Not two weeks after the latest spate of forced evictions, the report into the 2008 Tibet demonstration massacre is released.
The chinese government officially killed seventeen people, and unofficially murdered two hundred. A particularly charming murder occurred when a woman was detained for eight days, after tearing down a poster on a police station. Her crime, that of defacing a piece of paper, earned her torture and beatings so severe, that she couldn't eat without vomiting, she was unable to speak, and she had difficulty breathing. She died twenty two days later.
Another fantastic example of human rights comes courtesy of the same event, as people were left to die on the doorsteps of hospitals. Why weren't they treated? All hospitals in the area were told to lock their doors, and accept no-one on the days of the riots.
Classy.
When talking about china, it's often mentioned that america, and indeed the west at large, should force change upon them; presumably through some economic measure. The blind hypocrisy of the west when condemning these acts of violence on the one hand, and supplying them with raw materials and purchasing from them with the other, is not lost on those I talk to.
To understand the reason no-one in the west cares we should look at the latest governmental evictions in Shanghai.
Tens of thousands were forced to leave their homes, not to make way for a fantastical government project, like the thousands who were made homeless by the Beijing Olympics, or the thousands more who were made homeless by the recent Trade fair in the same city.
No, these people have been evicted by Disney. They're building a new Disneyland in Shanghai, and thanks to the american mega-corporation, thousands of essentially harmless chinese people, depending on subsistence farming and basic wage jobs, are moving into destitute tenement blocks to live out their lives in poverty.
Way to go Disney. While Obama condemns chinese co-operation with North Korea, his country funds Billions of dollars worth of investment in the same government he condemns.
Hypocrisy 1 Sanity 0
at the end of the day the only thing that matters to governments (apart from individual's personal self agrandisement, obviously) is money - everything they say/do that doesn't relate to the generation of aforesaid stuff is simply lip-service to the voter - that's reality
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