Injustices USA

China does have a lot of problems, but it can be hard for someone unfamiliar with the country to understand how Chinese do not live with fear every day, given the prominence in the press of stories about the treatment of people like Liu Xiaobo and Zhao Lianhai. In fact, many of my Chinese friends are just as outraged by those cases as I am by some US stories, like the unbelievable racism and injustice described in this NPR story

Civil Rights, Judicial Bias Surround Texas Drug Case, by Wade Goodwyn.

Especially when one reads the accompanying Reporter's Notebook story that details the way some middle-class blacks blame the victims, one cannot imagine living in the US. But the victims themselves admit that they did not believe other Blacks who claimed the police was racist, until they experienced it in dramatic fashion themselves. While it is clear that the judiciary is much worse in China, from the point of view of ordinary people's daily life, it is actually quite similar. Both Americans and Chinese hear stories of gross injustices, and do what they can to redress them.