Video: China Milk Activist Mystery

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

11/23/2010

Video: China Milk Activist Mystery

Questions continue to surround the case of consumer rights activist Zhao Lianhai after his lawyers were handed a note saying their client was “unable” to meet them.

Zhao was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison earlier this month for “disturbing social order,” after he set up a website for parents of children sickened in 2008’s tainted milk scandal.

Video courtesy of Reuters.

Interestingly, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency today quotes China’s Justice Minister as saying the government is working on plans to improve lawyer access to clients in police custody.

See also: China’s Spoiled Milk Protest

ChinaRealTimeReport

Nov 23, 2010 9:18:44 AM | Activist/Dissident, Crime, Current Affairs

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