Albano Martins
The first time I visited China, I had been invited by Ma Man Kei, thirty-three years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. I visited Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and places nearby.
The population, who lived very humbly at the time, still dressed in Mao suits and were very curious to see Western children up close!
For many years I continued to visit China, but further to the North, and I saw the desire that the people had to develop.
The Cultural Revolution had already passed, with all the evils and misery it had sown, even affecting generations of future new leaders.
The formula created by Deng Xiaoping of having Special Economic Zones around Macau and Hong Kong and which later would be extended to various parts of the country which were to benefit from the dynamism of these capitalist economies, made the difference.
The history of China was to take another 20 years to give forth its first great blossoms, together with the transfers of sovereignty.
Tiananmen was another bump in this path, a natural result of the desire for greater democracy in a country that was already growing. In similar ways to Hong Kong of recent times, although there many interests, some even calling for independence, this incident tarnished the struggle for greater democracy within the same country.
I’m not here to tell you the wonders of the capitalist economy, known today as the western world, where the values of democracy are almost always confused with direct universal suffrage. And where important things as the general right to housing and work with a minimum level of dignity are forgotten.
As if the human rights that the West shouts towards heaven blind us to imperialist invasions and wars fought wherever economic interests lay, or to the plight of its own minorities or other forms of blatant racism.
The world is in constant evolution, unfortunately not always peaceful and unfortunately not always democratic and, being so, not always favorable for the most vulnerable, be they humans, nature, or animals.
China grew, with natural upheavals, but it is still a developing country today. Didn’t the West have many more complicated setbacks?
Look at the creation of the USA itself, at the massacre of the “red skins,” and the colonialism that spread throughout the world, the first and second world wars (the massacres by the Nazis and the Japanese), or even the atomic bomb dropped on civilian populations of defenseless women, the elderly, and children, in spite of the war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese that the West has feigned forgetfulness.
The economic growth of China, and of other underdeveloped countries, did not happen by chance or for reasons of Western benevolence, but because the logic of the market system invited its operators to look to countries that produced more cheaply, to overthrow their own rivals, internally or externally.
But grain by grain is the hen’s crop filled. And grain by grain the nation of China grew. And, as would be easy to predict, it became the factory and later the biggest restaurant and supermarket in the world. And that is an invitation for the rooster to crow.
The Western world was weakened by Trump. Democracies have lost their sense of humanity with ongoing political corruption and with a system of justice that does not work fairly or quickly, itself designed to let the country’s richest thieves and bandits pass through the mesh.
Economic power tends to control political power. China has studied the lesson well.
Human rights? Well, in the West the call for this is only valid if it is the right to protest and to speak. The greed of the system does not take into consideration higher order values. Neocolonialism has taken over the world.
A third system is needed, democratic, more humane, and friendlier to the environment and animals.
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