I'm occasionally taken to task for being "too positive" on China. Oh well. I do know the downsides of the place; but also its upsides. As Walt Whitman might have said of China: "... very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes".
The bad news on China remains the bad news: corruption that is not simply endemic, but ubiquitous -- everyone is on the take. Pollution is horrible. There are crazy clampdowns on free speech: vide the Plan 9, I wrote about.
But the thing is that all these are pretty well covered in the media. Everyone knows that many a thing is crook in China.
Less known are the positive things that are happening. That's why occasionally I do trend a touch upside-ish about our "motherland".
And so does Chandran Nair. He writes a good piece in the South China Morning Post, "Distorted view overlooks its many positive achievements" [pdf]
Summary:
1. Pollution: government aims for 20% renewable energy by 2020
2. Multicultural: 55 ethnic groups of 100 million
3. Clamp downs on corruption: attempts by Xi Jinping to tackle it (on this I'm, like, hmmmmm.... Seen this before, not much change on this one)
4. Tibet: Nair highlights the developments in the last 50 years. Which, for naysayers, is another case of "what have the Romans done for us".
The bad news on China remains the bad news: corruption that is not simply endemic, but ubiquitous -- everyone is on the take. Pollution is horrible. There are crazy clampdowns on free speech: vide the Plan 9, I wrote about.
But the thing is that all these are pretty well covered in the media. Everyone knows that many a thing is crook in China.
Less known are the positive things that are happening. That's why occasionally I do trend a touch upside-ish about our "motherland".
And so does Chandran Nair. He writes a good piece in the South China Morning Post, "Distorted view overlooks its many positive achievements" [pdf]
Summary:
1. Pollution: government aims for 20% renewable energy by 2020
2. Multicultural: 55 ethnic groups of 100 million
3. Clamp downs on corruption: attempts by Xi Jinping to tackle it (on this I'm, like, hmmmmm.... Seen this before, not much change on this one)
4. Tibet: Nair highlights the developments in the last 50 years. Which, for naysayers, is another case of "what have the Romans done for us".
