Sixth Question [Parfitt]:
Governments and human-rights groups have heaped criticism on China about human-rights issues. Is such criticism justified?
Answer [Lofthouse]:
No!
The evolution of human-rights is mostly a Western political phenomenon based on individualism dating back to the Greek City States hundreds of years before Christ and the Western Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD).
The timeline of the Ongoing Struggle for Human Rights in the West shows the first mention of an alleged human rights violation in China (according to Western values) was the 1989 (so-called) Tiananmen Square massacre.
However, you set the record straight on your Blog, June 4, 2011 in The Tiananmen Square Myth and I have written of this issue in What is the Truth about Tiananmen Square? and The Tiananmen Square Hoax.
Examples of the slow progress of the evolution of human rights in the West may be seen in 1791 (fifteen years after the U.S. Declaration of Independence), when the U.S. Bill of Rights incorporated notions of freedom of speech, press, and fair trial into the new U.S. Constitution.
In fact, in 1920, the League of Nations Covenant required members to “endeavor to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women and children,” but it took the US twenty-one more years before stricter laws banning the employment of underage children was declared constitutional in 1941 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Note, none of these early gains in the political arena of human rights took place in East Asia.
In addition, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not join the United Nations until 1971.
Since then, in human rights issues, the PRC has been increasingly successful at maintaining their positions. In 1995, they won 43 percent of the votes in the General Assembly; by 2006 they won 82 percent.
SFGate.com quoted Li Junru, deputy director of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, who said, “Since China adopted [its] reform and opening-up policy in 1978, the country has witnessed the second great liberation of human rights, as…reform in [the] economy, technology, education, culture, (and) politics…”
Since all of East Asia including China are collective cultures, the face of human rights may not fit the West’s definition of it.
Response [Parfitt]:
China’s culture isn’t collective. China is fond of saying it’s collective, that’s its strength, and the West should take a lesson, but if there’s one overarching rule in the Chinese universe, it’s this: the more you hear something, the more you can be assume it to be untrue.
‘Collectivism’ is a euphemism for ‘subservience.’
The Foshan incident highlights China’s awful individualism; 20 people ignoring a small girl hit by a truck. Western individualism may be extreme, but Westerners can act collectively when it counts. They often assist people in crisis, for example.
Cultural moral relativism argues there is no absolute truth, and no matter how dreadful circumstances become, they are forever valid. Cultural moral relativism isn’t unlike Orwell’s doublethink: “to hold simultaneously two opinions that cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”
China’s human-rights: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China
Final Word [Lofthouse]:
Regarding collective cultures, ERIC.ed.gov, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education, offers a definitive definition.
ERIC says, “The remarkable differences between the East Asian cultures of China and Japan and the American culture make acculturation of East Asians into the mainstream of United States society extremely difficult.
“Characteristics of individualistic cultures include: the individual as an autonomous entity; egalitarianism; competitiveness; and self-reliance.
“Characteristics of collective cultures include: individuals as interdependent entities; hierarchism; cooperativeness; and self-denial (sacrificing one’s own desires or interests).”
In Litigation Nation, I explained why the behavior of a few individuals during the Foshan incident cannot be used to judge a nation.
A better example would be the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which affected almost 46 million Chinese in 10 provinces.
In Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature, I compared China’s recovery to how America dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Continued on December 4, 2011 in Discussion with Troy Parfitt, the author of “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” – Part 8 or return to Part 6.
See Discovering Intellectual Dishonesty – Part 1
______________
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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Lloyd,
So, what you’re saying is: China can and should be compared to other countries, China is less corrupt than India, and the Chinese are much more satisfied with their country than Americans are.
If so, do you see China’s 2011, Transparency International ranking re corruption of 75 [out of 183] as being good?
And, assuming 87 percent of Chinese citizens are satisfied with their country, what can we conclude from this?
Thank you.
While Mr Parfitt may expect China to wave a magic wand and improve overnight, change for a country of more than 1.3 billion people takes time.
In the last thirty years, China has made impressive strides in developing a Western style legal system where none existed before, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of severe poverty, lifted restrictions on its people so those that can afford it are now allowed to become global tourists. Last year, more than fifty million Chinese visited other countries around the world as tourists including Europe and America. In 1976, few if any Chinese were allowed to travel outside China. Last summer, my step-mother-in-law came to the US for the second time and stayed for three months and she is not a card-carrying member of the CCP. She has visited Europe, Singapore, New Zealand and Australia too.
In fact, today Chinese students make up the largest population of foreign students attending US universities. Some of the children of China’s top leaders are among those students.
In addition, about 400 million Chinese are linked to the World Wide Web and some of those citizens living in China have taken part in this debate leaving comments, which would have been impossible in the 1980s. From this debate, those citizens share what they have learned with other Chinese citizens and the word spreads.
For another comparison, we will look at the development of the United States. In 1776 when the US was a new republic (not a democracy since America’s Founding Fathers despised democracy), 10% of the population was allowed to vote, women and children were the property of men and millions of African Americans were slaves in the southern states. It took almost 90 years and a bloody Civil War to end slavery. It took longer to free women and children from bondage—154 years from 1776.
If America can take more than a century and a half to evolve into a democracy (which the Founding Fathers despised), why should China be faulted for not changing as fast as critics such as Mr. Parfitt seem to want?
With the changes that have taken place in China since 1976, imagine what will happen in the next thirty years.
It’s true that the CCP has lifted millions out of extreme poverty. I’ve acknowledged that and the fact that since 1978, the CCP has done an enormous amount in the way of material development. There’s no denying that. There’s no denying that people in China have better lives and more opportunity now than they ever did.
However, China still, as of 2011, ranks 101st according to the UN’s Human Development Index, meaning it is nowhere near being a developed nation. Not anywhere close. Yet, countries/territories like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, etc. which are similiar culturally (and though not as large, generally have very high population densities) are way up the list. Japan and Korea are pushing the top 10. They’re also way up the list in terms of freedom of the press and GDP per capita.
A common theme in the China debate is for Sinophiles to laud achievements by China that are entirely commonplace in other nations. China actually lets its citizens out of the country for holidays now. Isn’t that something? People can actually take vacations abroad.
Then, of course, there are the contradictions. China has a quality education system; it’s been perfecting the art for centuries. In fact, “today Chinese students make up the largest population of foreign students attending US universities. Some of the children of China’s top leaders are among those students.”
That’s true. There are about 130,000 Chinese students studying in America.
China’s education system is so good that anyone with the opportunity studies overseas.
And who could forget the irrlevant comparisons? To Britain in 1835, to America in 1776, to India in 2011. Such camparisons bring us no closer to understanding what China is. They are offered up as red herrings or by advocates who lack the mental wherewithal to focus on the topic. ‘You wanna talk about China? Well what about Richard Nixon? The Ford Pinto? Side two of the Beatles Abbey Road?’
As for democracy, it hasn’t been discussed, but I’ll tell you what Sinophiles believe: that democracy is impossible, and that the Party is the guardian of democracy; that democracy is not suitable or important for China (too many uneducated people, tsk, tsk), and the Party is working on it (these things take time); that democracy in China is possible, and look at what a rotten mess it is in India, America, etc. Don’t look to places where democratic systems get along fairly well; you can compare China to whomever you want; just choose a comparison that yields a flattering result. Comparsions that yield unflattering results are racist, biased. They are not smiley and only hurt the feelings of 1.3 billion people.
“Please, offer us something more than this.”
Alessandro, I can’t offer anything better than your answers. The majority of readers are probably aware that there is such a thing as media bias, an extension of human bias. Papers have a political slant, they have their favourite targets, they sometimes disregard reporting on certain subjects for dubious reasons, etc. TV news can be incredibly sensationalistic, especially American TV news. As a Canadian, I consider much American TV news to be little more than rubbish and trivia mixed with a few moral lessons. But the western press in general, including that of the United States – and I’m mainly talking about print – is not having a go at China just for the sake of it.
You’ve just revealed yourself to be a conspiracy theorist.
Terry,
Katrina has nothing to do with this subject or website. It is no more germane to the discussion about China than the mating habits of butterflies.
I am not denying that rescue efforts after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake were sincere, and I’m sure some were quite heroic. I watched a piece done by foreign journalists on a local offical trying to assess the damage, get things organized, etc. He seemed like a very sincere and nice man. He was obviously really concerned and really busy, but he took a few moments to try and talk to the journalists in English and explain what was going on. The guy was something of a one-man show, going into houses to see if anyone was inside, organizing meetings…. I hope he got recognized for his efforts.
Terry,
Do you think the parents lied to the Western journalists about being threatened by the PSB and made to sign conduct agreements? Do you think they lied about the shoddy construction of schools (again, buildings near collapsed schools were often intact, or not nearly as damaged) and that schools were poorly built because of graft?
Here’s a quote from the NY Times, 2009
“The Chinese government has refused to release the number of students who died or their names. But one official report soon after the earthquake estimated that up to 10,000 students died in the collapse of 7,000 classrooms and dormitory rooms.”
There are lots of interesting articles on the web (from print media) about the collapsed schools and corruption. Perhaps you could read some of them.
Thank you
Note: The following quote is Troy Parfitt’s own opinion and nothing else. As such, it is meaningless—except to Mr. Parfitt. Mr. Parfitt wrote, “Katrina has nothing to do with this subject or website. It is no more germane to the discussion about China than the mating habits of butterflies.”
Wrong, Mr. Parfitt, this Blog published a post on June 6, 2011 comparing how the United States handled Katrina to how China handling its 2008 earthquake. In fact, this Blog often compares what happens in China to similar incidents and events in the United States and/or other countries and cultures. As amazing as this might seem to you, China is not isolated from the world and it is acceptable to compare and contrast by using facts instead of cherry picking facts that support one individual’s opinion.
That post was titled “Recovering from a Beating by Mother Nature” as a four part series, and may be found at
This is my Website and Blog. I own the domain name. I pay the bills. It is not a democratic institution or a public company with shares sold on NASDAQ or the US Stock Exchange, and I disagree with your opinion that how the US handled hurricane Katrina has nothing to do with this subject.
Indeed it does!
In fact, comparing and contrasting how other nation/cultures handle a tragic event provides more facts to assist readers to come to a more educated understanding of China other than relying on the opinions of one individual such as you.
There is no better way to learn something about a country/culture than looking at facts and contrasting and comparing them to others [this is not a question—it is a fact].
A Chinese maxim favored by Deng Xiaoping was to “seek truth through facts”, which is what I attempt doing in this Blog. I am all for facts and comparisons and I do it all the time.
China is a member of the global community of nations and cultures and comparing China in isolation as you often do while passing judgment on China and its culture is a travesty.
It is obvious that the only way you can make a case for your opinions of China and its culture is to disallow these comparisons with other countries and cultures by censuring comparative facts.
For more comparisons, Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that nearly three quarters [75%] of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). At the bottom, we have Somalia with a score of 1.1, slightly trailing Myanmar and Afghanistan at 1.4 and Iraq at 1.5.
In 2010, China ranked 78 with 100 countries ranked more corrupt by whatever criteria Transparency International uses to compile this comparative list.
Then, this year, 2011, Transparency International ranked China 75 [out of 183 countries ranked, which means 108 countries scored lower than China in 2011]. In comparison, the democracy with the most people, India, saw its score slip from 3.3 in 2010 to 3.1 in 2011. Lest I forget, India ranked 95th on the 2011 list.
What do readers learn of China from this? The answer is simple. China is working to improve while India is failing.
I invite readers to click on the link to Transparency’s report and discover how many of the world’s glorious democracies scored lower than China.
Source: http://www.transparency.org/
More facts and comparisons follow:
“There’s some evidence that China’s people are exceptionally gung-ho about their county. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center asked the people of 24 nations, ‘How satisfied are you with your country’s direction?’ This year, 87 percent of Chinese people said they were satisfied, more than any other country polled. In comparison, 36 percent of U.S. citizens said the same about their country.”
In addition, “China again emerged as the proudest country in a poll by the BBC World Service in February. An overwhelming 92 percent of Chinese said their country had a positive influence on the world.”
Did you get that? 87% of Chinese were satisfied with their country, while only 36% of Americans were satisfied with the good old U.S.A.
“Although the Chinese and foreign press have reported outrage among some parents who lost children in collapsed schools, the overall reaction of direct beneficiaries as regards the government aid they received was outwardly positive.”
Source: Lessons from the Sichuan earthquake
http://www.odihpn.org/report.asp?id=3008 12/4/2011
As callous as it may sound, it is noticeable that in most disasters here the level of anger of the aggrieved is inversely proportional to the amount of compensation.
An Official death toll was released in May of 2009
“The 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan on May 12 last year destroyed or damaged 11,687 schools, leaving 5,335 students dead or missing and 546 students disabled.”
Although there are “lots of interesting articles on the web (from print media) about the collapsed schools and corruption”
there are also Earthquake Engineering Reports attributing the collapse of buildings to the magnitude of the Quake and the building construction methods.
I find it odd that the main attention and anger was drawn to the collapse of some 8000 schoolrooms (not school buildings) and little attentention paid to the collapse of 7 million homes.
Mr.Parfitt,
You complain about us making conspiracies about western media sources, yet you yourself are biased enough to focus on the plight of some children while ignoring the fact that the way the Chinese government reacted to the crises was in general a success story and they reacted to the disaster really well, certainly much much better than how the US government responded the the Katrina hurricane or how any western governments have reacted to their own natural disasters.
Several years after the katrina earthquake, construction still hasn’t finished whereas from what my personal friends have told me it took one year to rebuild nearly everything in sichuan.
If your conclusion is that the sichuan earthquake is yet another example of how confucianism and the Chinese government lacks morality, what can we conclude about western values and the US government through the katrina hurricane?
We all know that those schools were poorly constructed, but you have to realize that they were in a rural area. So you’re expecting every school in a developing country like China where 150 million people still work as migrant workers that can barely eke out a living to be well-constructed and able to withstand an earthquake? I’m not sure if that is even the case in the US, the richest country in the world.
“UK’s the Guardian and France’s Reporters Without Borders were engaging in slander?”
Ehm….absolutely so…and it wouldn’t be any news..For RWB I’ve already said…The Guardian as the majority of mainstream medias in the west are collateral to economic/financial/political power, and they usually make use of acute double-standard in reporting news from the world, according to which is the country they are reporting from, and to which group of interest they belong to…Or u still believe “newspapers” only report the pure, objective and absolute truth, and journalists are some kind of selfless heroes??
I’m familiar with Manufacturing Consent. I think there’s truth in it.
However, this didn’t strike me as being falsified. What would the Guardian stand to gain from fabricating such stories? Imagine the fallout if it were discovered those reports were invented.
We’re talking about reports from Chinese people relayed by Western journalists and human rights groups in Hong Kong to the outside world. Who’s lying? The Westerners? The Chinese? Both?
Alessandro, thank you for supplying us with such a perfect response. It’s not that a high quality Western publication reported on the plight of parents who’d lost children because of governmental corruption, and then compromise the “rights” of those parents when they became upset, it’s that the Western publication, working in collusion with nefarious business and political interests, was only working to slander China. Full stop.
Such a heartless answer is thematically consistent with the bulk of responses here.
Such a heartless answer is thematically consistent with the bulk of responses here.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAAH…u can’t really come up with nothing better than this, right?
A high quality western publication….Ok, I give up..I see u live in a fairy tale…
By the way, u’d probably be surprised to know that “high quality” western newspapers lie regularly, often simply invent declarations or just make up names (it has been the case also with the recent earthquake in Japan), falsifying words and also pics (or cutting them to better serve what they wanna say..even if in so doing the completely falsify the original message conveyed by the pic)…
Please, offer us something more than this..
Mr. Parfitt,
If you believe the Western media is pure of heart and honest to a “T”, then you are mistaken and out of touch with reality.
I majored in journalism. That’s my field. The media is rife with errors and mistakes and bias. Freedom of speech does not guarantee honesty, error free or free of bias. It only means that the government cannot control the media and if you challenge me to offer proof, be my guest. Find it yourself.
However, the media can be sued for libel and slander and often are. I wonder how many times the Guardian has been dragged to court or threatened with a lawsuit.
The very nature of daily news with its deadlines often between midnight and three in the morning means in the rush to beat the competition errors are made and the bias is natural from the reporter’s personal beliefs and cultural perspective.
In fact, “Media Bias is Real Find UCLA Political Scientist”
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-6664.aspx
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.
These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
Mr.Parfitt,
The first comment the BBC responsed to the sichuan tragedy regarding the Chinese government was: “The reason for the great response to the sichuan disaster is that they want to set a good image of themselves to the international community”. I wonder how a media source can get more biased than that. Problem is, most western media sources report in a similar fashion when reporting about China.
Hong Kong and Taiwan both sent hundreds of journalists to the scene. Many of the scenes they filmed and reported were deeply moving. Would you say that they were collaborating with the Chinese communist party? Should the reporting of the guardian and France’s reporters without borders, who have proved themselves to be largely biased against china time and time again somehow be considered to be more valuable than these journalists from Hong Kong and Taiwan who were at the epicenter of the disaster not long after the earthquake?(Yes, western journalists only went to the disaster area well after the earthquake when travelling to the disaster site was convenient again)
Within days, tens of thousands of soldiers had made their way into the disaster hit areas. The efficiency of the rescue plan was one that westerners can only dream of. Premier wen jiabao was at the disaster area within a day to make sure things went according to plan. At the elderly age of 67, he still braved all the tough conditions to walk through the epicenter of the earthquake hit regions to console the victims. Would any western leader do the same?
Many of the soldiers did not sleep for days on end yet they still would not accept any of the provisions that people tried to give them along the way. They had to run all the way to the disaster hit regions covering tens of kilometers a day on foot. PLA soldiers often had to risk their lives to save others. For hurricane katrina, I heard that it took days before troops appeared and all they did was to prevent looting. So much for human rights!
For anyone who doubts the unity of the chinese people, they should consider the fact that sichuan has a high proportion of minority races including tibetans. The rescue effort consisted of people of many etnicities united as Chinese without any discrimation whatsoever and putting their differences aside to combat the disaster and save as many people as possible. Many people that earned barely enough to eke out a living were donating thousands of dollars to help out the victims. I wonder if this is the lack of morality you’re talking about.
And as you said, Mr.Parfitt, there were problems with the rescue plan. My father personally knows someone who witnessed government corruption during the incident, but choosing to focus on these individual incidents instead of focusing on the big picture is pathetic and immoral to say the least. In your desperation to label China and confucianism as lacking morality, you have shown that you are the impassive and cold-hearted individual, not the Chinese people.
Thanks Terry, I couldn’t have said it better….On second thought…u’ve expressed that far better than what I could have done…:)
“The reason for the great response to the sichuan disaster is that they want to set a good image of themselves to the international community”.
The BBC said that did they?
You’ve quoted that. It’s probably online somewhere, eh? Could you provide us with the link?
Ahahah, at a loss for argument Troy, are we??? Or u really think that EVERYTHING BBC states is readily available online with a link?
Sad to see that u behave like that
Alessandro,
Right, except the BBC couldn’t possibly have said that. For one thing, it’s written in Chinese English.
Not only does it sound unnatural, leading off with such a statement as Terry says (“The first comment the BBC responsed to the sichuan tragedy regarding the Chinese government was…”) does not follow standard procedure.
The problem here is that you’re not writing to your audience. Rule number one, Alessandro: write to your audience.
Most people reading this discussion would be Westerners, most likely native English speakers. So when someone says the BBC led off their coverage of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake with the line, “The reason for the great response to the sichuan disaster is that they want to set a good image of themselves to the international community”, readers think, ‘Oh, really?’
Propaganda only works on the weak minded, Alessandro.
Mr. Parfitt, I will ignore the usual china-bashers empty slogan about the schools destroyed by 2008 earthquake (sure, some of them have surely been poorly built, u know, the area hit by the earthquake where not very reach or developed…but u mustn’t go very far to find out school destroyed by earthquake – and by earthquake THOUSANDS of times less powerful of that in Sichuan – in Italy couple of earthquakes have seen school crumble and students die. If I’m not mistaken it happened as well in Turkey and other other countries as well..so, yes, there exist poorly built school for which somebody should be held accountable for, in many places of the world..What u conveniently ignore – typical and despicably of you -, is the sheer power of that earthquake, the enormous area affected, and the development of the area. The quake measured 8 on the Richter scale..I hope u can understand what that means..while in Italy it was around 5….That’s just to say that corruption and poorly built buildings exist everywhere, also iin developed countries – should we here remember the aftermath of hurricane Cathrina in US? -, and it’s not singling out again China on this – as u clumsily did with the Foshan incident – that u will prove anything..except ur own bias and ideological prejudice), and will only inform u that I have just opened The Guardian website from my home in Beijing..so, just to tell u… (btw, I wouldn’t put too much trust in Reporters Without Borders..theirs is a very ambiguous organizations, criticized by many parts (it’s on the NED payroll, has had relationship of different countries Intelligence Agencies, and its founder, Robert Menard, is a quite controversial individual…)
Yes, Alessandro, but Chinese parents said schools collapsed to powder and rebar while buildings nearby still stood. They said it was because of corruption. You know how that works, right? Local cadres get cash from Beijing, and they pocket a bit before the construction co. that wins the bid goes to work, pocketing a little more. Eh? Skimping on materials, etc. That’s what the Chinese parents said. That it was a systemic problem. That they believed that may have contributed to the death of their only child. Do you think those parents were lying? Didn’t know what they were talking about? Trying to hurt China’s good name?
compare the 8 thousand classrooms destroyed with the following damage reported
7:million homes/hospitals/factories destroyed
24 million homes damaged
5000 bridges destroyed/damaged
47 thousand kms of highways are roads destroyed/damaged
Damage area 440 thousand square kms.
Mr. Parfitt, your attitude always give one unpleasant thought that only you knows things, u speak the most obvious and superficial things as if u were revealing unspeakable truths….speaking of nonlinear thought are we, uh?? Now, u’d be surprised that, as I said, in Italy, and also other countries, buildings supposed to be built according to anti-seismic guidelines, didn’t stand up to a less than 6 DEGREES RICHTER quake… (probably u ignore, considering the nonsense u keep writing, that a 8 degree quake is not 3 times, but THOUSANDS of times more powerful than a 6 degree quake)..the power of the Sichuan earthquake was enormous, it affected a caused damage in a huge area (as Aussie in China stated, 440 thousand square km..an area larger than the whole of Italy, Germany or UK, slightly smaller than France or Spain…!!), the most affected areas were not very developed, and local cadres in remote provinces do not get money directly from Beijing. That they pocket some of the money they get, I think, it’s not a surprise to ANYONE, as it something that happens in China, in US, in UK and in a large part of the world…Or u think that, though a big problem, corruption is only a chinese problem? And u think that construction companies trying to save on materials, or to pocket some more money during constructions only happens in China (if that is actually what u think, my suggestion is to wake up, and open ur eyes. If u’r simply singling out China only cause it is China and u don’t like it very much, while the facts u talk about happen everywhere in the world…well, I can only pity u) or that u just revealed us some shocking truth (bridges, buildings etc collapses in different part of the world – also US – even in normal condition, cause the companies which built them saved money on the materials they used….Do u think that is a shocking truth as well, or a terrible sign of how evil those governments are…or, as it appears quite clear by now, this is the case only when u speak of China??). I think u should leave a little aside ur prejudice and ur bias (by the way…usually investigations on disaster are conducted by third party cause the people directly hit on a personal level by them are, comprehensibly and rightly so, too emotional and not objective…Or are u suggesting to let, say, relatives of the victims judge some culprits instead of supposedly impartial judges and juries, not directly related to the event?). Those relatives where not lying, but this doesn’t mean that all they’re assessment were objective and completely reliable…and NOBODY denied that schools crumbled, as did hospitals, homes, and other infrastructures..
Please, tell u are better than this, and that ur reasoning can be a little more sounding, and it’s not only based on slander, prejudice and ideological hate.
Mr. Parfitt should be ashamed of himself and apologize for his accusations that corruption in China had anything to do with the collapsed buildings during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In fact, any source in the West be it Bloggers or media should apologize and admit the truth based on the following “facts” and comparisons.
The 1971 Sylmar earthquake in Southern California measured 6.7 and lasted sixty seconds
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco measured 6.9 and lasted 10 to 15 seconds.
China’s 2008 Sichuan earthquake hit and measured 8.0 lasting TWO MINUTES of shaking and hit with more than ten times the force of the two California quakes used in this comparison using facts instead of opinions as Mr. Parfitt often does to push his biased agenda.
In addition, the earthquake in China lasted twice as long as the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and eight times as long as the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The “FACTS”.
The Richter magnitudes are based on a logarithmic scale (base 10). What this means is that for each whole number you go up on the Richter scale, the amplitude of the ground motion recorded by a seismograph goes up ten times. In addition, the longer a shake lasts, the more damage.
This means the 2008 Sichuan earthquake had more than ten times the force of the two that hit Southern California in 1971 and 1989, and yet those much smaller earthquakes managed to collapse a so-called earthquake resistant hospital building barely three months old, a double deck freeway, the Bay Bridge and damage a dam besides causing thousands to become homeless while killing some.
The 1971 Sylmar quake claimed 65 lives and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, including the destruction of two hospitals, two freeway interchanges and the Lower Van Norman Dam. Damage to the earthen bulwark dam raised concerns of a partial or total collapse. Much confusion ensued as various agencies declared a need for the mandatory evacuation of 40,000 people, or voluntary evacuations of various portions of the San Fernando Valley below the dam.
An Earthquake resistant hospital in Sylmar collapsed in the 6.7 magnitude quake in 1971 in Los Angeles County. At Olive View, three people perished, all of them in so-called earthquake-resistant hospital buildings that were barely 3 months old and this was in the United States.
This destructive earthquake occurred in a sparsely populated area of the San Gabriel Mountains, near San Fernando. It lasted about 60 seconds, and, in that brief span of time, took 65 lives, injured more than 2,000, and caused property damage estimated at $505 million
Note: I was at home in bed sleeping when this earthquake hit and we lived twenty or thirty miles from the epicenter. The earthquake hit at 6:00:55 A.M. PST. Our house shook for what seemed a long time. A hanging lamp in the living room was swaying back and forth like a pendulum and objects were falling off shelves throughout the house.
Then there was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which was a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989, at 5:04 p.m. local time. Caused by a slip along the San Andreas Fault, the quake lasted 10–15 seconds and measured 6.9 on the magnitude scale.
This quake killed 63 people throughout northern California, injured 3,757 and left some 3,000-12,000 people homeless
In comparison, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was measured at 8.0, which means more than ten times the force of the two earthquakes that hit California in 1971 and then 1989.
China is a developing country. Bricks are the most common method of construction and many structures in that area of rural China had been around before 1949.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 8.0. The epicenter was in Wenchuan County, Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, 80 km west/northwest of the provincial capital city of Chengdu, with its main tremor occurring at 14:28:01.42 CST (06:28:01.42 UTC), on Monday May 12, 2008 lasting for around 2 minutes, in the quake almost 80% of buildings were destroyed.
An even better comparison with more “facts” would be the 2011 Sikkim earthquake that hit India. This earthquake was a magnitude 6.9 and lasting 30–40 seconds. The impact was at last 111 deaths and property damage in India was estimated to be around $20.28 billion US dollars.
If the force of the earthquake goes up so do does the damage and deaths. January 2001, the Indian Gujarat earthquake measured 7.6 and 7.7. This quake killed around 20,000 people, injured another 167,000 and destroyed nearly 400,000 homes. This earthquake lasted more than two minutes.
By comparison, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake was three to four times more powerful (and had about four times the death rate) and lasted about the same amount of time as the 2001 Gujarat earthquake.
I wonder why India didn’t get the same level of criticism in 2001 that China did in 2008 from people such as Mr. Parfitt. In fact, if Mr. Parfitt had his way, only opinions would be allowed in this debate while facts and comparisons would be banned—except those he uses.
I was in China just after the 2008 earthquake occurred. There were no wide-angle shots of the areas affected on CCTV, which practically had 24-hour coverage, and I watched hours of it, days of it. There were extreme close-ups that made you wonder what you were looking at, and shots taken from helicopters where you couldn’t really see anything: some grey streaks among the green. Instead of showing wreckage, what the government chose to show was leaders doing a lot of yelling into megaphones. Mind you, local cadres appeared genuinely concerned (I’m sure there are lots of honest, well-meaning local officials), but the ones flown in from Beijing appeared to be more concerned with putting on a good show.
The focus was on the response, not the extent or cause of the damage. As you know Lloyd, many of those who died were students as school seemed particularly prone to disintegration. Parents who asked why schools had been reduced to piles of powder while buildings nearby remained intact were initially allowed to speak out, but, as usual, once their group got too large and too vocal, and started asking difficult questions about corruption, the Public Security Bureau moved in.
Parents were not allowed near collapsed schools. They were threatened, prevented from protesting, isolated from one another, and forced to sign conduct agreements. Parents were told if they didn’t sign and maintain “social order,” they would be denied compensation packages. Human rights organizations in Hong Kong reported that parents who refused to cooperate were sent to labour camps for “re-education” (note use of quotation marks).
I read this in the Guardian, not available in China. Foreign correspondents gathered their information by talking to parents, who were eventually banned from talking to journalists. A year later, in 2009, Reporters Without Borders, based in France, listed China as being 168th out of 175 countries in terms of freedom of the press.
You’ve mentioned several times you were trained as a journalist, Lloyd. Would you say that, like me, UK’s the Guardian and France’s Reporters Without Borders were engaging in slander?
The Guardian is available in China
Oh, is it?
Apologies then.
Thank you Aussie in China.
I apologized for not knowing that below, but where is it available in China?
Not that it means anything, but in the 4 months or so I spent in the PRC, I never saw any Western publications (and I looked – in bookstores, universities, university bookstores, hotels), but have since been told that, for example, the International Herald Tribune is sold in China. Are such pubs only available in cities like Shanghai and Beijing? I admit this is an area I know little about.
Mr. Parfitt,
You didn’t look very hard to find Western Publications. Every major bookstore I have visited in China had a section with books and magazines in English. In fact, there are a number of Blogs and magazines published by Westerner’s in China in English. Once such English language magazine is “City Weekend Magazine”, which is owned and operated by English speaking foreigners.
http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/
As for foreign publications being available in every town and city in China, that would be an absurd expectation since China has one written language that every literate person in China reads and that is Mandarin. It would be expensive to offer books in languages no one could read in small towns and second or third tier cities unless there was an audience for them.
Oh, and then there is Sexy Beijing TV, which is in English.
http://sexybeijing.tv/
Other than those few examples, China has its own online Amazon.com in Dangdang.com, which is an E-Commerce site similar to Amazon.com and is China’s largest Internet book retailer. Like Amazon, dangdang.com includes a marketplace program that allows third-party merchants to sell their products alongside Dangdang’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangdang
In addition, Amazon’s Kindle devices are selling in China because its e-reader allows users to log on to banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook… Source: BBC – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11673116
Then there is Amazon.com in China allowing anyone in China that reads English or any other language to order whatever he or she wants and have it shipped to his or her home. If any Chinese is interested in any topic, they have many options to buy and read that topic in any language.
http://www.amazon.cn/
Lloyd,
“Oh, and then there is Sexy Beijing TV, which is in English.”
I’m sorry. Is this a publication? I’m talking about publications, primarily foreign publications: major English-language newspapers and magazines. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (also Chinese), you walk into a major book shop and you can find just every major magazine you could here in Canada: Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the whole gamut, not to mention mountains of English-language books.
In Taiwan, even small bookstores with mainly Chinese products often sell National Geographic and Time in English [and Chinese); every convenience store in the country sells the China Post and the Taipei Times (often with stories taken off the wire).] The International Herald Tribune is printed in Taiwan. You see racks outside shops in Tianmu offering USA Today.
But when I first went to China, to Beijing for five weeks on a study program, I couldn’t find any of those magazines or publications. None. Zero. Zilch. I’m not talking about online, but on the rack: physical form. I’m not saying they didn’t exist; I’m just saying I couldn’t find them, and I looked, a lot – because I spent quite a bit of time in bookstores. And when I returned to China for the second, third, and fourth time, I still couldn’t find them. Not one.
I have a friend in Shanghai who assures me you can get the International Herald Tribune, so I assume that’s true: what I was asking Aussie was where? I’m just curious.
As for books, if you want to talk about that, besides textbooks and translated Chinese classics, the selections I saw were dire, and I believe I was doing my book hunting in China’s biggest bookstore, the one on Beijing’s Wangfujing. There were a lot of Sherlock Holmes books and ones by Charles Dickens, which I suppose counts for something. Apparently, the CCP couldn’t find anything wrong with David Copperfield.
Here’s an article about banned books and Chinese nationals buying them in Hong Kong in Taiwan.
http://www.cnngo.com/hong-kong/shop/banned-books-600786
Except for the statement to the effect that terrible accidents, and terrible people, exist everywhere, there is little logic in these responses, and even less compassion. Moreover, as it pertains to this discussion, there is zero introspection. Instead, what we see, comme toujours, are exercises in non-linear thought augmented by denial and sprinkled with bits of anti-Western rhetoric and accusations of racism – oh, and in this case, a brief history of quotation marks and a nod to the power of mothers just for good, mentally sound measure.
Sinophiles, Chinese nationalists, and apologists say Westerners use examples like the Foshan Incident to shame China, or underscore the so-called heartless political system that is Communism. That’s sometimes the case, certainly, but it’s not the one I’m making. I don’t believe Yue Yue’s being hit, run over again (to try and finish her off), and ignored by 20 some passersby as she lay bleeding and broken on the ground has much to do with China’s Communist system. It may have something to do with it: Chinese citizens thought it did; some brought up that a citizen had been found guilty of criminal negligence when attempting to assist someone in distress, and that because of that, people believe it best to never get involved.
But the Foshan tragedy speaks to something deeper than China’s communist nature and its inchoate legal system. It underscores a lack of morality and introspection (critical thinking). But don’t take my word for it. Chinese writers like Lu Xun (1881-1936) and Bo Yang (1920-2008) were quite preoccupied by this issue. In fact, a lack of societal compassion was what spurred Lu Xun (one of China’s best-known writers; and my favourite one) to begin writing. His first story, A Madman’s Diary, was an attack against Confucian values, which Lu Xun blamed for turning the Chinese people into paranoiacs who believed their only option in life was to cannibalize or be cannibalized. Bo Yang echoed this sentiment, adding what a shame it was that Chinese virtues resided largely in books. And now, Liu Xiaobo (2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, in jail for subverting the state) is continuing the argument. There is a dearth of morality in China, Liu says, which stems from unsympathetic Confucian doctrines.
I didn’t have time to write it in my 150 word response, but there was an incident similar to the Foshan Incident in Taiwan in the1990s, and Taiwan is not Communist; nor is it part of China. But it is still influenced by Confucian principles. A work truck hit a man and then backed up, and over him, to finish him off. Drivers had been instructed to do just that by their employers for financial reasons: a funeral is cheaper than a lifetime’s worth of medical costs or a drastic hike in insurance premiums. The boss says, ‘If you hit and badly injure someone, make sure you kill them,’ and you do it. You don’t ask questions. This is Confucianism taken to its logical extreme. In the real world, Confucianism doesn’t have anything to with kids sitting under banyan trees listening to wise, virtuous sayings.
And it should go without saying that major accidents (human tragedies) are a staple of news reportage, especially, it seems, television news. Let’s say in one day, there are three such stories covered by foreign correspondents and broadcast in, oh, for example, Belgium. There’s a plane crash in Canada that kills 24. Initial conclusions point to the Canadian pilots’ culpability: preventable pilot error. In Italy, soccer hooligans riot; 8 dead, 76 injured. In China, a bus crash kills 9 students; the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Let’s say all stories are covered equally, just the facts and no sensationalized statements or excessive speculation.
1. Does reportage of the bus crash represent an attempt to besmirch China?
2. Should human tragedies from China not be reported? Or should they be reported differently from those in other countries? If so, is China the only country that deserves exception in this regard? Why?
Also:
3. Have Chinese writers and intellectuals like Lu Xun, Bo Yang, Liu Xiaobo, and the Mao Zedong biographers Jung Chang and Li Zhishui been motivated by bias toward China? Have they sold out to Western interests to give their homeland and compatriots a bad name? If so, why would they do such a thing?
The irony here, as people following this conversation are doubtless beginning to see, is that denial and recrimination are being substituted for introspection and criticism. By failing to admit culpability, and by failing to advocate change, the conditions that helped facilitate the Foshan Incident continue to exist, and similar incidents are bound to occur again, again, and again. Chinese culture remains locked in a self-replicating state of myopia, and until that state is challenged, life will never truly improve for the Chinese people.
Mr. Parfitt,
The stories you share sound similar to the Ameican Ford Pinto case when Ford Motor Corporation realized that the Ford Pinto might burst into flame in a rear end collision. It was decided by Ford’s accountants to cover it up because it would be cheaper to settle in court than fix the problem and when it did go to court, Ford fought for decades and eventually settled for several hundred million for fear that the jury might award a larger penalty.
This incident with the Ford Pinto was similar to the US tobacco companies and eventually it was revealed that these companies knew long before the court cases that cigarettes caused lung cancer and a host of other diseases but they went ahead and had their chemists do all they could to make the cigarettes as addictive as possible anyway. Coke, Pepsi and other soda companies have done the same.
Then there is the true Erin Brockovich case where a public utility in California attempted hiding the fact that they had been dumping cancer-causing chemicals into the ground water causing hundreds of people to get cancer and die in addition to birth defects in the local children. I read recently that the same company was caught doing this again. It seems that the HUGE multimillion-dollar settlement of the Brockovich case wasn’t enough to teach them right from wrong.
There are so many stories of this sort in America and the West similar to your examples in Taiwan or China, which you blame on Confucianism. Confucius has no influence on the West and America, so how do you explain what Americans did to their own citizens and tried to cover up all in the name of profit in the Ford Pinto case, the tobacco lawsuits and the Brockovich case, which are just the tip of a North American iceberg?
Mr. Parfitt,
You don’t pay much attention to what anyone writes except what you want to see and you ignore most of the points that refute your opinions. If you think ignoring most of the arguments against your case will win you points, you are wrong. I suggest you take a class in how to debate. Anyone that is following this debate may easily read what everyone wrote and make their own minds up. I suspect many will not be led around by the nose by you.
Allessandro says, “The incident of that poor baby-girl in Foshan, in its immense tragedy, is nothing new in the world, and/or unique to China (inhuman episodes like that, unfortunately, happens wherever in the world…)”
Terry wrote, “Thousands of netizens [he’s talking about the Chinese people] expressed their anger online and many people donated money to the poor girl (I’m sure he meant the ‘poor girl’s family’.”
In addition, you make no mention but ignore how China and the Chinese responded to the 2008 earthquake.
Instead, you insist on focusing on an incident where a toddler was killed in a narrow street in a Chinese city to judge all of China and its government where it was obvious the driver of the first truck didn’t see her and the second driver didn’t come along to deliberately finish the job as you so cold-heartedly imply.
A child as small as a toddler dressed in black prone on the pavement of a small possibly poorly lit street might easily be missed by a driver watching that he didn’t hit any of the merchant stalls lined along the side of the narrow market street.
None of the comments here denigrates the tragedy that took place except in your words where you make such accusations that it borders on slander. In fact, you have gone out of your way to take advantage of this tragedy to validate your case that your stereotypical, biased, racist opinions are correct about China.
Instead, you are the individual that lacks compassion when you say, “Except for the statement to the effect that terrible accidents, and terrible people, exist everywhere, there is little logic in these responses, and even less compassion..”
It was you that dredged up this tragedy to use the actions of about twenty people in one midsize Chinese city to condemn China’s central government and its culture when you said, “the so-called heartless political system that is Communism.”
I remind you that when the 2008 Earthquake hit China and about 45 million people became homeless overnight, China reacted quickly while in the US, for comparison, President Bush and the US government did almost nothing to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In fact, days went by while hundreds and thousands suffered and died in the heat and humidity while the city was flooded before the federal government acted. All President Bush did was fly over the destruction thousands of feet above the ground and look out of his little oval window to see the devastated toy landscape below.
For comparison, in 2008, China’s leaders flew into the devastated earthquake zone from Beijing within hours and were on the ground among the injured and homeless.
Then you conveniently ignore that fact that the CCP has done more to pull its people out of severe poverty in the last thirty years than any nation on the earth including all of the so-called, morally superior democracies where poverty is increasing.
Lloyd said,
“you insist on focusing on an incident where a toddler was killed in a narrow street in a Chinese city to judge all of
China and its government where it was obvious the driver of the first truck didn’t see her and the second driver didn’t come along to deliberately finish the job as you so cold-heartedly imply.”
Lloyd is right about one thing. The first driver did not back up to try to “finish her off” as I stated previously. From the video, and written accounts, it’s impossible to know if either driver saw Yueyue.
For the third time in this debate, Mr. Parfitt is admitting he was wrong.
Thank you.
Mr.Parfitt,
why only focus on the bad aspects regarding the Foshan incident? Doubtless, those passerby’s should be criticized for being cold-blooded and the parents for not looking out for their child, but the immediate response to the tragedy was surely commendable. Thousands of netizens expressed their anger online and many people donated money to the poor girl.
One comment I saw online expresses my view perfectly:
“Predictably, whenever this sort of news report emanates from China, you get the usual anti-Chinese bashers and haters coming out of the woodwork with their tuppence worth of racist generalisation.The story has already been met with indignation by the Chinese themselves and they do not need the holier-than-thou Westerners to preach about what is right and wrong to them.”
The incident of that poor baby-girl in Foshan, in its immense tragedy, is nothing new in the world, and/or unique to China (inhuman episodes like that, unfortunately, happens wherever in the world – in the US as in UK, in Italy, in France or wherever..people beaten to death in the street with nobody intervening, kids beaten or sold as sex toys to old guys without any help from neighbors or people who know etc.).
It has unfortunately become a kind of “blanket” example of how “bad (communist) China is” (I used communist in brackets, cause if China wasn’t nominally communist, that same event would have been considered a tragic incident in which the people involved – and not a whole country and its political system – have showed at what low the human spirit can arrive. An incident as many others in the world) for China-bashers exactly cause it happened in China, if it had happened wherever else in the world, it wouldn’t even be noticed.
I find it particularly despicable for Mr. Parfitt to use it here just as a tool at his own advantage to back a strange “theory” (collective societies are still composed of individuals, that can have all the good and bad sides of any individual in the world. Collective societies are not paradises, and for a society to be a collective one, it doesn’t mean than in that society crime, evil etc. doesn’t exist. Therefore using that tragic incident as a rhetoric tool is both useless – cause it doesn’t proof anything – and despicable – for the same reason, as well as for many others -).
Alessandro,
I wrote about this topic at
http://ilookchina.net/2011/10/17/litigation-nation-virus-spreading-west-to-east/
and pointed out that the tragic death of the little girl in China is not unique to China and provided links in that post to similar examples in America.
Mr. Parfitt pulled this same trick on me somewhere during the debate in one of the posts [which may not have appeared yet], and I countered by providing how the Chinese responded after the 2008 earthquake with a link to a post I wrote comparing the US to China’s response to a major natural disaster. It is a four-part series.
http://ilookchina.net/2011/06/24/recovering-from-a-beating-by-mother-nature-part-14/
You said, “I find it particularly despicable for Mr. Parfitt to use it here just as a tool at his own advantage to back a strange “theory” (collective societies are still composed of individuals, that can have all the good and bad sides of any individual in the world).
I agree, which is why I agreed to the format of this debate—to reveal “a” fraud and I use the quotation marks to make a point regardless of some obscure grammar rule that somebody in England cooked up several hundred years ago to create a unity and clarity of meaning in the written English language.
You see, I have studied the evolution of the English language and it is always changing by taking away or adding new words and changing the original rules of punctuation and grammar and sometimes even the spelling of a word.
Through this example, we see the evolution taking place that Mr. Koratsky has studied for the last thirty years.
If we want to talk about the evolution of the English language, we can trace the influence of Britain’s many conquerors through the evolution of that language. In addition, each conqueror’s race was eventually assimilated into the overall British culture through marriage, which happened in China with the Yuan and Qing Dynasties.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Never underestimate the power of mothers influence on their children no matter who the usually absent father is. Even today, mothers worldwide are more hands on with raising children than fathers.