My other post, titled as Truth about the Tibet unrest, has drawn quite some harsh yet very candid responses from many people around the world. I appreciate those responses very much. One visitor said:

"So when we see China eradicating this unique and valuable culture, it makes us sad and angry. It looks like a mean child pulling the wings off of a butterfly."

I appreciate this comment very much because it's a very honest comment and clearly reflects what's in most west people's mind. The root of the whole thing is of course the human right issue. I replied under the other post but I thought this very issue deserves a separate post. So I copied the original reply and re-post it below with some formatting so that it's easier to read. I titled it as "Whose Human Right is more important in China", which might sound obsurd to you, but I hope it won't sound as obsurd afterwards. 

Some may find two other posts, titled as a difficult problem for a difficult nation and workers condition in China, to provide some additional background from slightly different aspects. 

A Brief Summary

So many people are suffering in China because of poverty, not because of the current communist regime (I stress the current, not the past).

The current communist regime is trying hard to develop economy so that these poor people's life can be improved, their ways are controversial, but it is my view that they are doing is for the greater good because their way benefits more people than it hurts; as opposes to “pure evil” and “mean” assumed by a lot in the west.

People who advocate to “stop communist” not only showed that they do not understand the suffering of the poor people in China, but also when they press for a few, they take away so many of these poor people’s only hope. So their effort hurts more Chinese than they helps.

Whose Human Right is more important in China? 

The larger issue focused on these Buddhists monks is of course the human rights issue. Human rights has been a soring point for China’s rulers and it is my view that it has never been really understood by the west.

To understand the problem, one needs to understand the root of the problem China faces today: Poverty.

China has a huge amount of poor people. This people are not very well educated or had no education at all. They do not have any skill to make a good living, the society did not give them any opportunities throughout their life (most of they went through culture revolution). They are very upset about the government. This population runs at hundred of millions (remember China has 1.3 billion people). What the government can do about them? Not too much. The government is trying to get them food, basic medical services, and basic education for their kids. We are talking about the kind of poverty with not even enough income for food ---- something like a monthly income of $50 for a whole family.

When a whole region is poor and uneducated, the government officials in that region won’t be any better, except that they are not as poor because of corruption. Poor and corruption goes hand by hand. What the central government can do? Not much. On the surface they keep a tight grip on everything but in reality, there aren’t enough capable and good officials that are willing to serve at local level of poor area (much of their ability go wasted even if they do); bad/ incompetent official takes up the post instead, some purely with the intend of being bad --- they still following the central government on the surface because if they don’t, they lose their post. Capable people leave and seek a better life in big cities.

Many of the most horrible abuses occur towards these people. A few examples:

1. The central government says: One family one child. The rich cities implements a complicate plan consists of educational programs, tax preference, economy incensitives/fines and etc. When it goes to the poor region, these officials send a bunch of mobs to push down your house if you accidentally dropped a second child. These are barbaric people’s barbaric way of dealing with people. What the central government can do? Not much. They can send another local official, but it aren’t going to be much better;
   
2. The central government says: Use FDI. The rich cities again implement a comprehensive and relatively balanced plan. What these officials in the poor region do? They grab the farmers’ land and work with some crooked business man and split the profit, then get a government loan and disappear; What the central government can do? They can punish the official and put another one. But with so many of those, many simply go unnoticed. For some of them, even if they are not bad, they do not have the ability to understand how things should work;

The list can go on and on. The point: nothing works with poor, and these people, hundred of millions are suffering horribly because of that. I grew up among them.

The central government has been trying hard to improve these people’s life. How do they do it? Infrastructure, Investment, Education, Tax Benefits and so on. For example, the government built a major railroad across where I grew up, along with the railroad it brings in jobs. Yet everything comes down to money and people. So the government is able to take money from the rich region and redistribute it to the poor region, they are able to shift capable officials who knows how to develop economy to oversee development in the poor region (these are high level officials, not local officials obviously). In China you will see a lot of governors who served as governors of one province and then serve as governors of another province.

How do they do that?

1. Top down strong authoritarian power. When nothing works from bottom up, they plan on the national level, then put focus on a few province, then send strong capable officials there along with huge monetary/resource invest, those officials will usually then focus on the province capital first, and gradually cascading down. This involves a lot of strong administrative muscling and democracy works against this. For example, with democracy they won’t be able to appointment an experienced governor to a poor province;
   
   
2. Media control. When people are already poor and angry and on the verge and you tell them that somebody else is rioting, they immediately join because they felt for the same cause, this can spread quickly to be all over the country when there are so many unhappy people. This happened during the recent riot in Tibet. When asked why he would do it, one of the rioter said: all my friends were doing it, so I joined. Why? Because they are on the verge of their lives. Hundred of millions of Chinese are in the same situation. This is not a religious issue.
   
   
3. Suppress any voice that would create “chaos” situation. Falungong started as a religion and have had millions followers for several years without getting into any trouble with the government. Things quickly turned ugly when they staged a huge protest around ZhongNanHai (central government official building complex) to appeal the government against alleged beatings and arrest in another city. The beating and arrest could be wrong, but there isn’t much the central government could do – or they can take care of one case, but numerous others will continue to pop up;

And of course, nothing happens overnight, so all these policies are suppose to be long-term policies.

Obviously all of these are very controversial. They are designed to maintain the asbolute authority of the central government. The ultimate reason that the Chinese leaders need absolute authorities is because they need such strong authoritarian power to carry out their economical development plan, and anything goes against the government would undermine its ability to do that. President Hu’s own father was suppressed to near death during the culture revolution and died at age of 50 in the late 70s because his life just “withered after years of cruel physical abuse”. Premier Wen has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the job of being China’s premier because it’s overwhelming physically and mentally demanding. China's most top leaders are prompted over the years due to their ability to oversee large scale of development. Most of these people are rather decent people.

Rampant corruption, excessive power abuse, deteriorating environment and many other issues arises as this kind of economy development with "Chinese characteristic" progresses. These are the cost, and it is cruel (of course, these problems need to be addressed as well). But what’s the alternative? The alternative is hundred of millions continue to struggle just to live. Hundred of Millions lives on the poverty line, many of them have no running waters, no power, no education, no medical care, and even no food. When these hundred of millions people’s life are improving everyday, when tens of millions new youngs are getting richer and richer and more and more educated and much brighter future, that’s where these policies are being justified. Comparing with the life of hundreds, maybe many thousands of outspoken reporters and activists and all the lives their respective cause represents, this is still a much larger gain, especially when there is no real quick effective solution to the underlying problem. The math is very simple, the reality is very cruel. The choice is becoming tougher and tougher though because all these pressure from the west. Many in the west has never seen the life of those poor people. They do not understand while they press for a few, they take away so many others’ only hope.

Obviously human rights and other issues, such as environmental issues still are very important issues that need to be addressed, especially as economy progresses, more and more people's life are gradually getting better, these issues need to go along with it. That's where the west can help. Many have helped pushing the cause and things have been improving over the years. But pushing it overboard would be disastrous.

If you still think the Chinese government is a mean child try to pull the wings off a butterfly, I suggest you go take a look of those poor regions, and see how their lives are comparing to yours, and see how much have improved during recent years on the larger scale. 

How it happened

It happened due to these steps:

Step 1: The Chinese government wanted to develop the Tibet region because they are just too poor, even by comparing with the rest of China, which overall is a very poor country. I believe one of the reasons they do this is because they believe large wealth gap leads to social instability;

Step 2: The Chinese government started to invest heavily in the region on infrastructures and encourage private business owners to settle there;

Step 3: Many Chinese business people and Hui people (Muslims in the north-west China) went there and started to do business there. They are richer and generally more skillful about doing business;

Step 4: Many local Tibetans felt being marginized and being economically taken advantage of;

Step 5: They couldn't stand it and eventually they decided to get even by burring down all the Chinese and Hui shops;

But they are called freedom fighters by the west.

Why The Chinese government expels west journalist

This is a very controversial move by the Chinese government and I believe even within the government there are great argument about whether to do it or not. But here is the reason why they went ahead to do it.

The West is largely sympathy with the Tibetans, which is no secret even before the unrest. When such an event broke out, the Chinese government needs to get the situation under control with as less brutality as possible. With extensive west coverage, it will be just like blowing wind into a wild fire and it will inevitably encourage more violent protest, which is not going to be good or pretty to anybody. So basically the Chinese government is trying to smother fire here. Regardless of the cause, a wild fire is not going to bring any benefit to anybody.

Why China staged a strong response despite of negative view all over the world

As covered in another post, China has a LOOOT of unhappy people --- a small fraction of them due to the political reasons, the majority of them due to economical reasons. Running China is like a house wife running a family with 10 kids. If one cries and you give him a candy, the other 9 will immediately start to cause trouble. That's one of the most important reason that every time anything happens, the government always tries to put the "trouble maker" down heavy handed first.

The other reason being, a lot of local officials try to cover their butt when something bad happens. This also happen a lot and obviously that is something very bad. But when a decision is made from the high level, this is usually not the case. Unfortunately the two cases are always perceived being mixed together, even among a lot of Chinese.

China is at a stage that can not afford a lot of things that are essential by the west’s standard. It's just like you can not enforce a drinking water purifying standard when many of them don't even have running water. A lot of things the west is used to are not workable over there.

The fallout of the west one sided coverage

Obviously this is something too early to judge, giving the fact the tension is still going on. But the riot itself alone definitely seriously damaged China's image on the international stage, not to mention the response after that.

The other issue, which is even a greater concern is, the west seriously damaged their own image in front of many Chinese this time. It is widely assumed that everything in China is always "people against government", this is simply not true. Especially this time when the west largely turns a blind eye on the crime of the rioters. Many Chinese simply felt finally they see how blind and bias the west can get.

The problem of that is it will only make everything else the west advocate more difficult for Chinese people to listen, which is needless to say is a bad thing. While whether China does what the west demands is a totally different issue, whether they actively listen to what the west says is extremely important because the west still get a lot of things right or partialy right.

The worst scenario is, when 1 billion Chinese people start to say "screw you up, west idiots" and the west say "screw you up, evil China". That's about when you would expect a WWIII.

Many low quality product issues are traced back to China in recent years, most notoriously last years toy and pet food scare in the United States. China as a country has been taking blame from all over the world for being “unethical”, “cheating” and etc.

Those people who crank out such products are hated within China by ordinary Chinese as much as by Americans. Those sells poison food/drugs not only export, but also sell domestically. In fact they sell in domestic market much more because for many Chinese, being poor means they have no choice but buying low cheap quality stuff, which gives them much larger exposure to the dangerous goods. Over the years there have been using some sort of powders (god knows made from what) that has no nutrition at all to fake baby formula and cause baby death from lack of nutrition; Using low quality industry grade alcohol to produce alcohol drinks and cause deaths; numerous of such cases have been exposed by media (yes, the state run media) and many of the “unlucky” ones are caught and punished.

The problem is that it occurs on such a large scale and it has been very difficult for the Chinese authorities to crack them down. It’s like the drug business in certain countries. You push one down, the other pops up. Many ordinary Chinese holds the views that, if you don’t try to play tricks, you are not going to get anything because you are always going to be out maneuvered by those who does. That rooted back to several factors, one being their low business standard/skills; second being a large poor and uneducated customer base; third being the government’s inability to enforce the rules. And it’s unlikely that any of those can be changed over night.

I believe the FDA currently is doing something quite right --- they are helping the Chinese government to track down those few who did it. Given the scale of the problem and the poor economy foundation of China, it’s unlikely that anything will improve dramatically, but every little help counts and if carried out consistently over a long period of time, it can help a lot. I believe the effort is appreciated by Chinese authorities --- forget about premier Wen’s claim that “99% of Chinese product is safe”, that’s just a political show. If he’d really believe that, he wouldn’t be putting a vice premier in charge of product safety.

Hope things will get better gradually.

A riot broke out. Law enforcements put it down and try to hunt those who broke the law. Should it not been Tibet, it wouldn’t have gotten this much attention. 

In fact such riots occur rather often in China, almost all of them occurred because economy issues, not religious issues. Corrupted government official have caused riots because they abused their power; Real estate developers have caused riots because they illegally takes the farmer’s land (thus take away their living) and got away from it; Large number of stated owned factory worker layoff have also caused numerous riots simply because those laid off workers can no longer make a living.

Almost in all cases, the government tries to restore the social order first. While I have a rather different view about how many people are really suppressed in China, I know there are A LOT OF unhappy people in China. There are a lot of reasons for them to be unhappy, but the root of the problem is that they view the society as being unfair. Things like they know somebody who broke the law got rich; like their local government officials are so crooked but there isn’t much they can do about it; etc. And they always manifest on the economy front --- those who got the money won’t say a thing because they would be betting too much to lose. Those who got left out eventually reached the breaking point and decided to get even by force.

There is no single silver bullet to solve this problem. When the economy develops, some people will be left out. When the whole society going through such a trenching transformation like China does now, a lot of people will be left out. There are two primary reasons why they are left out. One is that they were not afforded any opportunities; second is that they lack the skills to survives through hash times. This is the case for many laid off state factory workers: for decades under Mao’s years they worked on so out-dated factories that they did not learn anything. When the factory finally has to shut down, they do not have any useful skills to secure them a new job. They felt betrayed and abandoned. They would criticize the government for shutting down the factory, but obviously the history is not rolling back. Many of them eventually riot.

Whenever it occurs, it is inevitable that it will be linked to democracy, human rights, etc. Because these people are not happy with the government and they wanted to get their “shares” like so many others had. So they start by criticizing and attacking the government or even going extreme, and many of them end up being harshly handled down by the government.

The general belief among Chinese leaders, and many ordinary Chinese, is such criticism/attack has no values because there is no real/quick solution for the underlying economy problem. In the case state owned factory shutting down because it no longer makes any economy sense to keep it running, there is no way for the government to turn it back running not only because it would be a bad economic decision, but also simple because it’s not financially feasiable. At many occasions, the only thing the government can do is to rob something off John and give it to Joe. Some times they do that, sometimes they don’t. It also depends on whether the local government has the skill to do it right. Some times John was OK but Joe was crying, so you rob off something off John to give it Joe and ends up both crying.

On the contrary, the Chinese government has been putting great effort in developing the economy, in the hope that better economy provides better employment opportunities thus make more people happy. It also can provide better revenue for the government so that the government can improvements a lot of fundamentals social infrastructures/programs. It has worked to certain degree but as in the case of Tibet, it some times back fires when wealth are not distributed as many people thought it should be distributed, in another word, the existence of great wealth imbalance.

What the Chinese government has been doing to Tibet in recently years was exactly intended to avoid such situations. During the 90s the east cost started to develop and the Chinese leader foreseen the country is going to run into big problems if only the east develops and the gaps gets bigger and bigger between the east and the west. People in the west still need to be feed and if they get poorer and poorer while seeing the east get richer and richer, they would get extremely unhappy and that would be very difficult to handle. So at the end of 90s the government started to systematically planning shifting resources into the west so that the west can develop. Thus they started to build railroad, highways, and other infrastructures into the west and also use various monetary/administrative tools to attract people to invest in the west. Tibet has been one that benefits most from such plans, with many Han Chinese moved their along with their businesses.

It is unfortunately to see such effort has been misperceived as trying wipe out the culture in Tibet. That is very much ironic because “culture” is probably one of the least concerns in Chinese leader’s mind (as long as it does not cause problems). Today’s Chinese leader are very pragmatic (read “money matters first”) and it would be one of the stupidest thing for them to suppress a culture unless it started to give them problem (which obviously is the case for many other incident, such as FaLunGong). But when that occurs, it’s often the culture itself being hijacked by other movements. The culture itself, as long as it’s not perceived as unhealthy by general public (For example, any explicit sex related stuff), they are generally tolerated without any interfering from the government.

In the case of Tibet, there is no doubt that there been long history and religious reasons for many Tibetans wanted to be independent. At the same time, there are also huge economy reasons for many Tibetans wanted it to be a part of China so that it can continue to reap the great benefits of the center government’s economy development plan. So there are deep conflicts there. More over, the fact that the government try brings in more Han’s business in (and they are richer) has a negative impact on many Tibetans because it widened the wealth gap.

So it all comes down to there is a problem and what’s the best way to solve it. And Chinese leader rarely acts on “ideology principles” (they embraced capitalism faster than everybody would have expected! --- there is one exception though: sovereignty). They try to find out the best and most affordable way to solve the problem. So far to put the violence down first has been effective --- until it happens in Tibet and the government got framed into all these political dictatorship stuff.
 
Obviously just putting the violence down can not be the only action. There are other things can and need to be done to avoid/improve the situations. Better legal system, better employement/education opportunites, better social security system and more transparent government are all important elements that the government has been working to improve. But just like a seed won’t become a tree overnight, there is still a long way to go.

Workers condition in China is not good.

Close to slavery working conditions

About 8 years ago I was in Shenzhen, one of the special economy zones and fastest growing cities at the south border nearing HongKong. I had a friend visiting, who had a cousin working as a factory worker nearby. She happened to work on night shift during that time. I wanted to treat them both a nice dinner so we went to the factory to look for her (no, they did not have phones).  We found her in the factory dormitory, where every 6 workers share a room (maybe about 200 sq. ft.?) with three double beds. She said she could not come because she needed the time to sleep, otherwise if she perform poorly at night during work, she would be punished.

Isn’t that slavery? Pretty close. What’s the government is doing? Why is it even allowed? Many people in the west ask. And they quickly concluded that the government is doing a terrible job on protecting the worker rights.

But the workers wanted it

The generally view among the west that the Chinese government is doing a terrible job on protecting worker rights is wrong. In order to understand the situation, first we ought to understand why it exists. It exists because both the worker and the factory owner want it.

Most workers (usually called “migrant worker” because they come from other part of country) were farmers. Because China has missed the industrial revolution, it has a huge number of stone-age farmers, roughly about half of the labor force are farmers that generates only about 10% of the GDP. They live in the rural area where there is no running water, no shops around, and many of them have no electricity during most time of the year. A typical farmer family cultivates a few acres of lands with donkey/cattle and gets some thing like a thousand ponds of rice, some cotton, a few bags of beans every year. That can be anywhere from a thousand to several thousands Yuan (1 USD = about 7 Yuan) if they sell them --- that’s their whole income. With that income they usually can get food on the table, but often can not afford anything else, even their children’s education.

On the contrary, by being a factory worker, they usually can make about 1000 yuan (about 150 USD) a month. A thousand yuan a month one person oppose to a few thousand yuan at most for a year for the whole family! That’s a huge difference. That’s way better than what they had in the rural villages. What’s more, they now live in the cities, even still live in dormitories. They will be able to get a glimpse of the city and maybe sometimes get some rare free time to go shopping. And they will even have some spare money saved for the future.

Most of the original factory owners are foreigners or people from outside of the mainland China. Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong kong people. They came for the cheap labor. They employee a lot of “migrant workers” and obviously profited the most from this situation, but they at least give the workers something better than what they were getting without them.

What the government has been doing

Obviously there are tons of problems with this sweatshop modal. First of all, it’s not sustainable. While some factory owners are decent people, a lot of them are not. Very often, the workers are being terribly mistreated by their greedy boss.

The government was the one who initially set up tax incentives to attract them. These are almost always resource/labor intensive shops but they have been able to generate quite some tax revenue for the government, as oppose to many state owned enterprises that keep losing money. The government then channels the money into many other projects, such as infrastructures, social security, medical and educations, all of which have been dramatically improved during recent years due to increased government revenue.

As the economy grows, there are signs of labor shortages and workers are in a better position to negotiate compensation than before. Other section of the economy, notable the service section has grown significantly and that gives the government quite some revenue and leverage to gradually transfer such resource/labor intensive business into more sustainable one and improve workers condition along the way. A new much tougher labor law came into effect this year, which causes many foreign factory owners to move out or threat to move out, but that might be the intended purpose of the new law.

Overall the government has to strike a very delicate balance between the economy fundamental and its policies, as it has been doing. They can not go overboard and can not lag behind. So hopefully as economy keeps growing, worker condition in China will get better and better.

There are a lot of pressures in the west about how to force China to behave. What is generally overlooked is why they do what they are doing.

The ultimate reason for their behavior is their economy situations. This might sounds taboo to most western people but if you looked at the recent 30 years of development, you would conclude that the Chinese government is doing everything they can to develop the economy. To develop the economy for what? Not to threat any other country, not to rant about anybody else, they develop the economy for the good of their own people.

There is a high cost associated with high growth, environment, worker condition, extreme wealth imbalance, and of course, human rights, just to name a few. One of the most crucial points is, what most westerns think important is not important for ordinary Chinese. For ordinary Chinese, economy is the absolute #1 issue. Environmental issue is a big deal for people who make $500/day, but it’s definitely not an issue for somebody who makes less than $10 a day.  For those people if you ask them what if the air is twice dirty but they can make twice much, they would say who cares about the environment. Simply put, they are not at a stage where they can afford many of what westerns thinks are fundamentals, and it would be unwise and disastrous if the government forces what the country can not afford upon it. What the government can do is to carefully guide the public, which is what they are doing diligently.

Human right is another similar issue. Beijing is able to build a new terminal in 4 years, where as London Heathrow ’s new terminal 3 took a decade. Their efficiency lies in their authoritarian power, they are able to move a lot faster because of that. And that fast move benefits more people than it hurts. When a few are crying because they are not fairly treated, a few thousands or even more are excited about what they have just got. There is simply no way to make everyone happy and still maintain that speed. When a lot of people arguing human right issue for those very few, they do not realize their behavior are hurting a lot more people that actually benefit from such an “iron-fist” government. And that is the ultimate reason why the Chinese government usually acted strong against such criticism.

I would love to see the word to take a more lenient position towards China. It’s a country that ha suffered so much in the past and today is still suffering from all kind of problems. They now have much better leaders and have made great progress. But all the western hostilities are just making the matter more complicated than it should and probably end up making life harder for many ordinary Chinese.

Even with decades of stunning economy growth, China still has a per capital GDP of about $2K/year, compare with $30K to $40K in the developed country. That’s a huge difference, a difference enough to have their priorities totally different than yours. Just imagine to cut your income to 1/20 of your current level and then see if you care so much about what you care now. The Chinese government itself has been trying hard to response all the pressure from outside, but it simply can not act completely off its base, after all, they are the one that faces the reality in China.

I grew up in China and now live in United States. During the years in U.S. there have been many high profile events associated to China, SARS outbreak, food/tool poison scare and the recent Tibet riot, just to name a few. The media opinions in the west towards China are over all negative. Having spent most of my life in China, I feel many of those opinions are biased.

My judgments are based on the assumption of that I know much more about China than most westerns since I grew up there. I see a lot of difficulties that China faces both during the past and at current time and I understand the Chinese culture and philosophy much better. I see a lot of reasoning for China to act the way it acts, many of which appears to be either evil or ridiculous to westerns are simply not so once you put yourself into the same shoes as Chinese leaders. Just like the saying goes, there are two sides to every story. The differences between the two sides are often huge. On a larger scale, such differences cause unnecessary tension between China and the rest of the word and adversely affect all the involved parties.

Thus I setup this website to express my opinions, largely based on my understanding of the other side of the story, in the hope of helping soothing some of such differences. Obviously my judgments could be wrong sometimes, not to mention that China is huge country, many part of China I have never been. So don’t try to tear me apart if you disagree with me on a certain issue, or don’t agree with me on anything at all. I am posting my opinion as mine and hope some one would agree with me. Whether you agree with me or not, you are welcome to post your comments.

I intend to keep this site as a positive place and I hope it can benefit all the interested parties. Flaming post, personal attacks are absolutely not welcomed.