If China cares about people's opinions, maybe they should ask before they raze their homes. As usual, public discussion is just a rubber stamp for the decision of the leaders. Shirley and I got a taste of that at the school in Tianjin where we worked last year. Very frustrating, and leading to inefficient and unpopular decisions. Not that Bush would ever do something like this (*coughWACOcough*).
Learning to Be Chinese: "A" is for assimilation at China's strict minority schools, an article from Newsweek states. A few comments on this article. First of all, it's clear that this institution is an antiquated left-over from the days of hard core political indoctrination and supression of dissent. Secondly, Wuer Kaixi, one of the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Movement was of the Uighur ethnicity, and a student at Beijing Normal University. Thirdly, this article is intersting to me in light of a Foreign Affairs magazine article I read a while back which argued that immigrants were quicker to assimilate into American culture than in Europe, which was cause for higher rates of violent incidents and racial conflict in Europe between immigrants and locals. So is China just applying this principal to a higher level, or swinging the pendulum too far in that direction?
On the China weblog, Richard notes a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times that calls for democracy in mainland China before reunification with Taiwan. I'm pretty disappointed with the New York Times; it would been enough to print the person's name and title, and his letter would have been unnecessary:
JUNG-TZUNG YIH
New York, Aug. 14, 2002
The writer is director of the Information Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office.
It's like printing a letter from an Israeli calling for an end to the Palestinian suicide bombers, or a letter from an arab person advocating the creation of Palestine. Is it really news? This is the same reason I filter out the good reviews at Amazon: a sincere self-criticism is worth a thousand words of flattery and self-agrandizement.
From the August 17th entry at The China Hand, a great quote from a Salon.com article The Media Titans Still Don't Get It about the Web, which also describes my feelings towards China:
Similarly, Weinberger views the Web's perennial technical problems and "under construction" imperfections as a healthy antidote to sterile professionalism and a key to the Web's phenomenal fertility: "The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. The Web is broken on purpose ... Remove the controls and we'll have to put up with a lot of broken links and awful information, but in return we'll get a vibrant new world, accessible to everyone and constantly in the throes of self-invention."
Yes!