A Chinese official said Monday that New Zealand should consider special compensation to parents of Chinese students killed in an earthquake last month because their loss was magnified under the country's one-child policy.
Seven students from China have been identified among the 166 confirmed deaths in the quake that devastated Christchurch city on Feb. 22, and as many as 20 others are still missing.
Chinese Embassy official Cheng Lei said Monday that Chinese quake victims had lost not just their only child, but also a future breadwinner.
He said New Zealand should consider providing additional financial assistance to those families.
I do hope the New Zealand government rejects this logic.
One, the New Zealand government didn't cause the earthquake--New Zealand was the victim of it.
Two, New Zealand didn't limit Chinese families to one child each--the Chinese government did that deed.
So those families who lost their only child were victims of an earthquake that New Zealand didn't cause and a one-child policy that China caused. This is simply an extortion attempt by a large nation against a small but wealthy nation.
As an aside, the compensation the Chinese government provided to the victims of the 2008 China earthquake, a package valued at $8,800 in cash and a per-parent pension of nearly $5,600, is most certainly less than what they will get from New Zealand as a matter of insurance and basic compassion.
Those poor souls in China suffered from nature, a Chinese one-child law, and poorly constructed buildings. Funny that nobody in China considered the magnified loss of that failure to build schools according to their construction code and inspect them to ensure safety. Well, the schools of the elites were built just fine, by all accounts. It was only the tofu-dregs schoolhouses that collapsed on to the children inside them. Some children are more magnified than others, naturally.
I'm sorry about the Chinese loss of their only children. New Zealand is not, however, responsible for the tragedy.
