Just more evidence that one, Biden is a moron, and two, the left loves it when the government can force you to do anything. This time its forced abortions:
What we ended up doing is setting up a system whereby we did cut by $1.2 trillion upfront, the deficit over the next 10 years. And we set up a group of senators that have to come up with another $1.2 to $1.7 trillion in savings or automatically there will be cuts that go into effect in January to get those savings. So the savings will be accomplished. But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.
So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that’s much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that.
He fully understands forcing people sterilized against their will:
Health authorities are planning to sterilise nearly 10,000 people in southern China over the next four days as part of a population control programme.
Some of the people in Puning City will be forced to have the procedure carried out against their will.
…Chinese newspaper reports say that those who refuse to be sterilised have seen their elderly mothers or fathers taken away and detained.
Hundreds of people in Puning are said to have been locked up.
…More than 1,300 people in the city have been held in local government buildings where they were given “lectures” on China’s family planning regulations.
During the past week, dozens of women in southwest China have been forced to have abortions even as late as nine months into the pregnancy, according to evidence uncovered by NPR.
more:
Sources in Linyi City and its surrounding counties claimed that up to 120,000 women had been coerced into submitting to the procedures and that some of them were in the ninth month of their pregnancies.
The arrests follow the detention on 6 September of a local activist, Chen Guangcheng. Mr Chen had claimed that women with two children were being forced to undergo sterilisations, while women pregnant with their third child were required to have abortions.
Human rights groups have long insisted that China used compulsory abortions and sterilisations as a way of enforcing its one-child policy, which restricts couples to just one child and was introduced in 1979 as a means of controlling the growth of its population.
Because those are most assuredly the results of any government policy that requires couples have no more than one child.
From NRO:
“China’s One Child Policy causes more violence to women and girls than any other official policy on earth. To merely mention the economic consequences is to turn a blind eye to the terrible human suffering caused by forced abortion. Chinese women are literally dragged out of their homes, strapped to tables and forced to abort.”
At least Boehner had the balls to speak out against this cruelty when he met with the Chinese President:
…And finally, we raised our strong, ongoing concerns with reports of human rights violations in China, including the denial of religious freedom, and the use of coercive abortion as a consequence of the ‘one child’ policy. When it comes to guaranteeing the freedom and dignity of all her citizens, including and especially the unborn, Chinese leaders have a responsibility to do better, and the United States has a responsibility to hold them to account.”
But not our Vice President.
See author page
By 2009 China already had 32 million more boys born than girls.
(The entire population of Canada in 2009 was 32 million!)
I’m sure Biden ”fully understands” that it is routine for Chinese families to opt for abortion when they find that they are expecting a girl.
Chinese mothers have early access to ultrasound diagnostics and abortion.
China’s laws do not expressly prohibit or even define late-term termination.
That infanticide while illegal is speculated to be in the hundreds of millions.
Families who want a son will abandon their infant daughters on the side of the road to die.
Because of the huge sex ratio millions of men will not be able to find a partner.
Many Chinese men are buying foreign wives according to the World Health Organization.
The going price for Burmese women is between $600 and $2,400.
Because the low chance of being able to find a partner future males in the Chinese society may lead to antisocial behavior and violence, threatening societal stability and security.
Curt, . . . Biden’s Speech in China addressing the leaders, contains so many strange statements that there is no need dissecting them, but the warped thinking “comments” are obvious and are very consistent with the lazy mindset of this out-of-touch-couldn’t-care-less Administration.
You can only shake your head and wonder how America ever got so conned.
Joe apologized (groveled in fact) for not speaking “Chinese” (i.e. Mandarin) to his hosts. What the hell is he doing apologizing to these people? And in general he mugged and clowned like an idiot. Because of course, he is an idiot.
The people in this Administration know what Joe is. The people in the State Department know what he is. They could have sent somebody who is somewhat less stupid, like Hillary. But they didn’t.
Projecting weakness is a good way to get into a war without meaning to.
@Wm T Sherman: #3,
Wm T, I’m sure that you’re familiar with the fact that many (economists included) believe a serious War is imminent (3-5 years) because that will be the only way to hide/deflect/solve the coming international economic meltdown.
Here’s trusting that voters won’t get conned into cheering for that one.
12″And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is [that] of life. And the dead were judged out of the things written in the books according to their works.” Revelation 20:12. This is what comes to mind when I read about people like Joe Biden. It will not end well for him I’m afraid.
Thank you for drawing attention to this horrible atrocity against women, men and (mostly) baby girls and boys. This is just awful.
China is nothing, absolutely nothing like most of you envision. The Chinese “government” is not the all powerful monolithic block of evil communist dictators bent on controlling every move of each Chinese in China. I found, in many instances, the Chinese enjoyed greater freedom than people living in the big cities in the US. Political freedom they simply do not have but . . . the government surprisingly leave most of the Chinese alone in their everyday life and when they travel. It all comes down to location. Walking along the streets of Chengdu, Kunming, Taiyuan, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Hefei and even Beijing, one would never know they were in the evil, godless communist country called China.
Yes, there are forced and horrible abortions taking place in China. There are, however, an equal number of abortions (percentage wise) that take place in the US. Murder is murder be it by the uninformed or by the forced. Humans end up dead.
Not all families are forced into having only one child. I had many students who had one, two and even three siblings. It all depends are where one lives in relation to Beijing and how important the province. It also depends on what job one has. A couple of university professors can have two kids. All minorities can have as many as they like. There are also places where one can just pay the local officials to keep their kids.
I am not in support of the Chinese government in any way. They have screwed themselves big time and there is no way out of the quagmire they are responsible for. Implode is a word that I have read often from those who really know about the social and economic situation in China. The point is that one does not have to vilify the “communists country” we call China. It is communist in name only with the majority of activity conducted within its borders being capitalism.
And we will not be going to war with China anytime soon. Countries that trade generally do not go to war. Economics pretty much trumps politics. China cannot afford it! No need to look for a demon to attack. Liberalism is big enough for us to worry about at home.
Just my opinion and nothing more.
A quick bio check confirms that Biden is the first of four siblings. Color me surprised.
But it’s all okay because according to Larry, China is a capitalist country, not a communist country…
This is just more proof of the authoritarian regime that is the Communist government of China. And what amazes me is you still get apologists for the atrocities that occur in China. We get lectured that it isn’t all that bad in China.
Well I’m not buying that, so why don’t those of you who apologize for and defend China go sell your story to those women who were forced into having abortions; or to the thousands of political prisoners; or to those people who have had their homes and property confiscated; or to those families who have had their children taken from their homes.
.
.
Do not believe I apologized nor did I defend China. I simply stated what I experienced living in China for the past three years. It was nothing like what I believed or expected. China is a huge country with a huge population and is even more diverse than the US. By continually emphasizing the events that fit a persons agenda, followers of the agenda will believe everything they read and then extrapolate that all of China must be the same – with abortions being performed daily in all the hospitals in China and where women and children are abused hourly.
I ask you simply, anticsrocks, have you ever been to China? Have you ever met and become acquainted with a normal, run-of-the-mill Chinese from the mainland who is in the US as a student or as a visitor. Most of the Chinese I know have little use for their government but historically are better off than any Chinese in the history of China and that covers over 4000 years of continuous civilization.
Yeh, I thought you had not, yet you cling to your little beliefs as if you have lived and worked in the evil country of China. Demons! Demons! Why do we need demons in order to function politically?
Once again, I am only sharing my experiences and thus they are only opinions.
BTW who is this Larry? Is he openid.aol.com/runnswim?
Your insistence that China is a communist country economically bends the definition of communism to breaking. The majority of businesses in China are privately owned and very much capitalist. Cities all across China have thriving individually owned stores run by mom and pop. Take a trip there to see for yourself. Read what you want. Believe what you want. China is a capitalist country with profit making at the lowest level of business activity to the highest level. It is not a centrally planned economy but a market driven economy. Does not matter what the NY Times states nor does it matter what the CIA Fact Books say. Capitalism is the driving force behind the rapid growth of China – now the second largest economy in the world (which IMHO is totally meaningless).
I have visited China several times and know Chinese people. Surprisingly, China is a somewhat lawless society compared to the U.S. – the Chinese can pretty much do what they want as long as they don’t cross someone in a position of authority. That’s a big “if.” There is a code of silence about political matters. If you want to see the dark side of their society, try shooting your mouth off about the system or the government. I didn’t of course – I didn’t want to bring trouble down on people who had been pretty decent to me.
And there is plenty of corruption in China; life in the countryside is different from life in the city. Many rural areas are run by corrupt government officials. Much of the oppression in China occurs at the local level and is for monetary rather than political reasons.
It is not accurate to call China a capitalist country. Mercantilist crony capitalism harnessed by a socialist ruling class would be closer to the truth.
Individual Chinese are varied like anywhere else. Many fine people there, some not so fine people. But other nations and their interests do not deal with individual Chinese. They deal with the machinery of the Chinese government.
I am sure that a visit to Japan in 1935 would have produced many memorable encounters with individual Japanese. And that would have been irrelevant to the coming conflict, which was not set in motion by individuals but by their government.
@Wm T Sherman
Most of what you wrote is accurate from my experiences. Would disagree with your concept of capitalism and China. The biggest majority of economic activity occurs at the small business level (you surely saw all the small shops run by families in your visits that mirror what happens in Western and modern capitalist economic countries). Most of these small business people are not politically active and are earning money to live on. Capitalism in its purest form. The big moneyed corporations are heavily endowed with corruption and the ruling elite. Believe this to be accurate and if you cannot call these small businesses capitalist then you cannot call the same type of business in the US capitalist either.
China, the last time I checked was in the bottom as one of the five most corrupt countries in the world. What the heck, Thailand is also in that mix as well! Corruption is a way of life and it is not subtle as it is here in Thailand. So, I pretty much agree with the overall theme of what you wrote.
Comparing Japan of 1935 with China of today is too much of a stretch for me. The Japanese felt they had been cheated by the outcome of WWI and pretty well turned inwardly and away from Western ways and trade. Once again, the importance of trade cannot be underestimated. Japan was striving toward self reliance and thus resources became a critical part of the reason for their aggression. This does not apply to China, economically, socially or politically. I do not believe that China is the major threat militarily as some would have us believe. That does not mean I do not think she is a threat – just not the evil demon that so many would have her be.
BTW, tell me the difference between the Obama Administration of “mercantilist crony capitalism harnessed by a socialist ruling class” and that of the Chinese. BTW, in a real communist economy and society there can be no capitalism. Most conservatives have no concept of what it means to be a real communist. The elites in the government of China could call themselves social democrats, national socialists or even royalist and would not have to change a thing. They are just a bunch of elites in a ruthless organization similar to Nazis, baathist and any number of authoritarian structured regimes.
I often questioned my students concepts of socialism, communism and capitalism as well as the “sensitivity” of the Taiwan issue and had no problems. The university in which I was teaching was not a hot bed of propaganda but was like any university I have taught or attended. Truth seemed to be the underlying goal. We even celebrated Christmas, Easter and Halloween and had a ball without any problems (although I had heard rumors that I may have had special dispensation because I got along with everyone and was involved in everything that had to do with English on campus). Thanks for responding to my humble opinions.
@Chill:
There’s a major difference between being forced to something and freely doing something of your own freewill and if you don’t understand the difference your a progressive of the worst sort.
@Chill: Asked and answered in one breath? You have a very inflated opinion of yourself to do that.
I concur with PurpleDragon’s assessment of your stance on this issue.
Economy aside, chill – you still think China is not communist?
@PurpleDragon: Good point.
One older Chinese lady bought a condo where I live.
Her grown daughter visits her from time to time.
The daughter lost her only child in a school that collapsed during an earthquake in China.
She and her husband were among those parents told they could go ahead and have another child if they wanted to.
Gee, thanks government.
One little problem.
Every one of the mothers who lost a school-age child that day had already been made sterile by surgery after their childbirth.
OOPS.
We don’t do that to women in FREE countries.
Chill, if the average Japanese person in 1935 thought they had been cheated by the outcome of WW1, it was because this message had been drummed into them as a matter of government policty.
And if you think the traditional suspicion with which Chinese regard foreigners is a thing of the past, then you were not paying attention. There is a strong streak of nationalistic paranoia in many Chinese and it will come out under the right circumstances. And like Imperial Japan, it is encouraged as a matter of government policy.
Regarding capitalism — a hole-in-the-wall shoemaking shop in any third world country would fit your definition of capitalism. So what. The capitalism we care about in other countries has production that feeds into or otherwise influences international trade, or else we would not care about it. China does not protect intellectual property from piracy and does not always recognize patents. If you want to sell advanced manufactured items in China you have to set up production there and share technology. They sell to us and don’t want us selling to them. These activities are not recognizable capitalism as we practice it in the West. The storefront capitalism you are talking about is invisible unless you travel there as a tourist.
Consider Viagra. The patent for Viagra was submitted in China in immaculate form, compliant with the law in every way. The Chinese government then changed the patent law and ex post facto announced that the Viagra application did not qualify under the new version of the law and was null and void. The Chinese now manufacture Viagra, somebody else’s invention, and pay no royalty. The issue was clearly the money to be made; their greed made any pretense of obeying the law go out the window.
China has built entire complete cities in the desert that stand empty. Nobody lives there except a few caretakers. http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-chinese-ghost-cities-2010-12
This sort of massive misallocation of resources happens in a command economy, not a market economy. That our own government is increasingly squandering funds on large scale unneeded projects such as high speed rail does not detract from this point; it underscores how stupid this sort of thing is. The scale of the waste and market distortion in China is still something that our would-be socialist overlords in this country only aspire to.
China’s distorted economy is going to crash. They can paper over the cracks for a while, but it’s coming. And the coming disaster there is not due to capitalism or a free market – it is due to the unimportance of these things in China.
I feel so sorry for any liberal who tried to back up Biden’s words for him.
Obama (Finger-to-the-wind) isn’t:
The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization,” Biden’s spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff told The Daily Caller in an email. “The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant.”
Biden came under fire for comments he made during appearance at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, in which he said that he would “not second-guess” the nation’s one-child policy. That policy has resulted in sterilizations and abortions on a large scale.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/23/obama-administration-attempts-to-clarify-bidens-one-child-policy-comments/#ixzz1VtOOXUMD
Rick Perry:
John Boehner:
Mitt Romney:
The reason behind the one-child policy is an earlier Chinese govenment policy – Chairman Mao promoted having as many children as possible to create a massive population as a bulwark against foreign invasion. It was epic ignorant stupidity, like the “Kill the Birds” campaign and the backyard steel-making furnace campaign, only bigger and far more destructive. In the modern world, massive population does not confer military power.
@Wm T Sherman:
An excellent book that pretty much covers what you are writing about is Poorly Made in China. Their is no way that I would ever invest one dime in China because of the ridiculous and corruption system the Chinese have developed to suck money into the pockets of their elites. Every large investment made by a Western firm has government elites involvement.
As you stated, governments deal with governments and not individuals. On the other side, individuals deal with individuals and I am an individual. I think you are completely wrong about your references to the lonely shoe shop in a third world country . The people I dealt with daily were not lonely shoe shop owners but owners of a wide range of businesses that would mirror what one finds in the West.
Granted I was in rural China but the ancient trading post where I lived had 700,000 people and the closest city, about thirty minutes away, had 4 million people. You believe that the government does not care about these millions and millions of small business owners! They are the driving force behind the growth of the economy since most of the people of China live in rural areas like the one I lived. The government is just squandering the growth on stupid projects so they can put a “greatness face” for their corrupt rule. Once again, I can only relay what I experienced dealing with the local Chinese that I befriended.
Yes, I am conflicted by what I experienced in China and what I read prior to going to China. I did not meet people who portrayed the traditional animosity against foreigners as you think is encouraged by the government. In fact, I found the exact opposite.
While traveling along the Silk Road from Xian to Kashi, I met a high school student in Tianshui at a KFC who told me he loved America and what it stood for. On that trip, we constantly met Chinese who were eager to get to know us because we were Americans. We also met a tour guide in Xian who rambled on and on how he loved the ideas of freedom and justice represented by the United States. In all my travels across China, I only had one bad experience and that was from a bread maker who was drunk out of his mind and wanted to attack me because I was foreign. His friends apologized for him and said he was too drunk to know what he was doing.
Too many students have studied in the US for one to think that the Chinese are going to end up like the Japanese and hating all things foreign and all foreigners. I did not experience such a thing and doubt if it even exists in modern day China.
BTW, Zhuhai is one of those ghost cities that was built several years ago and still has very few people living there. The locals call the development The City Of Heaven because only fairies have taken up residence.
The point of all my writing is simply to point out that China is probably not the China of Western propaganda. It can easily be divided into nine separate economic regions with each region having separate governing powers and societies. Yes, the government is a brutal dictatorship but, as you rightly point out, will not bother you if you are no threat to their power. This is why Christians (or any other unauthorized groupings) get into trouble when they try to meet as a large group. The governing elites no how successful peasant revolutions have been in the past.
Isn’t it amazing how some people would prefer to resort to personal attacks when they disagree with an opinion?
@Chill: You said:
You mean like this?