good work Lee Liau! I hope more people will stand up and start express your oponion to the Canadian Medias.
Treating China as a pariah will reverse progress
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, March 28, 2008
Re: Fascinating Facts about China, March 26.
In anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the recent crackdown in Tibet, it seems that a wave of bias has swept the Western media, causing even people who know little about China issues to feel qualified to voice their opinions.
Columnist Dan Gardner's satire only exacerbated my perception of ignorance among some Western pundits. He indirectly calls for an Olympic boycott as a method of pressuring the Chinese Communist government into accepting responsibility for its human rights abuses. In other words, by alienating China, we will somehow miraculously force it to clean up its act.
What Mr. Gardner must have missed while reading up on China issues is that China has made huge progress since opening up to international trade in the late 1970s. There is no doubt that Deng Xiaoping's travels abroad and amicable relations with foreign leaders led to China's increased involvement in the global community -- and was in turn at least partly responsible for bringing the national poverty rate down to eight per cent in 2001 from 53 per cent in 1981. I predict that by continually increasing its global presence, China can only improve -- not only economically but also in its treatment of human rights.
But treating China like some kind of global pariah, as Mr. Gardner's column suggests, will only succeed in reversing 30 years of bounding progress. As our neighbours to the south have all too vividly demonstrated in Iraq, forcing new ideology too quickly onto a regime that is not yet prepared can have disastrous results. A revolution, therefore, cannot be exerted forcefully from the outside, but has to come gently from within.
So my advice to Mr. Gardner, and others like him, is this: know your story from both sides before expressing your opinion in our newspapers.
Lee Liau,
Ottawa
Treating China as a pariah will reverse progress
The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, March 28, 2008
Re: Fascinating Facts about China, March 26.
In anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the recent crackdown in Tibet, it seems that a wave of bias has swept the Western media, causing even people who know little about China issues to feel qualified to voice their opinions.
Columnist Dan Gardner's satire only exacerbated my perception of ignorance among some Western pundits. He indirectly calls for an Olympic boycott as a method of pressuring the Chinese Communist government into accepting responsibility for its human rights abuses. In other words, by alienating China, we will somehow miraculously force it to clean up its act.
What Mr. Gardner must have missed while reading up on China issues is that China has made huge progress since opening up to international trade in the late 1970s. There is no doubt that Deng Xiaoping's travels abroad and amicable relations with foreign leaders led to China's increased involvement in the global community -- and was in turn at least partly responsible for bringing the national poverty rate down to eight per cent in 2001 from 53 per cent in 1981. I predict that by continually increasing its global presence, China can only improve -- not only economically but also in its treatment of human rights.
But treating China like some kind of global pariah, as Mr. Gardner's column suggests, will only succeed in reversing 30 years of bounding progress. As our neighbours to the south have all too vividly demonstrated in Iraq, forcing new ideology too quickly onto a regime that is not yet prepared can have disastrous results. A revolution, therefore, cannot be exerted forcefully from the outside, but has to come gently from within.
So my advice to Mr. Gardner, and others like him, is this: know your story from both sides before expressing your opinion in our newspapers.
Lee Liau,
Ottawa
