“Whoa” is all you can say. Here’s Senator Obama on China:
Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”
Does he have any earthly clue on just how the infrastructure was developed in China? Just yesterday the NY Times reported on two women in their 70s who are being sent to a “re-education” camp becasue they protested at the Olympics over the government’s confiscation of their homes to make way for Olympic development:
The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China’s authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.
And their vastly superior train system? Here’s the reality:
The heaviest snow in decades is continuing to cause transport chaos throughout China ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. BBC News website readers have described their experiences of travelling across southern China.
GUANGZHOU – HONG KONG
It is estimated that 500,000 people are stranded in the southern city of Guangzhou as they wait for train services to resume. Paul Surtees was among the crowds on Monday.
The railway stations in Guangzhou are a scene of horror, with countless thousands of desperate and freezing people besieging them.
Guangzhou is a place of vast numbers of migrant workers. They saved up for the whole year to afford a third-class ticket to their home province for the holiday and they can’t get anywhere near the station.
As you approach Guangzhou’s main station, people are standing shoulder-to-shoulder trying to get into the station. The plastic marquees put up outside by authorities do little to keep people warm in freezing conditions.
Those people inside the station daren’t leave for fear of losing their chance to travel. But trains aren’t going. So people are literally living there and have been for days. Whole families have camped out there setting out newspapers on the floor and settling down. The huge expanse of the station concourse is a sea of bodies.
There are only a dozen toilets, so people relieve themselves on the station concourse. I saw human faeces. The amount of mess is indescribable.
And maybe Senator Obama missed the story on the May 12 earthquake that hit in Sichuan that killed about 70,000 people, including many students killed in their government-built classrooms:
But grief refuses to be channelled. It spills over. In Sichuan, it turned to anger as parents demanded to know why 6,898 school buildings collapsed during the quake while government buildings remained standing. As the nation continues to mourn, it will begin to remember the deaths it has been forbidden to recall: not only the thousands who were slaughtered in 1989, but the tens of millions who died under Mao Zedong’s rule during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
And here’s more on China’s lead on its infrastructure:
The scavenging underscores the economic desperation still widespread in much of the area affected by China’s May 12 earthquake. It also raises fears that some of the recovered scrap will be used in the construction of new buildings, compromising their strength. A woman the scavengers identified as a buyer wouldn’t say where the scrap steel will be used. But in poorer areas of China, it is a common practice to reuse second-hand steel bars in new buildings, even though the result, construction experts say, is generally inferior to using new materials. If that ends up happening, it would undercut efforts to address the widespread problems with poor construction in rural China, which was highlighted by the quake’s devastating impact.
So, in retrospect, maybe a message of be-like-China is not the best strategy.