WORDS I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SAY:  Hooray for France.  A DARFUR ACTIVIST  GROUP  will hold an illegal protest  in Beijing during the Olympics.   Not even the Chinese can get away with brutalizing foreign,  non-Asian  liberals, or jailing them for years like they did Steve Kim.  CHINA’S BRAND IMAGE is suffering in the region, too.  Most of the press coverage has focused on  a possible effect at the Beijing Olympics, but Asian nations that had seemed alarmingly deferential to the Motherland...

Although protests against the Chinese colonization are spreading geographically, it looks as though a massive Chinese show of force has restored Chinese control to Lhasa, at a cost of about 80 dead. Here’s a good slideshow of news photos and some recent video news reports. The first is from Sky News: Another casualty of the protests has been democracy free speech in India, whose government is arresting Tibetan protestors. Here’s a report from Australia. I will warn you that these...

China may be the O.J. Simpson of thuggish regimes. Gutter thugs like the rulers of Sudan and Burma have justly earned their international pariah status after calculating that the consequences of slaughter would be manageable and acceptable. China’s regime has learned from Saudi Arabia’s example, lining its avenues of commerce with expensive lobbyists and P.R. firms, thus escaping most of the consequences of its behavior and even buying its way to quasi-legitimacy. But even the Chinese know that this strategy...