call me if a facist, if you will. i've given this some thought and came to the conclusion that ten years of human rights violations by a country isn't such a bad thing.

take china for example and its human rights violations. they've been attacked left and right by groups like amnesty, human rights watch, the UN, the US, the EU, i could go on. china has been called out on all sorts of things; torture, forced confessions, forced labour, limited freedom of speech, no assembly rights, its approach to tibetan autonomy. again, i could go on. these are things we've known about for years but do little more than issue reports condemning the nation and while china doesn't ignore their violations; they see things as improving but in the meantime certain measures are needed to protect safety and social stability. basically, china is telling the world; look we know we treat our people like crap but us some slack, we provide you with inexpensive crap, you don't want us to cut that off do you? no one is exactly making full blown effort to make china commit to international standards of human rights at the expense of economic losses.

and things are improving no doubt. as the american economic empire is beginning to show cracks and crumble from within, red china is emerging as the new economic superpower with its cheap products and cheap labour. in turn, china's society is facing unprecedent social mobility and continued economic growth for china will require greater personal freedom and restraint by the state. whether continued growth can occur within the single-party communist state is debatable. can capitalism and state-control function together? can full political control while continiously relaxing economic regulations sustain the people's republic of china? most would say no. economics and politics go hand-in-hand and you cannot change one without affecting the other. china has managed to strike a balance between the ideas and compromise both to a certain extent.

but the idea of human rights violations being good for china gives them the ability to pretty much do what it wants to its people. biomedical technology is the way of the future. while in the states, bush is severely putting limits of things like stem-cell research which are being used in the exploration of cures for conditions such as parkinson's, diabetes, and blindness among others. the states have chosen to dramatically politicize what is a scientific issue and drastically limit what biotechnological companies and research labs can do. in the long run, the nation is shooting itself in the foot by controlling the scientific community. the rest of the world appears to be embracing this research with greatest spending by the likes of sweden, israel, netherlands, uk, south korea, and even brazil jumping on board. and of course, china.

china enjoys an advantage over the rest of the world in that its human rights conditions are suitable for crude forms of research. while the brits have to be cautious and try stuff on rats or place petty newspaper ads for the lowly to get paid to be drugged up with all sorts of unknown chemicals, china can pull anyone off the street into its labs. the limits of their forms of research are ultimately, well, limitless. is it right though? from our perspective, certaintly not. by no means, should we advocate clamping down on human rights in the name of scientific research. in the states, the republicans take issues with embroynic cells being used for research so people being rounded up into labs will probably never happen. and nor should it.

so amnesty or whoever can issue all the reports it wants about human right violations but nothing is going to change in china without overwhelming international pressure. giving beijing the 2008 olympics may have been some vague pseudo-political attempt by the international community to make china more transparent to the rest of the world. maybe the attention of the nearing olympics will expose the social conditions of the chinese but who knows. in the meantime, china will continue to grow into the new economic hegemonic empire because its conditions are ripe for such expansion.

shit luck for the rest of us