“Again, as I stated in an earlier comment, the Chinese students at our local university paint a completely different picture of China than you do. So considering the fact that they were born and raised there and you weren’t, I’m taking their word over yours.” Source: Timothy V.
Timothy had more to say and so did I. This post is a shorter, edited and revised version. I didn’t edit Timothy’s quote—only my words appearing below. If you want to read the entire response, go to Left of the Right and scroll down until you find Timothy V’s latest with my response following his.
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Often, when I read complaints about shoddy Chinese products in the American media, the language makes China guilty as if the government of China gave orders for that to happen. That’s not the way things work.
For example, the president of the United States and the Congress are not responsible for tainted American meats or fruits and vegetables that make people sick. Click on this link to the CDC to discover how bad it is. In the United States, food borne diseases have been estimated to cause 6 million to 81 million illnesses and up to 9,000 deaths each year.
Or what about the murder and mayhem on our roads and freeways? More people die every year in car crashes in the United States than died fighting in Vietnam for more than a decade.
Or how about unnecessary deaths in American hospitals due to greed and carelessness. The annual number of deaths in American hospitals should shock anyone.
In fact, like America, crimes in China are often traced to one greedy person or a group of individuals and when caught they often get a death penalty or kill him or herself.
The individual in China found responsible for the tainted infant formula killed himself before the trial.
As for the few Chinese students you know at your local university—sure they grew up in “today’s” China and I didn’t, but I believe the Chinese I know, who all grew up in China, are better sources than the few you know. Besides being married to a Chinese woman who was born in China and didn’t leave until she was in her twenties, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know and talk to Chinese people of all ages in China and America. I’ve met Chinese from many occupations in both countries. I’ve even talked to a Tibetan refugee. In addition, I talked to a retired Communist official who fought in the revolution that Mao won.
Chiang Kai-shek
There was also the eighty-year old I met in his closet-sized room in Shanghai. With my wife interpreting, we talked for hours. Prior to 1949, he had been a Kuomintang police chief in a small town. He stayed behind when Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with China’s treasury leaving the mainland broke. This former police chief was arrested in 1949 by Mao’s troops and spent half his life at hard labor in a prison camp close to Tibet. He knew about the gold from the treasury, because he was the one responsible to make sure it was loaded on the train.
He said about the prison camp, “Ten-thousand went in and five-hundred came out.” Today’s Communist government gives him a small pension—enough for rent and food. He was happy to be free again and didn’t hold grudges.
Discover more about this debate at Freedom’s Evolution
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.
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