In the months leading up to the Beijing Olympics, there was much talk about the state of human rights in China. Some declared that human rights continued to deteriorate while others insisted that the situation had been improving for the last 30 years. Still others asserted that both sides are right and that it is like describing a glass as half full or half empty.
Actually, in some ways, China is like the proverbial elephant, whose proportions are so huge and whose parts are so different that they cannot be grasped by a single person feeling a single part of the animal.
Societies East and West have stories about blind men and an elephant. It is common to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. In the West, it was popularized by a 19th-century poem by John Godfrey Saxe, "The Blind Men and the Elephant," which goes: