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2007-05-05 China-Japan-Koreas
Illiteracy rate is climbing fast in China
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Posted by Zenster 2007-05-05 16:52|| || Front Page|| [9 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 It must be mentioned that Red China uses a significantly simplified character set compared to classic Chinese, and yet cannot manage to educate a significant number of its people. Contrast this to Taiwan, which uses only classic Chinese, and yet according to the CIA World Factbook has a literacy rate of 96%.
Posted by trailing wife 2007-05-05 17:39||   2007-05-05 17:39|| Front Page Top

#2 For anyone interested in more on China: here's an excellent in-depth article that's well worth the time to read.
Posted by xbalanke 2007-05-05 19:01||   2007-05-05 19:01|| Front Page Top

#3 Or America, which has on 26 letters, but can't* seem to educate half its popularton.

* Or perhaps won't.
Posted by Jackal">Jackal  2007-05-05 19:19|| http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]">[http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]  2007-05-05 19:19|| Front Page Top

#4 popularton? :-)
Posted by Frank G">Frank G  2007-05-05 20:06||   2007-05-05 20:06|| Front Page Top

#5 popularton = Number of imbeciles in a nation.
Posted by Thavigum Turkeyneck9375 2007-05-05 20:08||   2007-05-05 20:08|| Front Page Top

#6 LOL!
Posted by Frank G">Frank G  2007-05-05 20:14||   2007-05-05 20:14|| Front Page Top

#7 btw - I meant no disrespect to you, Jackal, just teasing :-). I've had more than my share of misspellings, especially with "teh". For some reason my brain/fingers wanna type "the" out of order. How hard is "the" to type? Jeebus
Posted by Frank G">Frank G  2007-05-05 20:19||   2007-05-05 20:19|| Front Page Top

#8 It is, as Seafarious says, Lysdexia. I have a similar problem, and teh or hte are among my worst...
Posted by Bobby 2007-05-05 21:11||   2007-05-05 21:11|| Front Page Top

#9 Dyslexics of the world, UNTIE!
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-05-05 21:24||   2007-05-05 21:24|| Front Page Top

#10 from and form, the and teh, and and nad, my most common, in that order.

Yea, untie! I garee, Zen. ;-)
Posted by twobyfour 2007-05-05 22:15||   2007-05-05 22:15|| Front Page Top

#11 Ditto for RUSSIA vv Gubmint failures in local mass-education efforts for citizens; + waves of LEGAL + ILLEGAL Muslim + Chinese + Norkie-Other Asian immigration, ala KOMMERSANT + GAZETA.RU.
Posted by JosephMendiola 2007-05-05 22:56||   2007-05-05 22:56|| Front Page Top

#12 You gotta wonder iff tasty Mexican burritos + Korean spicy squid will tame the Russkis.
Posted by JosephMendiola 2007-05-05 22:58||   2007-05-05 22:58|| Front Page Top

#13 Some of the money quotes from xbalanke's superb link. Be sure to read the whole article. It's one of the best I've seen in ages.

But China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, fortunate to be working for an expanding global market, increasingly enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining 1 billion, however, remain among the poorest and most exploited people in the world, lacking even minimal rights and public services. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.

The Party’s primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development. It expends extraordinary energy in suppressing Chinese freedoms—the media operate under suffocating censorship, and political opposition can result in expulsion or prison—even as it tries to seduce the West, which has conferred greater legitimacy on it than do the Chinese themselves.

The Communist Party is no less mendacious when it comes to China’s AIDS epidemic. The problem is gravest in the province of Henan, where vast numbers of poor peasants contracted AIDS during the nineties from selling their blood plasma (a trade generally controlled by Party members) and then having the blood, sans plasma but pooled with that of other donors, reinfused, absent HIV tests—a recipe for massive contamination. The AIDS sufferers of Henan are now dying in the hundreds of thousands, trapped in their impoverished villages with no one to care for them.

The government’s initial reaction was to deny any problem, isolate AIDS-affected areas, and let the sick die (a pattern that initially repeated itself when SARS broke out in the country).
Police barred entry to the contaminated villages, and new maps of Henan appeared without the villages, as if they had vanished into thin air. But after the international press became aware of the growing crisis, the Party banned the blood trade (though it enforced the prohibition fitfully) and in 2000 at last officially acknowledged the existence of AIDS on Chinese soil.

Villagers often told me that it wasn’t the local Party secretary whom they most hated but rather the family-planning agents. To ensure the proper implementation of China’s single-child policy (in some provinces, the limit is two children, if the first is a girl), the agents keep close watch on childbearing women, often subjecting them to horrific violence. In 2005, a family-planning squad targeted the city of Linyi and its surrounding rural area, in the Shandong Province, because the population had far exceeded the Party’s child quota. The agents kidnapped 17,000 women, forcing abortions on those who were pregnant—in some cases, immersing seven- to eight-month-old fetuses in boiling water—and sterilizing those who weren’t. The agents tortured the Linyi men until they revealed the hiding places of their daughters and wives.

Many goods that China produces are worthless, Mao Yushi reminds me—especially those made by public companies. About 100,000 such Chinese enterprises continue to run in the old Maoist style, churning out substandard products because they’ve got to hit the targets that the Party sets and provide employment to those the Party cannot dismiss, not because they’re responding to any market demand. Most public-sector firms don’t even have real accounting procedures, so there’s no way of ascertaining profitability. “China is not a market economy,” Mao says bluntly.

The Party gives the banks lists of people to whom loans should go, and the rationale is frequently political or personal, not economic. Indeed, in many cases, banks are not to ask for repayment. That investment decisions obey political considerations and not the law of the market is the Chinese economy’s central flaw, responsible at least in part, Mao Yushi believes, for the large number of empty office buildings and infrequently used new airports and an unemployment rate likely closer to 20 percent than to the officially acknowledged 3.5 percent.

Another factor that is rarely discussed involves the disparity between urban and rural wages. For first world nations like the USA, this gap is usually around 1.2:1 or 1.5:1 at most. China's has been assessed at anything from 3:1 to 5:1. Earlier sources addressing the 1990s have protrayed this key economic indicator at as much as 10:1 to a whopping 17:1. Even 3:1 competes with such economic hell holes as Zimbabwe or Middle East tyrannies.

It is this sort of income disparity that betrays China's dirty economic secrets. The 200 million citizens who enjoy a Western lifestyle do so at the detriment of the other ONE BILLION Chinese peasants. Many of that 200 million achieve their status only due to government paid expenses and subsidy for their services as political "aparatchiks".

China's image as an economic powerhouse is a vast facade in danger of crumbling at the least bit of destabilizing force. The West continues to prop up this monstrous regime and must share in the blame for its crimes against humanity.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-05-05 23:21||   2007-05-05 23:21|| Front Page Top

#14 You gotta wonder iff tasty Mexican burritos + Korean spicy squid will tame the Russkis.

I've often wondered the same myself.
Posted by gorb 2007-05-05 23:44||   2007-05-05 23:44|| Front Page Top

23:56 Redneck Jim
23:48 Zenster
23:47 Redneck Jim
23:47 JosephMendiola
23:44 gorb
23:40 Redneck Jim
23:35 JosephMendiola
23:28 JosephMendiola
23:26 Redneck Jim
23:21 JosephMendiola
23:21 Zenster
23:09 JosephMendiola
23:08 Redneck Jim
23:02 gorb
23:01 OldSpook
22:58 JosephMendiola
22:56 JosephMendiola
22:55 Redneck Jim
22:53 Captain America
22:51 JosephMendiola
22:44 JosephMendiola
22:32 Zenster
22:23 Zenster
22:22 twobyfour









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