A widely circulated slogan on the internet in China these days reads:
For every wrong there is a perpetrator, and every debt a debtor.
(If you want a good fight) the government building is on the right.
For those of you who read Chinese, the original Chinese text is ”冤有头,债有主,前面右转是政府”.
A typical example of the political satire/ euphemism commonly found in present day China where reportedly over 30,000 internet police patrol the net around the clock, the rhyming slogan has been suggested to be hung in front of every kindergarten or grade school in China.
I am obviously referring to something that is already well covered in the media: during the 51 days from March 28th through May 12th, across China 5 atrocious knife attacks (China has a strict gun-ban) targeting young children in kindergarten and primary schools took place one after another. (In addition, there were at least two more separate attacks where the perpetrators killed family members or fellow villagers including young children.)
All middle-aged men, one of the attackers set himself on fire following the atrocity and was subsequently burnt to death, and one other was heard shouting “they don’t let me live so I won’t let them live either. Let’s die together!”
Like suicide bombers in the Middle East, they all seemed to want to make a statement with their actions.
While collectively the incidents helped, for the first time, put a spot light on a disturbing social trend with grave implications because they happened so close to each other, they were however not the first of such type of attacks where the attackers, in an attempt to inflict the maximum hurt and thus shock in the society, deliberately sought children’s blood to shed in order to revenge what had made their hearts bleed in the first place, be it grudges against others or injustice suffered.
And sadly many in China believe they won’t be the last either, for the root causes run down deep in China’s contemporary socio-politico-economic fabrics. Just consider the following fact and you will know something is terribly wrong with this society: China has the world’s highest female suicide rate. What’s more, it is higher than its male suicide rate, whereas the global male-to-female ratio is about 4:1…
But why children?
While universally all human societies place much emphasis on children’s welfare as their collective hope and future, in China children carry another layer of significance that is quite economically driven and thus pragmatic: the country’s long-followed “One-child Policy” — firmly in place since the late 70′s — has rendered the children one of the “most precious assets” here – this being in a nation where the “yin-and-yang” of everything has been fundamentally disrupted and increasingly consumed by a “Great Leap Forward” to chase the mighty Yuan.
Children also happen to be the most vulnerable and thus the easiest to attack (or ‘loot’).
I wrote in a previous post in March about how over a hundred children in Shanxi province reportedly either died or became retarded after receiving apparent bogus vaccines distributed by a government agency and the subsequent government cover-up/cencorship. What I did not know at the time however was that the whistle blower in the incident, a medium-ranking government public health administrator, as well as parents of victims subsequently received anonymous offers of ’silence fees’ and, as an alternative, threats of bodily harm.
(For those who read Chinese, here is a video showing how vaccacines are marketed and sold in China http://www.56.com/p62/v_OTgyODc2OTE.html. In a nutshell, they are casually traded in online classified forums like surplus industrial inventary with no regulatory oversight and with sales people suggesting “if you are concerned about whether it is fake or not, just do not use it on your own children”).
In 2004, 171 babies with severely swollen faces were admitted into hospitals in Fuyang, Anhui Province because they had been fed what turned out to be zero-nutrition baby formula produced by unscrupulous businesses across the country. Ultimately 13 of them died. The others were believed to have had irreversible damages to their brain and organ development.
Despite crackdowns by the government, in 2008 following the Olympics, the Chinese people learnt — due to (or perhaps rather thanks to) the pressure from the government of New Zealand – that one of the country’s leading discount baby formula (aka milk powder in Chinese) producers had been adding industrial melamine to boost its protein content reading in tests — in fact a tactic widely practiced by the whole industry in China, as it was later found. The number of infants affected was estimated to reach over 300,000, with close to 13,000 of them hospitalized and eventually 6 dying of kidney stones and other kidney damages, according to official accounts.
Following the scandal, the father of one of the victims’ was so enraged and concerned that he turned himself into an activist and started organizing other parents in making sure that justice would be served and that like incidents would not happen again in the future. He was eventually arrested and tried behind closed doors with his feet in chains — something that usually “adorns” death-row inmates, such as the former chief/deputy chief of the Justice Department/Police Force (respectively) of Chongqing who was recently sentenced to death as the “top dog” in last year’s crackdown of mafias there (please refer to my earlier post entitled “The Ancient Pigeon…”).
Also in 2008 right before the Olympics, thousands of school children died during the Sichuan earthquake when their shoddy — as partly evidenced by the skimpy steel usage revealed by the toppled buildings’ broken walls and uprooted posts – school buildings collapsed, often in the most harming way possible, i.e., with ceilings on each floor caving in. By stark contrast, most government office and residential buildings stood intact, in many cases literally next to the leveled school ones.
So when their surviving parents’ grievances and protests were silenced and their subsequent lawsuits thrown out, in the name of social harmony (he-xie — see my previous post entitled “The Ancient Pigeon”), reportedly the only thought on some of these parents’ mind was how to get guns and explosives…
Apparently what we are seeing here is just the tip of the iceberg (for more information on this, please refer to my earlier post entitled “China Looming Large: The Next Titanic, Or Mere Sandcastle”).
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(The text below was added on June 2, 2010 at 9:36 pm as a comment.)
“And sadly many in China believe they won’t be the last either…the only thought…was how to get guns…”
Sadly these came true yesterday. And apparently the advice from the “slogan” above was well heeded, too.
On the morning of June 1st (China time), another middle-aged man – a 46-year-old Zhu Jun stormed into the courtroom in Yongzhou, Hunan Province with a light automatic rifle and started shooting at the bench, killing 3 judges and wounding 3 other court employees, before taking his own life.
Zhu was the head of the security guards at the local postal office and he reportedly had a dispute with the local court over the fairness of the judgement on asset division in his divorce case.
