In Other Words

China's silence

The New York Times reported that ex-president and current head of the Chinese military, Jiang Zemin, has announced that he is going to resign. According to the Times this might very well be a ploy to actually get more power, but it could be a sign of the end to a power struggle that has been consuming China for the last few years and also a possible softening of foreign policy towards such ‘provinces’ as Taiwan and Hong Kong. Officials were forced to take a hard line with these countries as otherwise they might be accused of being un patriotic or sympathetic to these upstart’s causes.

It could theoretically mean that the ‘One China’ policy could go on the back burner and China could truly focus on achieving economic success instead of having the most land. It would also mean there would be more effort spent on reducing poverty, corruption and wasteful spending. Important, considering how much of the World’s resources China will both produce and use up in the next couple of decades.

Far more interesting, however, is the continued secrecy of the Chinese government. Take, for example, Jiang Yanyong who was the hero who made the world aware of the SARS epidemic raging through China, which the authorities tried to deny. He was almost imprisoned for putting the Chinese people’s concerns before that of the red party. Then, when he wrote a letter stating the Chinese government should apologise for the Tiananmen Square Massacre he was detained and exposed to propaganda material for a month, before international awareness and internal pressure forced the authorities to release him.

It gets even better, Jiang Yanyong was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which is the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, recently. Unfortunately he was not allowed to leave China and his daughter (I believe) had to go pick it up in his stead.

China is still trying to avoid receiving bad publicity by silencing the voices that speak it, rather than fighting the original cause of the bad publicity. This can be seen back in Singapore, to some extent, as well. Though admittedly Singapore prefers simply tossing those people that badmouth it out, or sewing them in a court of law for liable. Do these governments really believe that they make things better by silencing the people that point out what is bad? I guess they don’t even consider that what these people are pointing out is bad, do they?

Interesting Fact: While we’re on the topic of China, a widower in Beijing kept 200,000 cockroaches as pets, according to the Hong Kong’s mainstream press. (this fact was drawn from news of the weird, which is very interesting and entertaining.)

posted by Symbol @ 7.9.04