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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (1253)	10/21/2005 1:37:38 AM
From: freechina	Respond to of 218644

news.google.com Lets see all the various viewpoints the world has on China White Papers. Here is a less glowing report - India has 1 billion people - is their size causing them to abuse rights like in China? By GEOFFREY YORK Thursday, October 20, 2005 Page A1 - Globe and Mail - Toronto BEIJING -- China had an uncompromising message yesterday for the millions of workers and peasants who have protested against Communist officials in recent months: Dictatorship is still the only permissible option. ... The release of the paper seems to confirm that Beijing is anxious about the growing number of street protests against local Communist officials. The government has cracked down on dissent this year, jailing an increasing number of critics and activists. From Beijing's viewpoint, the trend is ominous. There were 74,000 protests and other 'mass incidents' in China last year, involving 3.7 million people, according to government figures. It was a dramatic increase from the 58,000 incidents in the previous year and the 10,000 incidents a decade ago. ...Despite its claim to be a white paper to generate discussion, little discussion or debate about it was evident on China's Internet yesterday. ...The government's crackdown on dissent was vividly illustrated by a violent attack on a democracy activist in southern China this month. The episode began in July, when about 400 residents of Taishi, a village of 2,000 people, signed a petition calling for the replacement of their elected chief. After a series of protests, the local authorities agreed to set up a committee to organize a referendum. But then a gang of thugs, apparently with government support, began to put heavy pressure on the activists who had led the referendum drive. Dozens of protesters and activists were arrested last month, while Beijing ordered the media to stop covering the Taishi dispute. iht.com Richard Baum, a political science professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the report shows that scant progress has been made in political reform. "This is pretty discomforting in the sense that there are simply no new ideas here," said Baum, a China specialist. Baum said Chinese leaders appear unwilling to expand political freedoms in part because they fear unleashing social upheaval in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. "They are coming up against a number of uncomfortable facts," Baum said. "There is a great deal of repressed demand out there for political expression." Of the government, he added, "there is a fear that if you give an inch, they will take a mile." In recent months, the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said that China is planning to broaden direct election of officials to the township level. Currently, direct elections happen in selected rural villages. But the report makes no mention of any new township elections. The release of the report comes as American officials have been calling for more openness and political reform in China. As part of a major address last month, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, urged the Communist Party to expand the use of direct elections and warned that domestic pressures in China were building for political reform. Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank president, visiting China this week, also urged the government to grant more political rights to its 1.3 billion citizens. Wolfowitz said that allowing more public participation in governance would help reduce corruption. There is no corruption in USA? The new report offers little to suggest that China is planning any immediate or significant changes. President Hu Jintao of China, who is also head of the Communist Party, has disappointed reformers who had hoped his rise to power in 2003 would bring greater political liberalization. Instead, Hu has tightened controls on the Chinese media and stressed the predominance of the Communist Party. Tensions are rippling through Chinese society, particularly in the countryside where protests are rising over corruption, pollution and lingering poverty. Wolfowitz noted that roughly 150 million people in China live in 'acute poverty,' despite the country's economic rise. Other studies show that more than 500 million people live on less than $2 a day.