Bill wrote:
In my response to Maggie Coleman's post of the NYT article about the
"slaughter of girl babies" in China I said the one-child policy was
reactionary, but that one-sided reports were no better. By one-sided
reports I meant those that ignored other plausible explanations for the
recorded gap in the number of girls and boys, explanations that the
anti-communist, anti-chinese and anti-choice lobbies like to *avoid*.
I am no expert on demography or China. I just think that recognizing the
political context of these kinds of reports is the beginning of wisdom.
Steve wrote:
Thanks Bill for the thoughtful reply. When I first read Maggie's response
and the rather bizarre ad hominems that came with it, I couldn't help but
wonder if this kind of exchange would have been possible on a left
political economy list even ten years ago. With the downfall of the
Soviet Union, it seems that many assume the cold war to be over, or the
rules by which it was played to have changed substantively. As a result,
the source of information and whether or not it's likely to be tainted by
US foreign policy needs seems also to be less and less something that
liberal and even left scholars critically interrogate (as Bill did so well
in his response to this article).
In Hawaii China's human rights violations is a favorite pet cause of
liberals who fashion themselves to be quite progressive. This to me is
particularly problematic, not because China does not have a human rights
problem, but because one would like to think that activists in the States
would want to give their time and energy to raising awareness about (much
graver) violations of human rights in countries that do not appear on the
front page of the NYT as topics of human rights discourse (Indonesia,
Turkey, Israel...).
In early 1997, Harry Wu came to speak at the University of Hawaii. He gave
a public talk for $9 per person!! The guy is a blatant fraud, but liberals
and progressives here just can't believe that someone who talks human
rights is insincere, or god forbid very right wing. Recall all the
utterly naive hopes progressives placed in Lech Walesa.
It is not so upsetting that liberals don't get it. But one would expect
better of lefties including Coleman. You might wish the cold war was
over, but yes it is very possible that liberal sounding rhetoric about
oppressed "slaughtered" women might very well be funded by some very
reactionary (even anti-choice, anti-feminist) institutions. Even in this
day and "Post-cold war" age.
