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[quote=St Disibod][quote="Defeated Romanticist":11uy6ojf]China may be cleaning up its act for the camera next year but that doesn't mean that it is going to become a beaken of light in a bleak world for human rights. I expect it to return to type by 2010.[/quote]
Don’t get me wrong, internally China has many problems. Some are simply of humanitarian concern, though of a most acute manner, while others affect our economic interests- such as the use of slave labour to undercut normal prices. The heat should be kept on China on these issues.
[/quote:11uy6ojf]
I agree that the heat should be there but the spotlight should also be lit on all the sources of those issues and I don't think you'd disagree?
There's a fair few myths about China alright and those say, economic interested 'bulwarks' of the current humanitarian issues are one of them. And to point them out is not to defend the Chinese, just to make it clearer than what we see in the mainstream media.
But before I start on them lets not forget that it's an evil dictatorship which jails union organisers and beats, shackles and tortures those who don't kowtow to the wishes of Chinese and Western Capital. There's massive inequality and corruption with Communist party millionaires from corrupt, er, planning, real estate speculation etc. But importantly, it's an authoritarianism that sits comfortably with western capital.
The free-market development myth is one such myth, yet China got where it is by ignoring much of the free-market mumbo-jumbo. The Chinese have shut their borders tight to foreigners except as it suits China’s own industries. The government have not listened to those who 'advise' that they should stop controlling, owning and regulating industry. As explained by Stiglitz China's economic surge began with the government's funding and nurturing rural cooperatives, fledgling agricultural and industry protected behind high trade barriers.
Now in other areas, China's neoliberalism is highly compatible with authoritarianism and it shares that tenet with other examples like Chile say or now Iraq and Haiti. It is this interest that is starting to cap progressing in some areas and what we don't often hear is how, sometimes, what holds it back are in fact western interests and corporations and their representatives in the various American and European chambers of commerce. And I'm referring to workers rights (such as to not be worked to death*), freedom of speech, safety regulations, environmental policies etc etc. Time and again they lobby to prevent improvements on these.
* One interesting article on this.
[b][i]How we shop until Chinese workers drop[/i][/b]
[url="http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1107"]http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1107[/url]
Western corporations have been deliberately blocking moves to give Chinese workers real rights
....Last year, the Chinese dictatorship announced a new draft of labour laws designed to finally allow Chinese workers like her - too late - some basic rights. The new law would permit people like Lan and Meiren to join trade unions and participate in collective bargaining over wages, safety measures, and work hours. It would give them the right to have a written contract. It would give them the right to a severance payment. It would give them the the right to change jobs freely, without the current bizarre controls from their former employers. Where previously China's labour rules were diffuse, dispersed and barely enforced, now they would be drawn together and backed with big fines.
The dissident-killing Chinese Communist Party didn't propose this change in the law out of a sudden flush of benevolence. They did it because the Chinese people have in increasingly numbers been refusing to be tethered serfs for the benefit of Western corporations. Last year, there were 300,000 illegal industrial actions in China, a huge spate of "factory kidnappings" of managers, and more than 85,000 unauthorized protests.
The Chinese people were showing they did not want to leap from a Maoist gulag to a market-fundamentalists' sweatshop. They demanded a sensible compromise: strong trade and markets to generate wealth, matched by strong democratic trade unions to stop markets totally devouring them. They want an end to grinding poverty, but one that doesn't kill them as they get there.
But they bumped into a huge obstacle. As soon as the draft laws were put out for consulation, groups representing Western corporations with factories in China sent armies of lobbyists to Beijing to cajole and threaten the dictatorship into abandoning these new workers' protections.
The American Chamber of Commerce - representing Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others - listed 42 pages of objections. The laws were "unaffordable" and "dangerous", they declared. The European Chamber of Commerce backed them up......
Having said all that the Chinese health system is now probably the most privatised, for-profit on the planet. The result? Nurses going to work in army hard hats....
Chinese hospital staff face attacks amid high prices and dubious care
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0 ... 04,00.html
Another myth is the inscrutable plundering of Africa myth which is closely followed by the new latin American plunder one.According to the domestic media, several hospitals have already hired police to patrol wards and maintain order.
[....]
China's healthcare system - once almost free - is now one of the most market-oriented in the world. Since market reforms in 1979 the government's share of healthcare costs has declined from 54% to 17%. According to the World Health Organisation China ranks 188 out of 191 nations in terms of the equality of financial access to health.
For hundreds of millions of poor farmers, all but the most rudimentary care by "barefoot doctors" is unaffordable. A peasant saying has it that a pig must be taken to market every time an ambulance siren wails, a year's work is ruined as soon as you sleep in a hospital bed, and if you are struck with a serious disease, 10 years of savings go up in smoke. In 2004 a report said 75% of rural patients who declined recommended hospital treatment did so because of financial reasons.
http://www.walterlippmann.com/chomsky-02-08-2006.html
All of this is happening against the background of very substantial popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available.
Furthermore, there is South-South integration going on, so Brazil, and South Africa and India are establishing relations.
And again, the forces below the surface in pressing all of this are international popular organizations of a kind that never existed before; the ones that meet annually in the world social forums. By now several world social forums have spawned lots of regional ones; there’s one right here in Boston and many other places. These are very powerful mass movements of a kind without any precedent in history: the first real internationals. Everyone’s always talked about internationals on the left but there’s never been one. This is the beginning of one.
These developments are extremely significant. For US planners, they are a nightmare. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine is about 180 years old now, and the US wasn’t powerful enough to implement it until after the 2nd World War, except for the nearby region.
After the 2nd World War it was able to kick out the British and the French and implement it, but now it is collapsing. These countries are also diversifying their international relations including commercial relations. So there’s a lot of export to China, and accepting of investment from China. That’s particularly true of Venezuela, but also the other big exporters like Brazil and Chile. And China is eager to gain access to other resources of Latin America.
Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to. The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone; and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers. But it’s not easy to intimidate it. In fact, you can’t intimidate it at all. So China’s interactions with Latin America are frightening the United States. Latin America is also improving economic interactions with Europe. China and Europe now are each other largest trading partners, or pretty close to it.
- This one's the funniest, not because of the consequences but the mainstream media's representation of it while they just completely ignore the elephant-in-the-room of ongoing, western, apres-WWII decades of exploitation .
One example was a recent BBC Newsnight debate on Africa which included Darfur, where the interviewer (Mark Urban I think it was, I don't think Paxman would've let it slip tbh) allowed someone get away with suggesting that China was in Africa merely for its own interests. And that's where it was left. In a debate where the US and the West was involved! As far as I've read China, in relative terms, is letting African nations choose their own route to development sans golden straitjackets.
And on the very complex issue of Darfur* a pie poster called ministerforkebabs linked to a very interesting article from an African perspective by Mahmood Mamdani and published in the lrb.
*The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html
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