Many in RCS know me as a contrarian when it comes to popular viewpoints on China and Asia.
Some popular held beliefs: China is not environmentally friendly China's record of human rights is atrocious compared to the West
Here are my contrarian beliefs:
companies that choose to open factories in China, do decide what quality of products they wish to produce, and also what environmental technologies they choose ask for
when the Chinese government decided to build the three gorges dam, they were widely criticized for relocating a few people away from their ancestral lands, did anyone consider the amount of coal / gas that would be reduced? Yeah, it is harsh, but which priority takes precedence?
many years ago now, when I was a young-un, the Chinese economy was quite closed to the west. At the beginning of China opening up, my father visited his eldest sisters for the first time in his life. The whole world, including Asia and China, believed that Chinese citizens were being deprived, or were suffering human rights injustices because they did not have a television set and car to drive.
there was huge international pressure for the Communist nation to open up its markets and politics to become a democracy and industrialized nation. The Chinese citizens that my parents saw, were in no way poor, and they visited not the main city centers, but a farming region. They had shelter and more than enough food.
Unfortunately due to the likes of Edward Bernays, democracy has become intrinsically linked with industrialization and thus environmental degradation.
China has just begin to match the United States for CO2 emissions. Yes their cities look a lot more polluted because there are more people in a concentrated region. However, per capita North Americans still outdo their asian and european counterparts by large factors.
do the math the population in China is 1.3 billion, whereas the United States has 300 million. Therefore Chinese citizens have just started to pollute at the rate of 1/4 of an average North American.
and we in the West, encourage industrialization?
the truth is that the West, is out of ideas. They force what they consider to be the best way of doing things, i.e. democracy and industrialization, without realizing the consequences.
The West is depending on China to come up with a solution to have an equivalent standard of living at 1/10th of the pollution, but North America does not know how to do that itself.
Don't even get me started on Tibet, people want to preserve a serfdom and despot? What is wrong with that picture? Western ideals of racial purity and segregation have caused the most bloody feuds all across the world, wherever they are introduced.
contrarian opinions
China is not environmentally friendly
China's record of human rights is atrocious compared to the West
Here are my contrarian beliefs: