Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's disappointing, because it was bloody huge here. Still, I guess bricks aren't high on the list of items China exports, whereas Foxconn is making an awful lot of the gadgets in such high demand around the world.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
and in states like China, (b) is pretty questionable.
Really? Cos I could walk 3km up the road and be in an area where most of the collars are white. Those that aren't are in jobs like security, maintenance, hospitality and transport to support those white collar jobs. China now has literary and cinema genres focussing on the white collar world (Du Lala, for example - I think the film's English title is Go Lala Go).
Russell mentioned Vietnam's efforts to avoid being mere cheap outsourcing, China's central government has been pushing for years to move up the ladder in terms of technology, innovation, the cultural sector, and the service industry, among others. Basically, China wants to be what the US and Western Europe have been until now.
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Keir's got it.
As for why anybody would want to work at Foxconn, perhaps I should've taken a few photos of a village I visited over Chinese New Year. And that wasn't even dire poverty.
And for all of Foxconn's abuses (and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korean bosses in general have pretty poor reputations here), yes [*warning: There are some really quite unpleasant photos in the following links] there is worse out here. Anybody remember the Shanxi brick kiln slavery scandal, or did that not make the news in NZ? Kids were being kidnapped off the streets of cities and towns in Henan, driven up into Shanxi, and forced to live and work in conditions that make Foxconn look like paradise.
Russel's right, these issues are being talked about in China, and more. In fact, that NY Times article was translated into Chinese and published by Caixin (although I can't for the life of me remember where I found that link. Oh, and if you don't read Chinese, for crying out loud, do not use Google Translate), although so far I haven't seen any reaction. And as the ChinaSMACK links above demonstrate, these issues are also being discussed in indigenous fora as well as just translation of foreign reporting, and the discussions can be quite lively. Positive change is happening, but it'll be a long, slow process.
And it's snowing here, but only just barely.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Lilith __,
Now that kite looks like it's about to zip its flyer off to somewhere he didn't quite expect to be.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Lilith __,
Impressive photos. Damn, I wish I had that kind of skill. And damn those photos and that interview brought back memories and some pretty raw emotion.
Like: Taking the ferry from Dalian to Tanggu (Tianjin's port), leaving Dalian taking in the view, breathing clean air, admiring the clean water (yes! admiring!). Next morning, waking up, taking a walk, look over the side and think, shit, I could walk on that muck. And ship after ship after ship vanishing off into the thick haze all waiting their turn to get into the port.
Or taking a rickety old minibus from Taiyuan out to Jinci, juddering over what might have resembled a road back in the dying days of the Qing dynasty, passing Taiyuan's biggest coal-fired power plant and then a collossal fertilizer factory belching flourescent orange smoke into the grey haze. Nice park, fascinating temple, good thing later that year the city government set up a new bus route down the highway away from the industry operated by fully intact buses.
Or my trip to Linfen (yes, I have been to the world's most polluted city), flying to Yuncheng (nearest commercial airport), when the plane crossed over the Taihangshan we could no longer see the ground. The descent was one of the freakier ones I've experienced, zigzagging all over the place, features on the ground only becoming visible when we were perilously low (can the pilot even see the airport?!). The plane door opens and instantly I smell coal. Ah, yes, back in Shanxi. I was picked up at the airport and we drove up the expressway to Linfen. Huge factory after huge factory loomed out of the haze and disappeared as quickly. Visibility couldn't have been any more than 100m. It was clear that the local governments of southern Shanxi were pumping huge sums of money into their tourism resources - and if you're into ancient Chinese history, forget about Xi'an or northern Henan, Linfen has Yao's tomb, and just outside Yuncheng is the original temple to Guandi, built right on Guanyu's birthplace.
Or when I lived in Taiyuan, taking the bus back over the Taihangshan after my semi-regular coffee, cheese and other luxury buying trips to Beijing, seeing up in the mountains villages of brick houses built into the mountainside with a small (so far as these things go) coal-fired powerstations sitting next to huge piles of coal, mysterious small holes in the mountainside (illegal coal mines? Quite likely), and the stream running bright canary yellow. Chinese industry isn't just gargantuan, but also tiny and almost as pervasive as the PM2.5 the Beijing city government finally started to report openly.
Photo: Linfen street scene, November 2008. The pollution doesn't look as bad in that photo. I blame Nokia.
And now my entry for one of those Tui billboards I've heard about:
I wonder if I could get a legitimate copy of Manufactured Landscapes in Beijing? -
Geez. Just read of a run on supplies of bottled water in Liuzhou, Guangxi, down in the south of China, after a cadmium spill upstream. Whoever takes over once we're gone is going to have a hell of a mess to clean up.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Lilith __,
The relationship of brain size to body size to intelligence is somewhat complicated
Indeed. When I took my wife to Rainbow Springs, she was most impressed by the smarts of Keas.
Planet of the Alpine Parrots?
Or with your comment on whales do you mean to suggest that marine mammals are going to re-evolve their arms and legs and come extract their revenge. I'm sure more than a few seals would be keen to get involved, too.
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hmmm... now I'm wondering... If we were to zip ourselves round the cosmos at the speed of light for a bit then return to Earth, would we find Planet of the Apes or Planet of the Cetaceans? Or considering that some apparently not so big brained animals have been around a lot longer than any mammal and don't seem to be in any great hurry to shuffle themselves off into oblivion, Planet of the Crocodilians?
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
That incident was many years ago, and those students have long since been let loose on the world. They were only first years at the time, and my job then was to teach them spoken English, so I wasn't in much of a position to take things any deeper or broader.
My current students are Information Technology majors, and my job too focussed on getting their English writing up to scratch for study at a Western university, but I do like to challenge the older and stronger students and stretch their English out to their limits. Still, as a language teacher it's my job to teach them how to express themselves, not what to think. Yes, that can get frustrating, but that's my job.
We're agreed on the nature of both science and traditional knowledge, and I do think Taoist attitudes towards aligning oneself and one's actions with the natural order could use a little more airplay. The same goes for many other traditional philosophies. The thing is, traditional knowledge speaks to a lot of ethical concerns that science doesn't deal with, and so the two can, and should, inform each other, a kind of complementarity where the bright points of one light up the dark areas of the other.
I think one of our greatest limits is our giftedness. On a regular basis, and just yesterday and five days ago, I cross a bridge named after the reservoir that's supposed to be underneath it. Every time I cross that bridge I look upstream and see a dam holding back water (or ice, this time of year) so that the county town can have the illusion of a healthy river flowing (or frozen) along it's southern edge. I look as directly below as I can when driving and downstream and see a couple of tiny creeks and acres of grass and mature trees where the reservoir is supposed to be. On a good day I can see as far as where there is actually water stored. It's a long way away. With every intervention we make into nature, we seem to shoot ourselves at least one more bullet in the foot.
I dunno, how hard is it for us as a species to understand that everything we have comes straight from nature, and when we die we're going straight back to nature, and that we are inescapably a part of nature? Or that when nature no longer finds us useful we'll be discarded, just like countless other species before us? Our survival as a species depends on that understanding and acceptance of those facts.
Oh well, enough ranting. I'm discovering that although out in Yanqing County fireworks are set off during daylight on the 5th day of the 1st lunar month (I did our family's just before lunch. Nothing excessive, mind), down in city Beijing the 5/1 fireworks are mostly set off in the evening. I guess that means this must be the first 5/1 on the lunar calendar I've spent in downtown Beijing since fireworks were legalised within the 5th Ring Road. Another reason rural and urban China feel like different countries.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Islander,
Because a majority of us *just dont know how fragile our lovely Papatuanuku/Gaia
is, for our life-form (let alone all the others!)*We think we are forever.
Bloody hell, NOT.
I wish I could disagree with you, but no, you're absolutely right.
I once showed my students "The Vertical Limit" and asked them what it was about. They said, "It shows nature is our enemy and we must fight nature!" Bloody hell! And this in the country that invented Taoism and it's wuwei, non-action, go with the natural order philosophy!
Where on earth did this hubris come from, and where is it going to take us?
I suppose on the plus side here in Beijing we'll soon be getting a network of charging stations for electric cars, we're supposed to get cleaner petrol by the end of the year, and the government asked us to not set off quite so many fireworks this CNY to help protect the air... too little, too late?
