ARTICLE: "China Presses Grieving Parents to Take Hush Money on Quake," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 24 July 2008, p. A1.
In America, the parental grief would be allowed to rage on in the media, then in governmental hearings, and finally in civil courts. The end money transfer would be higher, but in relative terms, in the same zip code in terms of burden to those who paid. Possibly, if true criminal negligence was discovered, someone would go to jail. Laws might be tightened or changed, as would regulated inspections.
In short, both the grief and guilt would be processed to the fullest extent of the law. Society, in the end, would find grim satisfaction.
By trying to pay hush money, the Chinese Communist Party tries to short-circuit all this, reducing both their leadership and their legitimacy.
It is a bad, stupid, short-sighted process that answers nobody's needs in the end.
And it'll piss people off, because it tells them that their own government prefers to hide its mistakes rather than do better by the people. It says the Party's fears for its own survival outweigh the loss of the parents.
That's not "Chinese." That's just plain wrong in any culture.
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Comments (1)
They need the institutions to make the process happen. I don't think they have them, or what they have cannot work in a fashion similar to our system. You need all the stuff authoritarian regimes avoid -- independent courts, independent press, political parties that really go after each other, several layers of government which are accountable to the public and to each other, basically honest machinery like building inspectors and recorders of deeds, lawyers who can take cases to court and pursue them without getting harassed or worse. It is tough to get all this stuff in place. It took us centuries. The Chinese are doing an incredible job on the narrowly economic and technical side. Now they need to do things on the less tangible, less obvious, and at-least-as-difficult institutional, legal, political and constitutional side. At least they don't have to start from scratch. They can look at what works in the rest of the world. Hernando de Soto could give them a very good seminar on much of this stuff, for example. I wish them well. They face a very hard challenge.
Posted by Lexington Green | August 5, 2008 6:50 PM