China Adoption, Chinese Infant Adoption - Genes! And other China news...

10/19/07

Genes! And other China news...

Posted by : grant in China Adoption Blog at 06:30 am , 437 words, 371 views
Categories: Current Events 2007

Because traveling families (and other people with a connection to China, like, uh, people who've adopted from China) need to know what's going on, here's just a few headlines from the Middle Kingdom:

The Dalai Lama just got a medal from America's government, and boy, is the Chinese legislature ticked off. That official statement is as good a way as any to learn China's version of Tibetan history. It also ends dramatically:

No force can stop the progress of Tibet in the great family of the Chinese nation. All attempts to interfere in China's internal affairs and undermine China's fundamental interests are doomed to failure.

You can practically hear the ominous music swell, can't you?

On a marginally related note (and of more interest to people trying to do a little uncensored net surfing while cooped up in a Guangzhou hotel), a Chinese geek has issued a report on ways around the Great Firewall. I actually never ran into the Firewall while cooped up in my various hotels, but part of the thing with it is it keeps changing. And if American news, say, is being seen as "undermining China's fundamental interests," well then, imagine CNN.com vanishing off computers across the country. Except those that know the ways around the Great Firewall.

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Not that everything is all black and white (of course). In fact, I was just reading a Time magazine article from this summer about China's "Me" Generation -- the folks who are coming of age in post-Communist China. It's an interesting piece overall for anyone who's a little curious about what everyday life is like over yonder - the stories behind the news. The "Me" Generation -- they don't much care for Communist politics. They don't much care for any politics. They're probably a lot like the rest of the world that way.

And if you want to know just how much like the rest of the world folks in China are, scientists have just sequenced the first genome for a Han Chinese person, opening the door to all kinds of genetic therapies focused on folks of Asian descent. This could be valuable for treating various heritable diseases that occur in Asian populations (like our children) and that occasionally have non-Asian doctors (like some of our pediatricians) scratching their heads.

On an even more cheerful note, there's another maybe-extinct animal besides the baiji that might just be not-so-extinct after all: the South China tiger. They're extremely rare, of course, and not doing so well as a population. But they seem to be hanging on. At least there's one of them left alive... for now.