Foreign criticism often misguided
By Chris Devonshire-Ellis
April 9 - With so much talk recently of Tibet for various reasons, and so much Western paranoia about even mentioning the name of the country (blogs running the name as T*bet or T1bet displays rather a lack of confidence, or a somewhat bizarre notion of harboring anti-China naughtiness. It’s almost become a trendy fashion to mistype the capital city that cannot, apparently be actually spelt for great fear of the Chinese police shutting them down) we decided to dig out an old, long deleted back issue of China Briefing about the investment environment there, which we ran in 2002 (click on cover to download the pdf).
Then, China Briefing hadn’t quite reached the glossy professionally produced standards it has today, but it was at the time – pre-blogging of course – pretty much the only source of China investment information available concerning FDI legal and tax issues about China, at least for free. 40,000 print copies were produced for this issue and distributed across China, and online. The issue followed meetings I had with the Tibetan autonomous regional government, at the time headed up by Guo Jinlong, the Party Secretary. Guo, now the mayor of Beijing, spent some time with me explaining the issues China faced with Tibet, and was a generous host, treating us to Tibetan banquets, dancing and singing. He was also obviously a man who enjoyed getting out and about in Tibet’s harsh sunshine; he had become very dark tanned indeed. (more…)