Just Another Rant

My apologies for the lack of posts recently, I have been in the middle of moving the Garment File corporate headquarters to a more secure and lavishly posh location. I've also been a little uninspired as to what topic to cover. In lieu of something creative and exciting, I decided to cover a topic that nearly everyone has been covering recently.

We have all seen the pro-Tibet, anti-China protests as of late. While a lot of people, myself included, do not know enough about the Tibet/China conflict to take a definitive side, I would like to offer alternate reasons that we should condemn the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

I recently got done reading a book called "China Shakes the World" by James Kynge. It details China's rise to power as a manufacturing giant in the world. It also details the perilous future that China faces as a country and as a player on the global stage. While a lot of what he said was common sense, he shed some light on some things that I didn't realize. To summarize, China consumes natural resources and pollutes at a greater rate than any other country in the world, while its laws allow even more subsidized pollution by ignoring international laws regarding imports of things like stolen scrap metal and illegally-harvested lumber.

While the magnitude of disregard that China has for the international community is alarming and upsetting, China's blatant disregard for basic human rights is even more appalling.

While it is true that China is still officially a communist state, China has migrated more and more towards capitalism every day. This move towards capitalism is what has allowed China's quick rise to power in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. While China still calls itself a "People's Republic," the days of true communism in China are long gone. Instead of government controlled agriculture and manufacturing, China's government has allowed more and more private enterprise. While this may seem like a move toward a progressive nation headed for democracy, it is instead just another symptom of a communist-controlled state.

When Deng Xiaoping started his financial reforms that allowed Chinese people to actually turn profits on surplus agriculture, it seemed to be the first step towards a completely free-trade based society. The problem was (and is) that nearly every aspect of private enterprise is still controlled by the Communist Party. Sure, you can get a small business loan, but the loan will be from a State-run bank. Sure, you can exist as an entrepreneur in a province, but that person who is in charge of your province answers directly to a hierarchy of Communist Party leaders.

As a result of expanded capitalistic opportunities, the government in China now has more control than ever. These powers, as a necessity of complete control, have evolved past just a national control of economics and politics, but have graduated into the absolute trouncing of almost all basic human rights.

Even some of the economic policies hurt the common man in China. As the government constantly manipulates the currency to keep it artificially undervalued, it keeps wages so low that a majority of the common people live in poverty. The government does this by subsidizing power and water costs to keep the perceived value of the Renminbi (China's currency) low. It works like this. If your power bill is $100 a month, making $400 a month seems pretty outrageous. If you had to pay those rates, you would demand higher wages. You would realize that you were not making nearly enough. What China's government does is eat a portion of the costs of the power bill, so that the customer only sees a $20 bill, making that $400 seem that much more of a paycheck. This allows China to stay on top of production by keeping wages lower than almost anywhere in the world.


This might seem like a pretty strong example of China's willingness to step on its people's rights, but it's merely the beginning. Since China entered the World Trade Organization it has been continually ranked in the top ten offenders of human rights worldwide.

While the Lou Dobbs's of the world will tell you that we should boycott China and Chinese products because of their subversive business practices that are "stealing American jobs," I would argue that the need to boycott the Olympics should be based solely on China's atrocious record of human rights violations.


Currently, China and its government:

• Rank 7th in executions per capita worldwide
• Ban words like "democracy" from online chat rooms
• Sentenced a man to 3.5 years in prison for writing essays about human rights
• Run almost all news outlets
• Filter all internet content that refers to human rights or anti-China rhetoric
• Limits membership of high-ranking offices to atheists
• Regularly turns a blind eye to forced abortions because of its benefit to the "One-Child Policy"
• "Misplaces" international mail that may not be pro-China
  
• Have ignored restrictions put on trade with genocidal Sudanese
  

Since the Olympics are meant to be a sign of friendship between the nations of the world, our support and participation in the Olympics signify our "friendship" with China. It seems to me that no country would support Hitler-run Germany's hosting of the Olympics. When the host city of the Olympics is based in a country that is, without any question, one of the worst offenders of human rights in the history of the world, it should be up to civilized countries like the U.S. to take a stand. It should be up to us to to tell the rest of the world that we don't support countries that don't embody the same freedoms that most of the world agrees should be universal. While I'm not advocating our intervention in foreign countries, I am advocating at least making an effort to not associate ourselves with them.

It is even more ironic that the theme of the Olympics is "One World, One Dream". Apparently this singular dream does not include the dream of fair wages, a clean environment, or the right to free speech.

I realize that this post is really scattered and "wandering". There is just so much information about China's history of injustices towards its people that it is hard to reduce it into a short summary.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!