Watching China

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TODAY'S POST

This op-ed piece in the New York Times -- printed just days after the almost unfathomable suffering in Sichuan -- is more than just shocking. It is like a dagger in the spine.

Ostensibly a discussion of technological advances throughout Chinese history, which China has failed to employ for the benefit of its people, the author, Simon Winchester, turns to the real point of his essay in the penultimate paragraph:

China, in its headlong attempts to modernize, has often demonstrated a dismayingly cavalier attitude toward the well-being of its people: skyscrapers are built with little attention to safety standards and are invariably far from earthquake-resistant; huge dams — not least the monstrosity that has so ruined the Three Gorges of the Yangtze — are erected in a slapdash fashion; subways, like the system burrowing through the waterlogged alluvium beneath Shanghai, are built with incautious haste; freeway tunnels are bored through earthquake fault zones.

While all that is asserted in this paragraph may be true, it is a deliberate low blow coming at a time of extraordinary weakness. Does anyone deserve such haughty academic criticism when their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers, are smote with undeserved disaster? Where is your heart, man? For what purpose, this op-ed? To influence policy?

[Listen to Melissa Block of National Public Radio report on-site from Sichuan here.]

The editorial staff of the New York Times needs a significant dressing down for its cruelty. If you agree, send an e-mail to Clark Hoyt, the public editor: public (at) nytimes.com

UPDATE (May 16, 2008)

Gordon Chang himself joins the fray. Shameful.

It is shocking enough that a Chinese national, rather than an American, won the commission to sculpt the body of Martin Luther King. Even more outrageous that the model of the sculpture is fashioned in Changsha.

But look at it! An aggressive, unsympathetic posture -- arms crossed! Not representative of the inspirational Reverend leader, but of a Communist war-hero. What a horror!

A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too "confrontational" and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

This commission should be taken away from the sculptor and awarded to someone who understands, in the American context, the value and meaning of the movement for equal rights and Martin Luther King's place in it.

Amid concerns for terrorism during the Olympics, the cause of this explosion is as yet uncertain.

A woman on the bus is quoted as having said, "“车门刚刚打开，突然就闻到一股怪味，然后车厢当中一个座位烧起来了。”" [ Editor's translation: The door of the bus had just opened and suddenly I smelled a strange odor, and then a seat in the center of the bus burst into flame.]

Spontaneous combustion of a passenger or something more sinister? A trial run?