ABSTRACT
A start to answering the question in the title may lie in a couple of admittedly Washington-biased stories:
A Virginia congressman, conservative and Republican, is holding hearings of his subcommittee on the Sudan Government’s bombing of refugee camps in their civil war. He looks around the room filled with the lobbyists representing that government hired with money from its large oil reserves and asks: “Who among Washington’s well-paid consultants speaks for the victims of Third World violence?”
A few years ago the cities of Baltimore and Seattle issued proclamations honoring an embattled Chinese religious group. The results from these fairly pro forma press releases were vigorous protests from Beijing’s embassy with pointed reminders of the two cities trade ties with China. The two American cities withdrew their proclamations and actually wrote apologies to the Chinese government.
