Murder of Children.
Spoke Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, re the China school attacks since spring -- 5 or 6, depending upon counting -- and the non-response of the mandarins of Beijing. The most recent horror in Shanxi Province turns on a longstanding property dispute between the killer (now dead at his own hand) and the local Party boss. The Party boss sold the public land for the school, so the school was willy-nilly relocated on land rented from the perpetrator, Mr. Wu. The dispute raged, and Wu's madness exploded when he attacked and killed seven children and two adults. Gordon Chang observes, "This couldn't have happened in a country with law and courts. It is a product of China's one-party dictatorship."
iPad Suicides.
Also spoke Gordon Chang re the unusual number of suicides and attempted suicides at a vast manufacturing complex in Shenzhen. Young people leaping from dormitory windows in response to group pressure, unhappiness, isolation from family, ignorance. The complex is the vast Foxcann, on the Mainland across from Hong Kong, where they build the iPad and many Mac products, including the iPhone. Foxcann has moved in a hotline, and it is calling in monks to exorcise evils spirits and comfort the dead. The Chinese people are thrifty, vigorous, ambitious, relentlessly cheerful, self-assured, magical. The Chinese government has not any of these qualities: in addition, Beijing is rotten with kleptocrats and dullards in power.
Referred to me from a young friend in China:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-05/14/content_9847269.htm
Hundreds of million of Chinese have fled the homeland in the past few centuries. There are Chinese communities throughout the world. Not surprising, the only people immigrating into China are from North Korea.
Take heart, JB fans. Only another 8-12 hours before Elena Kagan's picture scrolls down off the home page.
This is just plain silly - trying to link the random killings of Chinese school children to Chinese government intent, policies and corruption. We ourselves have adults killing and preying on children. We have sanctified abortion as a human right. Children routinely kill other children on the streets of our urban centers. Mothers drown their children in bathtubs. Children are left in cars parked in the sun with the windows rolled up while their parents drink in bars, gamble in casinos or commit adultery in shady hotel rooms. Students have been known to turn automatic weapons on their classmates in school cafeterias. Yet nobody takes the leap of blaming any of our sacred cow institutions (except to speciously promote the politically charged gun control agenda).
Wherever there are people such incidents are bound to occur. My sister-in-law was murdered by a rapist in New Delhi where she worked as a medical (speech) specialist. My sister took her own life in Switzerland where she worked as a dentist. These incidents were regarded as personal tragedies, adequately borne by a narrowly confined circle of grieving survivors. None of it was ascribed to American imperialism, capitalism, socialism, government corruption or jihadi recruitment and incitement.
There is plenty of legitimate evidence that indicts the unelected, self-serving crony government of communist China. These five or six incidents chronicled thus far in a nation that big may justifiably qualify as ‘copycat’, but does not translate into a significant trend.
I understand the desire to besmirch and heap insult and blame on someone regarded as distasteful. I understand the desire to overlook human shortcomings in order to defend someone whom we insist on admiring. The U.S. media has been doing the latter for years as pertains to our two most recent Democrat presidents. At the same time they can’t wait for a card-carrying tea party member to fart, so they can classify the entire movement as uncouth.
Blaming the Chinese government for what essentially amounts to no more than a ‘crime’ (or crimes) is just as bad as what our own state-controlled media is doing. And it’s disingenuous to boot. On one hand, we refuse to classify China as an enemy; while, on the other, it gives us the satisfaction to editorialize about what could just as easily apply to us. In this way we can touch upon the true nature of our misgivings without the risk of breaking something which we obviously regard as fragile or sacred. When China responds with its own list of sins as these might apply to America, we simply declare a stalemate and walk away.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Great interview with Hutton last night, John. Almost missed it, but it was the high point of the show. That guy knows his stuff.
NYT: For the past two months, Chinese authorities have been trying to deal with a string of vicious attacks on young children in rural elementary schools. They have clamped down on news coverage, citing fears of copycat crimes and called for heightened school security. But on May 12, a man stormed a village school in Shaanxi Province and hacked to death seven children and two adults. It was the fifth attack since March, all involving middle-aged men using knives, cleavers or tools. Seventeen people have been killed and nearly 100 wounded in the attacks.
Some commentators say these attacks are symptoms of extreme stress in a rapidly changing society, an undercurrent which the government has failed to recognize. Though the cases may differ, is there a broader context for these attacks?
Xueguang Zhou, sociologist, Stanford University
C. Cindy Fan, associate dean of social sciences, U.C.L.A.
Guobin Yang, associate professor, Barnard College
"This is just plain silly - trying to link the random killings of Chinese school children to Chinese government intent, policies and corruption."
It doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. The numbers - 509 children killed - is more than random whackos in one-offs. The Chinese leadership instituted the one-child policy 30 years ago. It has produced a lop-sided bias in male births, with the consequence that many men have scant hope of ever having a wife and children in a society that is highly-family oriented. It has been trying for almost 20 years to modernize China by accelerating moves from rural to urban, from agriculture to industry. It has been trying to grow economically by feeding people freedom with a teaspoon. One unintended consequence is severe social tensions, forces that the government cannot control, that it can only react to. What is the focus of one child policy? How better to vent rage against the policy than to attack the products of the policy?
Lou, as an unattractive person myself, I generally disdain gratuitous comments upon the physical appearance of others. However, I do wonder why women who succeed in the Democrat party are so often troll-like in appearance... Shalala, Napolitano, Elders, Hillary, the list goes on.
Corlyss D and JB as well – Excellent points both! The fundamental remnant of what can be considered ‘religion’ in China is ‘ancestor worship’. By extension, therefore, the issue of the welfare of progeny itself rises to utmost significance. Clearly, the untimely death of children – defined as a child dying before the parent does - by any means hits a raw nerve. (We have seen something of this already when schools collapsed killing scores of students during recent earthquakes; and, again, during the tainted milk and formula scandals.) The impact of this is of course aggravated by China’s one-child policy which the government has been pursuing for years. As Corlyss points out, such policy has already produced many predictably unintended consequences which are sure to return and bite policy makers in the ass in untold ways. Perhaps we have now reached that point.
What is more interesting to me than the recently publicized bludgeoning and hacking deaths of Chinese children is the government’s apparent reaction to it. China is an authoritarian state. Theoretically, at least, it views itself as being able to control virtually every aspect of what goes on in China. In practice it can and does not. As a last resort, it can always count on the state-controlled media to maintain the illusion of a well-rounded, efficient communist Utopia by disseminating the Chinese version of government- approved ‘happy talk’.
The fact that this news has come out in the first place indicates that some sort of power struggle is occurring within the government itself. Factions within the government of China are exploiting this to call into question the efficacy of the current leadership. It is indicative of a powerful challenge to present leadership having been launched. Successful or not - whether leading to an eventual better outcome for the Chinese people or not – it seems to show that things are in flux at the very highest levels.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
I remember you - you're the one who always lectures me about physical appearance not being important. My response to you was that if that's the case, you should be consistent (per your own words on another thread) and criticize positive comments regarding appearance equally as much as negative ones. So, John started out a recent thread by referring to Cristie as "burley and handsome". In fact, he quite frequently compliments candidates on their attractiveness. Why do you not take John to task for this custom? Possible reasons:
(1) You don't want to take on the owner of the site (self-preservation)
(2) You don't mind positive feedback, only negative feedback (censorship) or
(3) You haven't noticed your own inconsistency (lack of self-awareness).
Did I miss an option?
I offer you this somewhat relevant nugget of insight from überblogger Steve Sailer, namely, Sailer's Law of Female Journalism:
"The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking."