"If the local government wants to develop and you are against them, they hire some gangsters, and they beat you to death and use cement to bury you." - ESPNI believe it. I saw clear echoes of it. In the small way of one witless foreigner, I contributed to it. But I never wrote about it. Maybe, someday, I'll work it into something.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
The Hidden Country
I never wrote about my visits to China. Or maybe I did, but only a little. It is a hell of a country. I only saw the frenetic, relatively wealthy area around Shanghai. Here is some good writing about a place where ...
4 comments:
I recall hearing a while back that undeveloped land on one side of the Huanpu River grew to the size of Chicago in, like, 30 years. Nobody knows capitalism like the communists.
Interesting link. Thanks!
We've been to China five times but never to Beijing (unless you count the hotel stopover on our way somewhere else). I've never seen the Great Wall. Never seen Xian.
Have seen Shanghai, the big city, the destination for many of the rural poor who can't make a living anymore or who aspire to a better life.
China is an amazing place, at once the epitome of can-do (selling pretty river stones to tourists along a tributary to the Yangtze River) and the dregs (those smog pictures in the ESPN story tell no lies).
When the farmers complain that the authorities are selling their land out from under them, they are right, but under Chinese law, as I understand it, the land wasn't *theirs* to begin with. They are part of a coop and the local authorities give and take what they think is "best" for the communal whole, or claim so. If the farmers can prove that the decisions weren't made in the best interests of the community, they have the law on their side. If they can't, if it's only that =they= don't want to give up the land, too bad.
Look what happened to the villages along the Yangtze that would be flooded after the dam was built. Your family's farmed that land for two hundred years? Too bad. It isn't yours. The greater good is the dam. We'll move you somewhere else and you can start over again.
The Chinese are making sacrifices, risking their lungs and their lives at high altitudes, to bring modernity to Tibet, which has slaved under the thumb of a greedy theocracy. Or so they'd have you understand. The Tibetans have a different view of what has happened and is happening there. The Han Chinese are selling prayer flags outside the square in front of Johkang Temple in Lhasa. Do they believe in prayer flags? No. They're there to make yuan and only to make yuan.
The folks in Yunnan Province are simply relieved that the Han Chinese have decided to promote tourism and eco-tourism and let them keep their province and their lifestyles as-is to act as a draw, "come see the ethnic minorities of China."
The muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province (once upon a time the Republic of Eastern Turkistan) aren't so lucky. The Han Chinese don't trust their religion and don't trust the people who practice it. Want to get ahead? Don't grow a beard. Deny your religion.
I could go on.
China is fascinating.
If the local government wants to develop and you are against them, they hire some gangsters, and they beat you to death and use cement to bury you.
Actually, that sounds like Jersey City.
Hey Don, I wanted to drop by and say thanks for all your contributions to Boiled Dinner. I'm hanging it up. I just can't deal with the brain damage anymore. I'll keep lurking, though, and definitely be involved with Film Freaks. See you around!
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