The Bright Side of China 1

As I'm about to move back to China, I realized that it's time for me to get used to the Chinese way again. Actually I was never able to get used to it even since I was kid, but now that I learned more about the world, I can put everything in context and look at it more rationally.

So today I read a piece of news about a young man who was shot dead by the police. According to the many witnesses at the scene, the young man was attached by a mafia, he escaped and asked the people around to call the police. A group police did come, but for some reason, instead of protecting this young man, they shot him dead.

This may sound bad, but we have to put it in context. Not many years ago, there were incidents in which the police shot hundreds of people, intentionally. This time, it's just one person, and the policeman probably was not even intentional.

What happened next is a little hard for me to swallow. The police published a statement saying that this young man was on drug, and he was attacking the police with a knife. But according to the witnesses, this young man was severely injured, had no weapon and was asking for the police right before he was shot. Even if he was a criminal, given that he has no gun and the policemen are fully armed, it wasn't necessary for the policeman to shot him. So how could the police lie so blatantly? I almost felt anger. But then I remind myself, if this happened 10 years ago, the witnesses wouldn't even dare to speak and we wouldn't even be able to reading the news about it. In addition, one of my favorite poets also took a bullet from the police during the Maoist era, her mother had to pay for the bullet that killed her daughter according to the Chinese law. This young man at least got a free bullet.

Thus, we can see signs of progress toward more openness and justice in this incident.

I  will  write more  on this subject later. But  here is a quick note on the milk powder crisis. Yes, it's quite bad  thousands of  babies  are sick because of the contaminated milk produced by state protected milk companies. But don't forget just 50 years ago during the big famine caused by bad policies, babies were not poisoned, but they were often eaten. So this is not really a bad time for Chinese babies from a historical perspective.

Writing like this really helps me to remain optimistic about my country.