(Photo:  AP)

It is so very easy to see this world of ours solely from our corner of it.  We all learned about our nation’s history as a melting pot, a place for people all around the world to come and have a chance at freedom and success.

Some of those places were bad placed, nations who were self-proclaimed enemies of ours, nations who took a different path than ours, nations whose people had less human rights than ours, nations who looked and spoke and lived differently than we do.

China is one of those lands.  The country has been flipped on its head since I first visited Beijing in 1994.  Very few Westerners visited then; in fact, you could count the number of Western hotels in Beijing on one hand.  I wasn’t a very experienced traveler, so all of it was a bit bewildering for me.  I made the good decision to have a young engineer give me a tour in and around Beijing, and so we saw Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.  My favorite memory of that trip was going to a ceramic factory, where entire families of grandparents and parents and children made beautiful vases and other items.  They hand-bent slivers of tin and brass to create the ornate designs then filled these patterns with whatever you use to make such things.  We still have the vase which I brought back from that trip.

I’ve been back probably ten times since then, traveling to the big cities as well as into the rural areas outside of Shanghai.  The one thing about this land that has stayed with me since my first trip there was just how many people a billion people is (now 1.3bil, I believe).  Every conceivable contraption that can have a minimum of two wheels is driven or ridden on impossible paths and roads and highways to carry impossible loads of stuff from here to there.

We’ve been led to believe that this is a country of evil people, a Communist country at one time looking to conquer Southeast Asia unless we prevented it.  I’ve never been much of a revisionist historian, and I do not fault the slippery slope that led us to the Korean War and to Vietnam.  Our logic was based on the domino theory, that if one of these countries slipped into China’s grip, then the entire region would eventually capitulate.

I must admit I am only recently learning about what’s going on in Darfur and China’s role in blocking UN efforts to take action on the government there.  China has invested significantly in the oil industry in the Sudan, and this is an example of their policy to go directly after raw materials procurement at the source rather than buying on the open market.

So, it’s easy to compartmentalize a nation of evil people led by evil men and women who have zero human rights, a nation of foreigners speaking multiple languages with so many people that they even manipulate the birth rate and skew the percentage of boys born due to their One Child program.

(Photo:  Getty Images)

Yes, it’s easy until you see that the tears of a child in China who has lost her mother are no different than the tears of a child in Birmingham who has lost his father.  35,000 people lost, a number that may grow to 50,000 among a people of 1.3 billion.  Then 158 relief workers die in a mudslide as they frantically care for those injured and mourning and in shock.

And you see that the people of China place as much value on each life lost as we do.  Their nation mourns, and their leaders are faced with challenges that seem overwhelming.  5,000,000 people left homeless?  That would be all people in Minnesota or Colorado told to get out of their homes immediately.

As I head to grab lunch, I am struck by this question:  am I connected to any of this?  Do the tears of that young girl, do they fall on my cheek?  And should they?

Tags: china, darfur, earthquake relief

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under Governing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.