My Take | Sadly for some, the sky is not falling on China
- Sorry, but there is no crime wave in the country, and young college graduates are not doing so terribly in finding jobs relative to their foreign cohorts
If you read the news a lot, you will no doubt get the impression that the sky is falling on China.
That’s exactly what my dog-walking neighbour, whose ancestry is Irish-British, thinks about the country. A lovely and very funny man, he is fiercely anti-China. Needless to say, we agree to disagree.
Let’s just say his picture of contemporary China has been coloured by reports from highly respected Western news sources.
Here’s one typical news item: “A recent spate of violent attacks in China has prompted a reaction on social media platforms such as Weibo, exposing widespread public discontent about the nation’s downturn.
“A stabbing in Shanghai last week in one of the city’s metro stations garnered about 164 million reads, with some speculating that the culprit was a stocks investor, a group battered during China’s US$7 trillion market meltdown earlier this year.”
Right, one violent stabbing and the news got 165 million views on a mainland Chinese website. Perhaps it’s not that violent crimes are on the rise in China, as this story from Bloomberg tries to paint, but that crimes are actually rarer than in many countries and so, when they do happen, they stand out, no?