I think it's a mistake to set oneself up as being either in camp A (ok to criticise China) or camp B (not ok to criticise China) because it misses the point entirely as to whether there's a problem or not. Sure, the West has made a mess of things so far - the 300 million North Americans whose lifestyles have an average carbon footprint that would require 9 planet earths to be globally sustainable are a problem. There's not much despute about that any more. A population of 1.3 billion represents a sizeable portion of the world's population so the reality is that trends in that population have a massive global impact. That's not a matter of opinion, it's just the way things are.
Also, the notion that you can't criticise any country/regime on a particular basis without making a thorough criticism of every other country/regime that is also worthy of criticism on that basis is absurd. There would be absolutely no scope for dialogue on any of these matters if that were how it worked.
As for Tibet, who's the Despot? The Dalai Lama? And the monks are the serfs? Come on. Even if that were remotely true, would invasion of the country have been justified? There's divided opinion over whether the invasion of Iraq was justified and there we were dealing with Saddam Hussein - do you really mean to draw a parallel between Hussein and the Dalai Lama? Or perhaps I completely misunderstood your point, in which case I apologise for having taken you up wrong ;-)
Contrariness breeds polarisation
I think it's a mistake to set oneself up as being either in camp A (ok to criticise China) or camp B (not ok to criticise China) because it misses the point entirely as to whether there's a problem or not. Sure, the West has made a mess of things so far - the 300 million North Americans whose lifestyles have an average carbon footprint that would require 9 planet earths to be globally sustainable are a problem. There's not much despute about that any more. A population of 1.3 billion represents a sizeable portion of the world's population so the reality is that trends in that population have a massive global impact. That's not a matter of opinion, it's just the way things are.
Also, the notion that you can't criticise any country/regime on a particular basis without making a thorough criticism of every other country/regime that is also worthy of criticism on that basis is absurd. There would be absolutely no scope for dialogue on any of these matters if that were how it worked.
As for Tibet, who's the Despot? The Dalai Lama? And the monks are the serfs? Come on. Even if that were remotely true, would invasion of the country have been justified? There's divided opinion over whether the invasion of Iraq was justified and there we were dealing with Saddam Hussein - do you really mean to draw a parallel between Hussein and the Dalai Lama? Or perhaps I completely misunderstood your point, in which case I apologise for having taken you up wrong ;-)