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Reason Number 3. Children – The Endangered Species.

Posted by Unknown Minggu, 20 Juli 2008 0 komentar

Excerpt 5.

“As writers living in China we have become constant surveyors. Asking questions is easy since most Chinese are eager to explain their life, culture and feelings.

One question we pose to almost everyone we meet socially is, 'Who loves their children more, Chinese parents or Western parents?' The response invariably comes quickly with the firm belief that the answer is irrefutable. Chinese parents!

Sometimes we paste a forlorn look on our faces, if only to gauge the sensitivity of our subject under question. Quickly they offer, ‘Well, I am sure you love your children in a different way…culturally speaking.’

Of course it is true that Chinese families love their child (most often a single child, as allowed by the one-child policy) a great deal and expend great effort and finance to prove that. Chinese parents are often overwhelmed, complying with the demands made by their pint sized Emperors and Empresses.

But it seems that China loves its children only one child at a time, because nationally there are thousands of children suffering horrible deaths and injuries every year.”

I wonder how many people in China still remember the name Zhang Yaoyi? Very few, I guess. Certainly no one I have spoken to in the past year or so – no one at all – has known who she was.

And now, of course, there’s Li Shufen. People might remember her for a few weeks, just like they remembered – briefly – Zhang Yaoyi. After all, child deaths like those provide temporary pin-pricks of conscience to Chinese society before public opinion rolls on – indifferent, uncaring.

But the thousands upon thousands of other children, set to work as pickpockets, beggars, laborers or – worse – sex slaves, who ever pays attention to them, even for a moment?

Every day, in Shanghai, I see children begging on the tube – and the way they beg is simply shameful, kneeling on the floor in front of passengers, knocking their heads on the ground. This, of course, is the kowtow, the Chinese tradition based on self-abasement, on humiliation.

And nearly every single passenger simply ignores the child, see right through him or her as if invisible – that, or curses the child away with a sharp word, or even a kick.

Shanghai, one of the richest cities in the nation, does nothing; no social workers, no education, no health care – nothing, nothing for these children. They are simply expendable. Are there any child-care specialists in the Shanghai police force?

Sure, the poor in every nation get a raw deal, and children of poor parents are exploited all over the world. But, in China, it is not just the poor who get a hard deal.

Truthfully, I think to be a child in China today is to be a moving target, not a prospect for the future.

For schoolchildren in China (or at least those children fortunate enough to have access to education; for while China can find tens of billions of US dollars for the Olympic Games, it cannot find the funds to upgrade education for millions of its young), life is mostly misery.

Chinese children up to the age of seven or eight are like their peers all over the world. They are happy, bright, full of life, full of mischief. They have their range of characteristics, from the quiet and rather shy children to the boisterous and badly-behaved ones. But each has character, each is an individual, and each is ready to burst into noisy joy, to play and laugh and simply embrace life.

But then I think of children who are just a few years older, say ten years old. For them, ‘the process’ has begun. ‘The process’ is the method whereby the Chinese education system crushes that life, that individuality, out of the child. The sheer weight of by-rote learning, the inflexible, rigid, monotonous teaching, the endless hours of homework and the pressure to succeed, exerted by teachers, parents and indeed much of society – all that crushes the essential child.

And so, by the age of 14 or 15, children in China have forgotten how to live. Treated like so much nuts and bolts in school, they become robots.

But even as the children study, Chinese officials have found new ways to kill them.

The new weapon is called ‘a school.’ Crushed as the floors accordioned down as a quake struck, 7,000 classrooms collapsed and nearly 5,000 children died, while the pockets of officials were lined with graft money, ripped-off instead of used to make the schools quakeproof.

The Chinese Communist Party has no respect for rules, no respect for law, certainly as related to children. The CPC pisses all over the law whenever it wants, shits on the constitution and wipes itself with the ‘rights’ of the people. China’s government teaches the lesson ‘fuck the rules.’ And so the builders did.

Consider Juyuan Middle School, in the city of Dujiangyan. This school was identified as being structurally unsafe. Last year, the school got money to upgrade its construction quality – 200,000 yuan, more than enough to complete the work. But the money was not spent for that purpose. Press reports say the cash went for ‘trees, paint, new classroom windows, and power line improvements.’ Result: two of the school’s buildings totally collapsed – the only buildings to do so in the whole city. Two hundred and forty children died.

As if the deaths alone were not terrible enough, the Chinese government then insults the bereaved parents, shows its contempt for them, their suffering, their pain. For all across Sichuan parents have been prevented from holding mourning ceremonies at the schools where their sons and daughters died. And all across China, the press has been prevented from asking questions about why so many schools fell. Sure, a few English-language outlets in the Chinese media have covered it, but those reports are for foreigners only, concocted to give the outside world the impression China’s media is open. Definitely not for domestic consumption.

The average people of China, treated as second-class citizens as they are by Beijing, live in a sort of latter-day New China Apartheid.

This Apartheid values overseas impressions of China far higher than the concerns of the Chinese people themselves – deny the bad news, avoid the tough questions, and carry on with death and destruction as normal.

Excerpt 6.

“Perhaps the one-child policy has shifted the focus of adults so much that caring eyes do not see others in harm’s way. Or possibly the constant reminders of overpopulation have inured adult kindness to the point of blindness to the importance of ultimate care for every single child.

Today’s Chinese parents who have obeyed the one-child policy expect to receive traditional filial obedience from their child. This obedience, which was traditionally shared by many siblings must now be shouldered by one. This micro-nuclear family basis has corrupted caring in China.

'We have no time for others when others have no time for us,' as one proud father told us, his son closely listening, learning the ‘rules’ of life in modern China.”

‘T’ for Tibet, ‘X’ for Xinjiang for all you China visitors to the August Olympics.

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Judul: Reason Number 3. Children – The Endangered Species.
Ditulis oleh Unknown
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