The Worst Defense is Intelligence; The Best Defense is Belligerence
By Rhodo Zeb. Filed in China |Tags: china.politics, china.realities
Poignant:
You can think, but you can’t speak. No one else knows your thoughts, so your suffering and hopelessness are yours alone and there’s no way to compose a threat. Of course, it’s best if you don’t have the ability to think for yourself; that will be safer and more harmonious.
No civil rights whatsoever. Think about that. At any time, any citizen of this country can be hustled away by the authorities, and it might be days or weeks before they bother to tell your loved ones. In serious cases, your own family, ignorant or innocent of your crimes, may also be seized and held, without charges, for weeks or even months.
Bloggers like the one quoted above are harmonized on a daily basis, censored, reviewed, every single day. Is it too much to expect that they feel as if they are watched?
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
What does game theory suggest will happen, over time, in this type of situation? Remember how we used to talk about brain drain? Will that meme come back, do you think?
We should not ignore the great strides that China has made in these two decades, and we should not forget that there are still millions of people who have not yet had the opportunity to enjoy (much) in the fruits of progress.
But at the same time, we cannot forget the reality of where we are and where we will be if China doesn’t continue to evolve from this present state. Everyone knows that the government permits (somewhat passively) companies like Sanlu to poison the populace, and that many, many government officials act with impunity towards common folk.
That is why these particular issues, along with a few other extremely difficult problems, threaten to take on a life of their own whenever a flashpoint is created. We saw that just this past week in Nanjing. FOARP is right, there was almost certainly no political motive to the incident, but it is still a fine example of a very serious problem: Some government agencies and/or individuals are completely out of control, such as in the Deng Yujiao case, and no one is able to supervise or hold these people responsible, until they do something so outrageous that it becomes big news.
I am expecting a quiet next few days, myself, but still, it should be said: This situation cannot stand long. It will naturally break down if left like this.
Wednesday, May 27th 2009 at 20:15 |
WTF? RZ has something, anything, bad to say about the late, great planet China and it actually has some teeth? What’sup with that? A moment of clarity or just melancholy over a certain NBA team’s post season performance?
Wednesday, May 27th 2009 at 20:27 |
Lakers are fine, they got the Nuggets right where they want them.