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| Xi Jinping, China's heir apparent Sergei Karpukhin/REUTERS |
"... a few foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do than try to point fingers at our country… China does not export revolution, hunger or poverty; nor does China cause you any headaches. What else do you want?"
That was China's leader-elect, Xi Jinping speaking in Mexico in 2009. I buy into that argument: that China has done a lot for its people. Since 1979, the beginning of the opening up of the economy, some 500+ million Chinese have been raised out of poverty. That's surely an increase in human rights for them.
I was in China in the late seventies, the fag-end of the Cultural Revolution and I remember the drab clothes and drab views -- nothing out of line was ever expressed. Now we have a raucous, roiling society, in which you can say pretty well anything you want -- just don't call for the overthrow of the communist party. Sure, there are human rights abuses, jailing of dissidents, rampant corruption.
But compared with how it was, China today is like the light after dark. It's a lively place, the internet -- despite restrictions -- is alive with a plethora of views and news.
My simple point: that China is not the horrid place it's painted by foreign politicians and media. The people causing "headaches" as Xi puts it, are not China, but those in the Middle East which are Muslim, and the Muslim countries in South Asia.
China is part of the Hemisphere of Construction (that includes all of us more interested in building things, in going places -- in the world, in outer space -- in giving people a chance in life), vs the Hemisphere of Destruction, which are all those hewing to an ideology that values death over life (their words, not mine).
Postscript: How China could yet fail like Japan, Martin Wolf, Financial Times, June 14 2011
