[Peace-discuss] The US & China

[E. Wayne Johnson]

China-bashing is a popular sport.

I would say that some of Mao's ideas were sound indeed
and some of those who followed had some good ideas too.
My wife is the 6th child in her family and we have 4.  I judge the
one-child policy that was once zealously afflicted on the Chinese
as being quite unwise.  There is some awakening to that now
that the population age distribution is showing some issues.
The current pop-culture ideal is to have 2 children.  We know
a few people with 3 or 4 children and quite a few who have 2.

I have lived in China for 2 years this time and 5 years beginning in '96.
I consider the USA to be a far more restrictive and authoritarian society
but there are things one would point to like freedom of the press, 
although actually
one can pretty much disseminate whatever misinfo you like as long as you 
are cool about it.

When I visited Guangzhou in 1991 I saw people eating out of the 
dumpsters and garbage cans,
sifting through with bowls and chopsticks.  It was already much better 
by '96.
Now the Chinese definitely have money and are relatively well off.
There are too many cars.  It used to be a sea of bicycles now it's a sea 
of cars.
I have a Chinese driver's license.  I had to take a test.  I dont have a 
car here but
have driven here.  The expressway roads are excellent.

I have been pretty much all over the country and into some quite remote 
places
working in animal agriculture.  There are some serious problems in 
livestock production,
and these are all people related problems.  We are trying to do 
something about it.
Such matters are generally hard work, cost money, and tend to make some 
people angry.
I found myself to be a bit perturbed this morning.  Better some one else 
to be angry rather
than me.  It's very important to have good friends.  Maybe even to make 
new ones, as another
Dr. Johnson suggested.  Actually it's going well and we are training people.

I dont know about the death rate increase in the
human population.  My father in law is 93 and his wife is 89.  One of 
his cousins
is 105 and pastors a church in their hometown.  My father in law fell 
and broke his leg
a couple of years ago and almost died of pneumonia but did not.  He's ok 
now.

On 2/16/2012 6:54 AM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
> "...the problems China faces are serious. Some are demographic, 
> reviewed in /Science/, the leading U.S.science weekly. The study shows 
> that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, 
> 'mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education 
> and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that 
> resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.' This 
> progress ended with the initiation of the capitalist reforms 30 years 
> ago, and the death rate has since increased."
>
>
> On Feb 13, 2012, at 9:37 PM, Carl G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> [The Obama administration is desperate to provide Americans with a 
>> new hate-object in China, to cover over their shilling for the 1% and 
>> corresponding failure to improve the declining economic position of 
>> most Americans. (Note the fraudulent bank-fraud deal this week - very 
>> much in the banks' interest and not that of the public.) As generally 
>> in their service to power, academics step forward to provide a 
>> propaganda cover. Here's an important dismantling of recent academic 
>> writing on China.  --CGE]
>>
>> "Books about China, popular and scholarly, continue to pour off the 
>> presses. In this ever expanding literature, there is a subdivision 
>> that could be entitled ‘Under Western Eyes’. The larger part of it 
>> consists of works that appear to be about China, or some figure or 
>> topic from China, but whose real frame of reference, determining the 
>> optic, is the United States. Typically written by functionaries of 
>> the state, co-opted or career, they have as their underlying 
>> question: ‘China – what’s in it for us?’ Rather than Sinology proper, 
>> they are Sino-Americana. Ezra Vogel’s biography of Deng Xiaoping is 
>> an instructive example. Detached for duties on the National 
>> Intelligence Council under Clinton (he assures the reader that the 
>> CIA has vetted his book for improper disclosures), Vogel is a fixture 
>> at Harvard, where the house magazine hails Deng Xiaoping and the 
>> Transformation of China as the ‘capstone to a brilliant academic 
>> career’..."
>>
>> The rest of the article is at 
>> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n03/perry-anderson/sino-americana
>>
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