Actually, I am because I'm chucking and clipping Globes left and right and this may be ending soon. Blogging about the Boston Globe is useless and sucks now.
"China’s reforms alter two longtime policies; Party will relax 1-child restriction, end labor camps" by Chris Buckley | New York Times, November 16, 2013
HONG KONG — The Chinese government will ease its one-child family restrictions and abolish “re-education through labor” camps, significantly curtailing two policies that for decades have defined the state’s power to control citizens’ lives, the Communist Party said Friday.
Related: Chinese to ease one-child policy
That's odd. My printed paper headline titled the same article Chinese families still at mercy of officials despite easing of one-child policy, and the article seems to bear that out. I wish I could say the switcheroo censorship was something new here.
The changes were announced in a party decision that also laid out broad and potentially far-reaching proposals to restructure the economy by encouraging greater private participation in finance, vowing market competition in several important parts of the economy, and promising farmers better property protection and compensation for confiscated land.
Senior party officials, led by President Xi Jinping, endorsed the 60 reform initiatives at a four-day Central Committee conference that ended Tuesday, but the decision was released Friday. Xi described the document as a bold call for economic renewal, social improvement, and patriotic nation-building — all under the firm control of one-party rule.
We have the same in AmeriKa, except the Corporate War Party has two factions.
“We must certainly have the courage and conviction to renew ourselves,” he said in a statement accompanying the decision....
Xi has tried to project an image as a leader who can pursue a potentially conflicting agenda: bringing about broad economic and social shifts while also fortifying one-party rule.
He's like Obama.
For months, analysts have speculated about the new economic policies that could be introduced at the meeting. But the planned changes to population policy and punishment, two areas where reforms have been debated, and delayed, for years, gave the decision significance beyond the economy and could stir public expectations of even bolder changes under Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang in the decade they are likely to spend in office.
I hope they won't be disappointed like us.
“Xi Jinping may have the most concentrated power of any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping,” said Xiao Gongqin, a professor of history in Shanghai who closely follows Chinese politics and advocates “neo-authoritarian” rule to protect the march of market reforms. “Politically, he has pursued an ideological tightening, because he wants to prevent the kind of explosion in political demands that could come in a relaxed environment. That’s the biggest danger for any government entering a period of reform.”
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The party leaders also confirmed an announcement made earlier this year, and then abruptly retracted, that they intend to abolish re-education through labor, which since the 1950s has empowered police authorities to imprison people without any real judicial review.
You mean like a sort of indefinite detention and torture system, that kind of thing?
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"Chinese court acts on abuse in legal system" by Chris Buckley | New York Times Service, November 22, 2013
HONG KONG — China’s highest court demanded Thursday that judges bar confessions obtained through torture and avoid applying the death penalty when the evidence is shaky. The directive was unlikely on its own to curb such abuses but reflected a growing official recognition of the need to stop gross injustices, specialists said.
China's Supreme Court more honorable than our own, which has approved torture.
The Supreme People’s Court of China issued the “opinion” seeking to curtail abuses a week after the Communist Party leadership published a set of proposed reforms, including a commitment to end “reeducation through labor,” a form of imprisonment without trial or effective judicial overview.
The court many of the problems that lawyers and human rights groups have said plague China’s criminal legal system, including torture by police, concocted evidence, faulty forensic investigations, and a tendency for judges to be swayed by official pressure or inflamed public opinion....
In other words, their courts are just like ours.
The court’s instructions, which were dated Oct. 9 but published Thursday.
Their newspapers as tardy as ours, too.
“Testimony of the defendant acquired through torture, freezing, starvation, baking in the sun, roasting, exhaustion, and other illegal collection methods shall be excluded,” they said.
The demands mostly repeated previous pronouncements and did not prescribe penalties. But they demonstrated some effort to end gross miscarriages of justice, which have battered public confidence in courts, said Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch.
I have no more confidence in the corporate courts of AmeriKan ju$tice.
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I also see China is still being attacked by terrorists of the Islamic persuasion, and factory safety is still a concern (although I did not see this burning on the Globe's website today).
On the brighter side of things, the Chinese are going to the moon, a new political party has fermented.
Yup, the Times they are not changin'!
