When China joined Russia last January to veto a fairly mild United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Burma to free political prisoners and improve its abominable human rights record, Beijing’s Ambassador at the UN helpfully explained that “no country is perfect” and that “similar problems exist in other countries”. Including, as he of course did not say, China.
The parallels may not seem all that obvious this week. Leaving aside the contrast between China’s boom economy and the misery inflicted on all Burmese by the military regime’s cruelty and incompetence, political repression in China these days stops short of organised mass rape and (outside China’s vast lao gai “reform by labour” camps) systemic forced labour. Yet the “problem” on the Chinese leadership’s mind, then