My best guess is China doesn’t have a long history of meddling in the affairs of Middle Eastern nations, that they oppress muslims in their own country doesn’t appear to cause enough outrage.
While I agree with everything you’ve said I’d like to add that eventual social upheaval is expected in Chinese tradition. For order to descend into chaos to change again into order is considered a living example of the Dao. And one of the first acts of every Chinese dynasty was to write about the descent of the last one.
The Chinese, in their bones, believe power eventually corrupts and when that happens the current order must fall.
Very true. Even the first line of the classic “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” is “The Empire long divided must unite, long united must divide.”
No I am talking about the historical Chinese province of Annam, which is roughly the same area as the former country of North Vietnam. It was sometimes a province and sometimes a tributary duchy or state for most of the last 2000 years. What used to be South Vietnam was formerly part of the Khmer empire and various other kingdoms, which was displaced by Vietnamese expansion over the last 1000 years.
The northern part of Vietnam was heavily influenced by Chinese culture and politics even when it was nominally independent.
The ethnic Chinese in Vietnam are a different issue. Before 1975 most of the business class (small, medium and large) in South Vietnam was ethnic Chinese. They are Chinese immigrants into a non-Chinese country, just like the Chinese in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Totally seconded.
I tend to think it’s more simple than all of this: China is a very good customer of OPEC and China also hasn’t done anything to piss of OPEC yet.
Once they do, this will all go downhill.
Its quite a big issue and is mentioned often. So to answer the question in the OP, people have come out in protest.
However, kindly stop looking at the “muslim world” as some giant monolith populated by automatons who go nuts at the slightest hint of “oppression”. Most Arabs don’t give much about Kashmir, S Asians don’t do more than protest over Palestine, outside South East Asia, very few people know or care about the insurgency in Thailand or the Philippines. These issues are local to their region.
The thought that China doesn’t back down because it isn’t a democracy is incorrect. One notable example is their recent abandonment of their deadline of requiring their filtering software on all China’s PC, after massive public (internal and external) pushback.
China has just as much reason to be as sensitive to external criticism as any other nation. If the Middle East starts boycotting them, it would actually affect their economy, after all. If riots spread due in part to bad press, it will be bad for China.
I would look for another explanation. My guess is that Sitnam is correct: it’s all about the history in the Middle East.
Frankly, I think this is nonsense. There’s plenty of cases where protesters are not fazed by daunting odds against them and their cause. Besides, what has protesting the Danish cartoons or, for instance, the anti-Islam flick by Dutch MP Geert Wilders really gotten the protesters? How have Denmark or The Netherlands ‘backed down’? Also, what **Avumede **said.
In order to answer the question raised in the OP, we need to realize that countries in the Middle East are not democracies and that protests are not spontaneous - they are organized and directed by the authorities if it pleases them, and only if pleases them. This does not mean that people in the ME are not genuinely upset about the Danish cartoons or about Wilders’ film, but it does mean that they only display their rage if the authorities allow them to. If this is the case, they won’t just allow the protests but even facilitate them by busing people to the embassy of the country presently under scrutiny.
“The fact”? Is this really even anywhere remotely close to being true?
Hmmm…well which group seems more devout, nay, nigh-on obsessed by religion, and which group tends to treat its religious worship more like a weekly social get-together??
TheMightyAtlas,
This goes a long way of explaining my office mate’s explanation
(a few days ago) of immigrating from Vietnam, but ethically Chinese.
Ignorance fought. Thanks. 
I think I may have gone a bit overboard. This is true in the UK, (cite: New Study Finds Mosque Goers to Double Church Attendance) but I don’t really know anything about the rest of Europe, especially the nominally catholic part. Maybe churches in Poland are quite well attended.
I do know that even when I visited France and Italy in 2005 the churches were virtually empty, except St Peter’s in Rome. I don’t think I saw more than 20 people in a church, actually attending the service. There were hundreds of people who were rather obviously tourists, maybe “pilgrim tourists” but not local attendees.
Maybe if I went outside the centers of the big cities, I would have a different impression.
But if you visit the Netherlands, Denmark, or Sweden, this should be self evident. Not only will you find the churches empty, the average man in the street will react very strangely if you ask him about Church attendance. I work for a multinational in the US with a large number of expatriate Dutch, Danish and Swedish employees. They are quite perplexed by the number of people in the US attending church, and who are generally religious. As one of them says, in Sweden, “a church is a nice place to have a wedding, very picturesque.” Apparently the Lutheran church in Sweden has long since given up on trying to ensure that there is any spiritual significance to marriages they perform, at least on the part of the participants.
As the number of church attendees approaches zero, it is not hard for mosque attendance to top that number. Though I suppose there may be Christian immigrants too that have higher rates of church attendance than the native population, so maybe this is not so clear-cut.
You are in England, right? You can probably testify that even without published statistics, Church attendance among the native Catholic and Anglican population is pretty close to zero. Though Orthodox church attendance among Balkan immigrants may be higher.
I’m originally from UK, now in the US. The word “Christian” has a different meaning in UK. It basically means peoples whose interaction with the church is limited to baptisms, weddings, funerals - and that’s about it. The average British Christian doesn’t set foot in a church on a weekly basis.
Religious Christians are considered weird. As for muslims attending mosques in UK - well many go for Friday prayers at lunchtime, and that’s about it. The number of muslims who pray 5 times a day is a LOT lower.
Regarding Balkan immigrants - well I grew up amongst a large Serbian population - I never knew a single person who was religious. They went to Mass etc, cos their family demanded it, but apart from that they didn’t care.
Arab governments almost without exception are propped up to some extent by America. The only Arab government the US doesn’t currently prop up in some way is Syria. And Arab governments are well aware that their people think they’re illegitimate American puppets. They keep them under tight control, letting them vent normally only over Israel or something that doesn’t reflect badly on them, like the Danish cartoons.
In some cases Arab governments sometimes work with Islamic leaders, like in Saudi Arabia where the population is predominantly made up of religious conservatives and so the government is overwhelmed by popular opinion, or in some more secular countries they undercut and repress militant Islam like in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, etc. It’s not correct to say that Arab governments use religion as a tool, they’re all terrified of it, just some have no option but to make common cause with the Islamists to a certain degree (like Saudi).
There’s nothing about China’s relationship with the region that prevents criticism. What prevents criticism of China repressing minorities is that Arab governments do that every day in their own countries, internal repression by others is never mentioned in Arab media except in a “see, every country is like this, not just ours” context.
AQ are busy getting organised in Pakistan and training in Afghanistan. As far as other trouble spots go they’re also sending people to Kashmir and Chechnya and will send them to China if the situation develops into a permanent standoff between China and the Uighurs. Arab governments without exception are terrified of AQ and want to destroy them as much as we do.