China has been transformed in recent decades by an economic miracle that has seen rapid industrialisation and the transfer of hundreds of millions of people from the countryside to towns and cities.
This enormous change has lifted multitudes out of poverty and given them a better standard of living than they enjoyed in rural areas. But along with higher wages and urban living have come “western” diseases such as cancer linked to very high rates of smoking, and diabetes and heart disease thanks to a richer diet, lack of exercise and high blood pressure.
There’s an adjustment that needs to be made there. How many o those diseases of richness are noted simply because the folk are richer and therefore not dead already?
At the very minimum until you age adjust the figures you’ve no idea, do you?
You’ll note that they’re whining about the results of the previous meddling – the one child policy. And now they want to meddle more.
If I was doing the meddling, I’d try and supercharge China’s economy and make them even richer even faster.
But I suspect what the morons should really do is just fuck off.
I’ve travelled quite a lot on urban and rural China, and I can tell you smoking is far more prevalent in the latter. Load of bollocks 🙂
High rates of smoking due to urbanisation? Have they never met a Chinese peasant? Smoke like chimneys, they do.
Life expectancy in China has increased by about 12 years since the Deng reforms started, from 65 to 77.
…and is about 85 in Hong Kong.
Cancer, diabetes, heart disease are diseases of ageing. If you die younger of malnutrition, infections, hard work you don’t live long enough to get them.
But those hundreds of millions living in the countryside some of whom died of these diseases would not be counted because they probably went undiagnosed and the bureaucracy would not be there to register cause of death.
Our ancestors died of diseases which at the time were not recognised but now are, and were attributed to other things. The notion there are modern diseases resulting from our lifestyle, from which our ancestors did not die is ignorance.
How many years of wealth and comfort would we sacrifice in order to die in poverty?
“There is no human pleasure worth sacrificing for the sake of a few extra months in a nursing home.”
The implication that Chinese peasants were routinely screened for high blood pressure…
China has been transformed in recent decades by an economic miracle . . .
That seems to be coming to an end, so lots of people are going to have more to worry about that TypeII diabetes.
Yet more cultural imperialism. Anglo-Saxons & their hangers on are the only peoples on the planet who worry about obesity & its resultant health problems. Everyone else aspires to be a fat bastard. Detrimental to health or no. China has a brand of canned foods called “Fat Boy”. Features a grossly overweight infant pictured on the label.
Can’t help but wonder how much of the UK’s ‘obesity epidemic” is simply the result of how many immigrants there’s been in past few decades. They come, they bring their culture with them.
Dying in old age of cancer might be horrible, painful and unpleasant, but it must surely be preferable to dying in youth from hunger or from being put in a People’s Prison Camp for remarking on one’s hunger.
BiS,
There is also a line of Chinese food products with a similar grossly overweight infant on the label called “Healthy Boy”.