Why China is Not the Future

Despite China's surge in economic performance, CO2 emissions, sprawling coastal cities, and the upcoming Beijing Olympics, there is a side of China that the world does not see. Outside its economic explosion is a rot that burdens the vast majority of the Chinese people. Poverty, disease, oppression, and brutality linger in the communist nation. Scars of Tiannamen Square in 1989 are unhealed and any talk of the massacre results of intimidation and threats of government thugs.

Guy Sorman writing in City Journal exposes the Empire of Lies for what China truly is.

But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.(link)

This is not to say that China has not changed since Mao and Deng Xiaoping, indeed they have for the better in many ways. Yet China remains oppressive towards any who dissent, it hides the ravages of AIDS in Henan province and elsewhere, and still engages in horrible torture of political dissent and those who try to worship freely.

The Communist Party is no less mendacious when it comes to China’s AIDS epidemic. The problem is gravest in the province of Henan, where vast numbers of poor peasants contracted AIDS during the nineties from selling their blood plasma (a trade generally controlled by Party members) and then having the blood, sans plasma but pooled with that of other donors, reinfused, absent HIV tests—a recipe for massive contamination. The AIDS sufferers of Henan are now dying in the hundreds of thousands, trapped in their impoverished villages with no one to care for them.(id)

Sorman's piece is invaluable to those wanting to know more of China and the current state of its transformation from a Communist state to an autocratic, dictatorship. China resembles a fascist entity more so than a Communist one since its embrace of market reforms. Nevertheless, the Chinese people yearn for freedom and democracy and we should help them achieve it incrementally.