Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site pyuxa.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!pyuxww!pyuxa!wetcw From: wetcw@pyuxa.UUCP (T C Wheeler) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: Liberty and Isolation are not the same things. Message-ID: <1002@pyuxa.UUCP> Date: Fri, 21-Sep-84 09:08:16 EDT Article-I.D.: pyuxa.1002 Posted: Fri Sep 21 09:08:16 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 21:33:09 EDT References: <4337@utzoo.UUCP>, <1120@dciem.UUCP> Organization: Bell Communications Research, Piscataway N.J. Lines: 21 If you call living on a diet of cabbage an improved quality of life, then you must have a different view of life than I do. Further, since 1949, there have been numerous famines in China. I don't have the dates in front of me, but they have happened with regularity. A famine is not the sort of news the government likes to talk about in public, but they have happened according to reports leaked out of Hong Kong. The biggest crop in China right now is cabbage. Tons of it are trucked into the cities and piled in mounds along the streets. The people then purchase this strange commodity and try to subsist on it every day. My sister-in-law spent three weeks in and around Bjeing(sp) last year. Her biggest impression was the mounds and truckloads of cabbage being delivered every morning and the lines of people waiting to get their share. I don't want to demean the efforts of the current government over there, but to paint a rosey picture of the situation is dumb. I am also sure that conditions under the former feudal system were worse, but to intimate that there have been no famines since 1949 is also dumb. T. C. Wheeler