It is strange how political ideas can catch alight, after decades of being ignored or scorned. Just as volcanoes that have long been thought dormant can send out a sudden, shocking spurt of flame and ominous rumbles, so ideas can magically force themselves into everyone’s consciousness when ‘everyone’ has forgotten about them.

China invaded Tibet decades ago, and it has long been known that they were up to no good in that romantic and precipitous country, turning the alleged site of Shangri-La into a kind of suburb of their overcrowded and polluted communo-capitalist police state. A small and dedicated handful of activists have carried this particular torch for unproductive years. But it is only really now, with the Olympics at hand, that large numbers of people have awoken to the horror and injustice of the situation. It is cheering to see the Chinese getting a long overdue verbal kicking for their forced homogenization, censorship, tyranny and torture. Their actions in Tibet are utterly reprehensible (although they are only really replicating there what they have done in China proper – which no-one seems really to mind).

There are less pleasing aspects to this modern morality tale. The first is perhaps a minor point - the protestors are using ‘human rights’ as their rationale, a term that manages to be both politically loaded and utterly meaningless. They really ought to be using terms like “national freedom”, but the sad truth is that the majority of people don’t really think in these terms any longer. And by the way, the Games have little to do with‘global unity’, ‘coming together’ and all the rest of the sickly cliches – but are a strictly ruthless contest to determine who are the world’s strongest and fastest athletes. But that is not really the point; what matters is that the real nature of China is at last being exposed.

What is saddest about it all is that the protests are unlikely to make any difference. The Chinese cannot afford to set a liberalizing precedent in Tibet, which abuts onto a Chinese province with a large and separatist-minded Muslim minority. So although there may be a little politic concealment of reality until the Games are over, in the longer term the protestors will continue to be tortured, imprisoned and otherwise silenced, and the ethnic cleansing and uglification of Tibet will continue almost unabated.

And the Chinese are now too big an economic powerhouse for any other government or supranational organization really to put pressure on them. Since the UK has managed to make itself economically dependent on China for everything from washing machines and toys to i-Pods and telephones, we are faced with the spectacle of the hyper-moral Gordon Brown making excuses for the inexcusable. The US has allowed so many financial assets to fall under Chinese control that George Bush, too, the self-styled enemy of evil, is silent (which incidentally suits him, and makes him look almost Presidential for once). Only when the West stops buying cheap Chinese tat will we ever be able to exert effective pressure on behalf of the unhappy Tibetans (or, for that matter, China’s much-abused environment).  DT