Chinese Treatment of AIDS victims

Charles Brown CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Tue Jan 15 08:53:31 PST 2002


Chinese Treatment of AIDS victims Thomas Seay <entheogens at yahoo.com> Subject: Re:

- --- Charles Brown <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >
> CB: One hypothesis might be that there isn't that
> much fundamentally, systemically wrong with the
> current system , and it is as the government
> portrays it, poverty left from the past system that
> is the main problem.

Charles, According to the article that does not appear to be the case. Even if one could argue that poverty made selling ones blood an important additional income (one person that the journalist interviewed said he'd sold his blood around a thousand times) and even if poverty did not allow for hygenic drawing of blood (hard to imagine) then at least the Chinese government could help these people out...instead, they get ignored or menaced by the police.

Thomas, I was not responding to the article but to Scott's comment that he couldn't figure out why he can't find anybody in China who thinks that the problem is the current system ( see his statement reproduced below). I'd say that's an interesting comment from Scott. An objective observer would have to at least consider the possibility that the explanation is that in fact the system is not the problem and the people can tell that and that's why Scott can't find anybody who says that something is deeply wrong with China. There could be other explanations, but excluding that one is an indication of an anti-Chinese system bias in the thinker trying to understand what Scott observed.

Charles

%%%%

Scott Martens had said. " There seemed to be a pervasive notion that if only China could keep up economic growth, it could outgrow all its ills, and all the mistakes and problems would be buried in the past. And the public bought into this in a big way. When I had visited Warsaw Pact Europe before 1989, no one ever seemed to buy into the idea that the state was doing fine and the problems would all just go away. People didn't really seem to want capitalism, and they weren't always sure what they wanted, but I can't remember ever talking to someone who didn't think something was fundamentally wrong. Even in Vietnam, I had no trouble finding people who thought something was deeply wrong with the country.

I still haven't quite managed to figure out why its different in China."



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