Why is China focusing on car-ownership in a report about human rights?
This goes back a long way, right back to the Cold War and the establishment of the U.N. and the various international agreements on human rights, when the Communist bloc always said that it wasn’t just civil and political rights but equally important or, in fact, more important were social rights and economic rights and rights to development. So their argument is that it doesn’t make sense to talk about civil and political rights when people are hungry. I think the problem for China now is that they’ve already reached a level of material development that’s pretty good. And they themselves face a dilemma because they really don’t know whether to see themselves as a developing country anymore or as a superpower. And China has these two faces. It seems like China is sending a pretty unambiguous message to the world that it is a developed country, as seen in its recent dispute with Japan. It says that through its actions, but then their own premier, Wen Jiabao, made a statement emphasizing
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