March 12, 2007
MORE A PEER OF HAITI THAN THE U.S.:
'Thousands riot' in China protest (BBC, 3/12/07)
A protest staged by thousands of rural workers in central China ended in violent clashes last week, media reports and an official said.Several people were injured as up to 20,000 people clashed with 1,000 police in Hunan province on Friday, a local official told Reuters news agency.
A report on the Boxun Chinese news website said the clash was sparked by rising public transport costs.
MORE:
The Chinese Unease about Falun Gong: China's communists use torture and long prison sentences to repress Falun Gong, fearing that the fast-growing meditation movement might ultimately usurp their power. ( Jürgen Kremb, 3/12/07, Der Spiegel)
It was one of those beautiful nights in the hills west of Beijing. On September 23, 1993, a small crowd had gathered outside the Jietai Temple to celebrate the Festival of the Moon. Joining the few foreigners in attendance were several highranking army officers and party officials who lived in the ritzy neighborhood. All of them hoped to catch a glimpse of the full moon.One man seemed strangely out of place. His business card identified him as "Master Li Hongzhi" from the "Falun Gong" movement. A flier he distributed referred to Falun Gong as "the path to perfection."
The character "Fa" means "law" and "Lun" stands for "wheel." These teachings, Li said, had already attracted tens of thousands of followers. When one of the men in uniform called him a "crackpot," the wiry, medium-sized man with a burred northern Chinese accent silently turned and vanished into the temple. The officers burst into scornful laughter.
A few years later, they - like many other top Chinese mandarins - were no longer laughing; the mysterious Li had drawn a following that rivaled the Communist Party of China in size. Since then, the party has branded Li as a serious threat to its rule, claiming that the CIA is financing his organization in a bid to topple the Chinese government.
If only the CIA were that competent. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 12, 2007 9:53 AM
"sparked by rising public transport costs"
That's what happens when the government subsidizes public transport. Let's not let it happen here.
Posted by: h-man at March 12, 2007 11:00 AMMy very favorite statistic to quote to people recently appeared in Paul Johnson's 14 October 2006 Spectator column:
"According to Forbes magazine, in the five years since terrorists blew up the World Trade Center, an act which they hoped would fatallay damage the US economy, it has actually grown by 30 percent, ading $3 trillion to America's gross domestic product. That increase alone is bigger than the entire GDP of China, the new giant."
Posted by: Qiao Yang at March 12, 2007 11:02 AMThere are more people in prison and we execute more criminals per year than a country with three times as many people does.
Posted by: gupta at March 12, 2007 3:51 PMYes, we're a Puritan Nation, which is why we are a more decent society.
Posted by: oj at March 12, 2007 5:53 PMgupta, your statement makes no sense. People aren't imprisoned or executed because of population statistics. Those who commit crimes are punished according to the law.
Posted by: erp at March 12, 2007 6:54 PMgupta, can you provide us with the statistics that show the United States executes more criminals per year than China does?
Posted by: X at March 12, 2007 7:32 PMgupta, by the way, the United States has carried out a total of about 1,100 executions from 1976 to now, a period of three decades. CNN, hardly known for its pro-American views, has reported that one Chinese parliamentarian said his country executes 10,000 people in each year alone.
In its annual reports, Amnesty International gives numbers for executions carried out in China that are routinely several tens of times greater than in the United States. Please note that this only counts executions recorded in public sources. In a closed society such as China, there are many executions that are not made known to the public.
So if you can provide convincing data to challenge this historical record, it would be greatly appreciated by all of us.
Posted by: X at March 12, 2007 9:14 PM