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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