Students who protest Chinese cartoons as "racist" are blind to political realities

California’s elite students proved last week that, in addition to their academic woes, they have trouble distinguishing between freedom and tyranny. This is sure to please the world’s largest totalitarian state, which the students were defending.

On August 1, about three dozen students picketed the Sacramento Bee, accusing the only daily in California’s capital of racism for publishing two cartoons about China.

In one, by syndicated cartoonist Jeff Danziger, a Chinese official tells a blindfolded prisoner that because of the good news that China has been awarded the Olympics, the government will not charge his family for the bullet they will use to kill him.

The other, by the Bee’s Rex Babin, shows people wearing “Beijing 2008” T-shirts hanging from light poles. A man in a suit proclaims, “And we also saved on the cost of hanging banners.”

The protesters, from a group called Students Organized Against Racism, said these cartoons were racist and that the newspaper should apologize for publishing them. David Tung, a senior at the nearby University of California at Davis, told reporters that “if we depend on human rights, no country in the world would have the ability to host the games.”

Tung and his fellow protesters are clearly ignorant of a few realities. Those who protested Germany’s National Socialist regime during the 1930s and 40s would be astonished to hear that their criticism of Nazism was racist. Likewise, those protesting the practice of apartheid in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s would have trouble with the concept that they were racists, rather than the regime they were protesting.

Australia, the most recent Olympic host, does not forbid political opposition, imprison dissenters, control the press, machine-gun protesting students, persecute religious believers, and prosecute scholars on bogus espionage charges.

As some astonished Bee editors pointed out, China actually does this sort of thing, which calls into question whether the regime is a proper host for the Olympic games. The claim that “no country in the world” could withstand human rights scrutiny betrays a breathtaking ignorance.

China also has occupied the nation of Tibet for more than 40 years, suppressing the independence and culture of the Tibetan people. If Australia invaded and occupied New Zealand, it too would be open to criticism, but Australia has done no such thing.

Canada, Japan, the United States, Iceland, Belgium, Sweden, France, Italy and New Zealand, are examples of what are known as free countries. They allow political opposition, maintain a free press, allow free emigration and permit freedom of the press, free speech, freedom of movement and free association. The people have a right to these freedoms, and that is what human rights means.

North Korea, Cuba, and China are three of a dwindling number of nations that suppress freedom and human rights. All three are one-party communist dictatorships. China’s occupation of Tibet and constant saber-rattling toward Taiwan confirm the regime’s imperialist tendencies. Any student group that attempted to point this out publicly in Beijing would vanish without a trace. California students should know that, but by all appearances they don’t.

The University of California system accepts the top 12.5 percent of high-school graduates, supposedly the best and the brightest. But at UC Berkeley, the most desirable campus, 17 percent of first-year students require remedial education. At UC Riverside, the figure is 60 percent.

Besides math and English, the remedial classes should include a course in the basic difference between freedom and tyranny.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.