I don't think there's any question that the Sichuan earthquake is a worse catastrophe than Hurricane Katrina: as many as 70,000 dead in Sichuan vs. 3,000 in New Orleans and the Gulf. So why then has the response of the Chinese government been so much faster and more efficient than that of our own government in 2005? Case in point: the speed with which army engineers dug channels to drain a temporary lake that threatened to inundate the city of Chengdu.
Is this an unanticipated benefit of dictatorship?
Judging by the recent example of Myanmar, apparently not.
Is Wen Jiabao just more competent than George W. Bush?
Speculation welcome.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
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2 comments:
As if anything is NOT better than Bush, this is where communism is better than our system. The huge public works the Chinese have been building like worker bees for so long help the people. Besides that, no one's starving, literacy is up. In a crisis, the government has huge resources to call on. OTOH, they don't want to ruin the Olympics.
I'm not sure China qualifies as a communist country any more. It's more fascism in which the corporations are spin-offs from the communist nomenclature. And of course it's precisely because of that cronyism that various construction firms were able to build schools in Sichuan out of cream of wheat.
And communist governments aren't exactly well-known for their solicitude for the people. Mao is estimated to have killed 50 million of them.
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