China

[burgunder]

Did you know ...

... couples were required to seek permission from their employers before getting married?
... a Chinese citizen could not apply for a passport without his or her boss' permission?
... Chinese could not travel to Hong Kong or Macao unless they were in a tour group?

These things have just started changing. I didn't even know China

Comments

Evil Empires or the legacy of Mao

[staxxy]

I did know that actually. I also have know that if you of Tibettan decent you are not allowed to marry another person of Tibettan decent.

It always amazes me how much finger pointing is done at Hitler when none is ever done at Mao. He set up laws that will systematically destroy the entire Tibettan race, permanently. It is appalling.

and, yeah... I can go on about the horrors of China and their government for days, but I will be nice and stop here.

Watch Kundun. buy a couple of boxes of tissues before you do. a COUPLE of boxes.

[vulture23]

I heard about this on NPR this morning.

I also heard a bit, last night, about the recent upsurge in weddings in Iraq. It seems that, before May, the permission of Hussein's intelligence agency was required in order to get married. Now, people are free to have the weddings that were arranged for them by their families two decades ago....

I suspect that most Americans and Western Europeans don't quite realize what oppression really means, and don't really appreciate the level of freedom that we do have.

[thepresident]

yeah China's human rights suck.

[burgunder]

Hello, Alyce. Do you live in Seattle?

I've thought about that, too. About the orphanages. Given some of the foster horror stories I've heard (and plenty of good ones, too, they're not all horror stories), I wonder what the trade off is between individual attention and orphanages. Because attention is such the two-way sword...

[asterothx]

There's a reason they had gunpowder, paper etc. hundreds and hundreds of years ago and did little but make fireworks and a few arrows with it. I'm talking about the very limited capitalization upon the great discoveries they made. Bureaucracy! Whopping bureaucracy designed to keep you right in the little pigeon hole created for you for the greater order of society. You were born a farmer and thats what you were going to be... didn't like it? Commit suicide. The mongols made the first cannons though the chinese invented the gunpowder first. The chinese invented the compass in the first century Anno Domini, but had all but forgotten about it when europeans brought it around in the 16th century.
IMHO it was the lack of freedom for the common man to leave the path set up for them and test their ambition that allowed the great thinking and experimenting to often go nowhere.

Freedom isn't organized or pretty, but I'm a big fan of it /grin