Report: Chinese factory producing "Free Tibet" flags for export

Media reports from within China say a factory in Guangdong has been completing orders for the flag of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Workers said they thought they were just making colourful flags and did not realise their meaning.

Link to BBC News article (too jay shay, Hutch!)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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technex

that just made me laugh until my sides hurt.

such beautiful irony is much too rare.
Cowicide

Like all those damn yellow “support our troops” ribbons made in China? So you end up giving money to a communist, fascist state in order to “support our troops”? Hilarious.

http://www.antimagnet.com/yellow_small.gif

But, the big irony for me is that in the late 90′s I used to make stickers that looked just like that but they said “Fuck Tibet” instead of “Free Tibet”. I did that in America. And here is China creating the opposite pro-Tibet sticker there.

Awesome.
Antinous

By definition, communism is the opposite of fascism.

Communism is the opposite of capitalism. They refer to public versus private ownership of the means of production. Fascism could exist in either system, and has.
Antiglobalism

Surprise? We mass produce whatever sells and only later realized the effects of it. This was a funny find indeed.
Chuck

I still have to question the integrity of the Dalai Lama for his refusal to wear a Tibetan flag lapel pin.

…

Wait. What?
scottfree

Antinous, Like the wizard Shazam, I come running to a thread at the mention of a few magic words.

/assumes position at lectern/ The relationship between Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism is the subject of much debate, centred particularly on Adorno and hockheimers seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which it is argued that Fascism, not socialism as Marx posits, is the logical extension of capitalism. to understand this we must first define Fascism as an economic system, rather than a political one. The media tends to define fascism according to a set of social criteria: surveillance, arbitrary enforcement of the law, rule by the few etc, but fascism is probably best properly understood as an economic system in which the state exists merely to facilitate the flow of capital from the not wealthy to the wealthy. So if we look at Capitalism, socialism and fascism from a class conscious perspective, capitalism is owners vs workers, fascism is owners win, socialism is workers win. At any rate, a dialectical understanding of history will reveal that these three systems are not in opposition, but that each contain the ingredients of the others./steps down from lectern, absent-mindedly muttering to himself that it all isn’t at all as simple as he would like it to be/

Not that i am specifically reminding you, so much as i just like to see my thoughts posted on the intarnet.
Jeff

I would think the Chinese athorities would punish the owner of the factory. Ignorance of a flag’s meaning is no excuse.
Tian

One would think with all those Tibetan prayer flags are being sold in every headshops, the Tibetans would have some kind of textile manufacturing facilities.

Apparently not…
Jack

Onion head would be: â€œSlaves Unware They Were Making Freedom Flags, Are Slavesâ€
Silva

That doesn’t surprise me one bit. Only the most naive “free Tibet, boycott China” crowd would be shocked if they looked at the tiny letters in the labels of their high and low-priced electronic gizmos, clothes and other every day objects.
Landowner

“Free Tibet”?
I’ll take one.
dougrogers

#5, I caught the story in my newsreader. Thought it very ironic all the same. Guess I’ve been indoctrinated successfully without needing the other aggregate sites.

And I also saw the one of the children sold in to slavery at another factories. Looks like China needs to be Liberated.
Antinous

I define Fascism as the banding together of one or more demographic groups to the detriment of others. It’s a largely etymologically based definition. The USSR, although Communist, had strong fascist tendencies in that ethnic Russians, and to a lesser extent Ukrainians and other ‘white folk’, used the state apparatus to promulgate their own interests. Same thing with China and the Han, although I would no longer define China as Communist. My definition is both political and economic. If the fundamental contradiction of Capitalism is between public production and private appropriation, Fascism can represent private appropriation by individuals as in Capitalism, or by a ‘communal’ group such as an ethnicity in Communism.
Antinous

There seems to be quite a bit of overlap between Boing Boing, Digg, and Slashdot lately…

The solution to that, o Salad Days, is to suggest links to new and exciting stories heretofore undiscovered by the masses.
Spikeles

Heh. reminds me of this image http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/photographer/20/20534_large.jpg
squirrelgirl

ummm some of you seem to be missing the point. while it is in fact ironic for them to be making flags supporting freedom for a land they oppress… the REALLY funny part is the hippies giving money to the government suppressing the people they want to free, as a show of how much they care.
Sister Y

Guys I am reading Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine and, while it might be the most depressing book I’ve ever read short of Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, I have found it incredibly useful in evaluating the Chinese government and the possibilities for communism. Has anybody else read this?

Basically Mao decides that insert insane policy here will boost agricultural yields, and then his underlings enact the policies and then lie to him that his insane policies boosted agricultural yields. The ones that don’t, well, he has them killed. 40-80 million people starve to death as a result. There is widespread cannibalism. Architects of the famines and their descendants are still revered by the Party.
scottfree

Even people who thought the USSR was a force of good in the world tend to call it a ‘degenerated workers state’, whatever that’s supposed to mean, and leftists who don’t, tend to call it state centred capitalism. Stalin was all about the ‘socialist imperialism’ in which Ukranians had to suffer for the benefit of the mother country. But that is simply the idea behind Western imperialism.

Socialism /is/ the banding together of demographic groups to the detriment of others, in a sense, since it comes to pass throuh the appropriation of the means of production by the workers from the owners. Of course this is done with a mind toward abolishing class, or the demographic distinction which set the forces in motion in the first place, but still.

If you look at the nazis, surely quintessential fascism, they were as democratic as you like. People loved hitler. What made them fundamentally different from what came before wasn’t genocide, that had gone on for centuries, but the degree of production achieved with minimum compensation. You wouldn’t call the 19th century US fascism, but that was a time when ethnicities were at an opposition rarely matched in history. i think.

And so is fascism qualitatively different from capitalism? I don’t know. much cleverer folks than me argue about it. But at the end of the day, economic classes oppose each other; political systems do not oppose each other. If there are distinctions relevant to the operation of the withering state apart from relationship to the means of production under socialism, then it isn’t socialism, surely.
Antinous

The USSR used identical principles. Somebody must remember the name of Stalin’s scientist who made up crazy shit and starved half the country. But, funny side note: biofuels.
Sister Y

Antinous, exactly – Mao got all his theories from Lysenko and the Soviet scientists.
The Unusual Suspect

Looks like China has discovered what the West has known for a while: political entities are irrelevant to commercial entities.
Takuan

let’s email this image of a secret Chinese nuclear sub base to the flag factory
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00666/china-nuclear-big_666891a.jpg
Takuan

patriotic fervour
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/01/asia/china.php
Antinous

The Bargain is God. Especially if it comes in a really nice plastic handle bag.
grey not grey

cowicide –

“So you end up giving money to a communist, fascist state”

By definition, communism is the opposite of fascism. Both can, however, be totalitarian.
Takuan

Why did the factory workers not know what they were making?

Do the Chinese people need any better proof their government lies to them?
Cefeida

#8 Word, if only that were an exaggeration…

I’m sure both the workers and the government were well aware. But the government doesn’t care. They’re making money- and as long as they have that, no amount of flags will stop them.

The real joke is on the people buying those flags.
dougrogers

SquirrelGirl, we’re all in this together.
Falcon_Seven

iÂ·roÂ·ny /ËˆaÉªrÉ™ni, ËˆaÉªÉ™r-/ [ahy-ruh-nee, ahy-er-]
â€“noun, plural -nies.

2. a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.

The dictionary in action children.