 Outside View
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-01 07:22 'Hands off China' supports Games The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML) recently launched a campaign called "Hands off China" in central London with about 50 people attending it. According to information given on the campaign's website www.handsoffchina.org, comrades who joined the rally included Harpal Brar, chairman of the CPGB-ML, Jack Shapiro, veteran British communist and old friend of China since the 1930s, Avtar Singh Jouhl, general secretary of the Indian Workers' Association (GB) (IWA GB), Kojo Amoo Gottfried, president of the Ghana-China Friendship Association and former ambassador of Ghana to China, and Keith Bennett, a specialist in Chinese politics and history. Others like Isabel Crook, who has lived some 70 of her 92 years in China, and Mohammed Arif, General Secretary of the British Afro-Asian Solidarity Organization (BAASO), also voiced their support to the rally. Harpal Brar systematically stripped away layers of lies that are spread in the Western countries about China by contrasting them with new China's real record and achievements since 1949. He compared the different performances by Chinese leaders and the PLA troops and US national guards in fighting the Wenchuan earthquake and Hurricane Katrina respectively. He also refuted the thesis of the so-called Chinese ambition on the African continent that was spread by some Western countries intentionally as, contrary to the Western lies, China's relations with Africa did not begin in recent days but in the 1950s. The campaign is being set up in the light of the West's vitriolic and deceitful propaganda campaign being waged in the Western press against China, according to leaflets handed out by the organizers. "Hands off China was inheriting all that was best in all the friendship and solidarity campaigns that had preceded it over the last more than 70 years", said Jack Shapiro, who outlined the various campaigns that he had joined in support of China and how the Britain-China Friendship Association was forced to shut down by revisionists. Avtar Singh Jouhl pledged the full support of the IWA(GB) for Hands off China and suggested that resolutions be put in trade union branches to send greetings to the Beijing Olympics. This work has a bearing on all the other contradictions at play on the international scene and on the peoples' struggles in every part of the world. "This work is our internationalist duty", Brar said. The campaign is scheduled to hold its first annual general meeting in the autumn. Readers' comments are welcome. Please send mail to Letters to the Editor, China Daily, 15 Huixin Dongjie, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029 China. Send faxes to (86-10) 6491-8377. Send e-mail to opinion@chinadaily.com.cn or letters@chinadaily.com.cn or to the individual columnists. China Daily reserves the right to edit all letters. Thank you. (China Daily 08/01/2008 page10) |
