Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I didn’t mean to imply that we were somehow managing to shoot water out into space or otherwise disappear it. Rather that there’s only a certain amount of water available, most of that is not immediately useable other than for floating boats on, and we really do need to be a lot more careful with the very limited resources we do have.
As for here in Beijing, we certainly seem to be not just reducing the amount of useable water locally available, but the total amount of water. It’s being pumped out of reservoirs and aquifers, used domestically, agriculturally and industrially, then the waste dumped back into rivers to work its way down to Tianjin and the Bohai Sea faster than it’s being replaced. As a result, the entire North China Plain is sinking.
Oops, almost forgot: As for Beijing's largest reservoir, a police helicopter crashed in it last year, and just a few days ago a rather dimwitted taxi driver decided to take his family for a spin on the ice. The ice cracked, taxi fell in, driver managed to get out but his wife and 18/19 year old son drowned (the imprecise age is understandable when you consider that China has two distinct methods for measuring age and the obvious emotional trauma of the grandparent being interviewed).
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Islander,
Ae, but here's what I see: On a regular basis I drive my car across a bridge named Guanting, after the reservoir it's supposed to cross. This should be Beijing's second largest reservoir. I look upstream and see a dam holding water in the Guishui River so that the residents of and visitors to Yanqing County Town get the illusion of a healthy river. I look below the bridge and downstream and see a couple of tiny creeks and acres of grass and mature trees. On a clear day I see where the water is gathered. I look around Beijing and see a myriad of place names referring to bodies of water or springs or wells that no longer exist.
This kind of problem is by no means unique to Yanqing or Beijing or China. I get really upset when I hear of new dairy farms going into, for example, Canterbury, because I see regularly the real results of over-exploitation of such a basic resource.
Water, theoretically, is not finite - it's just a matter of buring hydrogen, right? But in the real world, you're right, and we're really pushing the limits.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Islander,
And rather poor, comparatively, in *home-grown* resources(whether farmed or mineral.)
Unfortunately, China has now found itself poor in [ETA: home-grown] resources, if not in absolute terms, certainly in per capita terms. Water, especially.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to DexterX,
I basically agree with your view of the NZ government, but here is where we disagree:
Yes really – the fact that China is not hindered by the restrictions of human rights and Labour laws has been advanced as reasons for its success and the basis of why the West, including NZ can’t compete.
Well, I know that a few have pushed that argument, but my answer is: no, not entirely.The Cultural Revolution ended the year I was born, and even then China wasn't a complete autocracy and there was a fair bit of too and fro (by the severely restricted standards of the time) between different factions. For example, Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing weren't the best of friends and had a disagreement or two. China now is in a state of transition towards a rule of law, and it is very, very far from perfect and human rights and labour laws are severely abused, but China is not unhindered, and when the law is insufficient to cut through corruption and Party meddling (redundancy in that clause? perhaps) public opinion can and does force the government to at least moderate, if not reverse or abandon plans.
Don't believe me? Why isn't there a maglev line from Shanghai to Hangzhou? What happened to the Xiamen PX plant? Why do you think the cadmium spill into a river in Liuzhou just the other day was reported so quickly and openly when the Jilin benzene spill into the Songjiang a few years ago was covered up until they were just about to turn off mains water supply in Harbin for several days? Take a look at the Shanxi brick kiln slavery scandal I referenced in a previous comment, or follow the links to the ChinaSMACK articles I posted in probably the same comment and read the translations of discussion that happened openly on the Chinese internet.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have personally witnessed people get away with shit here that would cause one hell of a scandal in NZ. All I'm saying is China isn't that simple. This is a massive country with huge variations in language and culture and massive regional discrepancies in level of development, quality of governance and corruption, with an authoritarian government trying to move into the rule of law and a modern economy and society with a growing middle class that's starting to demand it's say in how things are done and a peasantry that throughout history has been more than willing to overthrow its rulers (local, provincial or national) once they've passed their use by date, and that makes for one horribly complex situation.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to DexterX,
I dismissed it as not worth the busfare and made myself a cup of coffee.
Seems like a very fair assessment to me.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Islander,
Note the date the programmes ended: 1985.
I did note that, and that's about the time my political memories begin and the era I started developing my political leanings.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Ross Mason,
Geez, of all the things to sacrifice at the altar of Mammon.
And now New Zealanders have a reputation here in China for shite business skills. Coincidence?
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to DexterX,
The race to the bottom of the barrel.
Really?! Cos the China I live in is trying to work its way up, and so far as I can tell the current NZ government is trying to repeat the mistakes of the past with only a couple of minor tweaks in the hope it might actually work this time round, and those mistakes they're trying to repeat bear no resemblance to what's happening here in China. Also, just how often does anybody Western, politician, bureaucrat or media type, actually hold China up as a model to emulate?
As for singing China's praises, you'll have to forgive me, but there is actually good stuff happening here, like all-electric taxis (pictured) and (if I may be permitted a link to my own blog) more investment in setting up experimental infrastructure for new energy (e.g. electric) and energy efficient (e.g. hybrid) vehicles.
Of course, there is still plenty of bad stuff happening, like the recent cadmium spill in Guangxi or news today of a safety incident at a copper plant killing 3 and injuring 1. Even so, China is no more Mordor than it is the Promised Land.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Sacha,
And it seems they’ve done far better at that than NZ has over the last decade.
In some respects, certainly, but it seems to me there are areas where NZ still has an edge over China, and not just in dairy. Weta would seem to me to be far ahead of the Chinese cinema in its special effects. Considering some of the crazy arse shit that did the rounds of the internet after the Wenchuan quake, some of which was attributed to actual seismologists, suggests to me that GNS is way ahead of its Chinese counterparts. But yes, NZ could and should be doing better.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
China's economy is not actually limited to making things for export, and there are an awful lot of jobs here that do involve powerpoints, marketing, schmoozing. There's also a fair bit of R&D.
As for whose going to make stuff, for all the talk of the Pearl Delta's cheap manufacturing for export shifting to other developing countries, there's as much talk pointing out that those other developing countries don't have the infrastructure China has. And China is continuing to invest huge amounts in infrastructure. There are also huge regional disparities in development levels. As parts of China reach a more-or-less developed status, that developing country-style cheap, low margin manufacturing will shift to the less developed regions. For example, a lot of Beijing's heavy industry has been shifted out into Hebei (Shougang, for example).
