I agree with Henry about Harry Wu. I think his attacks on Doug are based
on much less valid reasoning. Henry might not like Doug's critical
comments on aspects of China's labor regime, but Henry can't even bring
himself to acknowledge that Doug also is critical of the AFL-CIO's positin
on China...Fact is someone like Doug will listen to David Bacon or Bill
Tabb's arguments on China trade policy, but not think much of Henry's
arguments. Something about Bacon and Tabb's arguments are much more
persuasive, which counts for something when trying to convince people
about importan issues such as US-China trade policy...
Steve
On Wed, 29 Mar 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Steve Philion:
> >I agree with this text, of course. Note that the source is the same kind
> >of source that Henry has so passionately attacked Doug for using when
> >making criticisms of the labor regime in China. It's nice to see that it
> >is alright to quote from the beast after all when discussing China....
>
> But Henry is correct. There is an enormous propaganda offensive that is
> attempting to demonize the Chinese government. Although it comes from
> rightwing sources, it is used as a club by the liberal wing of the ruling
> class to extract concessions. Nobody in the west, from Clinton to Jesse
> Helms, gives a shit about human rights. We are much worse on prison labor
> than China. When Harry Wu goes around spreading lies, it allows Clinton to
> put pressure on China to accept trading terms less favorable than other
> countries who have much worse blemishes. You might think that the
> criticisms of Wu that I posted here and on the SR mailing list were easy to
> come by. They were not. I had to spend my entire lunch hour the other day
> finding material against him on Lexis-Nexis. (I had forgotten about the
> PEN-L post.) I kept doing searches on "Wu" and "exaggerations" or "Wu" and
> "inaccurate" until I found the 3 items that have found their way into email
> discussions. Keep in mind, however, that if you do a plain search on "Harry
> Wu", you will get back 904 hits. This means that for every 1 article
> telling the truth about this rightwing provocateur, you get 300 describing
> him as some kind of saint. No wonder there is so much Sinophobia going
> around on and off the Internet.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
>
>
