From: eshen@.stern.nyu.edu (Eileen Shen)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Re: Protection bill
Date: 27 Aug 92 08:55:56 GMT
Organization: New York University

In article <1992Aug26.235940.21388@ulowell.ulowell.edu> cshi@cs.ulowell.edu (Chunde Shi) writes:
>Every individual has his/her own interests, which may not alway in accord with
>nation's interests. To servive in this World, a group of people has to fight
>together for the benifit of the group. Human Kind can be divided in to many
>group, one of them is called Chinese. Being born Chinese, no matter what you
>do, try to fit in the Westen World, they will treat you like a Chinese, well
>or
>bad, depends on alot of factors, one of them is the status of China in the
>world. For Chinese to servive and thrivive in this World, individual members
>of Chinese must be willing to scrifice individiual interests for the good the
>whole Chinese group, when circumstance call for it. It is like bees, each 
>individual bee is willing to give up its life, relase the stinger to the 
>invador, the whold bee group is better serviver specis than other group. 
>Otherwise, when people became extreamly selfish, the group is not going to be
>as competitive as those that are not, the group and the individual the group
>will not prevail. Ofcourse CSS should not go back to China, simply to

Your theory is fine, only to some extend. We all know what would
happen if it's advanced to the extreme. During the Great Leap Forward,
the Cultural Revolution, millions and millions of people got misused,
abused, tortured, exterminated, all in the name of "group interest"!
To me, the mere thought of putting blind faith in "group interest" is
frightening: people like you and I became small pawns in a chess game,
arbitrarily sacrificed by some grand social engineers! That's why we
need to respect human rights, and to lobby for the protection bill is
a way to assert our human rights. Doing so send a clear message back
home: the status quo is not ok. I just learned from People's Daily
oversees edition that ccp is liberalizing its policy toward overseas
students.  Give the protection bill full credit. If we did not assert
ourselves, we would be treated as shit.

	Selfishness has its virtues. This has been demonstrated and
proven in economics by Adam Smith and his followers who constitute the
mainstream economists. Smith's theory can be summarized as follows:

	In an economy, each individual should do what he thinks is the
  best for him and need not worry about the consequence of his actions
  on the society. There is an invisible hand--market mechanism-- to
  coordinate all the activities so that what is good for an individual
  is good for the society.

This may be an over-simplified summary, and any good economist knows
the inherent difficiencies of a laissez faire economy (a free economy
with only the invisible hand at work). But this point is still valid:
In a society, each individual should be able to pursuit what he/she
wants with minimum constraints. This is what made America great. At
least they said so in the latest Republic Convention, and it's also my
conclusion after all these years of observations and thinking. So your
theory of sacrifice notwithstanding. We are after all human beings,
not some simple- and single-minded, albeit still quite incredible,
bees, and we need a better theory to make China great in a competitive
world. We need a free, democratic China whose full potentials can be
made good use.

	China is a huge country with a awful lot of people. We may
agree or disagree on what She should or should not do. But it's ok for
SCCers to express their dissatisfaction on the current political
situation in China. It is ok for them to vote by their feet, lobby for
the bill. It is heterogeneity, not homogeneity, of opinions that makes
nations great. In fact, I dare venture to say that SCCers make a fine
example for all Chinese by asserting themselves and pushing a stubborn
regime change for the good. It's not a flawless tactic, and it will
benefit some disgustingly selfish people, but overall it's a good act,
IMHO.

>But worst of all kinds, in order to get better living, treatment from U.S.,
>defame China in front of the world, is not acceptable morally, not acceptable
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>to those individuals involved.
>China has suffered from all kinds of tragedies, please do not add another
>one!!!!

The bill is a tragedy? It certainly makes CCP look bad and illustrates
their policy failure, but I don't think it tarnishes China's image in
the world. Your opinion DOESN'T count here, I am sorry to say. Whether
the bill hurts China's image depends on what FOREIGNERS think of it. I
doubt you have any substantive data on this. So don't be an Ah-Q.