metaphor for the Chinese people, who after 20 years have either forgotten or ignored the death of the thousands of unarmed citizens on June 4.

“This is a problem in Asia as well as China. As long as people’s living standards improve and they live a comfortable life, they don’t care so much about abuses of human rights,” Ma Jian said recently in Ubud, Bali, as translated by his wife Flora Drew. He noted that many East Asian countries had grown economically but remained undemocratic.

Ma said he wrote Beijing Coma “not only to remind the young people [of China] about this history they may not know about but to also tell them about the idealism and optimism of young people 20 years ago”.

But given Ma’s books are banned in China, youth there is not able to access his books freely. Ma, who lives in London, said he knew more about what was happening in China than the people living there because of the government’s tight policy on information dissemination. He also has more freedom to express his views compared to his friends who live in China.

“Some writers in China perhaps feel they have freedom of expression – that things have improved but they are fooling themselves,” he said.

“Young Chinese writers have grown up in this culture. They are somehow able to circumvent it through the Internet but they can’t use sensitive words, otherwise access to their content will be blocked,” he said.

Ma hopes the Internet will help Chinese youth read his works.

Ma and Drew attended the Ubud Writers and Readers festival. The day Ma talked to The Jakarta Post, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced imprisoned Chinese and human rights activist and writer Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“These things indicate the West is putting pressure on China to respect freedom of speech,” Ma said.
Ma moved from Beijing to Hong Kong in 1987 shortly before his books were banned there. He now lives in London with Drew and their four children. Every time he came back to China, he was under constant monitoring, he said. In 1989, he joined the student protests, but a few days before the day of the massacre, Ma returned to his hometown in Qingdao as his brother fell into a coma after an accident.

Ma said that had he stayed in China, one of two things would have happened. “One, I would have remained a writer and would be in jail. Or, I would have given up writing altogether because if I cannot write freely, I would prefer not to write.”

Ma met Drew in 1997 on the night Hong Kong was handed over to China. Drew, who had studied Chinese in London, was at that time making a documentary for an American television station. She read Ma’s books, which he showed to her, and was convinced they needed to be translated into English.

After Ma moved to London, Drew translated his memoir Red Dust for almost two years while he was writing. The book about Ma’s precarious three years of traveling in China in his early 30s, at a time where travel permits were required to travel anywhere inside China, went on to win the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Red Dust was published in China under a pseudonym, but only after half of the content was censored, Ma said.

Ma set off on the journey because he wanted to see China through his own eyes. He was a state journalist before and explained everything that was shown to him was pre-arranged to paint a rosy picture. When he reached Tibet, he penned his findings in his first book Stick Out Your Tongue, about Tibet’s underbelly.

China is still Ma’s spiritual homeland, which he will continue to stay connected to. He said living away from China helped him see the country more clearly, like looking at a mountain from afar.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Ubud, Bali | People | Thu, October 21 2010