It’s natural and easy to react with shock and appallment when hearing stories of these Chinese womens children’s gymnasts being taken from their families by the nat’l government at the age of 3, and from there beginning a strict, strict regiment of training for the Olympics.

One girl specifically (the captain) was only allowed to contact her family just once every year, and when she’d request to go home, she was denied by her own family as a matter of “honor”

Initially I felt quite torn when I think of how these girls have been basically conditioned to be robots and programmed to do just one thing in life just barely out of the womb, making it impossible to compete with them. As a result I found it extremely difficult to have any respect for a country (namely it’s government) that apparently has such an inferiority complex that they’ll take ownership rights of a zygote and force them into modern day, athletic, slavery, just so that they can have a citizen of theirs stand at the top of a podium for a few minutes during a once in four year event.

However I got to thinking, what’s the alternative?

Having seen what life in the rural is, which makes a life of poverty here in the US seem like an episode of Cribs, I can only imagine that being an Olympic gymnast and honoring your country, the largest country with the richest history of any in the world–regardless of what sort of torture you have to go through as a youth–is infinitely better than a life you’d achieve living on a farm picking rice for 16 hours a day, not having any sort of escape route and perpetually “continuing the tradition” for generations throughout.

And in a country where essentially 700 million people or so live in the Dark Ages, you can bet that a high, high majority of them would send their kids off to do the same.

This is not even billions upon billions of others around the world that would sign up in a heartbeat as well.

There is certainly an honor in what they do that I can respect. It’s a cultural difference that may be hard is impossible to grasp as we sit away in comfy chairs behind our computers reading this while looking up the latest relationship statuses of our friends on Facebook–but until we’ve actually witnessed, or better yet lived in true poverty, that is poverty on an international standard, I don’t think we have any right to judge what actions the Chinese government and their families do in the way they nurture their citizens in an attempt to best in the world at what they do.

And while their intentions are far far from genuine and can easily be described as a humane crisis in any civilized part of the world, it’s hard to argue with the results, and who am I to deny a 12-year-old accomplishing more in her life than I ever will.

That said, I’m rooting for the U.S. all the way…