From Mo Yan's Nobel Lecture:
I am as uncomfortable and as annoyed with Yan's defense of what he calls 'necessary censorship' as I am with the oppressing notion that writers and their writing are always and solely pawns on a bigger political chessboard. It is true that being politically neutral is almost impossible for a writer, but so is being right especially when s/he believes that being a great writer means being a decent politician or even just a good intellectual.
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From Richard Ford :
Where I was teaching last year, at the University of Mississippi, it became known to me that it was now legal for my students to bring concealed weapons to class. Loaded pistols. I know ... it’s “impossible to imagine such a thing happening in Oxford or Cambridge”. This gun news was information I didn’t quite know what to do with. Should I just not even show up? (I’m too cowardly, plus they wouldn’t pay me, and I needed the money.) It was a fiction writing course, so should I maybe tone down my criticisms – in case somebody might not like what I say and decide to shoot me? It gives a new spin to the notion of “teacher evaluations”.
I was, after all, teaching the class, acting as the authority figure, so shouldn’t I be armed too? Be fully prepared to engage the students’ savage need to learn? This poses a new problem in pedagogy: the student as assailant. Is this just a “symptom” (everything’s a symptom, nothing’s ever just what it is) of the US falling further behind the studious Chinese and the quick-witted Indians in college achievement? “Arming oneself for the future” taken literally?
I don't understand why Americans are so worry about the Chinese or rather are choosing to believe their fears rather than to just learn about China and the outside world.
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Howard W. Friend asks some good questions about China's presence and influence in African countries:
China’s burgeoning partnership with Africa raises several momentous questions: Is a hands-off approach to governmental affairs the right one? Can Chinese money and ambition succeed where Western engagement has manifestly failed? Or will China become the latest in a series of colonial and neocolonial powers in Africa, destined like the others to leave its own legacy of bitterness and disappointment?
The answers to those questions doesn't depend on China, which like all the former Colonial powers and powerful countries, is on the African continent because of its national interests not to help African countries develop themselves. The answers depend as always on the politicians and other leaders of African who too often fall in love with powerlessness to dare to dream of different future than their present realities and unfortunate pasts.
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Just one expression comes to mind, 'despairing, but business as usual' after reading this:
IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.
Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?
For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.
I'm wondering how soon we are going to have billboards and people claiming that there is a genocide against little girls in the world in order of course to put the focus on abortion and not the context. Glenn Reynolds is already using the word gendercide, interesting.
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Pankaj Mishra argues convincingly, I have to say, that the United States and the "West" still have imperial reflexes, which are preventing them from acknowledging the realities of the post 9/11 world, an era where the East and the rest of the world are no longer scared of them and have their own ideas about how things are going to be. Sugary excerpt:
Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. In proposing cash bribes for the "moderate" Taliban, the Obama administration reminds one of FDR's bright idea about the original inhabitants of Palestine: "What about the Arabs?" he once asked the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"(...)The Chinese, Indians, Iranians and other emerging powers too have an idea of what they owe to themselves: the richness of the world that the west first claimed for itself. But while getting what they want, they won't claim the sanction of a superior morality and civilisation. Indeed, the long and appalling history of European hypocrisy in Asia and Africa may be why Beijing dispenses altogether with talk of Chinese values as its strikes deals with nasty regimes in Africa, and why even democratic India keeps mum about the advantages of regular elections as it tries to offset Chinese influence over Burma's military despots.
Reading Mishra's article forces me to ask myself whether America's most influential mark on the world was that it made it so cool and often so stylish to be a hegemon that now every country wants to be one and to exercise power in the same way. I'm coming to the realization that the post 9/11 world is one with a bunch of countries who have fallen in love, whether they want to be admit it or not with the American style of power, even as they resents it when it affects them. America is John Wayne and we know that there was a time when every man, no matter where he came from, wanted to be John Wayne even when he hated the fact that he was killing "Indians" and shooting from the hip without much finesse, sophistication or awareness of the sensibilities of others.
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No comments necessary to the news that China threw at its embassy in Harare a birthday-bash for Robert Mugabe except to wonder whether the Chinese have any standards to their African policies and whether there is anything that they won't do (but again that something one can wonder about many world powers in Africa):
Mugabe celebrated his 86th birthday on Sunday and made time to attend a party held in his honour at the Chinese embassy in Harare, China's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Hailed as a saviour by fanatical supporters and praised throughout Africa for standing up to what many see as bullying by the West, Mugabe is hated in equal measure by opponents who accuse him of being a dictator.
Mugabe "thanked the Chinese embassy for its painstaking preparations for the birthday celebration and ... hoped to further expand friendly cooperative relations in every field between the two nations", the Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry's website showed pictures of Mugabe cutting a birthday cake in front of a large sign wishing him "Happy 86th birthday" and addressing almost 100 guests.
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With some reservations, I agree with Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong on this:
The Chinese, it is said, are in Africa only for natural resources, to feed China’s industry and huge population. To exploit the continent, they provide loans and aid to rogue regimes. They worsen the plight of Africans by dumping cheap, shoddy products in their markets and ruin local industry. Chinese investors pay Africans a pittance, in contrast to more ethical Western firms. Given all that, China can only be an obstacle to Africa’s development.
It’s an exciting tale but, alas, the media have gotten it all wrong. It’s not mainly China that impairs Africa’s development, but a world system of neo-liberal capitalism, based on privatization, trade liberalization, and reduced social spending, into which China is now partly integrated. As part of the same world system, China and the West have many activities in common in Africa, but there are also some distinctly Chinese trade and investment practices and these are often more appealing to Africans.
"Africa" has a lot to gain by the involvement of China and that it is too easy and too sensationalistic to keep seeing Africa and Africans as objects of exploitations. It is never go when Africa is the place where hegemons, particularly formal colonial powers, are able to come and to serve their national interests without giving much in return and diversity and multiplicity are essential, That said, the focus as always ought to be elsewhere since development remains the central question and that we knows that it cannot be accomplished by trading partners or even solely international trade.
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The Olympics have officially started and yet, I don't seem to be able to care because I feel that they have become just another huge sporting event, without soul. What used to distinguish the Olympics from other sporting events before was the sense they were different, because money and glitter didn't matter. It is no longer true. Another detail which I found amazing is that in the US the Opening Ceremony will be broadcasted more than ten hours after it has happened. I wasn't alive in 1976, but I feel as though we are back in those days when the networks believed that they could manufactured the Olympics experience of their viewers.
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Gideon Rachman makes an excellent point on the idea of boycotting the Olympics in China this summer:
[…] But now that the Chinese have been awarded the games, I think it would be an even bigger mistake to boycott them. Much as the West would insist that the boycott was aimed only at the Chinese government, it would be both portrayed and percieved as an insult aimed at the entire Chinese people. The great task of international relations over the next generation is going to be managing the rise of China. Picking symbolic fights - and so whipping up Chinese nationalism - is the wrong way to go about things, I think.I was living in South-East Asia, when China made its first failed bid to get the 2000 Olympics. That rejection - in favour of Sydney - sparked fury even among many “Overseas Chinese”, who saw the snub as a deliberate effort to humiliate China. The Chinese chose not to bid for the 2004 Olympics - apparently it was an unlucky year. (Something to do with the Chinese word for “four” rhyming with death?) So there is a huge amount riding on 2008.
And a huge amount that could go wrong naturally, what with a marathon run in the Beijing smug, the situation in Tibet and the presence of the American president. President Bush has been foolish enough to accept an invitation to the Olympics - which means that if something does go awry, he will be on the spot and dragged into events.
I have no opinion on a boycott of the Olympics nevertheless I think that it would a petty and insignificant act. Further, it is an easy and show-offish to a complicated situation that requires bolder solutions. If the goal is to send a message about human rights, why not do something that will have the most impact, why not have the chutzpah to call for a boycott of all Chinese goods and to stop diplomatic relations with China? The West wants to have both ways, it has become addicted to cheap Chinese goods so it is looking for other ways to prove and to assert their moral superiority of the Chinese by reminding them that they may be an economic power, but that they are still a dictatorship. The point is that all of this talk of boycotting the Beijing Olympics is meaningless because it affirms the West’s insatiable appetite for cheap goods and its lack of courage to put its money where its mouth. I think it is far worse to pretend that human rights mean more than commerce by taking grand but meaningless such as the boycott of sporting event than to admit one’s weaknesses and to admit shamefully that the West is willing to sell its soul for cheap stuff.
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Jacob Sullum has a great article about China, little girls and international adoption on Reason. Sullum debunks what he believes to be myths fabricated by the Chinese government about international adoption and including the one that says that girls are not wanted and are most of the time abandoned by their parents. Sugary excerpt:
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say these girls are “unwanted” only because the Chinese government has made them so. Although the government’s oppressive, family-destroying policies have had the incidental benefit of bringing joy to the lives of adoptive parents in the U.S. and elsewhere, it will be a great victory for liberty when such heartwarming stories stop appearing on newsstands and bookshelves. These adoptions would not be occurring if the Chinese government did not try to dictate the most basic and intimate of life’s decisions.
[…] Given the barriers to adoption in China, its frequency, once informal adoptions are taken into account, is impressive evidence that, far from being unwanted in the country of their birth, China’s daughters are highly valued. It’s true that China’s strong patriarchal traditions, according to which sons carry on the family line while daughters become members of other families when they marry, mean parents are anxious to have at least one boy. Especially in rural areas, parents value a boy’s superior strength and expect sons, more so than daughters, to support them in their old age. These longstanding attitudes explain why boys are rarely abandoned in China and rarely end up in orphanages. […]
Even couples who give up daughters, leaving them in hospitals, in busy markets, at police stations, or literally on the doorstep of orphanages (as our daughter Mei was left when she was about 10 days old), may not be eschewing girls so much as trying to complete their families within the restrictions established by the government. Because of the one-son/two-child rule, Johnson reports, the typical abandoned girl is a second daughter.
Although I am for international adoption, it is impossible not to recognize their complexity and the ethical and moral dilemmas, which they pose. One of them is that one is about deciding what importance to give to the context and local culture during and after the adoption. The point that, as Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig has written, there is an irrational aspect to adoption, which makes it possible to consider children on both sides that is on the one of the those who desperately want to adopt and those who believe that no foreigners should adopt children from a different part of the world as commodities. What matter at the end, more than everything else, are the children and their well being.
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Jonathan Power has an article in the International Herald Tribune, one of the best articles I’ve read today. Its subject is Africa and it focuses on the amount of money from foreign direct investment from China and others that is flowing throughout the continent despite of its so-called poverty. Sugary excerpt:
As Chinese and Indian investors almost pour into Africa one wonders if their European and North American competitors have woken up to the fact that Rip Van Winkle is waking up in Africa.
The fact that a top Chinese banker brackets Africa with Asia is one more sign that the Asians themselves see what is happening in Africa as a repeat of what happened to them 20 and 30 years ago.
They can see the potential while Western commentators, their spurious words tasting of sour grapes, point an accusing finger at China in particular, accusing it of planning to rape Africa as the Europeans did a century ago.
This is not rape, by any stretch of the imagination. This is business opportunity. Africa in many countries is on the way to booming and Africa is looking for marriages of convenience with willing investors in railroads, toll roads, ports, motorbike and cement factories. Already there are over 900 Chinese companies working in Africa.
Power succeeds in demonstrating with his article is that Africa is not a doomed continent that is condemned to poverty and to underdevelopment. The key question remains however whether there will ever be a way to solve the inequality question by enabling more Africans to share the wealth of the continent. The main issue is that very few Africans and too many foreigners are benefiting from the resources of Africa and this fact makes them value stability above everything else instead of addressing more urgent matters through means that may cause instability in the short run, but then lead to more prosperity for all Africans.
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In an op-ed in which he argues that China is not anti-religious for it only fears sects such as Falun Gong, which resist state control, Slavoj Zizek makes an important point about culture and religious beliefs:
The significant issue for the West here is not Buddhas and lamas, but what we mean when we refer to "culture." All human sciences are turning into a branch of cultural studies. While there are of course many religious believers in the West, especially in the United States, vast numbers of our societal elite follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores of our tradition only out of respect for the "lifestyle" of the community to which we belong: Christmas trees in shopping centers every December; neighborhood Easter egg hunts; Passover dinners celebrated by nonbelieving Jews.
"Culture" has commonly become the name for all those things we practice without really taking seriously. And this is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as "barbarians" with a "medieval mindset": They dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, we seem to see the ultimate threat to culture as coming from those who live immediately in their culture, who lack the proper distance.
Zizek's point takes us back to the divinization of culture, which I believe is dangerous. Zizek makes the point that it is easier to tolerate beliefs that we don’t seriously, but that means in my opinion that tolerance is, in most cases, a form of condescension. It must be replaced by acceptance in which case the question becomes whether it is possible to accept what we don’t understand. Can a evangelical Christian accept that a Togolese who believes in Voodon doesn't want/doesn't have to be saved? For that matter, can a evangelical Christian understand that practising Jews are not future Christians or imperfect people?
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Niall Ferguson has an interesting take on the relationship among Bush, Sarkozy, and Brown, the leaders of the United States, France, and Britain. He argues that their biggest challenge is not to get along with Bush with each other and to develop strong alliances, but rather to face up to the fact that the West is weaker and that therefore the sphere of influence of their different countries is as narrow as it has ever been:
France, Britain, America: They each have had their era of hegemony. Now, however, they all belong to the club of developed debtors, with combined current account deficits of $970 billion last year. Other members of this club are Australia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. Apart from Iceland, it reads like a list of ex-empires, with the former members of the British Empire (energy-rich Canada excepted) in the lead.
Collectively, the developed debtors had to borrow about $1.3 trillion last year. On the other side of this great global equation is the club of emerging exporters. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 40% of the developed debtors' funding requirement last year was met by China, Russia and the Middle East.
The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. The only way to fulfill these promises is to pump out ever more printed paper: bank notes, bills, bonds, stocks and the rest. The emerging exporters buy these. The net result must be a creeping transfer of financial ownership from West to East.
[…] So the big question is not whether Sarkozy or Brown will get along better with Bush, but what China's sovereign wealth fund will buy when it embarks on its first investment spree. By comparison with these sovereigns, the traditional sovereigns of the political world are starting to look about as powerful as, well, professors.
And the really bad news for these presidents and prime ministers? Not only are the stakes getting lower all the time, you guys don't even have tenure.
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Mauro de Lorenzo has a short essay on the expansion of China in the African continent. Unfortunately, Lorenzo paints an ambiguous picture of the Chinese’s presence of the continent, which doesn’t explain fully the situation. Sugary excerpt:
Africa does not want to be forced to choose between China and the West. It sees Europe, the United States, and China as able to offer different kinds of investment and aid (which do not necessarily overlap), and wants to enjoy the benefits of strong relations with all. The United States may have to make greater efforts to reassure African partners on this score.
Another set of worries concerns the impact of Chinese competition on African enterprises and African exports. Chinese textile imports have decimated Nigeria's domestic production, forcing many factories to close. South Africa's textile industry was saved only through a bilateral agreement between the governments to voluntarily limit Chinese imports, though this is a temporary measure. Chinese traders in both rural and urban African markets, who can obtain consumer goods from China more cheaply through their networks, are usually able to undercut African traders, which breeds resentment. Michael Sata, a Zambian opposition politician, significantly boosted his support in last year's presidential election by running on an anti-China platform popular with urban traders and mineworkers upset with wage and labor conditions. African governments and unions are also worried about labor and environmental standards in Chinese enterprises, and about safety standards in Chinese imports, especially given that they usually do not have the capacity to conduct inspections and enforce laws.
Finally, there are some worries about governance, particularly as evidence mounts that Chinese firms are only too happy to bribe their way to lucrative contracts. The anti-corruption and good governance agenda is no longer only a "Western" agenda: it is shared by African people and many African leaders, and is expressed in continental agreements. In fact, to the extent that China's aid and investment increase tax revenue and create "policy space" for Africa governments by reducing their intellectual dependence on donor agencies, it may actually be a boon to the quality of African democracy.
As one African leader commented privately, "Their game is clear. They say, I'll build you a road, if you give me that mine. They are completely transparent." But this is said without malice or surprise. The lesson for the United States is that it is okay to have a more "normal," interests-based foreign policy with African partners that transcends humanitarian rhetoric.
Lorenzo fails to see the forest through the trees because although it is true that Africans have concerns about the growing Chinese influence in Africa, most of them welcome it precisely because it gives them the luxury to be coveted and to have choices. My take on the issue is that the Chinese influence is increasing in Africa because other major powers have taken Africans for granted. One only has to read Sarkozy’s speech in his trip to Dakar as the president of France in which he asserted that the problem of Africa was that the Black man has never entered history and to examine the controversy that it caused to understand the sensitive and explosive relationship that exists between Africa, former colonizing powers, and the West. However, I think that the United States precisely because it was never a colonizing power in Africa have opportunities on that continent, by offering to Africans a more pragmatic relationship, which isn’t as stained by history and sentimentality. China is taking advantage not only of its increasing power, but of the fact that it isn’t a Western country and that therefore it can claim that it isnt’talking down to Africans, but talking to them as a country which resisted colonialism and which is on the verge of becoming a superpower.
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David Shambaugh and Karl Inderfurth argue that the United States should engage China and edge less because both countries have too much too gain in cooperating with each other. Sugary excerpt:
China worries about US attempts to encircle it strategically with security alliances and partnerships, backed by a substantial military buildup in the South Pacific and Indian oceans – actions that the US government describes in official policy documents as prudent “hedging.” For its part, Washington worries about China’s military modernization program, economic dynamism, expanded diplomatic influence across Asia and increased global search for energy resources.
While this paradoxical mix of relations is likely to persist, more engagement and less hedging is needed. Given the severity of the challenges facing the international community today, it is increasingly important that Washington and Beijing maximize their cooperation on a global scale. While the US and China are increasingly interacting on all continents, the most promising area of Sino-American collaboration is in Asia.
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Kerry Brown has a list of China’s fifty most influential people. Not all people in the list are Chinese for the criteria are that “they have influence in China” and “that influence has to be in the People's Republic of China (PRC), not outside it….” The list includes the Chinese President Hu Jintao, George Bush, Bill Gates, and Jackie Chan.
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Daniel Drezner writes in Foreign Affairs what he believes to be the attempts of the United States to create a new world order in which China, India and itself formed a great power concert with the US of course remaining the leading power. He argues that although the efforts of the Bush administration to create and to mold this new world order haven't been successful, it is in the interest of the United States to persevere in order to avoid conflict and to facilitate not only cooperation, but also the creation of a fairer and more integrated order than the present one. Sugary excerpt:
From a U.S.perspective, it would be preferable for China and India to advance their interests within U.S.-led global governance structures rather than outside of them. The United States could get something in return for accommodating these states in institutions such as the UN and the IMF and giving them the recognition and prestige they demand: a commitment by Beijing and New Delhithat they will accept the key rules of the global game.
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I watched Wolf Blitzer facing David Duke yesterday and I thought that some things just never changed and I wondered how Blitzer kept his cool. Are we ever going to pass the point when people such as Duke are able to make such hateful claims as the one that Jews control the United States and the media and to find an audience? I doubt that David Duke believes his own claims; I think that as a savvy marketer, he knows that it is still possible today to make money with anti-Semitic propaganda and to argue, as too many people have since the beginning of times, that Jews are secretly ruling the world and are therefore responsible for everything wrong that is happening within it.
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“The Western difficulty in knowing quite what to make of India today is the mirror image of the debates that Indians have with each other. These do not want for passion or sincerity. One thing has not changed: Indians are their country’s most vociferous critics.When a series of bomb blasts ripped through commuter trains in Bombay last month, killing 183 and seriously injuring around 500 more, the teeming city of 18 million earned the world’s admiration for its display of community spirit, the swift response of its emergency services and, not least, that there were no reprisals against Muslims or any other group that might have been thought or rumoured to be the perpetrators. Indians were majestic in this moderation. This attitude must be maintained. [...] unlike China, India does let 100 schools of thought contend; and while that diversity can sometimes appear untidy, even anarchic, it cer-tainly does breed success” The London Times, "Inspiring India"
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Hu Jintao has begun his second tour of Africa since becoming president of China. The Chinese are increasingly interested in China as the tour of the Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing earlier this year showed.
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I just saw the images of Hu Jintao visit to the White House. I heard the speeches and of course, I saw the image of the Chinese woman, an accredited journalist from with the Epoch Times, who disrupted the Chinese President's speech. I couldn’t help thinking that the visit was a missed opportunity for the US.
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It is amazing to realize what strong emotions China awake in some people.
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Before coming to Washington, Hu Jintao will first come to Seattle, which is of course the capital of the Microsoft Empire. He will meet with Bill Gates, and dine in his house with other businesses. I can’t help but thinking that by meeting Bill Gates before meeting George Bush, Hu Jintao, and the Chinese are sending a message about their priorities and about whom they consider the most important man in the United States for them. Besides with Bill Gates, they can negotiate without having to give much since Microsoft is willing to respect restrictive Chinese laws (as Google and Yahoo) to have access to the Chinese Market. George Bush will try to negotiate with the Chinese, but he does not have as much to offer them as Bill Gates given his current political situation and especially given the fact that right now the US need China to support tough sanctions on Iran. We are living in the world where increasing economic power is more important than political power or rather where economic power has political consequences. I bet than Hu Jintao will feel a lot more at ease with Bill Gates than he will with President Bush.
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This week, the president of China, Hu Jintao visits the US and I am really looking forward to this visit for a few reasons.
I wonder how the press is going to cover the visit and if Jintao will get good reviews or negative reviews.
Finally, I wonder how the Chinese are going to frame their view on Iran. It is certain that a journalist is going to ask a question about Iran at the news conference that the two heads of state will have. I wonder how they are going to hide the fact or rather smooth over the differences between the two visions that they have of Iran and of the current crisis.
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Joseph Stiglitz has an excellent article, which praises China and the choices that it made to achieve both development and environment protection. He writes, “Part of the key to China's long-run success has been its almost unique combination of pragmatism and vision. While much of the rest of the developing world, following the Washington consensus, has been directed at a quixotic quest for higher GDP, China has again made clear that it seeks sustainable and more equitable increases in real living standards. China realises that it has entered a phase of economic growth that is imposing enormous - and unsustainable - demands on the environment. Unless there is a change in course, living standards will eventually be compromised. That is why the new plan places great emphasis on the environment.” So on the contrary to conventional wisdom, there are some things that the world can learn from China.
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Middle class families are rushing away from big cities in an attempt to avoid the high costs of living 
that comes from living in the cities. This trend is not only true in America, but in most of the developed countries where cities are becoming more and more places where people come to work than places where they live and raise their children. However, in developing countries and big emerging powers such as China and India, people are rushing to the big cities in order to run away from the poverty of the rural areas and to live in a place where there are more opportunities. The sad thing is that in China for example, big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing are the focus of the remarkable growth that the country is experiencing while rural areas most of the time do not see any of the good aspects of the Chinese miracle. Chinese leaders have promised not only to focus more on the inequities between cities and rural areas, but also the ones between the rich and the middle class who live in cities and farmers and villagers who are growing increasingly unhappy by the unfairness of a system which does not protect them from the risks of losing not only their land, but their way of life.
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The Washington Post has a great article on Adoption and China. It talks about how the increasing 
desire in the United States for Chinese infants is creating a market for stolen babies in China. This is of course not new information, but it is still appalling how need in what part of the world creates markets for everything in another part of the world. The West has become dependent on the rest of the world not only to provide cheap labor, but also to provide other things that are harder to find in the West. In this case, the fact that we are talking about children show how difficult it can be to survive in a country where the laws and the civil society aren’t strong enough to stop the trade of children. China is not the only country facing this type of problems, and the sad fact is that being stolen isn’t the worst thing that can happen to children. They can be raped and sold into prostitution some by family members. China has started a morality campaign in order to remind its citizen of their moral heritage. It will not stop anything for what is needed is more than words. In these situations, the countries with the means (money, power, etc…), countries from the West, have to act and do everything they can to make sure that in this case, the children that are adopted have not been stolen by their parents.
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