If you live in a country where the media is controlled, where the Internet is censored, where dissent is crushed brutally, where the walls have ears and where your freedoms are so constrained that your every action can be reported on, you have to ask serious questions about how your government can allow several thousand boys be taken and held as slaves and not know anything about it.
2 comments:
China is a strange connundrum. On the one level you are right. There is a certain degree of strong central control. However, although China is authoritarian it is certainly not totalitarian and the two should not be confused.
What has happened in Shanxi and Henan is highly likely to be corrupt local officialdom (both at local government level and within the police, who, some elements of which would have been well aware of what was going on but probably getting some kind of rake off to turn a blind eye.
It is very unlikely that such goings on would have happened in Beijing though. The Central Government has been keeping a strong watch over Beijing for a while now since a Mayor was sacked for corruption a couple of years ago.
The Communist regime is still too authoritarian and there are serious questions about whether the Chinese Government is keeping its human rights promises made in its bid for the Olympics. You should always bear in mind an old Chinese saying when analysing China: "Tian gao, huangdi yuan". The sky is high and the Emperor is far away. The further away you are from Central Government control the more likely you are to see such episodes. Shanxi is a backwater of China so what has happened is shocking but not surprising to old China hands.
I'm surprised it was allowed to be shown on TV in China.
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