A Man with a Flashlight

Zheng Xiaoyu, the late head of China’s Food and Drug Administration, executed yesterday “for taking bribes to approve medicines,” i.e. in order to demonstrate China’s serious response to recent food safety errors which killed a large number of pets in the U.S. Standard execution practice is for a court policeman to shoot the prisoner in the back of the head. The former practice of charging the executed prisoner’s family for the bullet has been discontinued. (Go ahead, read that sentence twice.)

In spite of its ambitious, hardworking, wonderfully resourceful people, and in spite of the many leaders working for reform within government (The Tiananmen Papers can’t be recommended highly enough), the Chinese administration is firmly in the hands of a cabal of vampires steeped so deeply in blood that they have to apply white powder to their skin before appearing in public (ok, not really, they didn’t touch the blood themselves… so far as we know).

If you support the death penalty you won’t mind seeing how it looks in China. (Not to be clicked lightly.) More at the Asia Death Penalty blog here. What a disgrace.

That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to write something about the wonderful, wonderful Ma Jian.