Key quote:
"The difference, I suppose, is that the United States is a democracy trying to protect its citizens, while China is a dictatorship trying to keep ironclad control."
Of course!
That tells you the mindset that brings this accounting to you, and why I can't take them seriously.
"Crackdown, American style; What China seems to be learning from the US" by Tom Scocca | June 22, 2008
Tom Scocca is a writer in Beijing.
IT WAS THE diaper bag that marked us as potential terrorists. We were on our way through security at the airport in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China's northwestern-most territory. We were flying back to Beijing with the baby on an early evening flight, after a two-day trip.
I had been bracing for an argument over the stroller. On the outbound flight, it had fit folded up through the X-ray machine, but Urumqi's baggage scanner was too small for it. To my surprise, the security workers were willing to hand-scan it and pass it through. But there was a problem with the diaper bag.
The airport-security wringer is a fairly new feature of life in China. When I first began traveling between the United States and the People's Republic four years ago, only one side had airports that felt like they were located in a totalitarian state: America.
We're #1!! We're #1!
How HUMBLING and EMBARRASSING is that, readers?
AmeriKa the TOTALITARIAN STATE over Communist China.
The land of liberty was where you had to strip off your shoes and belt, where your checked baggage would be diverted and pawed through by a squad of inspectors, where guards would stop you if you tried to make a cellphone call from baggage claim. Eventually, after the liquid-explosives alarm, it was where you couldn't even bring a drink of water on the flight.
And don't forget the cavity searches.
Or Ms. Carol Anne Gotbaum.
What is America's real contribution to global culture in the 21st century? In the airport line, as in so many other parts of modern life, China has been catching up with the way things are done in the United States. While our actors and activists lecture China about how the advance of liberty cannot and must not be stopped, the American experience has been sending out the opposite message: In a dangerous world, freedom and privacy must yield to the demands of law and order.
SIG HEIL!!!!
China wasn't lacking in law and order to begin with. But with the Olympics set for August, the Chinese authorities have begun speaking in terms that sound familiar to American ears.
In March, state-run news reported that a passenger or passengers had tried to bring down a flight out of Urumqi, using gasoline as the would-be weapon. Xinjiang is predominantly Muslim territory, with a history of separatist activity among the indigenous Uighur people. When the United States declared a global war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks, Xinjiang extremists were included on the list of opponents. The details of the gasoline plot were never quite clear, but the result was: soon after, China instituted an American-style liquids ban of its own.
Governments! They are all the same!!!
In exchange for hosting the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government promised greater openness and adherence to international human-rights norms. But it also promised that the Beijing Games would be safe. And if the latter promise gets in the way of the former ones, so be it. The world will get over the detention of a few dissidents much faster than it would get over a terrorist attack. When the foe is terrorism, the enemy may be anywhere; the battleground is the world of everyday life. It is necessary, in a campaign against terrorism, to emphasize insecurity. A worried public is more cooperative with its protectors. The rioting in Lhasa this spring, widely televised in China, didn't undermine public confidence in the government's legitimacy; it fortified it: These are the kind of people we have to deal with.
Hellooooo, 'murka!!!!
And check this out!!
Cha-CHING!!!! CUI BONO, folks?
America is exporting the strategies and equipment to prevent such an attack. Last year, The
Oh, I don't want to hear anymore about Chinese repression or human rights or Tibet, readers! Oh, the HYPOCRISY!!!!
Cha-CHING!!!!!!!
On our way out of Urumqi, the X-ray machine said we were the suspect people. Two officers, a man and a woman, were hand-inspecting bags that had flunked the scan. From the diaper bag, they produced two bottles of sunscreen, mine and the baby's. I keep forgetting about sunscreen - it's one of those maddening items that you need to carry around everywhere, until you have to go through airport security, at which time you need to switch from making sure you have it to making sure you don't have it.
The last time I'd forgotten, it had just been the baby's sun lotion, and an officer had waved it through out of sympathy. But two bottles? I stood convicted of boneheadedness. The sunscreen (irreplaceable on the Chinese market) went into the bin by the officers' feet, with other fliers' castoff bottled water and snacks.
Then they pulled out the two jars of baby food.
Technically, baby food is illegal under the new Chinese security rules. This marks one of the key differences between Chinese security procedures and American ones. In America, the rules may be intrusive, inconvenient, and pointless - and they can be foolishly and inflexibly applied - but people expect there to be, at bottom, some sign of reasonableness. Passengers need to be able to take their medicine on a plane, or take out their contact lenses. Babies need to eat.
The Chinese authorities, on the other hand, don't worry about whether or not people think the text of the rules is reasonable. The rule bans fluids. Baby food is fluid-like. Baby food is on the banned list.
Till Urumqi, however, the food hadn't been a problem. Airport screeners would see the baby, see the baby's food, and let it pass. The male officer at Urumqi was ready to do the same. But the woman overruled him: no baby food allowed. The jars would have to go in the bin.
It was a little before 6 p.m., the baby's dinnertime. Skipping a meal was not an option. He had screamed all the way to Xinjiang, and we were hoping to avoid a repeat performance on the return leg. We offered to feed him right there, at the security checkpoint. But baby food was not allowed. It had to be confiscated.
Somehow, while I argued with the female officer, my wife got her hands on one of the jars and began spooning fruit into the baby's mouth. The baby did not burst into flames. Unimpressed, the officer held on to the second jar. Perhaps the blueberries were a decoy, and the strained peas were the real explosives.
Perhaps it is just one more way of LOOTING PEOPLE!!!
Of course, in AmeriKa it is for YOUR OWN PROTECTION!!
Is a terrorist attack against the Olympics a genuine threat? Unfortunately, that's as hard to know in Beijing as it is in New York. Besides the reported airplane attack, there was a bus explosion in Shanghai this spring, and the government has reported raids in the west on heavily armed Uighur and Tibetan groups, including finds of weapons cached in Buddhist monasteries. The armed-monk plot may sound far-fetched to American ears, but it's not much more implausible than the kung-fu terrorist cell our own government announced it had broken up in Miami, or the feeble-minded alleged schemes to flood Lower Manhattan or cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge with wire nippers.
Or the official 9/11 fable and all the other false-flag cover-ups and set-ups promoted by the enabling and complicit AmeriKan MSM!!
The difference, I suppose, is that the United States is a democracy trying to protect its citizens, while China is a dictatorship trying to keep ironclad control.
I highlighted that above because THAT SYAS IT ALL RIGHT THERE!!!!
But good intentions are hard to prove. It's the difference between Ronald Reagan's vision of America as City on a Hill and the original version put forth by John Winthrop: In Winthrop's reckoning, the Puritan settlement in the New World stood as much chance of setting a bad example for all as a good one.
And we have failed (torture, aggressive war based on lies, masss-murder).
What China sees is what we do, and the distinction between the two countries' policies is not always obvious to the Chinese.
Or ME for that matter. I mean, WTF?
Nor, as China expands the security mandate to avoid Olympic disruptions of all sorts, would the difference be so obvious to the people preemptively arrested during the IMF meetings in Washington, D.C., in 2003, or before the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004.
EXACTLY!!!!
So China is cracking down, in the name of a secure Olympics. The police are more and more frequently stopping foreigners on the street, even in expat-friendly neighborhoods, and asking to see their passports and visas.
We run SWAT teams into neighborhoods and seal them off.
Visas have replaced air quality as the inescapable topic of conversation. Routine renewals are no longer routine; the authorities demand proof of financial security, certification of lodging, and an itinerary and plane ticket demonstrating that you intend to leave China.
I gotta show things in triplicate, so WTF?
Are the Chinese that different, or are we just told that by an agenda-pushing MSM?
A year ago, declaring you wanted to get out of the country for the Olympics was an affectation, a way for old China hands to express their dismay at the thought of a once-challenging city being overrun by soft hordes of first-time tourists. Lately, it's become a practical decision - better to wait out the security squeeze back home than to put up with the new annoyances. That, at least, is another difference between China's heightened security and America's: here in Beijing, it might have an end date."
As the U.S.A. doubles over from the slug in the gut!
