Discrimination
I often hear quite a lot of comments about racial chauvinism, racism, and lack of understanding when people make criticisms of China. But wouldn't a failure to criticize also be a crime in itself? I translated the essay below by a prominent Chinese author currently in the US, cuz i feel it sheds some light on this subject. A Different Type of Discrimination by the International Community Towards China- 3heng Y1 Hu P--g once took note of a very interesting phenomenon: the international community is quick to attack the United States for “overuse of the death penalty,” but turns a blind eye to the ruthless use of such practices in China. His explanation was: cruelness and inhumanity is the regular state of affairs in China, so people feel there is no use in even bothering to bring this up. His conclusion: this is a different type of discrimination against the Chinese people than that which the go----ment usually mentions. I agree, as people will always have different standards for the behavior of a gentleman and that of a hooligan. According to a Xinhua report from Washington, “data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that there are over 2 million people serving prison and jail sentences in the United States. According to documents prepared by the British gov---ment, this exceeded the amount of prisoners in all other countries, including Russia, ranking first in the world.” By the time I got to this part of the report, I started feeling a little suspicious: what does “all other countries, including Russia” mean? What about China, who accounts for half of the executions in the world one year after another? We Chinese citizens aren’t even qualified to be included amongst “other countries”? Wouldn’t you say this is a form of discrimination? According to Hong Kong’s Chen--ing magazine, the Chinese judiciary recently reported to the Pol---uro the number of citizens interrogated and detained last year in criminal and economic cases came to 1.513 million. Now let’s make a rough estimate (there was no data available on average sentences): if the average sentence was 3 years, then at least 2.3 million people would be in jail at once; while if the average sentence was 4 years, this number would go way beyond 3 million. Don’t forget to take note of the fact that this does not yet include the massive population in “jail with Chinese characteristics”- the system of reform through l--or. Also take into consideration the fact that official publicized statistics in China are… shall we say, less than reliable? The number of people trapped in the judicial system may in fact be much higher than the statistics above show. For example, according to a publicized report by the Supreme Court, there were over 1.5 million criminal cases in the country back in 1999, yet internal gov---ment reports at the time actually said there were 6.22 million such cases. That’s four times the publicized statistic! So do we need to multiply the numbers above by four? There’s simply no way to know for sure. There’s no doubt that when the British gov--ment named the country with the most prisoners in the world, they simply excluded China. Now this is the type of racism that gets my blood boiling! Unfortunately, this type of racism is everywhere you look. According to official estimates by the United Nations, there are over 4 billion mice around the globe, a number pretty close to the world’s population. But according to Beijing’s Evening News, there are nearly 4 billion mice in China, more than three times our country’s population. Obviously, the UN estimate left out China, depriving us of another sure “first place” in world rankings! Crows have no right to laugh at the fact that a boar is black, as crows are even darker themselves.
