On October 30, 1938, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was broadcast in the style of a radio news story with bulletins from reporters played by actors in the Mercury Theater, which resulted in hundreds if not thousands believing the earth was being invaded by Mars.
The excuse used to invade Vietnam and escalate the Vietnam War was the Tonkin Gulf Incident, which never happened as President Johnson claimed. This hoax led to the long war in Vietnam (1955 – 1975) with millions of troops and civilians killed and injured. Sources: The National Security Archive, Shakesville, and American USSR
Since 1950, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China invaded and reoccupied Tibet, we have been told repeatedly by our leaders, Hollywood celebrities and the Western media that Tibet was never a part of China before 1950, which was proven to be a lie by letters written in the 19th century by Sir. Robert Hart.
More evidence (that we do not hear of in the media) was published in the October 1912 National Geographic Magazine.
Now, Wiki Leaks reveals that the Tiananmen Square incident may be one of the biggest hoaxes in Western Media history or manipulation of the media by the U.S. government on a grand scale.
This revelation of the Tiananmen Square slaughter “that never happened” is big news in China, but in the West it is almost non-news.
After doing a Google search, it appears that only one Western media source published this story on June 4, 2011, and that was the UK’s The Daily Telegraph (to read the story click on the link).
To learn of this, I had to receive an e-mail from friends (American citizens) visiting China as tourists.
Wiki Leaks obtained cables that originally came from the US embassy in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square Incident, which partially confirms the Chinese government’s claim that PLA troops did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square.
Why the hoax? One answer may be found in What is the Truth about Tiananmen Square?
I wonder how many more Western media and U.S. government lies will be discovered in the future.
______________
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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youtube video is gone. please replace
New video up.
I don’t trust the U.S. media. To get my news. Instead, I listen to or watch BBC, France 24, that Russian news channel and Al Jazeera. IF they all report on the same story, by the time you’re done listening to them all, you may have a better idea of what’s really happening.
For anyone who wants to hear the news from around the world and hopefully beyond the control of the likes of Rupert Murdock and his News Corp and Fox News, here are the links to the news sources Alfredo mentions:
http://www.bbc.com/news/
Note: The BBC is the largest news network in the world. Neo-conservative Rupert Murdock’s New Corp is #2.
http://www.france24.com/en/
http://rt.com/
http://america.aljazeera.com/
Fair play Lloyd. Thank you for allowing my bold comments due consideration when lesser men who have returned irrational vitriol.
Many say that Webhua DaGeming or the Cultural Revolution was revenge and an attempt by Mao to cling onto his power in the face of criticism of his DaYueJin or Great Leap Forward failures by Peng Deheng and Deng.
Many would say he personally incited the red guards rabbles (in fact, he did as historical evidence shows) and he encouraged violence. He gave them more power than police and soldiers for about two years. Then they started fighting amongst themselves. For this we cannot blame him directly. For initiating the Red Guards and encouraging their attacks on bourgeoise we can blame him. We can also blame him for not controlling his crazy wife, implying he was in league with the Gang of Four.
One thing that annoys me is, why does Wiki say your wife spent time in a labour camp when in fact this was a farm commune in the Up the Mountain Down to the Village policy?
Now that’s American bias.
Labor camp or farm community? She lived in a barracks in a camp that held hundreds of thousands of youth (her descriptions reminded me of boot camp in the Marines but much worse), and there was never enough to eat and the teens had to work seven days a week from sun-up until sometimes in the dark of night. One time, she was so exhausted, she fell asleep in the fields and woke there in the morning.
There were work quotas. It was more of a slave labor camp than a rural farm experience. The same crazy Red Guard leaders were running the camps. They just moved their insanity from the cities to the camps. It would have been better if she had been sent to live with a peasant family in a rural village but that wasn’t what happened for her and hundreds of thousands of youth from Shanghai. I’m not sure of the other major cities set up farm/labor camps like those or not.
When she had a back injury, she was forced to continue working. The details are in “Red Azalea”. She wasn’t sent to a small village in rural China to live with peasants as so many of the youth were. Her story was not the one in “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”. If you haven’t read this small book, it is worth reading to have a comparison between the large collective farm (labor) camps and what it was like to be sent to a remote rural farming village to live with peasants.
When Mao’s wife was allowed to speak at her trial, she said, “I was Mao’s dog. When he told me to bite, I bit.” I think that says a lot. Mao started the movement that led to the Cultural Revolution with his Little Red Book of slogans that ended up being read and discussed in the schools. Those slogans inspired the youth that later became the Red Guard. Mao’s guilt is evident in the fact that he did nothing to stop the Red Guard during the worst of it and when he did, then tens of millions were uprooted from their families and forced to go to rural villages for an “education” in how harsh and hard that life was or were sent to farm camps (labor camps) where Anchee ended for three years.
When Mao’s Cultural Revolution gave power to the teens, the ever present bullies ended up with all the power in the Red Guard and turned on the teachers and students that bullies always pick on. China was turned upside down as teenagers were given power over everyone else: parents, teachers, the educated, business people, artists, etc. — one day China had a ruling class of adults and overnight that power was handed to teenagers. Imagine what would happen in any country that did the same thing. It was insanity and due to piety and Mao’s status in the Civil War, anyone that dared to stand up to this was crucified.
In fact, Deng Xiaoping did criticize what Mao was doing and the Red Guard visited his home but he wasn’t there. Instead, the Red Guard found his son at home and threw him off a three story building to punish Deng. The son survived but paralyzed and in a wheel chair for the rest of his life. Deng gathered up his family and fled by train south where he lived with his family under the protection of a powerful PLA general. That was when Deng started to gather other allies that agreed with him that the insanity of the Cultural Revolution had to end but no one was willing to do anything until Mao was dead so they planned what to do to take the country away from the Maoists and Mao’s wife and then they waited.
Very interesting and intelligent, thank you.
I will read those books. One of the Tiger women says Mao ended sexism. So why did they blame Mao’s wife for the excesses of the C.R?
Have you read the historical fiction novel “Becoming Madame Mao”? Besides having lived in China at the time and being (sort of a) victim of Madame Mao, the author put much research into this work, and she is proud of the fact that reputable historians (mostly Western since her books are censored in China—but there are illegal editions in the black market) have not challenged the facts she uses.
http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Madame-Mao-Anchee-Min/dp/0618127003
I would not say that Mao ended sexism. But he did make women equal to men so they no longer were the property of men.
Changing cultural habits and attitudes usually takes much longer and in fact, sometimes those attempted changes for the better fail because the people do not cooperate. It has been my experience in China that the Chinese people are much more independent and difficult to control and change than many people in the West may believe. There is an old saying in China that goes back for millennia and it says that the Emperor lives inside a palace surrounded by walls and that palace is a long way from most cities, town and villages meaning what the Emperor and/or leader doesn’t know, he does not know.
Even today, China is governed more from more the provinces than from Beijing. The central government in Beijing may pass laws, but that does not mean private industry or provincial governments are going to implement or follow them.
In fact, Lloyd, you shouldn’t call me biased. I said I neither follow a US or China line.I have criticized the US’s ethical policies abroad in this blog. You, on the other hand, appear to have made huge efforts to follow the Chinese party line to the letter. You admit no glimmir of a possibility that Mao was wrong and brutal.
And the surprising fact is, you probably even killed Communists in the Vietnam war ( not that China is Communist today,out with ceremonies and laogai correction methods) – are you a guilt-stricken repentant turned China apologist? It looks like it. If you disagreed with it then Lloyd, you should have done the jail time. Killing a man is wrong.
But the most ridiculous thing is – there is no Tiannamen Hoax because the massacre was NEVER reported ( except by idiots) as having ocurred in Tiannamen Square in the first place!!!
See BBC report live, reporting that students were conducted out of the square and were trampled in OTHER areas of Beijing.
See various propoganada movies made by CIA on theweb, even they dont report a TS massacre inside TS.
Funnily enough, you guys fall foul of a linguistic argument; it’s called TS Massacre because the protests derived from TQ demonstrations.
Yes there were bullets fired and students run over by tanks. Actually, students killed soldiers too. Massacre is not just students or soldiers but people. It has no bias in the word itself. There was bloodshed.
It was a massacre because every other Communist government was overturned but China’s,whose Emperor style government robbed the student leaders of the chance to ake change peacefully by ignoring them. They did ignore them to begin with.
Zhao Ziyang was placed under house arrest for twenty years for merely talking to them.
See the video footage of Communists hiding inside whilst a student delivers Charter 88 to the steps and door of CCP politburo, but they cower in silence.
All governments eventually have blood on their hands.
I wrote about the Tiananmen Square Hoax in more detail in other posts, and point out that even the CCP admits people died in clashes between the military and protesters in Beijing but many that died were not students and the students did not start the protests. The original protests were workers protesting corruption by individuals in the government and these people wanted the leadership of the CCP to do something about it. Something similar has been going on in the US and the West now for more than a year and these protests are called the Occupy Movement due to the corruption on Wall Street and in US Banks that caused so many people in the US and around the world to lose jobs.
Except in the US, we have so many movements and protests that most people tend to ignore them. At the most, they listen to something on the so called free media news about another protest about this or that, shrugs and changes channels to the next reality TV program.
However, in 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing did not start out as a democracy movement and the protests went on for some time (weeks) before the troops were called in to restore order.
In fact, civil disobedience of this sort is often handled with violence in every country on this planet. You may want to read http://ilookchina.net/2011/07/17/riots/ to discover what I mean. History shows that governments tend to act with force to stop even peaceful Gandhi type movements for change but what happened in Beijing in 1989 was no Gandhi type movement. In fact, there is no evidence that the students that arrived weeks after the workers started to protest government corruption were organized with a recognized leader.
Your use of language reveals a bias: “TS Massacre” “Emperor style government” “students run over by tanks” — An Emperor style government is one man rule and he was seen as a god. The closest the CCP had to that was with Mao and when he died, the CCP Constitution was revised to make sure that never happened again. The Presidents of China today are more of a figurehead and the real leadership comes from about three hundred Chinese scattered throughout the country linked together with a hot line and that leadership changes every five years due to term limits and an age limit that does not exist even in the US. Some have to step down and new faces replace them. This year will see many old faces go and new ones take their place.
The CCP is not ruled by one man but by the consensus of the top few hundred that were elected to his or her position in the party from the bottom up and in instances where quick decisions must be made by the few in the Polite Bureau at the top. The 80 million members of the CCP are organized sort of like a wedding layer cake and each layer is smaller with more responsibility.
And there is a form of democracy that does exist in China and it has been referred to as democracy from the bottom up. More than 600 million rural Chinese in over 600,000 villages hold democratic elections for the local village governments and anyone may run for office in those villages—even people that do not belong to the Communist Party. To avoid claims that these elections are rigged, the CPP invited the Carter Foundation (former US President Carter) to hold workshops in these villages to teach those 600 million rural Chinese what it means to vote in a democratic election and then the Carter Foundation monitors those elections to see that there are honest. This has been going on for years but has not received much attention in the Western media yet.
I repeat the CCP rules by consensus and not one man rule. There is also an impeachment clause in the revised CCP Constitution that allows China’s one house Congress to removed a president if he or she starts to become too dictatorial.
In China today, the Communist Party has more than 80 million members and there is a legal system that did not exist with the Emperors. It is not a Western or American style legal system and it is still in development, but there is one that never existed before. Under the Emperors there was no Constitution but under the CCP there is one and it does allow the government to arrest and send protestors to prison that threaten the State. There is a translated copy available in English on the Internet. My wife says there are a few translation errors but they are insignificant.
Using the term “massacre: claims that the PLA troops shot down peaceful protesters but the evidence shows that where the deaths happened, it was anything but peaceful since the mob was setting troops on fire and hanging some. The US, though, does have a history of massacres of innocent people for example during the American Indian Wars, in the Philippians where American troops slaughtered a quarter million civilians before World War II, and during the Vietnam War.
Then there is the real “Massacre” that took place in Taiwan under the KMT: You may want to read that too: http://ilookchina.net/2010/06/01/2-28-massacre-in-taiwan/
As for, “you probably even killed Communists in the Vietnam war”. Not in hand to hand combat. I was shot at with bullets, mortar rounds and rockets but seldom saw an enemy. Most of the time, combat in Vietnam was like fighting fog and ghosts because we seldom saw who was shooting at us. They came almost every night to hit our camp or shot at us unseen from the cover of the jungle when we were outside of our camp perimeter.
I was a field radio operator in a tank battalion (although I only rode inside a tank once. Instead, I drove a radio jeep with no armor, no doors and a canvas top or carried a field radio on my back while on foot).
During the war, my battalion suffered 50% casualties. But the war lasted for twenty years and my battalion first arrived in 1965 so those casualties took place over a period of ten years. I only served in Vietnam for one tour, less than one year. If I played a part in any casualties on the other side, it was my role as a radio operator in the field calling in artillery strikes, napalm, etc. to support our troops in combat while I was in the field with the troops.
In addition, the South Vietnamese NLF was made up of a variety of political affiliations and the Communists were but one. There were South Vietnamese Communists, North Vietnamese Communists, Laotian Communists, Cambodian Communists and Chinese Communist in that war in Southeast Asia.
However, after the Tet Offensive decimated the NLF in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Communists moved into the dominant political position in South Vietnam.
Thank you for that reply; Ill reread it a couple of times but Im afraid you misunderstood my post with regards to bias. It isn’t my bias to call it a massacre, since this is the historical term. Precisely because I am not biased I argued that a massacre is NOT a biased term. It means bloodshed, and can include killing on both sides. But it implies that some innocents died – so..perhaps it IS biased! But if we argue that soldiers were also massacred, then it isnt biased against the soldiers. And I admit, some indeed were.
See what I mean? I recognize as I did in my post before that students or workers also killed soldiers. There WAS killing on both sides.
Emperor style government may not be true today, but Deng was in that day a kind of de facto leader without a title. He was the Emperor so to speak. Funnily enough, check out youtube and youll see student leaders ( they were recognized,and exist today) in classic citizen-to-emperor style, imitating ancient China, genuflecting at the CCP doors in TS with a scrolled up charter that looks like its from Ancient China!!!!!
Thats because if the people wanted to get the Emperors attention, thats exactly what they did. It was imitating ancient precedents as a gesture of deep respect.
Tanks crushing students is not my biased version. It most certainly happened.
I can find the scroll submission on youtube for you if you wish, though a very biased American is reporting on Tiannamen, saying thousands were even killed while watching TV ina Beijing! A lot of crap.
Lloyd, Im not actually biased towards UK, US OR China.
I’m just inviting the strong possibility that collectivisation a d serfdom are similar in degrees of freedom. In the former, thepeasant owes his tithe to the Local Official. In the latter, to the Landlord.
This opinion is not biased.
I myself am not certain of its validity, but submit it as a rather convincing possibility.
If conditions were terrible inChina and Tibet, how an China be the economicliberator, unless conditions were SIGNIFICANTLY worse in Tibet?
The fact that America had bloody wars for human rights is the reason why I criticize China. If American hadnt been criticized by its dissident population, Rosa Parkes would still be sitting in the back of the bus and the civil war would have been lost to a bunch of greedy southern redneck plantation owners, who no doubt would have installed a kind of fascist plutocracy of slave labour.
The reason why I hate the CCP is because when the world was changing and students wanted freedom,they justbrutally repressed it.
WITHOUT PRESSURE ON HUMAN RIGHTS CHINA WOULD BE THE SAME,A PLUTOCRACY AND A BOOT THATSTAMPS ON THE FACE OF ITS OWN PEOPLE FOREVER.
Same as the USA if it hadnt have been ‘ badmouthed’.
So, you think if teenagers and twenty-something college students hold a protest and demand changes in a country’s government, those changes should be made?
Have you read the results of recent research on the minds of young people age 13 to 25. The brain is wired to take chances without thought and do stupid things. If the CCP bent to the demands of those few hundred college students (does anyone even know the exact number of college students that arrived to join the workers several weeks after the protests started–protests by the people that were never a democracy movement until after a few truck loads of students arrived and started to mouth off?) and implemented democratic reforms, would China have achieved so much economically or would it look more like India’s democracy today.
Democracy leads to mob rule. Those students were an unruly mob. When does an unorganized, unruly mob of a few hundred students speak for more than a billion people?
The teenagers these days are not capable of making decisions? I believe I’m proof of that. 😛
Between the ages of 13 and 25, my actions in life were proof of that too.
Im not bad mouthing China’s past at all. Name a country that had a proper system of human rights seventy years ago and Ill buy your trilogy and whatever else you publish.
Im (badmouthing is the wrong word – do Amnesty International badmouth?) criticizing China’s present and not too distant past.
A notable Chinese author just spent four tears in jail for writing apoem about Tianamen.
Millions of Chinese are simply evicted and over fifty Chinese land evictees over the past four years have set themselves alight,self-immolated. Not to mention scores of Tibetans.
Falungong have been tortured to death and had their organs harvested.
But the problem is, these sick crimes, sicker than any crimes perpetrated a hundred tears ago,exist today!
In fact, China is a cruel country with a history of cruelty.
Thats way tortures like ‘a thousand cuts’ existed until the turn of the century.
Thats why up until1950 breaking the toes of seven year girls was seen as a sine qua non for marrying well.
And today, China has the same sexism as the stats show – preference for boys.
Still have issues with slave labour in factories.
So TODAY is the reason for why it gets schtick or bad mouthing as you suspiciously term it.
Do you empathize with my points there?
China has a history of cruelty, you say. So does the British Empire and the American Empire. In fact, all nations/empires have examples of this sort of cruelty in their history.
For example, in the US, children as young as six and some as young as three were sold into servitude to work for scraps sixteen hours a day, six days a week and this went on for decades until laws in the 1920s ended that form of child slavery and abuse. Girls as young as ten were legally sold to whore houses in the US into the early 20th century.
What is happening in China is a cultural revolution that is leading to a better quality of life for everyone willing to work for it and more protections for individuals that have never existed before in China’s history but to expect that to happen overnight is ridiculous.
The CCP has ruled China for sixty-two years.
After independence from the British Empire, it took the United States eighty-nine years to end slavery and only after a bloody Civil War that cost about 600 thousand lives in combat. To achieve more rights and protection for those freed black slaves took another century (the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the US and protesters were murdered during those protests in the South).
It took 144 years for American women to be given the right to vote and the US still does not have an Equal Rights Amendment. During that movement, women were put in jail and brutalized for their beliefs.
It took the United States 160 years to pass laws that protected children from being sold into prostitution and servitude in factories and coal mines.
And critics of China want all of this and more to happen overnight in China! That is absurd. Evidence proves that China is moving in that direction but the more pressure that the West and America put on China the more chance that it may stall or stop. Let’s not forget that there are still Maoists in the Communist Party that believe the current leaders to the CPP are traitors to Mao’s legacy and the Maoists may be using this pressure from the West as a tool to gain power within the CCP.
Your comment even shows the progression of improvements in China. No one dies from the death of a thousand cuts anymore. That changed in 1912, and no girls have suffered bound feet since 1949 when Mao announced that women hold up half the sky.
In one day, the CCP elevated women to be equal to men. In the US, it took almost 144 years for women to achieve some sort of equality but not total equality yet. There are still conservative/religious political element s in the US that want to make sure women never have total control over their bodies by doing away with abortion rights that do not exist in some states even today.
I think thats fair enough; those critcs who think China should change overnight are silly. I dont count myslf among their number and I get tired of hysterical denuciatory China critcs who ignore the good.
But one thing you are wrong about; ten years in jail is nt a gagging order. Tiannamen critics like Shi Tao and many others got sentences in the order often years.
To be brutally honest, it is not possible to debate rationally with someone who confuses tn years in jail with a gagging order.
Actually I still dont get why China is so far behnd the US in human rights and the West generally..
Why? And why must you apologize for it being so?
Fred,
You misunderstood me. The gag order comes first and then when the gag order is ignored, then jail time usually follows. A gag order isn’t the same thing as a prison term. These are two different things.
The term gag order means someone has been told or warned not to talk publicly about a specific topic.
For example: my wife is Chinese and she has one Chinese friend that had a memoir of growing up in China during Mao’s time published in English in the US. My wife’s memoir, Red Azalea, was first published in the US and has been published and translated into 30 other languages (not Mandarin), but my wife does not Blog and is not an outspoken democracy advocate of China. She refused to become political. As an individual, she has the right to do that.
However, this friend of my wife’s that also lives in the US, and is now a US citizen too, wrote for a Blog in the US that was critical of China’s government and put her name on the posts she wrote.
Since this friend has family still in China, she travels there often. On one trip, she was invited to have tea with government officials (police of some kind I’m sure) in Beijing and during this visit, she was politely told to stop being critical of China on that Blog or she would not be allowed to return to China to visit her parents. She took the polite hint and stopped Blogging negatively about the CCP. Because she did as she was told, she still may visit her family in China.
That is an example of a gag order. In China, most if not all of the people that end up in prison for protesting or calling for democracy in China are usually warned to stop first over tea and when they don’t heed the warning, then they go to jail or in the case of someone that is the citizen of another country, he or she is denied entry to China—they end up on a blacklist.
That actually happened to Sterling Seagrave after his nonfiction book “Dragon Lady” came out. However, in Sterling’s case he was a citizen of the US and Australia and although his US Visa was on a black list, his Australian Visa wasn’t so he still visits China using the Australian Visa.
When I refer to a gag order or a hint that you better stop protesting publicly or else, that doesn’t lead to prison unless the person ignores the gag order/hinted warning.
Both my wife and most of her close friends all grew up in Mao’s China. My wife came to the US in the mid 1980s.
“Actually I still don’t get why China is so far behind the US in human rights and the West generally. Why? And why must you apologize for it being so?”
There is a BIG difference in the meaning of apologize and explain.
I have never apologized for anything that the CCP has done, but I do explain in detail what may have really happened and when there is very little or no evidence to support accusations of the CCP in the West, then I write what is called an Op Ed piece about it and question the claims. When I write an Op Ed piece, I also provide evidence that may show the claims against the CCP were exagerated or wrong.
That is not an apology.
Have you seen a ranking of nations regarding human rights? China is not alone with what the West sees as human rights problems. Human rights did not really become a serious topic in the West until after World War II.
For example, regarding human rights for noncombatants: There is a convention on cluster munitions that 76 countries have ratified but 35 have not. The treaty was opposed by a number of countries that produce or stockpile significant quantities of cluster munitions, including China, Russia, the United States, India, Israel, Pakistan and Brazil.
How bad are cluster bombs? The US dropped about 250,000 of them in Cambodia during the Vietnam War and these bombs are still blowing people up in Cambodia. A cluster bomb is a multiple landmine dropped from aircraft. Once it lands, it activates and waits for decades until a person or animal comes along, steps on it and blows it up.
Another example: napalm — jellied gasoline bombs. When this stuff hits your body it sticks like glue and keeps burning eating up your body in flames. There is a 1983 international laws against the use of napalm against civilian targets, but the US and Britain have used Napalm in the Iraq war and the US did not sign this UN agreement. Why?
“Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine,” said Kim Phúc, a napalm bombing survivor known from a famous Vietnam War photograph. “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius (212°F). Napalm generates temperatures of 800 (1,500°F) to 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,200°F).”
The United States had delayed ratifying the global women’s rights treaty for women at home and abroad. The treaty has been ratified in the UN by 186 countries. Only seven countries – the United States, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Palau, Nauru, and Tonga – have not ratified it. Why?
Then there is the US ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Along with Somalia, the United States is one of only two countries in the world which have not ratified this Convention. Why?
If the US is so concerned about human rights, why not ratify all of these treaties? And China ratified both of the last two treaties.
Regarding Human Rights:
The following list are the elements used to measure and compare global human rights by country:
1.A competitive, multiparty political system; (China does not have this)
2.Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses); CHINA HAS DONE THIS but THE US has not
3.Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and the absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of the public will; and (CHINA has done this in rural China at the village level for 600 million Chinese but not nationally)
4.Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning. (China does not have this)
And these four factors are used to decide if a country is free or not free. Really? According to these four standards, there are many countries, not just China, that do not qualify. In fact, in 2012, 60 countries were considered partly free and 48 were NOT FREE based on those four factors.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are all (oil rich) countries that are NOT FREE but the only country of forty-eight we keep hearing about is China. I suspect the reason we do not hear too many complaints of oil rich countries is because we depend on them to fill our gas tanks.
And Malaysia is listed as “PARTLY FREE”.
Check out the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World
And what is so great about a multi-party democracy? Even America’s Founding Fathers despised democracy as mob rule. America was founded as a Republic that doesn’t even elect its own leader by a popular vote. The President of the US is elected by 538 individuals that belong to the U.S. Electoral College, and Electors are often chosen to recognize service and dedication to their political party. They may be State-elected officials, party leaders, or persons who have a personal or political affiliation with the Presidential candidate.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution does not require that Electors be completely free to act as they choose and therefore, political parties may extract pledges from electors to vote for the parties’ nominees. Some State laws provide that so-called “faithless Electors”; may be subject to fines or may be disqualified for casting an invalid vote and be replaced by a substitute elector.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/index.html
Some sham of a democracy.
With regard to the gagging order I didnt misunderstand you. I know tht you wrote if the gagging order or silencing request is flouted, prison follows.
What I may have carelessly responded in my answer was intended to be the following; the US does not give people ten ear prison terms for merely sending an e mail about an incident twenty years ago. China does. It has done many times over Tiannamen. Sure, semi-free describes Malaysia. Prejudiced against other ethnic groups it is. Im English bythe way.
Those local elections represent America’s NGO efforts and China politburo consent, they were not initiated by China as you give out. In faxt, Li Peng put a stop to the NGO democratization process.
I am ashamed I have no lawyer skills to offer Cina, or I would happily join an NGO to work on the issue of Commerical Courts in the Countryside and Counyside Elections that American, not China initiated.
But sadly, Li Peng put a limit to how far we can democratize China.
In fairness, Lloyd, you must admit, though China isnt the worst, US doesnt incarcerate people and torture them to death for their religion or sending an email or writing a poem.
If you’re not aware that China ( which may be better than India and other countries) did and still does this numerously –
you, Im sorry to say, may be an authority on Hart but you are ignorant on the real China.
With all due respect, there is no other way to put it. We can pedanticize over the details and call up history when America’s human rights was equally bad or much worse ( which it was) but that effort is ultmately disingenuous.
Today is the issue. The US and the UK dont behave in that way. China doesn. Simple as that.
You make it sound as if the US went into China and started the democratization process in the countryside without permission. You make it sound as if the US forced China to do this. That is ridiculous. Anything major that happens in China only happens with permission from the CCP. China can say NO if that is what it wants to do and it often says NO. In fact, even if the Carter Foundation went to China first and volunterred to help, China could have said NO. No one forced China to allow the Carter Foundation into China. China went along willingly.
You make many claims with no cited evidence, no links to reputable sources. To me, you are only spreading rumors that you read from biased Western sources.
You say I’m ignorant about China. I disagree. There is a lot I do not know but many in the world, including you are also in the dark for many of the same facts/rumors that Western critics often tout as facts and the truth.
In fact, no one outside the CCP knows how many died in Beijing in 1989. There is no evidence, except rumors, that students were run over and crushed by tanks. NONE! Only claims. In addition, there is the famous man standing in front of a tank blocking its ability to move forward and the tank avoids running him over. If he had been run over, the same person that shot that photograph would have splashed that picture all over the world.
You say that we can keep calling u history when America’s human rights were equally bad or much worse. The truth is that there are still human rights violations taking place in America and/or by America around the world. The Iraq war was a human rights violation. It was a war based on lies and that is a fact that says every death and all of the suffering in Iraq after President G. W. Bush sold his lie to the US people and the US Congress so he could go to war in Iraq was an example of human rights violations. That suffering is still going on. Saddam was a dictator and a monster responsible for many human rights violations but taking him out and replacing him with someone else responsible for human rights violations was wrong, wrong, wrong.
If the US and the UK went in to Iraq to remove Saddam was an act of humanity to remove a violator of human rights, explain why the US and the UK has not done that in North Korea, Iran and all the other nations that brutalize its citizens.
All you have are opinions based on other Western media opinions–many written by biased Westerners or Chinese democracy rights advocates.
Democracy leads to mob rule. The Republic that the American Founding Fathers created was designed to avoid democracy and mob rule and we have lost that Republic. That Republic was not perfect because it allowed slavery to continue in the Southern States, and made women and children the property of men to do with as those men wanted, but it was better than the mob rule of Democracy and what it will become.
You and most critics of China judge China from a Western individualistic, Christian, Jewish, Greek, Roman Foundation and China was not built on that foundation.
Why do I not want to answer that question when China itself says that the leading cause of death for citizens aged between 18-35 is suicide? China is well-known to have the biggest suicide rate in the world for women? Are you going to tell me that the US has a bigger suicide rate?
Im not saying the US is squeaky clean.
In fact, the US is incredibly evil with regime changing and supporting fascist dictatorships in Latin America, and many other countries.
So, that’s just for the record.
I’m not pro-US either.
I have lived in China for a number of years, and I know for a fact that freedom is not something a Chinese can enjoy.
Millions are being evicted by local government greedy tp pay off their project debts, they evict farmers off land and sell it to developers.
Do ypu want to ask me how many of these evictee set themselves alight Mr.Lofthouse?
There are more things in Heaven and earth than are comprehended by YOUR philosophy Horatio.
Fred, it’s so nice to see one of your comments from Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. I understand that city in this predominantly Islamic nation that resorts to the use of harsh Islamic Sharia law in many of its provinces has a population of 355,530 inhabitants and 55% are Chinese mostly from Taiwan. It would be interesting to know if you are Chinese or not.
Anyway, I’ve written about suicide in China more than once on this Blog and those Posts will represent my reply to your comment with two pull quotes as examples:
http://ilookchina.net/2010/07/06/facts-prove-foxconn-a-better-place-to-work-and-live/
“The World Health Organization suicide figures for China show 18 male and 14.8 female suicides per 100,000.”
“There were ten suicides at Foxconn in five months and several attempts were stopped proving that Foxconn has preventative measures in place. Since the suicide rate at Foxconn was 1.25 suicides per 100,000, the evidence suggests a much safer, healthier environment than outside Foxconn’s walls—including the US with 10.9 suicides per 100,000.”
http://ilookchina.net/2011/01/23/amy-chuas-suicide-critics/
“In fact, Australia, which is mostly populated by European Caucasians, has a suicide rate way above China at 37.1 per 100,000 ….”
You say that freedom is not something that the Chinese enjoy. What do you mean by freedom?
A. the freedom to own property
B. the freedom to criticize the government in public with laws that protect that expression
C. the freedom to join any of twenty-two major religions or any cult such as the Falun Gong
For A: True, no one in China may buy property. They may only lease it in urban areas (and sell that lease at a loss or profit to someone that is qualified by law to buy it), and in rural China hold joint ownership (between the village collective and the government) of property in rural areas (that cannot be sold).
How about the US: there is annual property tax and if you cannot pay or do not pay the property tax, the local government will take your house away from you, evict you and throw you out on the street to become homeless before selling the house at auction to pay off the property tax that was owed. The same thing can happen if you cannot pay the mortgage on the property but then the bank takes the house away from the person that thinks he or she owns it.
According to NBC News.com, there are an estimated 600,000 homeless people in the United States and another 700,000 at risk of becoming homeless.
Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/01/18/10177017-homeless-numbers-down-but-risks-rise?lite
So, does anyone really own the land in America or China?
In addition, local governments in the US have the right by law to buy any privately held property without the owner’s permission at current market value if it is in the public interest such as building a public park or a highway, or rapid transit rail lines, or a shopping center or industrial park that will generate jobs that benefit the local community. The government does this all the time in America.
For B: True, China’s Constitution limits freedom of political speech/expression if it is seen to threaten the government and the public welfare.
In fact, there is no such thing as 100% freedom of speech in the US either. The only protection in America is from the government arresting someone that has an opinion that someone in the government does not like. However, he or she may be fired from a job if he or she says something the management or boss does not approve of. In addition, if someone spreads lies about another citizen in the US, he or she may be taken to court and end up paying a huge fine and even going to prison.
For C: Instead of the twenty-two major religions or any cults being approved in China, there are only five a Chinese citizen may join: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. In addition, although Judaism is not on the list, there are several Jewish synagogues in China.
Now I have a question: What is more important—the quality of life or the three freedoms mentioned above. In 1949, the average life expectancy in China was age 35 and it was about the same in Tibet. Today the average in China is 74.8 years, and average life expectancy in Tibet is now age 67.
In 1949, about 80% of Chinese lived in severe poverty and were illiterate. In 2011, 128 million Chinese (less than 10%) were considered living below the poverty line and less than 10% are illiterate. Severe poverty and starvation is almost nonexistent in China today. In fact, The World Health Organization credits China with 90% of the poverty reduction in the world in the last thirty years while next door in India about 40% of the people still live in severe poverty and several thousand children die each day of starvation.
In addition, according to Smith Barney.com, twenty percent of Chinese are now middle class. That is almost 300 million Chinese. In 1949, less than 5% of the population in China lived an average middle-class lifestyle.
Source: http://fa.smithbarney.com/public/projectfiles/35257b34-b160-45e4-980d-8bca327db92b.pdf
Then there is the freedom to travel. If a Chinese citizen has the money, (just like the US and many other countries) he or she and his or her family, may travel outside or inside China as tourists and China now has the largest number of tourists in the world (about fifty million last year) leaving China each year to travel to foreign countries and visit them as tourists. The same is true of the US. If people have the money, they will also be able to take advantage of that freedom and with a proper passport and Visa, leave the US just like Chinese citizens that also have the money, and travel to other countries.
But, if you are poor, you probably cannot pay for that freedom because it is true throughout the world that to enjoy all the freedoms that any nation may allow its people to have, one must have enough money to pay for that freedom.
Note: In the US, more than 15% of the population lives in poverty.
Lloyd, just to prove to you that you skew my words I will quote you and myself. Im no media influenced Westerner. I speak almost fluent Mandarin, I DONT think thousand were murdered in TS in1989 and i go by what Chinese tell me, laobaixing,not the kind you talk of.
I will now quote myself; ‘Those local elections represent American NGO efforts and China’s politburo consent – they were not initiated by China as you give out’.
You say ‘ You make it sound as if the US went into the Chinese countryside and started the democratization process without permission. You make it sound as if the US forced China to do this. This is ridiculous. ‘
‘Permission’ is another word for ‘ consent’. So clearly what you claim Im saying is bot at all what i am saying, which is that the US did this with the CCPs consent and Li Peng forced them to stop it.
Now you can see what you are doing. I spent five years in China and never read the media once but many poor Chinese said they hated the CCP and one said he wished the US would invade and takeover,no joke.
Now please do not misrepresent my language or my position as you repeatedly seem to be doing.
And if you feel badly about napalm or imperialism, why did you radio napalm and airstrikes, the harbinger if hell himself! Did you not use a tank to spray it yourself too ?
And God rewards you with a beautiful famous wife and an interesting retiree China career as author and blogger.
Wow.
I apologize if it appears that I misinterpret what you thought.
When I joined the US Marines, I was age 19 and had just graduated from high school. I knew little to nothing about politics because I grew up in a home with parents that did not vote. My knowledge of American politics would come years after I had left the Marines.
My father distrusted politicians and called them all crooks and believed it was a waste of time to vote or get involved. Maybe he was right. However, I have cast votes for decades and I do my best to be aware of what is going on politically in America, but I must admit that President G. W. Bush had me fooled too about the WMPs in Iraq. When all we hear in the US media is what the President or Congress wants us to hear, can we be blamed for being swept up in the popular opinion of most of the people?
The Tonkin Gulf incident took place while I was still training in boot camp. When I joined the US Marines right after High School, the US was not at war.
I served one tour in Vietnam in 1966 when the war was still popular among most Americans. That attitude would change after the Tet Offensive in January 1968. Before 1968, the troops and the American people believed we were doing something noble to stop the spread of Communism. Now, in retrospect, I think we were brainwashed by our own media and leaders. The truth about the lies that started the Vietnam War would be revealed sometime after the War.
By the time it was common knowledge that the Vietnam War was based on lies, President Johnson was dead. I’ve also read that President Kennedy planned to pull American advisors out of South Vietnam before he was assassinated. He didn’t want the US to get mired in Southeast Asia. But LBJ reversed that plan, lied to gain public support and escalated the war.
My education of that war would not start until I was in college using the GI Bill to help pay my tuition. In time, I learned about the lies that started the war and became more involved in educating myself about government and politics. What is that old saying? “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” President Abraham Lincoln also said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and most of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
“I spent five years in China and never read the media once but many poor Chinese said they hated the CCP and one said he wished the US would invade and takeover, no joke.”
We have a flat in China and I have traveled to China about eight to ten times with my family since 1999. My wife was born in Shanghai at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. She then lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution. From her, I have learned much about China and why it is probably wise to distrust the CCP, but I also distrust the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States. Anything that a politician claims must be verified and fact checked. It is a fact that many politicians exaggerate and lie a lot.
For that reason alone, I agree that there are Chinese that hate the CCP, because there are plenty of Americans that hate and distrust the political candidates of the Democratic Party in the US and millions that hate and distrust the Republican Party’s candidates. What else is new?
You may be interested in reading a post I wrote for another one of my Blogs: http://wp.me/s2mPRS-malarkey
However, during the Cultural Revolution, it wasn’t the CCP that caused the most trouble. The trouble caused during Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a popular movement among the people that worshiped Mao and many of these mostly young people did not belong to the Party. Mao said jump, and tens of millions of people jumped all over each other. He was worshiped and millions still worship him today. Was it mass insanity? I think so. My wife admitted in her first memoir that she was a victim at the same time that she was one of the people causing others to suffer. Most Chinese were victims and perpetrators at the same time—some sort of mass hysteria and insanity.
In Vietnam, I carried a radio on my back or drove a World War II vintage radio Jeep with a canvas top, no armor and no doors. I did not and never did have direct access to napalm. My weapons were an M-14 semi-automatic rifle, a .45 Colt automatic pistol, a K-Bar and on one field operation a .45 caliber machine gun known as a grease gun. I never napalmed anyone although I did relay orders twice with my radio for our flame tanks to roast Vietcong troops. Once, when the Vietcong were attacking our battalion CP and once in the field at a forward artillery base. However, I did not witness the torch being lit and the napalm in use. I was in a location near the action with the officers that gave the orders. The first incident was at 2 AM and the second at 2 PM. The first incident roasted about a dozen VC and the second more than one hundred and they were all armed combatants.
I think it is safe to say that after forty-six years since 1966, the young naive Lloyd that served and fought in Vietnam is not the Lloyd of today. We all, hopefully, continue to educate ourselves as we age.
I also host other blogs. This one is based on my experiences in Vietnam. http://thesoulfulveteran.wordpress.com/
Lloyd, you totally contradicted yourself. You start off by saying that China isnt a dictatorship becuause dictatorship means rule by one man,then you go on to say that a one party rule is also a dictatorship. Which would still make China a dictatorship!
I just study here. And..
prison populations is irrelevant. Take a philosophical argument; the punishment for stealing bread is to be hung by the thumbs and toes for a week ( this existed in China) – yes, this would cure the jail problem. Does that mean that rhe society is good? It means rule by fear.
Freedom to chanllenge the law is essential in a democracy.
You ask why we have the rit to challenge China’s rule of law, as if the right to challenge another countrys internal policy was a kind of imposition of trespass. It isnt, because China makes up a fifth of the world and its our biggest trade partner.
But they can criticize US too.
However, torturing peaceful falungong, putting a policeman who revealed a murder and then charging him with treason for revealing that murder safely?! Having a stunt double for Gu Kai Lai in the courtroom ( extremely obvious and proven by ear size etc) and the thousands of other ludicrous ways the government just steals property and ignores rape. It doesnt even have a law on male rape, so a guy gets raped,gets hiv and he gets fined!
You take an extremely conservative government line, ‘ bu yao ganshe women de neizheng!’ which means ‘ do not interfere with the internal policy! ‘ Nope, we will. Just as the US self-criticizes and scrutinizes,so will the world scrutinize China, because citizens are mostly barred from doing this.
Yes, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International will attack Malaysia and Japan and US too.
China happens to be worse though.
“Existed” in China is past tense.
If you are going to badmouth China’s past behavior, then we will also badmouth America’s past behavior.
For America, I will focus on US history before women earned the right to vote and own property in 1920, and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Before 1938, it was common for children in the US to make up about half of the workforce in factories as young as age six (and sometimes as young as three) to work sixteen-hour days, six-days a week for very low pay.
“By 1900, states varied considerably in whether they had child labor standards and in their content and degree of enforcement. By then, American children (as young as six) worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks, and peddlers.”
Source: http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html
“Child labor was common at the turn of the century, and many families needed the income earned by their children to survive. The 1900 census counted 1.75 million individuals aged 10 to 15 who were gainful workers. … There were no national laws that governed child labor, and while some States enacted and enforced such laws, most did not.”
Then if we go back to the 19th century, the US had slavery of African people and had to fight a bloody Civil War to end it.
Yes, hut im not bad-mouthing. Thats immature. Im criticizing. I agree and have never denied America’s violent past. But in the present, China gets away with much more! Can you not ffing admit thatmuts a simple point!
Is there any government that hasn’t done something to its own people or fought wars with other countries, justified or not. You may want to read this post (click link) to see if any American has a right to criticize China for its crimes against humanity both under Mao and after Mao without accepting that the US government has done some pretty horrible things too. It is arguable that the faction of the Chinese Communist Party that took over China after Mao died is not responsible for most of what was done under Mao’s leadership from 1949 to 1976.
http://thesoulfulveteran.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/what-has-america-accomplished-as-the-worlds-so-called-cop/
Since you are the one who claims China is getting away with “much more” (I think you are comparing China to the United States), please list what those alleged crimes are with links to reputable and valid evidence. For instance, how many wars has China fought with other countries since 1949, and how many civilian deaths and casualties resulted from those wars. In addition, compare how many people are in prison in China (for any reason) to those who are in prison in the United States.