Favoritism In Shanxi Sentences

In China today, some of the scummiest scum of the earth faced justice, and the scummiest of them all got off easy.

Zhao Yanbing, wasn't the scummiest. A roughneck hired to keep the Shanxi brick kiln's slave laborers in line, Yanging was convicted of beating a mentally handicapped slave worker to death. Today, he got a death sentence.

Heng Tinghan, foreman of another slave labor kiln wasn't the scummiest. He just enslaved 34 workers, and was convicted of intentional injury and unlawful detention,. His sentence: Life in prison.

The man with the curiously humorous name of Wang Bingbing, a man about whom nothing is funny, is the scummiest of them all. He ran the notorious Shanxi kiln and benefited personally from the kidnapping, beating, inhuman treatment and deaths of slave laborers, including children. He hired the thugs who beat sick, weak workers to death and paid the agents who kidnapped slave laborers for him.

Oh, and he is also the son of the long-time local Communist Party boss, so Wang Bingbing's sentence was a mere nine years in prison.

Of course, prison in China generally means being a slave laborer, so there is some justice yet in these sentences. We can only hope that Tinghan and Bingbing get particularly brutal chain gang bosses and die exhausted, beaten, hungry and broken. (After they have miraculously accepted Christ and saved their eternal souls, of course.)

Other Party officials got similarly cushy treatment, reports the "progressive" (read as "Socialist") blog Oread Daily:

Regretfully, China's actions against Party and government officials who were allegedly involved was not nearly so dramatic. Some were sacked from their Party or government posts. Others were given disciplinary warnings for lax supervision and dereliction of duty. The officials punished, reports CCTV, included 12 county level and six city level officials. In the center of the scandal -- Hongtong -- the head of the county government and deputy party secretary, Sun Yanlin was fired from his Party post. Party secretary Gao Hongyuan, and deputy head of the government, Wang Zhenjun were given a serious warning. The commission also advised dismissal of two township officials in Hongtong. Eight other officials are being investigated by the judicial department.

"Regretfully?" Wake up, Pinko Boy. Exploitation of the workers and protection of the Party is the hallmark of your beloved all-powerful State. "Deliberately," "Not unexpectedly," "Typically" -- all would be better than your sad little surprise that a Communist dictatorship didn't do better in the meting out of justice.

The blog's masthead quotes Marx ("Philosophers only interpret the world; the thing, however, is to change it."). He would be the wiser if he quoted Jefferson, Madison or Reagan instead. Like Marx, they changed the world; unlike Marx, they changed it for the better.

Photo: AP