The Diplomad, a blog written by a current or, maybe now, retired U. S. foreign service officer, has returned to the blogosphere. A quick perusal of some of the recent posts found what is to me the best wisecrack I’ve read in a while:
…I have found it impressive over the years to see how China has transformed itself from a poor, brutal authoritarian police state into a poor, brutal, authoritarian police state with large foreign currency reserves.
Objectively, I think it’s understating the actual changes that have taken place in China. I genuinely believe that the average Chinese is better off today than he or she was, say, thirty years ago. But better is not to say good and IMO the China bulls tremendously overestimate how much China has actually liberalized. See the remainder of the linked post for examples of the sort of thing I mean.
Let’s see, when Deng took over there were about 900,000,000 Chinese living in abject poverty. There’re about 900,000,000 living in abject poverty now, too. But there are also 400,000,000 now living the good life, so I guess on average things are better….
As I say better isn’t good.
Americans are still adopting children in China. France, not so much. As a general rule when foreigners are adopting and expatriating your children, you’re not a thriving society.
It’s the perverse One Child Policy. Couples may dump a first girl child if they get a boy on the second try.
Americans are still adopting children in China.
I sure hope that none were liberals.
As a general rule when foreigners are adopting and expatriating your children, you’re not a thriving society.
Why, there oughta be a law!!!!!! No foreign adoptions until all American born children available for adoption are adopted.
TangoMan:
Kids up for adoption come from poor communities. In the US that means more African-American kids. When we looked at adopting we considered US adoption. Our resistance was nothing to do with race — the impediment was open adoption laws. We no longer guarantee confidentiality in this country — a mistake in my opinion.
So we adopted in China.
Before you decide that we were looking for a little Asian prodigy, we put in for what is called a ‘special needs’ adoption. This probably violates your Marxist notion that we are required to use our resources in the most productive way, but we’re happy about it.