Butchers Of Beijing

"...The Chinese government, by its own admission, is struggling with widespread corruption. It disciplined more than 115,000 party members for this in 2005 alone. The effects of this corruption cut through Chinese society - a significant number of the 5,000 Chinese miners killed in accidents last year, for example, worked for mines partly owned by government officials who ignored safety regulations.

Unfortunately, the government's response to citizens who protest this corruption has been to fight the protesters, not the problem.

In the West, the attacks suggest a government that, ironically, may be less in control than it appears. Indeed, China's economic gains have only partly disguised increasing political repression.

Even foreign institutions are not immune; a Chinese researcher for The New York Times, Zhao Yan, is in detention and faces as many as 10 years in prison for allegedly sharing state secrets.

There are few avenues that serve as safety valves for dissent in China. Unsanctioned public demonstrations are punishable by prison terms. Ordinary people have been sentenced to 10 years in prison for merely posting their views on their Web sites or in email.

The tradition of "petitioning" public officials often ends in a beating by government-paid thugs or worse.

Freedom of the press is severely curtailed, especially when a newspaper covers an issue close to home. Some of the journalists who first uncovered the SARS epidemic are now serving prison terms...."


So a lot of countries in the world have shit, corrupt governments. But here's Red China's deal. They want to be a player on the world stage, nothing less than a superpower. And the shitty aspect of it all is that the rest of the world is bending over backward to let it happen. Domestically, the Chinese value system everyone hears about is as good as dead. Just a couple years ago I was taught in an East Asian politics class about how China is more about the community than the individual, that people look out for each other before themselves. Utter bullshit. People here would stab their family members in the back for some extra yuan.

My personal experience is with the teachers at my school. The headmaster cleary started this school two years ago as a business institution, not an educational institution. That means not the ethics of education but the ethics of business. Did someone say Enron? Teachers live three to a room and work from dawn until dusk and rarely get a day off. Even during holidays, they are forced to attend meetings that teach them to be better teachers. They were once told at one of these meetings that they were machines meant to serve their gods, who were the children. Over and over I hear about how important it is to please the children's parents, who pay the big bucks to have their kids taught English by unqualified dopes like me. These are the same parents who see their children only on the weekends, sometimes even less than that, yet complain when the teachers, who take care of them for five days a week, try to discipline their children. In China, you have little emperors and empresses, only-children of the nouveau riche who are spoiled rotten. Additionally, Chinese have certain papers that they need to get jobs and move around. The headmaster has these papers locked up in his office. If a teacher wants to leave, he or she must ask the headmaster. This is usually denied and now the headmaster knows the teacher is unhappy. The headmaster is also involved somehow with the local board of education. This means that he probably is in charge of whatever government oversight there is. The kicker is that this school has a beautiful soccer stadium that could seat a couple thousand. It has never been used. And what it doesn't have is the second teachers' apartment building, which is on the plans but not on the ground. They built this useless stadium instead of something that would actually bring enormous benefits. All for show and grandness. A side note, I do not fall under the same rules as the Chinese teachers. Life for me is actually pretty cushy and work easy and enjoyable. Which actually makes it so much worse in my mind.

My only hope is China's 900 million strong rural farmer and peasant population, which is getting increasingly disenchanted. Last year, the government dealt with 79,000 rural protests, including violent and fatal ones. The situtation now is the opposite of what it was in 1989, when Tiannanmen Square went down. Then, the urban population was mad and the rurals were happy. The urban population was able to organize and protest, while the rurals were unable to organize to show their satisfaction. Now they are unable to organize and show their disaffection, while urban dwellers continue to get rich. I really hope there's a rural revolt, organized and massive, in time for the 2008 Olympics, which Beijing sees as an event to showcase to the world how advanced and great China has become. What happened to spreading democracy, Bushies? This place needs it most. Instead, money is just being poured in by greedy capitalists too blind to see the suffering.

So in closing, free Tibet, Xinjiang, the revolution will not be televised, and see you ten years from now when I get released from a Chinese prison.