British PM Gordon Brown condemned the execution. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed regret that the UK's concerns regarding the case were not taken into Consideration by China.
The People's Republic of China Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, said something particularly PRC-like in her response: "Nobody has the right to speak ill of China's judicial sovereignty. We express our strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British Government's unreasonable criticism of the case. We urge the British to correct their mistake in order to avoid harming China-UK relations."
Much as China likes to try to pressure world leaders into ignoring the Dalai Lama and Tibet. You may read this and think "so what? China can't control what people around the world think." But you ignore the fact that the People's Republic of China, with regards to Tibet, has had a strategy of co-opting the world wide academia for the past several years, to the point where once sympathetic western scholars now speak and write about how wonderful Tibetans' lives are under Chinese rule.
Much as how China has managed to pressure and cajole nations around the world to recognize Chinese sovereignty over Tibet (and then turns around and tries to claim that no nation has ever recognized even a country known as "Tibet"). When was the last time you heard an American president (great "promoters of freedom" that they are) speak out about the fundamental human right of Tibetans to be free of foreign oppression? When was the last time you heard any European leader speak about Tibet truthfully...i.e. not as an internal Chinese matter, but as a matter of one nation occupying and colonizing another?
It is conceivable that China, since it spares no expense with regards to controlling not only Tibet, but how people around the world think about Tibet, feels it can also control world opinion about how it treats people, such as Akmal Shaikh.
The basic line of argument from the PRC side is that one doesn't even have the right to argue with what China does. One has no right to complain. Especially if you are not Chinese.
While I certainly agree that if one commits a crime one is liable to the local authorities for justice, I disagree with the principle that nobody can say some nation's judicial system is a crock of shit. Criticism is healthy. If China's judicial system had its ducks in a row, why then did they not seek a mental health evaluation for Mr Shaikh? Is it that it is more important to deal out justice or punishment, then it is to honor justice?
China can respond by saying that they are sovereign and had no need to seek out a mental evaluation since they already received British documentation about Akmal Shaikh but no mental illness was diagnosed in any record anywhere.
But this ignores the fact the justice should spare no expense in pursuit of the idea "innocent until proven guilty." This may be an American and Western idea, but China should not refuse it on those grounds, since the PRC itself is officially "communist" and Communism is lock-stock-and-barrel a Western tradition of anti-capitalist ideology.
So we are not to criticize China's judicial system and its handling of the Akmal Shaikh case. Nor its treatment of Tibet. Nor its colonization of East Turkestan. Nor its wanton destruction of the environment. Nor its official system of apartheid between those from agricultural communities and those from the coastal cities. Yep. World power indeed. And the ego to match.
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