In the same spirit, I found a piece which reminded me of several reasons why jumping on the Beijing 2008 bandwagon might not be so hot.
Fifteen reasons, to be exact.
In a consumer culture, money speaks louder than words. I recommend boycotting tyrants.
2 comments:
You know why the Chinese are hosting the Olympics, right? It is to make themselves appear as if their political structure is becoming dramatically less authoritarian and more democratic.
Why is that important? The five countries on the United Nations Security Council are the most powerful on Earth, although typically not for the exact same reasons. The "Big Five" are Great Britain, France, America, Russia, and China. The first three share a deeply intertwined history which culminated in the American experiment of the world's first true constitutional republic, or representative democracy, if you prefer. France & England much later changed into fully functioning parliamentary democracies, although England had been in the making of that ever since the Romans left the British Isles.
The other two left are Russia and China, known for their longer lasting authoritarian structure of government. Russia has made significant improvement since the end of Cold War, and now is considered what is termed a semi-presidential democracy; don't be fooled they have a long way to go, even in terms of their unparalled nuclear arsenal, numerically unmatched by any other power on the plant.
What's my point? China's vastly behind in the democractization race. Sure the Communists had to scrap most of their ideology with regard to the economy since they needed the Hong Kong industrialists desperately, hence why now China's GDP growth rate is by far the highest globally (India's 2nd place & that rate is less than half of China's). On the non-economic political end of it, China is still as corrupt and authoritarian as has been in recent history. Hosting the Olympics is another attempt to demonstrate, even artificially, that China is making "serious headway" into becoming a "modern" country.
sheer ignorance of China.
Post a Comment