Ni Hao Chato, ni zai zhonguo zuo shenme?

Living in China is a real eye opener. Our media, happily helped by our own Pisshead, love to demonize China. But a huge portion of these stories are from remote areas and hand picked for the sole purpose of making China look bad. Think of how bad the U.S., or any Western country, would look if you just picked every fucked up example you could find to portary the country. That is what the Western media does to China.

China does have a problem in that it's infrastructure is still very undeveloped outside of the big cities. Most of the horror stories come from some backwater town run by "Boss Hog" types. These places tend to be quite remote and getting them, and the corruption in them, under control has been a big challenge for Beijing.

Do forced abotions occur? Probably, but it is not the official policy coming out of Beijing. Nobody I know has been forced to have an abortion and nobody I know, knows anybody who's been forced to have an abortion. I actually have a friend in Shanghai who has two children. They had to pay a rather large fine for having a 2nd child but they did break the law. They accepted that fact and paid up. And anyone who thinks a one child law is barabaric just need to go to the Walmart in Xiamen on Chinese New Years Eve. You'll instantly see why the government wants to, needs to, control the population.

As far as "mobile death vans" are concerned, it really doesn't bother me. The Chinese don't fuck around with violent crime. There is no waiting in jail for years, with hundreds of appeals, etc etc. When you are convicted that's it. But the Chinese have a saying that goes something like "you kill the rooster to startle the monkey". In other words they have these public executions to scare people into not committing violent crimes. My wife, a Chinese citizen, remembers actually listening to the sentencing, folllowed shortley thereafter by a loud "POP" then a soft "thud", of a man convicted of killing a small child in her home town. This was played over the loudspeaker in school when she was in the 5th or 6th grade. Anyone hearing something like that is going to think twice about doing something similar.

Does it work? Well, when I lived in China I lived in Shanghai, a city with 14+ million people. I (a rich, by local standards, white foriegner) could walk down any street at any time of the day without fearing for my safety. How many people could say that about any big American city? Just look around us, it is rare that I read the morning paper and don't find another murder story.

Like you chato, I won't pretend that China isn't a country with many problems, but like you said "where isn't?" . The world would be a lot better place if we weren't all so intent on pointing out the flaws in other countries while sweeping ours under the bed. Just think what the world would be like if we dealt with our problems at home, and looked for the positive in other countries, instead.