f you’re looking for a safe country to travel to, China should be on your list.

They are able to brag about having one of the lowest crime rates in the world and travelers shouldn’t feel wary about walking around with their cash.

Liberals, myself included, often point to poverty in America as being one of the things contributing to crime. Here in China, there is plenty of poverty among the rural population flocking to the cities to find opportunity, but despite that fact, crime is low.

You occasionally hear of a bicycle disappearing from the street but that’s just about it. They’re harsh in their handing out of sentences and perhaps that’s a major deterrent. Consider if Wisconsin made the change to a sentencing structure closer to China. Some charges such as murder or drug peddling would simply be solved by shooting the offender in the back of the head, shortly after the trial, and billing the offenders family for the bullet. While it certainly sounds barbaric, the public doesn’t need to fear for their lives when they venture out onto the streets. Conservatives would point to this as a system that works but consider the fact that in America, many convictions have been overturned due to flimsy evidence or when DNA have proven the convicted to be innocent.

There is a big exception to this rule — if you’re a member of the party in power (which is always the communist party here) you may be let off with a harsh scolding for crimes as egregious as overseeing the forced slave labor camps for personal profit. Yes, that actually happened here but is the light sentencing of criminals here so different that we can say our system is better when the President of the United States actually forgives the sentence of one of his cronies who, for political purposes, exposed a former CIA spy and thereby exposed her to repercussions from those she worked to undermine as a covert agent on our country’s behalf? Yes, I’m talking about Scooter Libby who exposed former agent Valerie Plame after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson broke his silence about President George W Bush’s use of intelligence he knew was bogus to justify the invasion of Iraq. (No, there were no weapons of mass destruction and Wilson pointed out that Bush knew this.)

I guess since Libby, a friend of Bush’s with party credentials, will evade prison time just like the well connected Chinese boss who got off with a harsh scolding.

###
Jim McGuigan was in China on vacation with his family last week. He was unable to publish from China as this blog is blocked by China’s firewall so he is publishing several columns written in China, but not published from there.