They have also published an emergency relief hotline, along with bank account information to receive donations to assist their cause:

Account name: Red Cross Society of China

For those who want to donate in RMB: you can send money to the RMB account at the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China branch below:
For RMB: Beijing Dong Si Na branch
RMB Account: 0200001009014413252

For those who want to donate in foreign currency, you can send money to the foreign currency account at the CITIC Bank branch below:
Forgien currency: Jiu Xian Qiao branch
Account number: 7112111482600000209

Hotline: (8610) 65139999
Online donations: Red Cross Society of China website: www.redcross.org.cn
Click the tab for online donations

As part of her populist reinvention, Hillary Clinton last week criticized a Chinese business deal in Indiana that her husband’s administration had supported. Perhaps she should have consulted the U.S.-China Business Council’s study on U.S. exports to China before arguing that ties with China are hurting Americans.

That’s right, exports. The study tracks exports from each Congressional district to China. Between 2000 and 2007, 406 of 426 House districts clocked triple-digit export growth to the mainland. Note that the bulk were manufactured goods: Electrical equipment and machinery, power generation equipment, and aircraft are America’s top three export categories to China in dollar terms. In services, the U.S. ran a $3.7 billion trade surplus with China in 2006, the latest year for which data are available.

Take Indiana’s first district, home of the Magnaquench factory in Valparaiso, whose 2005 closing has Senator Clinton so ruffled. Between 2000 and 2007, the first district’s exports to China increased 307%, compared with a 65% increase for exports to the rest of the world. That amounted to $74 million last year.

Or consider the sixth district, home to the city of Anderson, the former corporate home of Magnaquench. The sixth district saw its exports to China grow 311% between 2000 and 2007, reaching $118 million last year. Perhaps not coincidentally, the city’s official Web site includes sections in Chinese (as well as Japanese and German). In both of these case studies, by the way, the exports are overwhelmingly manufactured goods.

Trade with China, like trade with any country, will at times lead to closed factories and displaced workers. But these latest data are a reminder that trade creates new opportunities, too. Rather than ratcheting up the antitrade and anti-China rhetoric, the presidential candidates would do better focusing on helping Americans seize the opportunities of trade. Pro-growth tax and regulatory policies would make a good start.

]]> http://debunk-cnn.com/0506/indiana-to-beijing.html/feed http://debunk-cnn.com/0429/chinese-calm-down-and-be-vagilance.html http://debunk-cnn.com/0429/chinese-calm-down-and-be-vagilance.html#comments Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:36:25 +0000 DebunkCNN http://debunk-cnn.com/?p=46 There is a good article written by Herald Tribune’s Shaila Dewan today titled Chinese students in U.S. fight image of their home. It gives account on how Chinese students started engaging “discussion” in public to fight the image of their home land. I think one good thing triggered recently is, by the overwhelmingly bias anti-China movement from some western media, that the traditionally silent and mind-own-business type Chinese start raising voices. The era of people like CNN commentator, Jack Cafferty, can freely call the Chinese as “goons and thugs” is ending.

However, the article ends at this sentence, “At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.” It refers to a water bottle was thrown by an angry Chinese student at the one who think and talk differently in that discussion.

When a small group of Tibetan extremists start burning down shops - along with people inside, beating up peoples on the street, pouring boiling water to law enforcement and claiming it was for freedom, the western media cheered. When the violence was suppressed by the law enforcement as every government would do, the western media lashed out the disapprovals under the names of “human rights” and other goodies. Then the Chinese united and stood up. But when the Chinese start throwing bottles, chasing and beating the oppositions (as seen in Korea,) it’s time to call for calming down.

Violence, extremism, fundamentalism and pure ideology are all harmful, doesn’t matter who hold them.

It takes a long lasting, sustainable, peacefully, open minded and moderate approach to correct and influence the bias western media and the brainwashed western society. Lashing out in forums using the deadest words and boycotting certain shop are short live and helping nothing.

Besides, whenever there are conflicts, there will be opportunists. The Chinese, especially the younger generation, should be vigilant about them.

There is a well-known site called anti-cnn, which resides in China. It’s a place started by listing materials demonstrate how western media distorted facts. Now it becomes a congested forum to express angry sentiment by the Chinese, most of them there are so-called the 80s and 90s generation. Lately, the motivation of this site was questioned, especially by another site called National Online, which started by the oversea Chinese in the U.S. Apparently they are rival now, even though they are almost identical and all claim serve the same purpose. National Online claimed and proved that every time its URL was entered into anti-cnn, the URL would be automatically translated into anti-cnn’s URL. At National Online, one of the most pumped and commented topic thread is the one “exposes” anti-cnn. Does it make any sense?

We went out did out own test.

We put out a post in National Online to announce debunk-cnn.com and a comment mentioned our site. Within 5 hours, the post was deleted. Days later, the comment was removed too. The inquiring sent to them has no response.

We don’t want to speculate but we do start questioning the motivation behind all the places where are fueling the flames of extreme nationalism and angry.

Therefore, we want to use our feeble voice to express our wish to all Chinese, “Clam down.”

“Why do ou rack your brains in trying to turn black into white? Don’t be too CNN,” sings this online singer named Mu Rong Xuan.

One hundred years ago, Pierre De Coubertin said, “There is a place in this world is very indifferent to the Olympic Games, that’s Paris.”

The 5th stop of the Olympic torch relay is Pierre De Coubertin’s home town, Paris. Pierre De Coubertin is best known as the founder of the International Olympic Committee. Because of that, the stop had special meaning. As Jiang Xiao Yu, the Executive Vice-President of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, said during the ceremony, the Beijing Olympic Game torch cames to Paris to visit Coubertin’s home town and to express the respect to the place where the moder Olympic Games was born.

However, the torch relay had been disrupted by some pro Independence Tibetan and their supporters, using violence. Even the disabled girl on a wheel chair, Jin Jing, was not spared from the attacks. All those happened under the encouragement from certain officials of Paris and under the watch of Bertrand Delanoe, Mayor of Paris. There was a banner for human rights hanging from the Paris city hall building. There were city officials hang Tibetan Flag and anti Olympic signs right out of the windows of the city hall. That lead to the cancellation of the Touch hand-off ceremony planed at the Paris City Hall. The torch relay was chaotic. The flame that represents our human beings’ common dream and the spirit of Olympic Games was put out in Paris. The city of Paris and its mayor Les Halles did that.

The City of Paris publicly betrayed the spirit of Olympic Games. Now the Bertrand Delanoe crowd seems had not had enough drama, they gave the “honorary citizenship” to Dalai Lama and continue using the faulty Tibet issue pressing China and to disrupt the Olympic Games.

This reminded us a hundred years ago how Coubertin experienced the similar situation for his Olympic Games from the similar Bertrand Delanoe crowd. Despite the initial success, the Olympic Movement faced hard times, as the 1900 (in De Coubertin’s own Paris) and 1904 Games were both swallowed by World’s Fairs, and received little attention. The city used Olympic Game to decorate the World’s Fairs and totally changed the original purpose of the Games. In his diary, Coubertin expressed his angry and disappointment about his hometown Paris, “There is a place in this world is very indifferent to the Olympic Games, that’s Paris.”

In the morning of April 6, looking at the snowflakes falling outside the window, I could not but wonder what the torch relay would be like.

About 8 hours later, when the torch finally struggled through the route, Olympic gold medalist Dame Kelly Holmes ran up to light the Olympic cauldron at the O2 dome, and 4,000 spectators cheered, obviously with a sense of relief.

This day will be remembered, as Beijing met London with splashes and sparkles. It was an encounter between China, the first developing country to host the Olympics, and Britain, the first western country to greet the 2008 torch.

On the bus to the airport, I was with some young girls from the Beijing team, including an Olympic gold medalist, Miss Qiao.

They were convinced that the people here were against them. One girl remarked she couldn’t believe this land nourished Shakespeare and Dickens.

Another asked: where is the “gentlemenship”? I used all my knowledge to argue for London, and looking into their watery eyes, I knew I was not succeeding. I can’t blame them.

They were running between vehicles for the whole day, noses red and hands cold, trying to service the torch bearers.

They had only about three hours of sleep the previous night and some were having lunch sandwiches just now.

Worse still, they had to endure repeated violent attacks on the torch throughout the relay. I was fortunate to sit at the rear of the bus and saw smiling faces of Londoners who came out in the tens of thousands, old people waving and young performers dancing, braving the cold weather.

In the darkness of a London night, waving the chartered plane goodbye, I had a feeling the plane was heavier than when it landed. The torch will carry on, and the journey will educate the more than a billion Chinese people about the world, and the world about China.

A young friend in China wrote to me after watching the event on the BBC: “I felt so many things all at once – sadness, anger and confusion.” It must have dawned on many like him that simply a sincere heart was not enough to ensure China’s smooth integration with the world.

The wall that stands in China’s way to the world is thick. In China, what’s hot at this moment on the internet, which has 200 million users there, is not only the attempts to snatch the torch but also some moving images of Jin Jing, a slim young girl, a Paralympic athlete in a wheelchair, helped by a blind athlete. She held the torch with both arms to her chest as violent “protesters” tried repeatedly to grab it from her during the Paris relay.

There is especially infuriated criticism of some of the misreporting of China in recent weeks, such as crafting photos or even using photos from other countries to prove a crackdown. On the other side of the wall, the story is different.

Standing in the middle, I am concerned that mutual perceptions between the people of China and the West are quickly drifting in opposite directions. I cannot help asking why, when it comes to China, the generalised accusations can easily be accepted without people questioning what exactly and specifically they mean; why any story or figures can stay on the news for days without factual support.

Even my own participation in the torch relay had been the subject of continuous speculation. I remember a local friend said, “We all like to read media stories. Only when it comes to ourselves do we know they can’t all be true.”

Of those who protested loudly, many probably have not seen Tibet. For the Chinese people, Tibet is a loved land and information about it is ample. Four million tourists visit Tibet every year. The past five years saw the income of farmers and herdsmen increasing by 83.3 per cent. In 2006 there were more than 1,000 schools, with 500,000 students.

In this Autonomous Region, where 92 per cent of the population is Tibetan, there are 1,780 temples, or one for every 1,600 people – which is more than in England, where there is one church for every 3,125 people.

There may be complicated problems of religion mixing with politics, but people are well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed. That has been the main objective of China for centuries. Tibet may not grow into an industrial place like the eastern cities in China, but it will move on like other parts of China.

I personally experienced China’s transition to opening up, from small steps to bigger strides. I remain a consistent and firm supporter of opening up. The latest events have led the younger generation of Chinese, those born since the 1980s, who grew up in a more prosperous, better-educated and freer China, to begin a collective rethinking about the West.

My daughter, who loves Western culture, must have used the word “why” dozens of times in our long online chat. Her frustration could be felt between the lines. Many who had romantic views about the West are very disappointed at the media’s attempt to demonise China.

We all know demonisation feeds a counter-reaction. I do pray from the bottom of my heart that the younger generation of Chinese will not be totally disillusioned about the West, which remains an important partner in our ongoing reform.

Many complain about China not allowing enough access to the media. In China, the view is that the Western media needs to make an effort to earn respect. Coming to China to report bad stories may not be welcomed but would not be stopped, as China is committed to opening up.

China is far from perfect and it is trying to address the many problems that do exist. It would be helpful to the credibility of the Western media if the issues they care and write about are of today’s China, not of the long-gone past.

In my one year in the UK, I have realized that there is a lot more media coverage about China than when I was a student here in the mid-1980s, and most of it is quite close to the real life of China, good or bad.

China is also in an era of information explosion. I am sure that more and more people in the West will be able to cross the language and cultural barriers and find out more about the real China. The world has waited for China to join it. Now China has to have the patience to wait for the world to understand China.

The article started with a seemingly normal tune, said:

About 500 Chinese students attended the relay, carrying pro-China signs and heckling the few people taking a pro-Tibet stand.

The Chinese students wore identical shirts with the slogan “One Dream, One Nation,” and many of them had Chinese flags painted on their faces, according to witnesses.

Then, the spin started:

An Olympics organizer said the Chinese Embassy arranged for the students to be there. Several of the students told CNN that the Chinese government provided their transportation to the event and gave them the flags and shirts.

We are sure there were other words about all the Chinese were volunteers. Because we know! But somehow CNN conveniently bring up a un-identified source and an accusational implication.

Then it moved on to another attack with a strong hint:

At least two other people carrying pro-Tibet signs were carried away by police. It was not clear if they were detained because of a disruption or if they were removed for their own safety.

After this, seems CNN was very disappointed by the none eventfully relay so they have to drop a shadow:

Earlier torch relay stops in London, England; Paris, France; and San Francisco, California attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators. Some protesters in those cities tried to disrupt the relay, and police made dozens of arrests.

Tens of thousands! Man! throw in those number must really made the writer happier to end the story without too much of materials to go by the anti-China and anti-Olympic theme.

Now, CNN, let us show you something you may not want to report, the true tens of thousands of Chinese protesting all over the world at 4/19 for you and your media buddies distorting facts and lying. And there were thousands of them stood right outside of the CNN building in Los Angeles.

[Show as slideshow]

Watch this video and give the answers in your mind.

Anyway, this guy took some pictures in the village. Some Tibetan showed great deal of hospitality and insist on taking pictures with their houses with China’s flag blowing. See for yourself.

[Show as slideshow]

Here we want to show you that, he is just another politician who involves all those ugly types of political conducts like we’ve been increasingly dislike in the rest of th world.

Here is something comes from within the Tibetan Buddhism. There is a section of Tibetan Buddhism called Dorje Shugden. They used to be friendly with Dalai Lama, who represents another major sector of Tibetan Buddhism. Recently the Dorje Shugden started putting out press release to start legal proceeding against Dalai Lama. From their documents you can learn something not very pleasant.

That however,after the rapprochement between and thawing of Sino-U.S. relations, there was a withdrawal of the funding of the Free Tibet movement by the Central Intelligence Agencyofthe USA in the mid- 1970’s, and the Respondent No.4wasforcedtoreconsiderhisoptions. Therefore, in view of the sudden paucity of funds, a stratagem was devised where by the call for a Free Tibet was to be slowly given up, and in order to divert the opinion of the public (specially Tibetans) from this, a controversy was created regarding the worship of Dorje Shugden. As a matter of fact, the Respondent No.4 does not,in his recent statements, any longer stand for the cause of a FreeTibet, but espouses autonomy for Tibet within China.

Obviously, Dorje Shugden is anti-China. But in the mean while, it reveals the beloved charming Dalai Lama did worked for CIA and be funded by CIA.

Amisinformation and denigration campaign was launched against the worshippers of Dorje Shugden. The argument against the worshippers of Dorje Shugden was premised on incorrect logic and takes the following form:

I.The Dalai Lama embodies Tibet.

II.People who dare criticize the Dalai Lama must be Chinese agents

III.The Dalai Lama does not approve of worship of Dorje Shugden

IV.Therefore Dorje Shugden worshippers must be Chinese agents

Dalai Lama has been saying, along with western media, that the Chinese government has been interfering Tibetan’s religion believes. Hey, he self doesn’t do any better. This is not something from propaganda, it’s from the very real Tibtan Buddhists. How do you think?

If you really want to learn some insight on this Tibetan Buddhist political battle, here is a article to start with. We bet you can’t stand reading it till the half way. It’s just bunch of crappy politics. The question we want to ask if you stoped, do you still like to worship a politician?

Just you know, even though this article is full of anti-China tune, it gives many facts too. Anyway, give it a try:

Battle of the Buddhists
Andrew Brown in The Independent, London, 15 July 1996

Ruth Lister drove her shining 7-series BMW with aplomb down one of the worst roads I have ever seen. It was so badly potholed and steep that we might have been in Tibet. And so, in a sense, we were. For though physically we were in the small West Yorkshire town of Hebben Bridge, making light conversation about the inequities of the council roads department, we had come to discuss the oracles and demons of ancient Tibet. Ruth and her husband Ron were central figures in an unprecedented attack on the Dalai Lama and are among the organisers of demonstrations against him planned for his visit to this country, which begins today and culminates in an appearance at the Alexandra palace in north London on Saturday. They even have their own alternative spiritual leader.

I had come to talk to them about the Shugden Supporters Community, the shadowy group they founded which had been bombarding the English media and the worldwide Internet with accusations that the Dalai Lama is “persecuting his own people” by discouraging or even forbidding the worship of a deity named Dorje Shugden Ñ originally the ghost of a disgruntled 17-century abbot Ñ in the monasteries under his control. Such worship is causing disharmony among Tibet’s protector deities, the Dalai Lama says Ñ he is a harmful spirit whose veneration may even be assisting the Chinese oppressors.

No one had heard of the Shugden Supporters, or the still more mysterious Freedom Foundation, until the spring, when they both started to issue press releases. Ringing the number given by one of these organizations, I got through to the Buddhist centre run by a rich, fast-growing and secretive Buddhist sect called the NKT (New Kadampa Tradition). It was in Hebden Bridge, in Ruth Lister’s house, that Steven Lane, a plump young man in his twenties with monkishly cropped hair, arranged to tell me the story of the Shugden Supporters Community.

Steven Lane talked for nearly an hour, hardly drawing breath, without notes. He had the catechetical manner you find among Scientologists or Trotskyists: people who know not only all the answers, but all the questions, too. If the wrong question came up, he simply steamed on and ignored it.

The view from inside the Shugden Supporters Community was almost a photographic negative of everything the outside world believes about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The worship of Dorje Shugden, Lane said, could not possibly be taken as threatening. It was a harmless spiritual practice, comparable to the worship of St Francis in Christianity; and four million people followed the deity. A long and damning report on the NKT which had appeared in the Guardian could be explained because its author was a member of a rival Buddhist organization. The Dalai Lama, he said, was not a spiritual leader; not even a member of the Gelugpa tradition (the dominant Buddhist tradition in Tibet). In fact, the Dalai Lama was not really struggling for Tibetan freedom at all, and his actions against Shugden were motivated by political desires. It was as if Lane were asserting that Nelson Mandela was a secret agent of apartheid with no moral stature at all.

It was a powerful indictment, flawed only by the fact that almost everything I was told in the Lister house was untrue. The figure of four million worshippers of Shugden was preposterous. There are only about six million Tibetans in the world at most, of whom less than half are members of the Gelugpa order (Steven Lane estimated 30 per cent), where the veneration of Shugden is concentrated. Even among the Gelugpa, only monks can be initiated into the cult of Shugden, and only a minority of those actually are. Most of the experts I talked to thought that about 100,000 people at most could be affected by the Dalai Lama’s ban.

The Dalai Lama is venerated as a spiritual as well as a political leader by all Tibetans, especially those in the Gelugpa order, to which he belongs. Only within the NKT centres are his photographs not displayed: in fact they are banned, as is all mention of his name. As for not struggling for Tibetan freedom he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, and caused a major diplomatic ruction between Germany and China earlier this summer after the German parliament passed a resolution in his honour.

Shugden himself is not necessarily the compassionate figure portrayed by the NKT. In one rite, reprinted in a Western study, his followers are asked to consider him “living in a palace in a lake of boiling blood, wearing a necklace of skulls and human body parts, in a terrible stench of human flesh”. Not quite the home life of St Francis of Assisi. Such shamanistic beings do have a role in Tibetan Buddhism: they are considered by most students to represent marginal aspects of Tibetan culture, holdovers from shamanism rather than central to the Buddhist message.

To be initiated into the cult of Shugden involves a contractual relationship with this terrifying deity: the initiate promises to meditate on him and pray to him every day for the rest of his life. One can see why Tibetans could be reluctant to offend Shugden; and in the Dalai Lama’s speeches to Tibetans against the practice, he has suggested prayers to protect them from the spirit’s vengeance. But why should English Buddhists in the West Yorkshire be getting so worked up?

Let us start with allegiance of the people involved. Ron Lister and his wife claimed not to be members of the NKT, but merely “concerned Buddhists”. However, when I went to use the telephone in the hall, I noticed that the first number on their speed dial was for “Geshe-la”, as the devotees of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso call their guru; later I discovered that Ron and Ruth Lister had edited the first of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s books to be published in English, and Geshe Kelsang himself told me that he had accompanied Ron Lister on his “fact-finding” tour round India to find evidence of the Dalai Lama’s alleged persecutions.

The more one digs into this story, the more everything comes back to the NKT, a sect founded by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in the late 1970s after he gained control of the Buddhist centre at Coniston Priory in Cumbria from a rival Buddhist organization. Since then, the NKT has been enormously successful. Unlike most Buddhist organizations, it actively makes converts and solicits donations. Steven Lane Ñ an NKT member for eight years Ñ said: “I have met Geshe Kelsang Gyatso on numerous occasions. He never orders. Sometimes, he suggests. Sometimes, he helps you to see different options.

This is a curious perspective. All the other evidence suggests an attitude of slavish devotion on the part of his followers. The foreword to one of his recent books says: “From the depths of our hearts we thank the author for his inconceivable kindness in composing the book. Throughout the preparation of this book, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has demonstrated compassion, wisdom, and inexhaustible patience … there can be no greater proof of the immense value of the Boddhisatva’s way of life than the living example of such a realized Master.

Within the NKT, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso is regarded as the “third Buddha”, who will bring Buddhism to the Western world. When I asked the guru himself about this, he replied: “Some people believe I am the third Buddha, but this is people’s choice. From me, never. I have never pretended I am special.”

The chance to meet him came unexpectedly. The day after I had returned from Hebden Bridge, two saffron-clad, shaven-headed NKT monks appeared in the reception of the Independent, accompanying a rather confused Tibetan devotee of Dorje Shugden. This party had made its way round several broadsheet newspapers to offer interviews with Geshe Kelsang.

I found him in the attic bedroom of a house in Golders Green. It was painted entirely white, except for a sort of shrine behind him. Two English NKT members sat on each side of me, ready to interpret, for the guru’s English is poor and his pronunciation difficult to understand.

Much of what he said to me was already entirely familiar: the claim of four million supporters; the idea that the Dalai Lama was planning to return to China as a Communist puppet ruler; the preposterous assertion, made with great force, that the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent (a devout Catholic) was “working for” a rival Buddhist organization.

I asked him something that puzzles me about this story: what business was it of his what the Dalai Lama does in his own monasteries? The NKT claims to have nothing to do with the Dalai Lama. It certainly doesn’t recognise his authority over its centres. Yet if the two streams of Buddhism are so separate, why does the NKT care about what the Dalai Lama does?

His reply was illuminating in its passion, if not in its logic. There was a sense sacrilege when he described the Dalai Lama’s actions which made many things clear. “The practice of Dorje Shugden came from generation to generation,” he said. “There is so much joy in the daily practice; and the Dalai Lama suddenly says this is bad, this is harmful. The Dalai Lama is not an ordinary being, and when he said this, everybody shocked. They experienced mental pain.”

Here he pressed one fist against his heart, in a gesture to ensure I understood what he meant by mental pain.

“If Dalai Lama right, then up to now, this practice we have done for 20 years, everything wasted: time lost, money lost, everything lost. That is the big issue.”

And maybe it is. Within traditional Tibetan politics, these ideological disputes always have a political pay-off. Gods such as Shugden, or Nechung, the traditional protector deity of all Tibet, make their wishes known through trance-oracles, on which all the major decisions of the state are based. In the confused and troubled times of the 1940s, before the Chinese invasion, the cult of Shugden was linked to narrow Gelugpa factionalism, and to a policy that exalted the interests of Central Tibet over the east. In arguing against the cult, and trying to suppress it within his monasteries, the Dalai Lama is not just making a theological point, but a political one: that the Tibetan state he wants would not favour one form of Buddhism over another.

But the dispute over Dorje Shugden makes no sense in terms of practical politics in the West. It has already directed a great deal of media attention on the NKT and its elastic ways with truth. Some of the mud being flung at the Dalai Lama will probably stick. The reputation of Tibetan Buddhism as a uniquely clean and rational religion will certainly be damaged. The only lasting winners from the row will be the Chinese, who have mounted a fresh campaign of repression inside Tibet this spring. And Dorje Shugden himself, aching for worshippers inside his lake of boiling blood.