Two of our international rivals have been in the news lately. China is hosting the Olympics and has been trying to put forth a positive image to the world. Russia is acting more and more like its Soviet Union predecessor, with militant dreams of an empire. Both deserve some comment, but in the interest of brevity, I'll just deal with one right now: China.
In hosting the Olympics, China has invited the world to come and see their country. They want everybody to think of China as a beautiful country, friendly, successful, and a leading member of the international community. Unfortunately, that's not the impression I've gotten. Quite the opposite, in fact. My impression is that the Chinese leadership (official and civilian) is made up of a bunch of cold-hearted, lying thugs who'll do anything to achieve their goals, with absolutely no respect for anybody or anything else. Fraud and cruelty is a standard way of doing business. Some of the things that stood out for me:
- They take girls who show gymnastic promise away from their parents as early as three years of age. The state raises them in an incredibly strict and rigorous training camp. Their families have no choice but to let them go and rarely, if ever, get to see them. In the US, we have terms for that, namely "kidnapping" and "child abuse". People go to jail for that. For life. In China, though, it's a state-run activity.
- Although the Olympic rules require that female gymnasts be 16 years of age during the year of the Olympics, the Chinese have no qualms about entering girls who are apparently as young as nine, ten, or eleven, and then lying about their ages. Now, it's certainly not unheard-of for American athletes to break rules (see Marion Jones), but again, this is the state that's doing it.
- Chinese officials evidently never heard of Nilly Vanilly, the pop duo whose careers were ended when it was discovered they lip-synced their songs. The officials decided that the real singer wasn't "cute enough" to be on TV, so they drafted a cutie to lip-sync. Deceitful, at best.
- In an effort to make Beijing look pretty, Chinese officials bulldozed the houses of thousands of people and replaced them with flowerbeds. Not only deceitful, but incredibly destructive.
- Turns out that all those flowerbeds require a lot of water. The water was diverted away from rice paddies and other farmland in the adjacent province, which is already suffering a terrible drought. All these paddies and fields are now dried-up and barren, the farmers are in terrible shape, and the food they produce has to come from other stocks. Deceitful, destructive, and ecologically devastating.
- Chinese officials never really came close to reducing air pollution despite all their promises and rhetoric.
None of this should really come as much of a surprise. China has a long history of heavy-handed official duplicity and a disregard for international rules of conduct. It's evident in almost everything they do. Rather than letting their currency float on the international markets, they keep their currency at an artificially low level, for example, which boosts their exports and restricts their imports. They don't respect copyright laws, so pirated CD's, DVD's, books, and artworks are readily available ... more money for the Chinese, none for the people who actually created the works.
If China was a person, it'd be that lowlife neighbor who made a lot of money in ways you don't want to know about, sticks garish decorations all over the lawn, lets his dogs loose to poop on your doorstep, and threatens you with physical harm when you let him know he's being an asshole.
Years ago, during the Tiananmen Square uprising, a single man armed only with a shopping bag stood in front of a row of tanks and stopped them. Today, the tanks are still rolling, but in a very different way.
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