==+==+==+== C h i n e s e C o m m u n i t y F o r u m ==+==+==+=== Wednesday, March 2, 1994 (Issue No. 9409) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Chinese Community Forum (CCF) is a journal published on China-Net. CCF is dedicated to the discussion on the issues related to the Chinese community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the Editorial Board of CCF. Contributions to the discussions and suggestions of new topics are very much appreciated. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= # of Table of Contents Author | Lines ============================================================================ 1. The East and The West a. Two Great Traditions (Part 2)............................Wan Bin 118 b. Missionary and Cowboy Attitudes: --America's "Special Relationship" with China (Part 2)........J. K. Fairbank 95 2. Trade and Politics a. The China-MFN Controversy: The Case For Maintaining China's MFN Status (Part 1).............Grayson R. Robertson III 102 b. To Spur Human Rights, Spur Trade...................Business Week 62 3. Readers, Writers and Editors a. Prison Labor Does Not Equal To Forced Prison Labor........Al Jia 26 b. INMATE Jeans..........................................Jing Zhang 57 c. Response to Mr. Al Jia................................Daniel Qiu 49 4. Question Corner a. Questions on Prison Labor...............................Ning Luo 34 ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== From The Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last week, we brought you the first parts of two articles discussing the cultural, religious differences of the East and West and the relationship between China and America. This week, we continue to carry the two articles. On this weekend, a special edition of CCF will introduce an article written on the same issue by a Chinese student in this country. Meanwhile, the debate between trade and politics is continuing. A graduate student in the American University had a comprehensive study on the issue of China's Most Favored Nation trading status controversy. His article had been forwarded to the soc.culture.china newsgroup previously. We will carry his article on in this and the coming two issues. Recently, the Vice President of IFCSS testified in the US Congress for conditional-MFN to China. We are interested in your thoughts and reaction. Last week, Mr. Daniel Qiu adapted an ABC News program for CCF. His article has drawn reactions from different sides of the argument. We carry two readers messages here as well as Mr. Qiu's response to one of them. Question Corner is a new column of our Chinese Community Forum. Our readers are invited to submit your questions or your discussions to the posted questions. In this week, in light of the discussion around the prison labor products, Mr. Ning Luo asks some quite arguable questions. Please submit your answers to his questions to: ccf-editor@ifcss.org. ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 1. The East and The West 1a. Two Great Traditions (Part 2)............................Wan Bin 118 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Continued from last issue) To illustrate this difference, let us imagine two classical pictures: a Western figure painting and a Chinese wash painting. In the latter, the landscape often occupies almost the whole space with one or several figures relegated into obscurity. A Western connoisseur might misunderstand the overall arrangement as a suppression of individuality. On the other hand, the nimbus around the head of a beautiful medieval or Renaissance figure often puzzles the Chinese mind. The setting is beautiful, so is the figure. But what is the point of that small halo, a visual cliche'? A readily found explanation is Western superstition. If only both sides would understand that appreciation of different mysteries demands different perspectives as well as different imaginations! However, from the Chinese point of view, the challenge of Christian transcendency is more than an image of unfamiliar beauty. The relevance of Christian transcendency to the general orientation of Western philosophy and modern intellectual life cannot be overestimated. Kant, in his "Critique of Pure Reason", where he is concerned with modern epistemology or scientific knowledge, denies transcendent knowledge, that is, knowledge which goes beyond the limit of experience. Such knowledge belongs to the noumenon, the thing-in-itself, or, to use the Christian expression, God. But in his "Critique of Practical Reason", Kant tells us that moral thought and in particular considerations about human freedom demand reference to a noumenal self. Hence a famous Kantian principle of man as the end, never only as the means. It is on this transcendent speculation that modern liberal thinkers have built various arguments about the freedom of the individual which constitute the starting point of Western political philosophy. Can we understand this Kantian "categorical imperative" without a sense of transcendency? Is it not true that Christian transcendency has in the past two thousand years cultivated an intellectual atmosphere whose impact upon modern society transcends religion itself? The relevance of transcendency to the natural sciences is equally important. Always pointing to the infinite, it acts as a force which constantly drives human imagination and creativity forward. It is said that the Chinese mind is capable of creating or absorbing new technology but is not so efficient in creating or internalizing new science. I would not go as far as that, but history has proved that the remark is not without foundation. It takes transcendency as well as abstraction to make a scientific mind. Unfortunately, in everyday Chinese conversation and in the mass media, science and technology are not differentiated. This matches another confusion: the equation of religion and superstition. When we discuss the Western tradition, we Chinese are often confronted with a seemingly inexplicable dichotomy between the moral man and the intellectual man, a distinction first made by Matthew Arnold who referred to the two elements involved as, respectively, "the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism". This gives the misleading impression that the Greek mind is concerned with "What-Is" while the Christian mind, like that of Confucius, is oriented towards "What-Ought-To-Be". I would argue that "What-Is" characteristic of both the Greek and the Christian traditions. Like Aristotle's "substance", God as a category is characterized by three priorities: knowledge priority--God is the Absolute truth or the subject and purpose of understanding; definition priority--God is the definition or the subject in terms of logic while all the others are predicates; and time priority--God is the Being independent of and determinant of all other beings. Without this combination of epistemology, logic and ontology as a prerequisite, Christian love and good works are meaningless. Modern Chinese intellectuals feel sympathy for Christian charity and works but many of them reject god as a term imagined through superstition. In the past ten years or so many of them have talked loudly about the importance of "transforming the traditional thought pattern", but what they mean by "thought pattern" has turned out to be economic, political or moral ideas. While they have been busy introducing Western ideas to replace Chinese ones, they have actually paid little attention to the thought pattern which supports those ideas. Thus we have a coin with two sides: Cathayan centricity on one side and wholesale Westernization on the other. This is the inevitable result of a three-thousand-year long tradition in which epistemology has yet to come to maturity. Doubtless, Christianity also experienced domination by What-Ought-To-Be. For more than a thousand years, the spirit of the Church ruled the Western mind. It monopolized the interpretation of the Bible and institutionalized the Christian world into a hierarchy of terror. The Reformation was of profound significance in that it removed the Church as the mediator between God and man. When man confronts directly what he believes, he is free to pursue What-Is. Without this spiritual and intellectual liberation, the capitalist spirit and Protestant ethics could not have made a new world. Max Weber should have added two significant points to his analysis of the rise of Protestantism. Firstly, that the re-establishment of What-Is predetermined by the separation of man from God, which not only gives rise to a religious revolution but nurtures modern epistemology which, in turn, challenges that religion. Secondly, that any faith or ideal, no matter how perfect it is, will inevitably decline in popularity if it is institutionalized into an interpretational hierarchy in order to control freedom of thought. The second point is more than a matter of thought pattern. Its far-reaching significance is a powerful challenge to any type of authoritarian institution. THE UNIVERSAL The above argument presents Christianity as a challenge to the Chinese mind. It does not imply that Christianity or the West are universal. If they were it would be impossible to explain Chinese prosperity in the past and its predictable possibility in the future. What, then, is the universal? It seems to be a misleading and even dangerous question, similar to "What is God?" or "What is the absolute truth?" A more acceptable formulation is that of unity in diversity. Unity does not mean conformity, nor does diversity mean the coexistence of independent but discrete elements. How can unity in diversity be achieved? I see it as a kind of challenge. It is a mutual exposure to new dimensions and perspectives, a constant discovery of complementary factors in otherness and, finally, a rediscovery of oneself. It is a dialectical movement towards reciprocal recognition of different traditions and thought patterns. Even if there is no contact for the time being, the challenge remains. Our task is to turn potentiality into actuality. The process is endless. It is in this sense that I take Christianity as a challenge to the Chinese mind. [End] From The UNESCO Courier, July/Aug., 1992 (Wan Bin is a Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Canton) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1b. Missionary and Cowboy Attitudes: --America's "Special Relationship" with China (Part 2)........J. K. Fairbank 95 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Continued from last issue.) James Reed begins his study of the so-called Missionary Mind by noting how the American Protestant leaders confused in their thinking the expression of their normative ideals with their appraisals of reality. By the spread of "Christian Civilization" they meant really the spread of the white Protestant Christianity of northern Europe and North America. When they spoke of "Christian China," hope was inextricably mixed with reality. Thus in 1914 the great evangelist Sherwood Eddy, fresh from revival meetings in China, declared, "We have long ceased to doubt that we will win Asia for Christ." In short, the Protestant missions lived on doses of wishful thinking. The British China hand J. O. P. Bland in 1912 saw the American enthusiasm for China's republican revolution as a reflection of "the instinctive American love for the underdog and the reassuring optimism" of the missionary public "to whom optimism is a vocational necessity." The hopeful assumptions and indomitable unrealism of this view infected American policy thinking, because the American missionary community was the only part of the country with firsthand information and a definite interest at stake. Assuming that at the turn of the century there were always some three hundred China missionaries on furlough in the United States, Reed estimates that they presented their case in public at least thirty thousand times a year, enough to keep their constituency of perhaps five million Protestant supporters properly concerned. The American business community, meanwhile, found that only 2 percent of American trade was with China. But it had inherited the tradition of the big profits of the old China trade before the Civil War and in the 1890s it was ready to hope for a China market. On the whole, American men of affairs were Europe oriented. The foreign service was not yet a profession, and American interpreters and translators came mainly from missionary sources. Thus the Missionary Mind formed American opinion by default. "The campaign for Christian Civilization became a kind of crusade, between the years l905 and 1915... Thousands of bright young well-scrubbed Protestant Student Volunteers sailed from San Francisco to build a Christian Civilization in Asia... By 1915 there were nearly 10,000 foreign missionaries ... one in every 1500 adult Protestants." In the absence of large economic and strategic interests, American policy makers were left to conceive of their role in China as benevolent and high principled. This laid them wide open to the Chinese penchant for the cajoling of the foreigner through friendship. Minister Paul S. Reinsch, who almost single- handedly triggered the American protest against Japan's Twenty-one Demands of 1915, did not disclose to the State Department that he was guided every evening by secret consultations with the astute young Wellington Koo of the Chinese foreign office, who depicted the Japanese menace in fervent terms but without disclosing too many details. Koo appealed to the benevolent paternalism of Professor Reinsch and found an eventual response in that other political scientist, Professor Woodrow Wilson, who was then president. Hunt's Open Door constituency and Reed's Missionary Mind had paternalistic and rather arrogantly aggressive qualities, which both authors see conducing later to the warfare in Korea and Vietnam. The American attitude toward China was unrealistic, misled, writes Reed, by "dangerous good intentions," by a "flawed and essentially ethnocentric vision," writes Hunt. Hunt also observes that "China--vast, populous, and teetering between renovation and collapse-- hold out boundless opportunity to the American expansionist impulse in all its guises." One could go further and suggest that China represented not only opportunity but a concrete need for help of the sort that missionary good works, and later John D. Rockefeller, could supply. The special relationship had its origin on the Chinese side in the complex strivings that led China into revolution. The ideas of a special relationship and of winning China for Christ were recurrent American responses to China's ever-growing potentiality for modern transformation. The Chinese culture that came under stress from modern changes was the most distinctive, separate, and ancient, the most self-sufficient, balanced, and massive, of any culture known to history. China's intermittent revolution, fitfully gathering steam during the last hundred fifty years, is therefore by far the most deep-going and large-scale social change ever required by history. American believers in change, dimly aware of this titanic and tortuous process, responded in the various fashions that these historians so ably describe. The Chinese people, in this view, made a special claim on American concern simply because they were in such comprehensive trouble. Indeed they still are, and the claim is still being made and responded to. Ironically, Mr. Hunt's chronicle of injustice to the Chinese in America will reinforce the old missionary sentiment of guilt and the need for atonement through good works. History constantly needs revision, yet it slips away slowly. Taiwan and Hong Kong, Reagan and Thatcher, even missionaries and cowboys, are going, going, but hardly gone. [End] [This article was written in June 24, 1983, as a review of Michael H. Hunt's "The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)" and of James Reed's "The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983)". This article was collected in "China Watch (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1987)"] ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 2. Trade and Politics 2a. The China-MFN Controversy: The Case For Maintaining China's MFN Status (Part 1).............Grayson R. Robertson III 102 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since 1980, China has enjoyed the benefits of most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status from the United States. Preferential trade status for China had escaped serious controversy until the events of June 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. However, after Tiananmen Square, the renewal of China's MFN status has been an annual and contentious issue within the United States government. In June 1994, the Clinton administration must once again decide whether to extend China's MFN status. This article argues that China should continue to receive MFN trading status and that other policy tools short of MFN withdrawal can be used to effectively address US humanitarian, political and security concerns. _What is MFN?_ Most-favored-nation trade status originated in the United States as an emulation of the European preferential trade system. Preferential tariff are significantly lower than established tariff schedules. Historically, a significant difference existed between the unconditional most-favored-nation clause in European trade law and the American version of conditional MFN. Under unconditional MFN, one country's extension of tariff concessions guarantees the same concessions to all nations associated with it through commercial treaties. American conditional MFN provided treaty signatories only the opportunity to negotiate MFN status when MFN was extended to one trading partner. Denying China's MFN status would severly impair the price competitiveness of its exports because US tariff would rise to 50 percent or higher. _The Goals of Preferential Trade with China_ MFN trading status was first granted to China in 1980 by the Carter Administration following the historic efforts of President Nixon during the 1970s to restore Sino-American diplomatic ties. Under the terms of the Trade Act of 1974, MFN status could only be granted to China through a Sino-American bilateral commercial agreement and satisfaction of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment requirements. The Jackson-Vanik amendment states that the President may grant a communist country MFN trade status in conjunction with a trade agreement and upon verification that the country in question permits emigration or is satisfied that the country is improving its emigration policy. The conclusion of the US-PRC commercial accord in July 1979 and the initial waiving of the Jackson-Vanik requirements, with Congressional approval, established MFN status and sealed the efforts of the Carter Administration to create a social and economic dialogue through fully normalized Sino-American relations. Successive renewal of China's MFN status have been supported by Chinese liberalization of its emigration policies. 625,000 Chinese citizens traveled abroad and 280,000 new passports were issued by the Chinese government in 1990.(1) During the same year, the United States issued 17,000 immigrant visas through consular offices in China, the full number allowed by American immigration law.(2) The principal restraint to Chinese emigration has arisen not from Chinese emigration policies but from the unwillingness of other countries to accept immigrants. MFN continues to provide an incentive for further advancement in this area as well as facilitating the contacts that the Carter administration established over a decade ago. The extension of MFN to China by the United States and other industrialized countries began the arduous process of bringing China out of international isolation by facilitating bilateral commercial treaties, consular agreements, and scientific and cultural exchanges between China and the Western world.(3) MFN establishment has created the most efficient avenue of Western influence over Chinese social reform: contact with the Chinese and influence by example. Such interaction has since contributed to the spread of Western ideas and values into Chinese society. Chinese citizens are now free to travel domestically, purchase foreign-made products, and wear Western clothing.(4) In the economic arena, MFN extension was designed to encourage modest commercial reform already underway in China. Some of these early reforms included greater economic freedom and experimentation, less hindrance to foreign direct investment and more employee control over state-owned industry.(5) The economic growth encouraged by these developments and the subsequent foreign investment in China has been staggering: real GNP grew at an annual rate of 10 percent from 1978 to 1988.(6) (To Be Continued) *-Grayson R. Robertson III is a second-year M.A. student in the International Economic Policy program at The American University's School of International Service.* _ENDNOTES_ 1. Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Renewal of MFN Trading Status for the People's Republic of China , testimony before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, United States Congress (26 June, 1991), 13. 2. Ibid., 8. 3. Arnold Kantner, U.S. Policy Objectives and MFN Status for China , _U.S. Department of State Dispatch_ (6 July 1992), 552. 4. Ibid. 5. Eagleburger, Op. cit., 13. 6. Zhu Qizhen, Most-Favored-Nation Status: Cornerstone of China-U.S. Relations , _Beijing Review_ (28 May-3 June 1990), 25. [Forwarded to S.C.C. by "Howard H. Frederick" from "SWORDS & PLOUGHSHARES: A CHRONICLE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS" vol.2, no.1, Fall, 1993. ISSN 1063-133x. Copyright 1993, The Graduate Student Council of the School of International Service, The American University, Washington, D.C.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2b. To Spur Human Rights, Spur Trade...................Business Week 62 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- President Clinton brought home the bacon with the $6 billion Boeing/ McDonnell Douglas airplane purchase by Saudi Arabia. He has chatted up Kazakhstan's President on a big Chevron energy deal, and his Administration is courting Indonesia for a piece of its $40 billion oil and gas program. In China, the Clintonites are simultaneously pushing American exports and investments. Vietnam is next. What is wrong with that? Nothing, except that all these countries are dictatorships by traditional U.S. standards. Even Mexico is one-party state. As the Clinton Administration pursues a policy of generating high-quality jobs at home by promoting exports abroad, it finds itself increasingly trading with countries that define human rights in very different terms than Americans. There was no problem when trade was largely with other industrial countries. But as the fulcrum of global growth shifts to Asia and Latin America, the U.S. now must increasingly deal with societies that provide fewer individual human rights than the West. These countries argue that authoritarian rule is necessary for fast economic growth and that communitarian value, such as higher living standards and better education and health, are more important to their people than individual rights. Rampant individualism, they argue, has given the U.S. crime in the streets, whereas anyone can walk through Singapore safely. What to do? With the end of the cold war, trade policy has suddenly be recast as part of the human rights debate in Washington. Among the "pragmatists" are corporate exporters and pro-growth Administration members, such as Robert Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen. The "idealists" include all of the President's labor union supporters as well as such political doves as Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). The split appeared in the battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement, where the idealists tended to identify human rights with fair wages. Now, they're against renewing China's most-favored-nation status. There's no doubt that U.S. economic pressure can, at times, improve some individual rights abroad. The U.S. has pressured China to release a handful of political dissidents, and Indonesia and Mexico have promised to improve the rights of workers as well. But this casting of human rights stones can be costly. With exports accounting for 11% of GDP--twice what it was 20 years ago--and export-related jobs paying 15% to 10% more than the average, America's economic self-interest lies in opening up markets abroad, not in ceding them to rivals who have fewer scruples than does the U.S. The idealists are right to pursue their agenda of supporting individual human rights around the world. But linking that agenda to U.S. trade policy can and has hurt the American economy. Just as surely, rapid economic growth in the Third World is solvent of the bonds of oppression. Building a strong middle class overseas through foreign investment and trade has led to greater individual rights in South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere, even in the face of authoritarian government ruling in the name of communitarian value. The truth is that delinking trade from human rights policy is the pragmatic way to promote human rights overseas. [This is an Editorial of Business Week, March 7, 1994] ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 3. Readers, Writers and Editors 3a. Prison Labor Does Not Equal To Forced Prison Labor........Al Jia 26 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear editor: In the article "Prison Blue: a Fashion Statement" (Issue No. 9408), one point is missing, a very crucial one, which is the fundamental difference between the prison labor in the US and that in China's Gulag, the former Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany, i.e., the former is on voluntary basis while the later is forced labor. What the US and other industrial democracies ban is not just "prison labor products," but products by forced prison labor. I have no idea whether Mr. Daniel Qiu raised this issue out of ignorance or deliberate distortion, the norm of communist propaganda. But it seems to me that any reasonable people, people with minimal common sense should know the difference. By the way, it is very disappointing that this forum often carries some crude, shallow junks that waste audience time. Don't take me wrong. This is not about freedom of speech at all. It is all about quality. If Mr. Qiu had argued, say, that the forced prison labor was moral and good and if this view had been well argued, I would not write this letter and criticize the Forum because that would not be about facts and, hence, quality, but about opinions. I am wholeheartedly for freedom of speech. But I do think that a moderated forum should make its best to carry quality stuff, stuff worth reading, not just anything. Thanks for your attention. Al Jia ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3b. INMATE Jeans..........................................Jing Zhang 57 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Nonetheless, one night, a "fashion statement" on ABC World News Tonight >caught my attention, and inevitably was linked to the getting hotter >MFN debate. >.... >ABC's Charlie Murphy tells us: Baggy jeans are the coolest cloth all >over the America for kids and betters of all are Prison Blue. They are >made by inmates in a medium security prison in Oregon, under the slogan >"Made only inside for those only outside". Kids like Prison Blue >because they are all thick. As a footnote to this observed ABC broadcast, let me add that, on the same or previous day (don't remember exactly), Donahue devoted his show (9:00-10:00am week day, NBC) to the same issue in great detail. Five Oregon-guys were interviewed, including two officials who were responsible for the program, and three of the inmates who produce INMATE. The Donahue-show agreed to most info of the ABC report, such as, the hotness of INMATE in Japan and the number of inmates who are currently hired (43, which BTW would expand greatly for the business is expanding rapidly), but differed from the latter in the salary the inmates are making. Rather than earning "$4.75 to $7.00 an hour", one of the interviewed inmates, who is a salesperson for INMATE & Prison Blue, makes "$20.00 a day", while the other two who actually do the sewing make "$10.00 a day". Although these seem to be the income of the inmates after the deduction to "victim funds and taxes", --- which was briefly discussed, there was neither reference, nor characterization enabling inference, to their salary before deduction and taxation. --- Therefore, I was quite surprised at the ABC numbers. As far as I can remember, there were these three issues that concerned the audience the most: 1. Whether do the inmates have the right, after committing a crime, to make money taking advantage of the prison residence upon the cost of tax-payers ? 2. Whether have the inmates deprived the law-abiding citizens of jobs? 3. Whether should the government do this kind of program, --- no matter what, considering the importance of "re-educating" them ? There was not a single question about whether the inmates are in a "forced situation" hence "forced labors". Another thing referred to in this show was the auto-license-plate- making, about which New Jersey was said to be one of the states (new to me). Having said these, I'd like to emphasize that what I've said does not implicate my opinion about "forced labor" in any way. I do think, however, given the INMATE and Prison Blue, it is a joke that "forced labor" could still be jeopardizing China's MFN. Jing Zhang, Univ of TN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3c. Response to Mr. Al Jia................................Daniel Qiu 49 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- In last week's Chinese Community Forum, I adapted an ABC broadcast news and added a paragraph of my brief comment ("Prison Blue: A Fashion Statement?"). I thought that things were quite clear and no need to further deliberation. After receiving Mr. AL Jia's comments on my comment, I feel that it is necessary to say a little more, since one's "common sense" may not be that of the others'. This only serves as a response to Mr. Jia, not a detailed comprehensive discussion on this issue. I was quite amazed to learn that the prison labor in the West was "on voluntary basis". Could Mr. Jia further tell me what other choices the prisons have in the West? The ABC program did mention that working in the jean-shop was a popular program that 43 out of 1500 inmates had the "choice". However, my common sense tells me that the rest of the inmates are working in other shops, making other products or doing some other services. The choice they can make is not WORK or not but WHAT KIND of work they do. They might be sent to have their training in boot camps or be locked in small cells. Nonetheless, it is still not by choice but by force. Incarceration itself is by force, the force of law and order, in whatsoever senses you have. If an inmate in a prison has various choices including not working, but staying in their cells, enjoying their life while reading Playboy, watching Tonya-Nancy episode all day long, I would wonder why there are not much more people make the choice of living in the inmate cells? One only needs to read the Christian Science Monitor of Feb. 9, 1994 to realize the existence of "forced prison labor" in the US. To what I understand, the argument has long been whether an institution should take the advantage to make profit from the prison labor since the inmates, no matter in the West or in the East, are certainly in a disadvantaged position in term of competition. The US law prohibits the import of prison labor products made by foreign countries, not only those from China or Former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, it does not prohibits the export of the prison labor products made in this country, no matter whether there are certain abuses in certain places which make those products. There are a lot of reasons for this, not only a political one. But definitely, the issue of the prison labor products export from China to the US has been politicized, and a lot of facts are exaggerated. I am not going to further discuss this. I believe readers can use their common sense to make the judgement. One more note: Mr. Jia compared the prisons in China with that of Nazi Germany. I can hardly believe there was any common sense in this assessment. In the prisons in China, most of the prisoners are criminals. I have not seen any account contradicting this fact, although political prisoners do exist. But in Nazi Germany's concentration camp or "prisons", the inmates were innocent people, not only political prisoners. I do not know who is ignorant here. Or is it the norm of certain propaganda? ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 4. Question Corner 4a. Questions on Prison Labor...............................Ning Luo 34 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Questions about forced prison labor and prison labor exports: When people talking about "forced prison labor", what do they refer to as the alternatives? Suppose that we are only talking about criminals (prisoners of conscience are not criminals and should not be in prison, but let's separate this issue out). Since they are sentenced according to their crime, then certain rights of theirs are deprived of. This is by force, force of law anyway. Whether a criminal is forced to stay in a cell, or he/she has an option to take the alternative to do some work instead, depends on the legal system of the country. The question is then: What should be the criterion for judging whether the human rights is better protected in one prison system then the other? Will Western democratic states' use of prison labor sanctions the practice? Is the "forced labor" is as acceptable as "forced prison term" according to human rights and humanitarian principles? From the economic point of view, a state may prefer to have prison labor instead of just providing the prisoners cells and foods in order to save some tax money used on running the prisons. However, should the prisoners to give the opportunity to work? As pointed out, prisoners' work take away jobs of some law-abiding citizens. Is this fair? Is the law prohibiting prison labor products motivated mainly by economic considerations (it's like the anti-dumping laws to prohibit "unfair competition") or mainly by moralistic considerations? +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++ + Executive Editor: Changqing Yang Executive Moderator: Huang Tang + +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + For subscription: mail "SUB CHINA-NT Your-First-Name Your-Last-Name" + + to LISTSERV@UGA (bitnet) or listserv@uga.cc.uga.edu (internet) + + For back issues of CCF: + + anonymous ftp to cnd.org[132.249.229.100]:pub/community/CCF + + For contribution and inquiry: mail to ccf-editor@ifcss.org + +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++