China Sends Her Regrets. Dalai Who?

What is that around W's neck?

Face is a very big deal to the Chinese. Two of the most important concepts in Chinese culture are guanxi and mianzi. The first, guanxi, sharing favors between individuals, connections, relationships, and the ability to exert influence. The second, mianzi, means face: saving face, losing face, and giving face. They figure W may have poked them in the eye with a recent visitor in a crimson dress who also thinks he is divine. W gave them some bad mainzi. The Chinese had to settle face.

The Chinese consider Tibet an internal matter. There are six million people in Tibet and the country or region has ebbed and flowed between being an invader and a subject to outsiders, including the British, for two millennium.

News about Tibet? Lately, China has been trashing the Tibetan forests at an unsustainable rate, but that is nothing personal, the Chinese do that everywhere.

We have enough problems without getting involved with the billion plus Chinese and their old scores with the Tibetans. The Chinese have settled their score with W, the US Navy, and settled face. Pass the Nivea please.

U.S. aircraft carrier denied access to Hong Kong
Wed Nov 21, 2007

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China has refused permission for a U.S. aircraft carrier and accompanying vessels to visit Hong Kong for a long-planned Thanksgiving holiday visit, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

The Kitty Hawk group and its crew of 8,000 U.S. airmen and sailors had been expected in Hong Kong on Wednesday, but will now spend the holiday on the South China Sea.

Hundred of relatives of crew members of the USS Kitty Hawk had flown to Hong Kong to celebrate Thanksgiving with their loved ones. Hong Kong has been a regular port of call for U.S. sailors on "R & R" (rest and recuperation) since the Vietnam War.

The Chinese move comes as a surprise just weeks after a visit to China by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, which he said he hoped would lead to a long-term dialogue.

"At present, it appears the USS Kitty Hawk strike group will not be making a port call in Hong Kong as previously planned as a result of a last minute denial by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs," State Department spokeswoman Nicole Thompson said.

The United States was pressing China for an explanation and to reconsider its decision, she added.

There are several possible sources of discontent that may have prompted the decision -- including U.S. plans to sell Taiwan a $940 million upgrade to its missile system and a meeting last month between President George W Bush and the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader who Beijing considers a traitor.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing declined to make an immediate comment.

Last year, a Chinese submarine surfaced uncomfortably close to the Kitty Hawk near the Japanese island of Okinawa, an incident that highlighted the potential for friction between the two powers.

"The U.S. Consul General in Hong Kong is in touch with the Kitty Hawk families," said Anthony Hutchinson, a Public affairs director at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong.

"I've seen some spouses and family come in, they're now sightseeing ... they'll adjust," said another U.S. consular official who asked not to be named.

The move by Beijing coincides with "airspace controls" on Wednesday which Xinhua news agency said affected the air travel plans of 7,000 people in south and east China.

The controls were introduced for "unspecified reasons".

The Kitty Hawk, laid down in 1956, has the second longest active service of any ship in the U.S. navy after the USS Constitution, a 208-year-old ceremonial sailing ship kept in Boston Harbor.

It is the only conventionally fuelled carrier in the U.S. fleet and is due to be decommissioned next year.

(Reporting by Joanne Allen, James Pomfret and Lindsay Beck; editing by Nick Macfie