“Yet the one slogan you never hear at the Olympics is that with dreams come responsibilities … And in the global neighborhood, any city’s treatment of its local problems is suddenly a matter of everyone’s concern. So evicting roughly 3 million of the capital’s residents, as Beijing has done, while spending perhaps $200 billion on reconstructing the city (more than 300 times as much as it spent on rural health care for the entire nation in 2006) raises terrible questions about what costs are legitimate in the pursuit of social and sporting acknowledgment.”

The Olympics may bring China many economic benefits and possibly even longer-term social ones, but in the short term it comes at great cost to those most vulnerable and oppressed by the state. Pico Iyer writes in Time, here.

Posted Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 @ 1:49 am
Filed in china, community and social, human rights, politics

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