Rex Murphy: Seal hunt pieties die at the Chinese border | Full Comment | National Post

We see in the gesture on the seal hunt how China is indifferent to, or careless of, the inhibitions and moral delicacies of the European community — which has long been showily exercised by the “cruelty” of the seal hunt. Euro-salons and -legislatures also have been the epicenter of the “Stop the Seal Hunt” movement for decades. Whether China’s move saves or revives the ancient Newfoundland hunt, or turns out to provide just a small, token market is not the question here. Rather, it is that China, in this one particular instance, is showing it does not share, is a stranger to, the so-called values that rule in “our” part of the world.

China doesn’t care what Greenpeace, or the WWF, or aging sitcom starlets think about the seal hunt, or about anything else. Judging from its intentions in the matter of building coal-fired power stations, China is determinedly out of sync with some of the other infatuations of the West, the great pieties over global warming being the most illustrious example.