After Sichuan, Tibet, Xinjiang, it is now Yunnan where a 6.5 earthquake on Thursday struck near Kunming. More than a million are displaced as a result; more than 300 are hurt; dead count uncertain.
Yearly, without fail, calamities of all sorts visit common people in China. Some, like those in Tibet and Xinjiang, are man-made. China’s rulers have said that those who made those calamities, clubbing to dead men, women, and children, burning property – in effect a 21st century tribal raid and killing spree – will be arrested, tried and, if guilty, executed. The executions do not constitute a threat (that AFP/AP and others have twisted it to mean); rather, it is a promise to the people to safeguard tianxia 天下 no matter what the rest of the world thinks and regardless of the opinions in the likes of Nathaniel Tan, BBC and the New York Times. Peace without justice is superficial and fraudulent – murders on account of race repeatedly go unpunished in the rest of the world because they are excused and they are done wholesale.
Tianxia 天下: All under heaven. For millenia in China peace is heaven’s mandate for the rulers. Common people, the laobaixing 老百姓, make almost no demand of their rulers – indeed, the mountains are high, the emperor is far away – but tianxia is one of the rare exceptions.
This principle of rule, tianxia, may be applied among Chinese Malaysians: Umno could have all the Chinese votes because keeping the peace is not terribly difficult to offer, beginning with leaving the laobaixing alone. In the converse way of seeing the same thing, three-fourths of the Chinese before 2008 won’t vote DAP because it is largely seen as cantankerous, rowdy and belligerent, all the qualities of Western adversarial politics that have come to infect Malaysian political life.
Such kinds of Western political qualities (using the “mass” public is favourite method) readily find a home among the Western-educated, Nathaniel Tan, et al, who have no inkling what that 天下 really, really means. This, adopting the adversarial politics and their Western acculturation, is no coincidence. You can tell from their web sites: they bow to the god of America, adore White man’s ways, and probably can’t read their mother’s name in Chinese. (Note, hence, how wrong was Mahathir Mohamad: it is not the Chinese-schooled, who he calls communists, therefore anti-Umno, but the St John’s types, the English-schooled, who would eventually turn against Umno/MCA.)
In fresh video images and domestic news from Urumqi, they speak of:
- Banks reopening; residents have returned to burned-out shops and homes. In one case, a man squatting inside the ashes of his shop cries uncontrollably: his mother, younger brother, and wife are still missing.
- The government has opened an office to take complaints of anybody missing and to help trace them; more than 200 cases have been received and recorded.
- One particularly striking CCTV footage shows a horde of Uyghur “peaceful protesters” throwing rocks at the glass walls of a supermarket and trying to break in through the front door, quickly locked. As this went on, staff and customers, mostly Ugyhur and Han women, hunkered down between the shelves while crawling towards a door. A man was quickly herding the women towards the basement quarters of the supermarket staff. All later emerged alive, including the man, but the supermarket was looted.
Related to Xinjiang:
Update: Possible 天下 in Malaysia
Between heaven and earth (tiandi, 天地) are people (ren, 人)…
“Today it (rule? governance?) is all about you the people of Malaysia. Kalau tidak kelapa Puan, tidak juga kelapa bali, kalau tidak kerana tuan-tuan dan puan-puan, mana kan saya berada di sini.” – Najib Razak, Jul 11.
