The Branding of China's Prisons

I just read an article about China's drug rehabilitation program [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/world/asia/08china.html?ref=world]. Their policy is very simple - you get caught with drugs, they send you to a minimum of two years in "rehabilitiation." Forget that what they call rehabilitiation looks, to the rest of the free world, very similar to a gulag [sorry former USSR]. Their policy may seem drastic at first glance, but there's a bright side to this. With the impending crash some are forecasting for China's economy [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/business/global/08chanos.html?ref=business], there could be a very viable win/win syndergy between China and the rest of the world.

If the US of A were smart, and it's a big "IF" we could work a good angle on this. Simply put, we could send them our Bernie Madoffs, and pay them what we would pay our own prison system to "rehabiliate" them at a discount. Because really - do we want our tax dollars being spent on taking care of former millionaires for the next twenty years? They could reap the brenefits of our nominal fee, as well as a great opportunity to brand themselves as green, good, and looking to the world's future. With a nice branding campaign - somthing along the lines of "China - keeping the world clean," or "China - rehabilitating the world...," they could take their good samaritan efforts, and make it real.

It's just a thought, but with the impending burst of China's economic bubble - who knows how far this could go to integrating them into the free world economy....