Despite some hiccups caused by the sorry state of the world economy, China is still The Future for many global analysts. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has even suggested that Americans have a lot to learn politically from the economic successes of Chinese authoritarianism. That China is the rising world power seems taken for granted in many elite foreign policy circles.
I’m not buying. I didn’t buy “Japan is Number One” when that was the mantra two decades ago, because Japan had severe demographic problems—as in, very few children; its lack of the most basic form of people power in the most elementary form, I thought, would soon become evident in economic weakness (as it has). China also has serious demographic problems. Thanks to a brutally enforced one-child policy, China will likely get old before it gets rich. And between now and then, there will be some 20 million or so Chinese men who have no possibility of marriage, their future wives having been aborted decades ago because of the one-child policy. Twenty million or more young men with no prospects of marriage is not, to put it gently, a formula for social stability.
The brutalities of the Chinese regime have also had a toxic effect on China’s public moral culture, as was demonstrated last year in a widely-viewed YouTube video: a truck driver in a Chinese city ran over a small child who was crawling across the street, stopped—and then ran over the child again, as if the toddler were so much road-kill.
Then there is government-run Chinese medicine, which has become a lethal enterprise.
Uighurs, a Turkish minority living in northwest China, are considered a threat to Chinese ethnic hegemony in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Second Uighur children in this lightly populated area are not infrequently euthanized by Han Chinese doctors. Uighur political prisoners are treated by the Chinese government as livestock: not for slave labor, but for organ harvesting. In what became known as the Xinjiang Procedure, high-ranking Chinese government officials needing organ transplants would check into a hospital near a prison where Uighurs were held. Uighur political prisoners were then blood-typed. Blood-typing was followed by tissue-matching. Then, as investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann writes, “the political prisoner would get a bullet to the right side of the chest. (A Chinese doctor) would visit the execution site to match up blood samples. The officials would get their organs, rise from their beds, and check out.”
The Uighurs were not the only victims of this grotesque “procedure.” Gutmann estimates that some 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners had their organs “harvested, their hearts still beating, before the 2008 Olympics.” An indeterminate number of Chinese House Christians and Tibetans almost certainly suffered the same fate. Something far worse than garden-variety human rights abuse is going on here, Gutmann concludes: “China, a state rapidly approaching superpower status … has, for over a decade, perverted the most trusted area of human expertise (i.e., medicine) into performing what is, in the legal parlance of human rights, targeted elimination of a specific group” (Ethan Gutmann, “The Xinjiang Procedure,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 5, 2011).
What kind of regime does these sorts of things? A regime that, to put it gently, lives in a very different moral universe—a moral universe the character and consequences of which Thomas Friedman and other Sinophiles might carefully consider. As, indeed, might the Vatican, where one still finds officials eager to establish diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Beijing. Yet surely the Church’s role in any possibly humane Chinese future will be built around its steadfastness under persecution and its forthright defense of the human rights of all (including Uighurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong devotees), not by reaching agreements with those who may well have harvested organs from Catholic dissidents, pioneering a new form of martyrdom.
Can a regime, no matter how powerful, become the world’s lodestar if it is morally corrupted by an utter disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life? The 20th century gave one, negative, answer to that question; I suspect, and certainly hope, that the 21st century’s answer will be the same.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
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Comments:
I also remember the time, when I was a kid, that "made in Japan" was equated with cheap junk. Then Japan developed and flourished. "Made in Japan" became the symbol of quality and reliability--and for good reason. A book came out in the eighties titled "The Coming War with Japan." We were going to have another showdown with them because of their exploding economic dominance. And then they went senescent and fell from grace, as you have pointed out, and everyone forgot about the "threat."
Fifteen years ago, I was complaining that alarm clocks made in China wouldn't last through the night before they malfunctioned. Today I have much less problem with Chinese made technology as the average quality has improved. I have this weird deja-vu feeling about it all. Will their fall from grace also come soon, just as it came to Japan? Time will tell.
There has been one ( nonChurch approved , not condemned either ) apparition , in Conyers , Ga , where the bl.Mother is said to have appeard under the title of 'Our Loving Mother .'
The ( now deceased ) visionary of those apparitions is said to have given a vision of Chinese soldiers on American soil !
Would one very effective means, to curtail the dragon , be the declaration of the Fifth Dogma , of inviting the bl.Mother , as Mother of all humanity , thus giving her, her rightful power and authority over all her children against the enemy - She who is the enemy of our enemy , as foretold in Genesis !
'Russia would spread her errors ' was the prediction at Fatima and if Chinese comunism and its fall outs can also be seen as an effect of this error from Russia , would it not be fanatstic , if the Russian Orthodox also could join , in the declaration of the Dogma and thus a major step in unity , which then could bring forth its fruit of a world that could be saved from the vast ill effects of rejecting trusting love for a good God and Father !
Whatever one thinks ideologically of price controls, do research on the countless interventions of the Chinese government to keep medicines affordable for most Chinese who are poor:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/257100-china-orders-more-price-cuts-for-drugs
Our last big chance to openly convert China was the 19th century which included the Catholic representative, France, in the second opium war, forcing open Chinese territory to both missionaries and opium dealing coming from the British. France also sacked China's summer palace of the emperor along with Japan et al during the boxer affair. The US has never had the white house sacked by foreigners and then asked why the US didn't convert to the sacking foreigners' religion.
Weigel needs much balance in this area but a good part of his audience perhaps wants imbalance and black and white hats. New York City has China's abortion rate.
Recently I read a book of true stories about baby girl childbirth in China where in some parts of China to this day the newborn baby girl is thrown into the cistern immediately upon birth. My adopted girl from China, one of the lucky who were merely abandoned at birth, is twelve now, and I still can't conceive of a time in the near future where she will be ready to read this book let alone know about human organ farming of those considered to be lesser humans.
Then all the more reason for you to spot problems in the demonization of all China because if your daughter eventually sees that you are demonizing her ethnicity as a whole based on slants in your sources, you will have a very mad daughter on your hands...especially if it is done with the religious cover shown in the Chesterton quote above ( how easily Chesterton forgot his country's drug dealing to China).
You are believing the article's numbers involved perhaps but a Canadian study done in 2007 by men who are against China on this, states their conclusion on numbers involved as being many but not known exactly with the exactitude which Weigel's source says she has. Secondly, you'll notice the study's conclusion states it is unknown and can't be known if the victims were under a death sentence as they were killed in this process. China has about 72 reasons for capital punishment ( the Bible has only one reason (murder) for gentile governments to execute in Gen.9:6). Here is the link:
http://organharvestinvestigation.net/
Giving China trade and technology and such was supposed to usher in freedom (somehow?) Wishful thinking...that made a few traitorous traders rich. Instead it has only emboldened the rulers. It is not working, at all.
Millions of surplus males, that is called an army. And here we are in the US buying cheap toys made in China for our kids, so that China will have the money to buy the bullets to kill them with. Boy, why didn't anyone thing of lavishing trade and technology and raw materials on Japan in the 1930's? Wonder how that would have turned out.
And watch with amusement as all the Chinese apologists come out of the wood work to fill this blog with libels against America. Claiming that some how cutting out organs of living innocents is better than having a high crime rate in Detroit, etc. Working overtime at the People's Dept of Internet Security and Propaganda tonight, are we?
I am glad the comments challenge the reader to not confuse the crimes of the Chinese government with the inherent goodness of the Chinese people. We are all subject to the cultural forces of our homelands, and it is hard to resist evil for all the westerners not subject to coercion and threats.
As Catholics, we should keep our brothers in our prayers and hearts as we help spread the truth about the sacredness of all human life.
1. The Yuan does not float against other currencies. Its value is set by the government and a government accounting system that is, to say the least, opaque. The Chinese will need something like the GAO before they can move ahead on the world stage.
2. For every 8 acres of arable land, the Chinese are able to cultivate two. Securing supplies of fresh water against pollution is critical for China but as yet, does not seem to be part of the government agenda.
3. Quality control/ accurate accounting problems are endemic in Chinese business. We learn only of the most egregious examples (melamine in baby formula comes to mind) but these kinds of issues surface in every sector of the Chinese economy.
Governments are immoral, just in different ways, China's real obstacles to progress are economic ones.
Although the one-child policy, enforced by abortion, "euthanasia", and forced sterilizations is immoral, its result -- an inverted age pyramid -- is an economic problem, not itself a moral problem.
Sometimes moral issues have to be addressed even if the goal is merely to solve an economic problem.
Discussions about Christianity are much easier to have in China than here.
Some of us wonder what kind of transformation might occur in China, politically as well as culturally and spiritually. There has already been an economic transformation that is more than evident. Just as the U.S. replaced Britain, it just might be that China will replace the U.S. as the #1 economy and superpower. God reigns supreme even if the U.S. does not.