China Droll

Heh! Interesting. Remember the Sichuan earthquake? I know, there have been so many disasters after that, so nowadays the two words only appear together in connection with “things that happened in 2008.”
I remember my shock and nausea at the time, and how I even donated money. I thought I’d better give it to a charity I already support by autopay, World Vision. (How I regretted it when I realised they are a Christian organisation, but never mind - each year I get a report on how well “my” kids are doing and how they both go to school, etc. Seems that WV don’t preach christianity but actually act it.) So, all is well there - and then I read just a few weeks ago about the all the money pouring into Sichuan at the time, helping everyone … except it didn’t. No, the central government took it to use it as it saw fit.

In the quake-hit towns, thousands of people are still living in “makeshift homes,” waiting for meagre handouts. No surprise there, really.

The million or so people displaced to make way for the Three Gorges are also still waiting; the fantastical sums set aside by the government for that particular group’s seamless shift to a new and better life having mostly ended up in local cadres’ pockets.

So when the Qinghai earthquake happened, I thought: Bugger it. I’m not paying for some beer-bellied bastard’s new house and four-wheel drive. Yep, that’s what I thought, and I’m standing by it. And I’m not giving a penny to the poor starving millions in Africa either, famine, flood and drought or no.

For if not even our trusted, caring and sharing central government can find it in their hearts to share the wealth with their own put-upon masses, how can we expect the regimes of Sierra Leone, Somalia and Chad or whatever, to even think of doing the right thing?

An article in this week’s Sunday Morning Times proved me right. In her book War Games, The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Linda Polman says that instead of helping people by our endless donations (and through supporting the steady stream of celebrities being photographed in stylish safari gear, holding black infants and shedding a tear) - our need to massage our completely irrational bad conscience is causing us whiteys to actually increase the bloodshed and misery in those countries.

“Humanitarian Aid” has become a huge business and milking-cow for greedy and unscrupulous Mickey Mouse-regimes all over the world. In for example Sierra Leone, according to the book, “the 2001 announcement that [the country] had once again been named the world’s poorest country was the occasion for a festive gathering in Freetown.”

It goes on to show that the big NGO donors never actually (dare to) check out what the donations go to - like Hong Kong government departments they know that they must show that money is being spent on no matter what, to be eligible for an even bigger handout next time.

So it’s actually in those countries’ leaders interest that the population keeps being poor and frequently massacred; if no bloodshed and devastation, no aid - therefore no income to prop up their armies.

If you look at the amount of money well-meaning westerners have spent on aid to for example Africa since let’s say 1970, (all right, I don’t have the exact number) you’d think that many of those countries would now be up and running with enough for everyone. Instead it seems most of the countries are sinking deeper into misery, corruption, war and lack of basic essentials.

Meanwhile western countries like Britain are still donating huge sums of money every year to China, the world’s now second largest economy. Or third - whatever: If they’re doing so fantastically well, why do they still insist on receiving handouts?

This misplaced bad conscience for something that some people’s great-great grandfathers did when they didn’t know any better, has got to give way to realism. Pouring money into so-called third world countries obviously isn’t working. If it was, they wouldn’t be third world anymore.

It’s time we stopped patronising adults around the world by thinking only we know how to take care of them. We don’t. It’s not working. This relying on handouts is actually keeping people in servitude. It’s like communism; when everyone gets paid the same no matter if they’re working or not, it creates an entitlement-minded society which, again, for example China, only snapped out of when the country turned to raw capitalism.

The Chinese people have done quite well for themselves after they were forced to stop relying on the government to take care of them. Surely other countries can do the same. All the countries in Europe have at one stage been desperately poor. Only those countries’ inhabitants’ hard work and insistence on a better, more democratic leadership have brought them to where they are today.

By stopping the handouts, awful a it may seem for our vulnerable consciences, we could actually be forcing a lot of people through what may at first seem to be callousness, to take care of themselves.