Steve Philion:
>I agree with this text, of course. Note that the source is the same kind
>of source that Henry has so passionately attacked Doug for using when
>making criticisms of the labor regime in China. It's nice to see that it
>is alright to quote from the beast after all when discussing China....
But Henry is correct. There is an enormous propaganda offensive that is
attempting to demonize the Chinese government. Although it comes from
rightwing sources, it is used as a club by the liberal wing of the ruling
class to extract concessions. Nobody in the west, from Clinton to Jesse
Helms, gives a shit about human rights. We are much worse on prison labor
than China. When Harry Wu goes around spreading lies, it allows Clinton to
put pressure on China to accept trading terms less favorable than other
countries who have much worse blemishes. You might think that the
criticisms of Wu that I posted here and on the SR mailing list were easy to
come by. They were not. I had to spend my entire lunch hour the other day
finding material against him on Lexis-Nexis. (I had forgotten about the
PEN-L post.) I kept doing searches on "Wu" and "exaggerations" or "Wu" and
"inaccurate" until I found the 3 items that have found their way into email
discussions. Keep in mind, however, that if you do a plain search on "Harry
Wu", you will get back 904 hits. This means that for every 1 article
telling the truth about this rightwing provocateur, you get 300 describing
him as some kind of saint. No wonder there is so much Sinophobia going
around on and off the Internet.
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
