29 Comments to 'Tragedy compounded by tyranny'
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Tragedy compounded by tyranny'.
:: Trackbacks/Pingbacks ::
No Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Tragedy compounded by tyranny
Posted By katie allison granju
Imagine having to get a government certificate in order to obtain permission to have another baby after losing your only child to natural disaster.
From the AP:
XANXIAN, China (AP) — Many of the earthquake disaster victims in central China were children. And, because of the country’s one-child policy, many of them left behind no siblings.
But officials say there are exceptions to China’s strict one-child policy.
Officials in the capital of Sichuan province say families whose child was killed, severely injured or disabled in the quake can get a certificate to have another child…
May 26th, 2008
Why is this a surprise? In China, you have to have your application signed by the authorities just so you can get a bus pass. Without that, you pay 1 yuan on the bus every trip you take.
Somehow, the American left will find a way to blame this on American “hegemony,” “imperialism,” and our unwillingness to negotiate with tyrants.
There’s nobody else to blame but Americans. If the United States hadn’t single-handedly created global warming, assaulted the world with its imperial might in two world wars and two “conflicts” causing France to be bailed out not one but four times, Mao’s China would have had no reason to be so restrictive on the population growth.
All kidding aside, China’s capitalist reforms are little more than profit taking for its elite. Meanwhile, countless millions get to serve as examples as to why command economies just can’t handle the complexity uncertainty and chaos represent. The 20th Century had between 50 and 100 million dead thanks to Marxism/Socialism/Nazism’s collectivist, command-economy dreams. According to Burma and China, mankind apparently needs more casualties before this parasitic ploy is exposed.
I have been teaching English in China for the last 7 years and I have seen it all. I do not live near Sichuan but I closely follow the coverage.
Instead of criticizing the Chinese I want to talk about the great change that has come about and is coming about. The US media could learn from watching the coverage of CCTV9. I feel that what we saw about Katrina was shameful and caused a great loss of face for the US. We will never see mistakes and the lapses made in the recovery effort in Sichuan on CCTV9 but do we really need to? Instead of focusing on what is wrong why not, for a change, report on what is right.
I have not heard anyone, anywhere blame the US.
Change is happening and it will continue to happen. Why not cheer the effort instead of complaining that it is not happening as fast as we want it to.
Typical of Instapundit to link to a gutter sniping post capitalizing on China’s earthquake disaster in order to make a political point.
Here, the officials are clearly saying “there are exceptions”. Yet the spin is on “certificate”. If voter ID laws that require identity certification are not over-burdensome or onerous, why should pro forma certification by the Chinese authorities - who are obviously willing to make those exceptions - be such an outrage?
Pathetic gutter sniping.
More on One Child Policy
I know lots of people who have a second child when they can afford it. That second child has become sort of a status symbol of the emerging middle-class.
2008 or 2009 are the years that the effects of the policy will begin to show. In university instead of having 60+ students in a class, it will be down around 30. Now that is good news, There may be other markers but this is what I can see with my own baby-blues.
Wow, having to show a photo ID to vote is as bad as having to get government permission to have a child … who knew?
Gutter-sniping, indeed. Typical of a pseudonymous parasite.
“Instead of focusing on what is wrong why not, for a change, report on what is right.”
Perhaps we could, if the US government would seize absolute control over all media and information that China has.
Personally, I would prefer an honest media, over the relentlessly negative media in the US or the relentlessly positive one in China. It’s very sad that the closest anyone in the world can come to honest sources of information are FOX and Pajamas Media, both far from honest but at least willing to tell the truth when lives and liberty are at stake. Every other news outlet has as their goal the end of all democracy in the world, as they are led by people who would rather be royalty of a dark age than mere citizens of a golden age.
Apparantly, some have not noticed that China has a problem with overpopulation. If the US had the same problem, they would also have the same system to deal with it. This is not “tyranny”, it’s common sense, which seems not to common around here.
“Any excuse will serve a tyrant.” — Aesop
That quote by Aesop applies equally speciously to critiques of voter ID. Your ideologue’s dislike of China is frying your brains. You can’t help yourself, so you use a tragedy to make a political point.
Given that the right to vote is a fundamental right under your Constitution, and the right to have a child is nowhere mentioned as is so often argued by American conservatives against substantive due process and a right to privacy — it is quite clear that an infringement of the right to vote is a more egregious violation of the Constitution than your right to have a child.
Given that, the burdensome imposition of ID as a pro forma matter is at least “as bad”, if not worse. Such a shame that Americans in their prejudiced hatred of China can’t see the mote in their own eye.
I’m sorry, but this really is taking out one part of the story and ignoring the context. The one-child policy is not simply a mean way for the government to control the people; it is a way to make use of limited resources - to ensure it is possible for the country to, you know, clothe, feed and educate all these kids. According to the original policy, there are lots of exceptions - in rural areas like the earthquake area you can have two children, any couple where both husband and wife were only children are permitted two. The certificates are issued nation wide to ensure the child in question has access to schools and services. They are not new. This statement issued by the government was intended to reassure people who lost children that they would be granted an exception, that it would not be the case that they just lost their one chance. It’s not creating some new certification system, just telling people that on top of their heartache, they will not have to deal with government opposition if they decided to conceive again.
There is just no sense of balance about China these days - the place has changed so much in the last 30 years. Yes, there are lots of things that still need fixing, but lets not harp on the things they are doing right.
Actually, not so much a shame as typical of the average ugly American whose hubris and blindness to the flaws of his own country (whom he typically holds to less rigorous standards) lends him an air of moral arrogance when lecturing others. And lecturing others on the pretext of a tragedy at that.
Pathetic gutter sniping is correct. It’d would be like a foreigner criticizing your government in the aftermath of Katrina, then saying that pervasive racism and encroaching disenfranchisement “compounds” the misery of black people in the United States.
You’d think it was outrageous. Yet you’re pitifully unaware that your own moral crusade here is equally offensive in a petty pointscoring way.
Merry and Rule 11,
do you have some kind of fetish for forced abortion?
If China has a “population problem”, which you postulate but do not adduce any evidence for (1/6 of the world is Chinese, and has been for all of recorded history), why is forced abortion preferable to free condoms and fines for people who get pregnant without permission?
The Katrina comparisons are real cute. If you didn’t notice, the levee system and the government of New Orleans have been run for decades by corrupt officials who are not white, and perhaps some small portion of the blame should be laid at their feet? When bribes and kickbacks take precedence over maintaining the flood control system in their own city, there are bound to be consequences.
There’s a parallel with the earthquake in China, no?
Hatred of the government of China is not “blind”. Oh no, it’s blindness that makes excuse for it.
Gabriel,
Oh for pete’s sake. Acknowledging there are reasons for population control in China = loving forced abortion, does it? Ridiculous. The Chinese population has not been consistently overburdened - it stayed in the range of 60-100 million over the course of centuries, then began a sharp increase during the Qing Dynasty, skyrocketing after 1900. The problem is that in spite of what looks like a big country, all the arable land is along the coast, so something like >90% of the people live on 40% of the land. There aren’t a lot of places to move, either. The forced abortions which peaked in the 1980s were an outrage, and they led to a changed policy of fines in the 1990s. That said, they continue intermittently, and they should absolutely be condemned. Population control is very likely a necessity for China, but that does not mean that every attempt at implementation has been successful.
But none of that is what this article was about - without linking to the whole piece or making clear what the context was, it suggests that the government is making families who lost children go through some sort of draconian certification system. In reality, there is a certificate system in China, and this piece of news was intended to reassure suffering parents that they would be eligible to get new certificates either for children born in defiance of the policy, for whom they are now paying fines, or for new births. It’s simply not a story about some new sort of red tape.
Merry - I think you are missing the point that I was trying to make: the government doesn’t belong in my bed or my uterus. **I** have the right to control my reproductive life and decisions, and whether this is “new” red tape or “old” red tape, it’s tyrannical for a government to require me to get the government’s permission before bearing (or not bearing) a child.
Katie
Yet Gabriel avoids the salient point of the Katrina comparison - that is, if foreigners were to use the tragedy to make an anti-Bush administration political point; he’d be outraged and up in arms. Indeed, the likes of Glenn Reynolds spent the aftermath shifting the blame around like you just did. Which makes my point - this is more a political game of partisan point scoring than anything else. Tragedy is just a pretext.
Just as you would take umbrage at over-the-top nakedly political attacks on the administration’s reaction to Katrina, it is equally asinine to twist Chinese statements on there being no obstacles to conceiving again (apart from pro forma certification) into something of a monstrosity.
Unless you’re a partisan hack, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
katie, that’s easy for you to say when you don’t have the pressing problem of feeding and clothing a fast growing population. You can subsume a lot of things under the rubric of ‘tyranny’. It’s an easy charge to make. But it is especially distasteful to use the earthquake as leverage to make your point.
First it’s not clear that as a policy matter, the policy instrument of limiting population is quite so odious. It’s easy to make vapid appeals to ideals or principles. But when the reality socks you square in the face, policymakers don’t have the luxury of vain appeals to principle. They face the stark choice of whether to limit population for now or face possible uncontainable demographic suicide in the future - whether from famine or other demographic pressures. In other words, prevention now or a painful cure in the future? These are hard questions not susceptible to facile answers on ‘principle’. Saying “tyranny” simply evades the problem.
If a woman can decide that she can no longer afford more children; how is that decision making process any different to a state’s population policies when it decides that its resources cannot support, in the long term, a greater population than a certain number? Lives are at stake. Just as it would be the height of irresponsibility for a woman to have children she cannot feed, so to it would be the height of irresponsibility for a country to leave unchecked population growth which could - at the macro level - result in people it cannot feed due to a lack of resources.
You can reject China’s approach to the problem, but to assume that it is all fun and games and that there are simple, facile answers to demographic problems is just beyond silly.
If a woman can decide that she can no longer afford more children; how is that decision making process any different to a state’s population policies when it decides that its resources cannot support, in the long term, a greater population than a certain number? Lives are at stake.
So says every tyranny. The end justifies the means. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union explored solutions to their surplus population problems as well.
If China has to forcibly reduce its population to survive, why do Hong Kong and Singapore–with no arable land to speak of–do just fine? India doesn’t force population control on its people, and is a food exporter today, when all the doomsayers were prophecying mass starvation by now.
Fascist governments often promote autarky, but not because they have to in order to survive, though they like to tell people so.
Somebody here is looking for facile answers to demographic questions, but it is not I.
From the early to mid-1990s a network of businessmen and government workers, known as “bloodheads”, set up hundreds of official and unofficial blood donation stations in Henan Province to supply the market for blood plasma created by hospitals and manufacturers of health products. The common practice of reusing needles, not screening for diseases, sellers traveling from station to station with false records to maximize their income, and the mixing the blood prior to centrifuging and re-injecting the separated red blood cells back into the peasant blood-sellers guaranteed the rapid spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B.
The blood stations began to be closed down in 1995 when the scale of the HIV outbreak began to become apparent. The ensuing coverup saw government officials take credit for dealing with the crisis which they caused, the harassment of journalists attempting to cover the story, and of whole villages dying of what was to them a mysterious disease because they had not been informed that they were likely to have been infected.
In 24 August 2002 the prominent HIV/AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, was arrested in Beijing and detained for a month for leaking an internal government report on the Henan AIDS crisis.
You can’t pick and choose “good” tyranny and “bad” tyranny.
Kate: when your children are eating my food, we got a problem. We can solve this problem through fines and government, or I can solve it with my gun. Your choice!
xiaoding, killing in competition for food is so civilized…the world every year produces more food per capita then it ever did. Food is not a zero-sum game.
let’s not forget the 60 million who died thanks to Mao’s collectivatization and industrialiation programs. Be grateful to him.
“So says every tyranny.”
Facile nonsense. This is the type of argument that partisans make when they say that the Bush administration’s policies are ‘fascist’. The Patriot Act? Fascist. Bypassing FISA? Fascist. Guantanamo? Fascist.
Population control? Tyrannical.
The fact of the matter is that very sometimes the ends justifies the means. That’s why policymakers do cost-benefit analyses. You must be naive to think otherwise.
“If China has to forcibly reduce its population to survive, why do Hong Kong and Singapore–with no arable land to speak of–do just fine?”
Are you daft or ignorant? Singapore DID have a policy of population control that was pretty effective. Now its fertility rate is below replacement rate.
More importantly, Hong Kong has less than 7 million people, and Singapore less than 5 million. These are exceedingly small numbers and manageable as compared to China, which has 1.3 billion souls to feed — 1.7 billion if population policies had not be implemented. You’re not quite grasping the scale of the challenge are you?
While I’m quite aware of Malthusian alarmism and the consequences of the Green Revolution, you fail to take the longer view of history — which is that the norm throughout history has been occasional population-reducing famines rather than unchecked growth and plenty. China especially has had multiple famines throughout its history, some manmade, many not. To be so absolutely sure that the country will never face another natural famine-causing calamity in the future is to be irrationally dogmatic and irresponsible. You’d rather take a chance on a country the scale of China where a food disaster will necessarily be on the scale of millions than to take some prudent policy steps to forestall unchecked population growth.
That just about sums up your ideological, one-track mind.
As for India, you inadvertently make my point. India has hunger problems of its own:
“Yet another report confirms India’s losing battle against hunger. In the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 117th for the prevalence of underweight children.” — “India losing battle vs hunger”, Express India
“India, like other Asian nations, is on the verge of facing net food deficit in the near future from food surplus till recently….Of the Asian countries, China had a surplus till 2003…More countries now face food deficit and Asia including India still have more hungry people, than in any other region of the world — over 510 million in 2002.” — “India becoming net food importer: UNDP”, The Hindu
As it is, India with a smaller population than China without population controls in place is already facing food security problems. China WITH population controls in place and a population 20% larger than its neighbor thus faces significantly more problems given that it has even less arable land than India.
If you add the ‘missing’ population that would have been there without the one child policy, you’re looking at a population 30%-50% greater than India’s. Which would mean per capita arable land far less than that of India’s — on which India is now already struggling to maintain food security and its net exporter status.
Gabriel, suffice to say that you haven’t a clue, and you merely repeat the uncritical ideological line like a partisan. Try thinking for yourself. You’ll be less tiresome then.
“the world every year produces more food per capita then it ever did.”
And still food prices are going up in tune to demographic pressures, which in turn have an effect on food prices.
Think before you type. Popular economics and invoking the Malthusian strawman won’t help you here.
“let’s not forget the 60 million who died thanks to Mao’s collectivatization and industrialiation programs. Be grateful to him.”
Now you’re catching on. Mao was among those who ignored the dangers of China’s population growth and thought the peasants expendable. He thought that a large population was an expendable resource.
It’s not a coincidence that it was only in 1979 that China sought to implement population limiting policies — after Mao’s death.
You seem to share the same attitude as Mao, a callousness that suits your ideological stubborness well.
Rule 11, are reading what you type?
“India, like other Asian nations, is ON THE VERGE OF FACING net food deficit ..”
in other words, it’s not happening now, but some people are predicitng that it will… as they have continually since the 50’s.
“Food insecurity” is a neat little dodge, isn’t it? It’s not the same as “not enough food”.
“And still food prices are going up in tune to demographic pressures, which in turn have an effect on food prices.”
No one ever said it didn’t. You’re arguing with a straw man.
I said, “the world produces more food per capita than it ever did”, and this is true.
“You seem to share the same attitude as Mao, a callousness that suits your ideological stubborness well.”
Except that I haven’t killed anyone, and I’m not the one making excuses for one of the most repressive governments in history.
People in the West voluntarily limit their population without using the tactics of the Chinese government, or any government tactics at all. My wife is from Beijing, and she is not pumping out babies.
China is a tyranny, whatever excuses you make. They always have the same excuses for everything they do. The Chinese constitution guarantees free speech and freedom of religion, but it’s a lie. Whether it’s Falun Gong or Tibet or 6-4, the excuses are always the same-the Party always claims it had no choice.
You want to be an enabler of that; well, you have to live with yourself.
“in other words, it’s not happening now”
Apparently reading is not your strong point either. Read the passage again:
“India, like other Asian nations, is on the verge of facing net food deficit in the near future from food surplus till recently….*Of the Asian countries, China had a surplus till 2003*”
In other words, China has ALREADY crossed that threshold in 2003.
And they crossed it even with population controls in place. Demographic pressures on the price of food would have been even greater without some of the ameliorating effects of the one child policy.
You provide no analysis, no facts, no reasoning in your response — and worse, you evince a complete misreading of the passage in question. At this point, you probably know you’re clueless. Which explains why you’re reduced to tastelessly using the earthquake as a platform for polemics.
“Except that I haven’t killed anyone”
No, but you’re advocating policies that have life or death consequences for large swathes of an overpopulated country. Not unlike Mao.
Moreoever, population limits in themselves don’t kill anyone either, so by your own logic, you shouldn’t be bitching. And yet you are bitching, which makes you inconsistent by your own lights, and you earn your own epithet.
The fact that you mention that the West is demographically different proves your cluelessness quite adequately. We know that the West is demographically different. That is the whole point. Until and unless China reaches that demographic tipping point — greater prosperity, an urbanized population, the material transformation of the peasantry and rural population — invoking the demographic structure of the West simply misses the point. It is precisely because China isn’t yet structurally similar in demographic terms to advanced industrialized countries that its population grows the way it does. Given that salient fact, IN THE INTERIM, population control is only prudent — until the government raises enough of its population out of poverty and into some semblance of material prosperity, at which point the usual demographic behaviours kick in and population limits will no longer be needed.
Your naive, shortsighted and utterly clueless approach to population policy is premised on sheer ideological prejudice. If you can muster neither facts nor logic, I suggest that you not compound your boorish ignorance by using the tragedy as a platform to launch polemical screeds on unrelated issues like the Falungong. Doing so just exposes your naked political agenda for what it is.
It may surprise you that China’s autocrats are not always wrong. Just as George W. Bush is not always wrong. It may also surprise you that, just as the Bush administration’s policies are not always fascistic, the Chinese government’s policies are not always “tyrannical” either.
Only an ideologue would take the trite, hackneyed positions you do without further thought. I didn’t know that caricatures like you still existed, but apparently, they do. The prototypical hubristic, ugly American.
“People in the West voluntarily limit their population without using the tactics of the Chinese government, or any government tactics at all. My wife is from Beijing, and she is not pumping out babies.”
BUT…your wife is not LIVING in China, is she? So she does not face the same circumstances as someone who DOES live there! KINDA DIFFERENT.
You know, just because a government is tryannical, does not make EVERYTHING it does wrong! Would you oppose famine aid, if it came from the evil China? So, how are you going to change the form of government in China, anyways? Persuasion, one at a time?
well i dont think that is rite and if that is the cause i wil of move some where else and do wat i have to do or just stay there and try to work out in having permisson in havingn another child because thats not fair be it is no ones falut that ya child was killed so they should be able to tell you that you can have another chid to be fair