See here below Letter to the Editor, International Herald Tribune (IHT), 15 Sept 09.
I don’t disagree with the writer for most of the criticism and thus feel no need to comment. What’s wrong with it, is the typical one-sided analysis of China, lacking balance in assessing the positive and the negative. I can as well frame it and put on my wall because this is what western media mostly show or write.
When I look at other countries today around the world, I see much worse. The IHT is at least fair in giving a neutral view on the dramatic situations in Africa, Asia and … Europe and the USA. Those countries also cozy up with despotic and despicable countries for oil, regional power, business and else. In so many countries minorities are slaughtered every day. Look at discrimination and infighting in our “advanced” Europe.
Pollution in some countries (even sometimes in USA!) also reaches alarming levels that are either ignored or covered up. Europe and USA has so much more cars. On top of that, they are very happy to sell their cars (including the monstrous Hummer) to China. So, Chinese cannot have their car like in the western world? Are they all supposed to stick to their bikes? See here some figures of car ownership in the world:
Car ownership/1000 people: USA & Japan (>450); China (20); India (8) – 17,000 new private cars on the road in China per day. Just imagine China goes from 20 to 100 – that’s 5 times the today amount of cars but still way below USA and Japan.
It’s all a lot of cynical one-sided hypocrisy.
I can give Mr. Hewitt some nice destinations to spend his holidays. Lucky at least he is not a woman. He might end up stoned, raped, receive 60 lashes, maimed. But hey, there is oil over there, never mind.
I can only recommend to him: don’t go to Wal-Mart or whatever. It’s all made in China. (handy profits for the MNCs, all quoted on U.S. and EU stock markets.)
We here do criticize China too. We are not blind but we also look at the bright side.
One party of autocrats
Thomas Friedman (One-party democracy,” Views, Sept.10) writes “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” This statement is, to be kind, scandalous. China is a police state. China’s leaders have brutally repressed the populations of Tibet and East Turkestan for many decades. The Chinese leadership strongly supports regimes in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea that have consistently ravaged their own people. China is itself corrupt. Nearly unabated air and water pollution devastates the health of the Chinese people.
Mr. Friedman’s argument for the “enlightened” nature of the Chinese leadership hinges on its embrace of renewable energy technology. It should be noted, however, that China continues to build scores of new coal-fired power plants annually, while the nation is in a headlong rush to put hundreds of thousands of new cars on its new roads. And, for my money, its rush to nuclear power does not in the least indicate the requisite thoughtfulness and attention to environmental protection that would allow its leadership to be called enlightened.
William F. Hewitt, New York