Although France sending its nuclear waste to China may have made it into a paper, this kind of thing is nothing special for China. China has been importing the garbage of other countries for years. Usually countries pay to import items, but China is at times paid to act as the landfill for many OECD countries. I wrote a sloppy undergrad paper about the international trade in electronic waste (e-waste), and if you don't mind the poor grammar and poor formatting which my paper was subjected to, it is available for you to read on my long abandoned attemt and being intellectual and philosophical through analyzing the world. For proffesional information avaiable from the Worldwatch Institute and a particularly groundbreaking report titled Exporting Harm – The High Tech Trashing of Asia by the Basel Action Network.

I actually visited one of the center of e-waste processing during a trip when I was in China for my junior year. Although I lacked the resources (money, time, connections) that professional reporters and investigators had, it was still an amazing experience to see just how filthy the place was, and having read previously about the cancer and other side effects caused by exposure to that level of toxic chemicals (commonly found in computers) gave my experience a unique depth.

It was also during the writing of this paper that I began to really get into the idea of re-use of products. Imagine this: If after being used for a few years could be sent back to the company that made it. This company could take apart the components, use whatever is still usable, and dismantle and cannibalize whatever isn't usable in it's current form. For an even simpler concept imagine that the bottles that beverages come in could be returned to the local 7-11, where they would be filled with a new beverage and re-labeled for its new contents. Imagine that candy bars came in re-usable and returnable Tupperware-like containers rather than disposable plastic. *sigh* What a world.

Losing Faith in Thomas Friedman

This is a man that (according to this article) has an effectively unlimited travel budget from the New York Times. He has also consistently ignored or fluffed over many of the negative trends and aspects of the China.

Friedman has also ignored environmental realities in China, listening to the government and business elites (apparently without realizing that not everything the central government declares actually ends up working) in the New York Times no less! He has been called an 'airport guru' to jets to different countries, takes quick glimpses at the capital cities and the latest high-tech industrial projects, and then gets back onto an airplane. This is of course a simplification, but it does seem to be relatively accurate!

He also seems to be a bit hypocritical in light of his own "climate and energy use" ideas.

EDIT: A classmate from Kalamazoo, Sean, who writes far more articulately and intelligently than my sloppy rants, has written a bit on Thomas Friedman. He has an analysis which recognizes subtitles far more than my writing does.

Are the world's poorest people getting richer or poorer?

I am having difficulty understanding the claims of a recent article from the Times of India claiming that the number of desperately poor people in the world has increased with previous reports about a UN paper which claimed that the world's poor were less in number now than previously. Curious... maybe the difference is just in the places and people that were looked at, the time period used and the statistics cited, but I still find it rather curious.

I don't look like an American?

I had another moment yesterday in which a Chinese person had trouble believing I was completely from the United States. When I confirmed for her that I really was born and raised in the U.S., she insisted that my parents were surely [paraphrasing] "from Spain, or some other country where people typically have dark hair, because I don't look like an American." Although it is factually completely inaccurate, my love affair with Spain causes me to be very pleased with her mis-judgment of my ancestry.

China's Environmental Woes Are Diverse, Numerous, and Mighty

For anyone that isn't as aware of China issues as I am, China has some serious environmental problems.

Dai Qing is one of the main spokespeople as to the environmental disaster that is contemporary China, and although she is most famous for her activism against the Three Gorges Dam, she seems to be widely knowledgeable about other environmental issues in China as well. She was recently profiled at The Globe and Mail, and the quotes taken from her pretty much give a accurate brief overview of China's current environmental situation:

The cost includes environmental devastation on a massive scale. Eighty per cent of the country’s rivers and lakes are drying up, she says. Sixty per cent of the water in seven major river systems is unsuitable for human contact. A third of the land is contaminated by acid rain. Two-thirds of the grassland have become desertified, and most of the forest is gone. Forty per cent of the arable land has been degraded by fertilizers and pesticides. Of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, 16 are in China.

Although there is little doubt among the general public that this disaster is a result of China's hyper-speed modernization and industrialization, academics and China hands are often aware that one of the most influential men of the 20th century (who happened to have one of the highest kill counts too, although I think Stalin and Hitler get more air-time in the U.S.) also had a decent role to play in raping and pillaging the lands of China.



Although the environmental catastrophe of modern China is fairly widely known and felt (even California suffers as a result), the origins of this situation well predate the founding of the P.R.C. in 1949. In a paper titled The Environmental Legacy of Imperial China Mark Elvin lays out some of the environmental challenges that Imperial China faced. Although I have not read it (yet!), Elvin apparently goes into far more detail in his book on the environmental history of China.


In other recent news that I have seen concerning China's environment, In the capital of the southern province of Guangdong, the government officials apparently are doing everything they can in order to clean things up for the 2010 Asian Games, the biggest multi-sporting event in the world after the Olympics. In the China Daily (a newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China, and often seen as the official mouthpiece of the P.R.C. government), a professor of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) claimed that a "5 to 10 percent crop loss is foreseeable by 2030 if climate change continues." He also states that the production of "rice, wheat and corn may suffer a 37 percent decline." A Greenpeace report on food security in China make the claim that China may lack a sufficient food supply for its population by 2030, and "loss of arable land and water scarcity will cut China's overall food production by up to 23 percent by 2050." Food concerns may be an increasing problem in the coming decades for China if climate change really does affect East Asia in the way that it has been predicted:

Credit where credit is due: I got the image from Sean Bennett, but I do not know where it is originally from.

However, the world need not fear climate change: We can save most of the world by blowing up select portion of it! Well... kind of. Apparently volcanic explosions have the effect of lowering global temperatures,

and through "geoengineering interventions" human beings could replicate similar effects. At least that is what a recent piece over at the Yale Global Online says. It could be an ingenious way to re-balance an over-heated planet, but it would be treating the symptoms (global warming) rather than the root of the problem (a civilization which is highly dependent of emitting toxic substances). I am also concerned about the possibilities of human being tampering with things that are incredibly complicated and effectively unpredictable. However, I would have to do loads more research on geoengineering and its possible uses to mitigate climate change before forming an educated opinion. For now I will just categorize it away in my brain as an interesting, novel, and potentially disastrous or wondrous method of destroying or saving humanity.


On a lighter note, here is a page I found about dancing presidents. Sometimes I have trouble believing that the brilliant minds who write for FP also put up such goofy things as that. But that is nothing compared to the most sex-ready Obama that you have ever seen (unless you are Michelle Obama). I had no idea he was such a sought after "partner" in China.

EDIT: Another China environment story in the CSM about a city that is trying to get clean.

Halloween(s)

I had two distinct experiences as a part of Halloween celebrations this year: one at work, and one out on the town, each with different level of fun.

A tired Mrs. Wei and a restless Allie

The first was the Halloween party that my preschool put on for the children and for the parents. In my mind this started as early as Thursday evening, when I helped Mrs. Wei carve a pumpkin (read: carved it for her). Mrs. Wei is one of the teachers at my preschool, a motherly figure with her own 5 year old daughter, Allie. Allie likes me a lot, and Mrs. Wei is very nice to me, so I guess I am kind of a friend of the family. I have told Mrs. Wei that if she ever needs someone to watch over Allie she can just give me a call. Mrs. Wei had asked me to help her carve a pumpkin, and I was excited to have an opportunity to attempt the cannibal pumpkin concept. Thursday we stayed at the preschool after the kids had left and got a table all covered with plastic, got some knives for the carving itself, and went to it. I used a marker to draw on our goal, and I got to it. Mostly I cut things out, but I recruited Mrs. Wei's help for some of the parts that I had clearly marked, so after explaining to her how it should be cut I got to take some small breaks to chit chat with the other three or four people that had also stayed after. I even got Allie to help me out (a little bit) in taking out the 'guts' of the pumpkin. In the end, although we didn't have access to as big of a pumpkin as I would have liked, I am quite pleased with how it turned out. One of the Chinese teachers took some pictures with her cell phone, but I haven't gotten a hold of those yet. I will certainly put them up here when I am able to, but for now, you will have to be satisfied to know that my creation was based off of, and ended up looking like, this. [EDIT: Pictures added. Not enough to show the final creation, though. :( ]

Except for the teeth the pumpkin is finished being carved.

On Friday, although I went to work, we did not teach class. The whole morning was spent between playing with the kids, preparing for the afternoon's party, and carving a pumpkin. I had the kids help me pull the guts out, which some of them liked and some of them didn't. They gripped the little seeds very gingerly and reached into the pumpkin to grab more very tentatively. It was cute to watch them do something so completely new and completely foreign to them. After lunchtime, however, things really started to get going. We re-arranged the cafeteria room, my friend Lao Zhou (a juggler) arrived, and the parent's started to show up. I was the MJ of the event, so once everyone was there, I got on stage to give everyone a quick welcome and to introduce the activities and entertainments of the afternoon (we got a magician too). It was actually pretty hectic, between some of the Chinese staff trying to have 2- and 3-year-olds play musical chairs, the pumpkin pie competition (I was one of the taste judges, and I had to spit one out), and intense disagreements between the bosses (as there always is here). As it wrapped up though, I was helping the other staff prepare for the evening's party. The afternoon party was just for the little kids (ages 2-4) and their families, while we had a separate party in the evening for the bigger kids (ages 5-7). The best part, by far, of the evening party was the haunted house. We all put a lot of work into moving things around and setting everything up in order to turn the cafeteria and two adjacent classrooms into a scary place for the families and for the children. Although the jack-o-lantern carving contest and bobbing for apples definitely had their fun moments, the haunted house was, hands down, the best part of the evening. After the parents and kids left some of the people at work planned to have some kind of an after party, but I preferred to go home and rest. I really had to work to get out of there, since my bosses wanted me to stay for the after party, but I made it clear that I would rather go home, so home I went.

Saturday (pre-5pm) was possibly one of the least productive days of my time here, ever. I blame this partially on Federico, since he recommended the game Spore to me, and then I went to a local electronics market and got it for 50元 (about $7 U.S.). I played Spore for pretty much the whole day on Saturday. I am amazed at how I looked up at the clock and HOURS had passed. Thankfully, I have a dinner date with a friend that evening, otherwise I might have kept playing until midnight (as I did on the next night, Sunday). I left home a little after five o’clock in order to meet my friend Fan Rong near NanLuoGuXiang. She had read a good review of a pizza place online, and she wanted to check it out. I was disgusted by the concept of YangRouChuaner Pizza and Kung Pao Chicken Pizza (which are apparently the famous house specialties), but we got a half-Italian half-African (banana and mango) pizza, which was satisfying enough. After dinner we took a short walk to the Peng Hao Theater (one of my favorite theaters in Beijing) for Beijing Improv’s special Halloween improv show. Beijing Improv is always a blast, but this one was a little different, since it was a special Halloween show. They started out by making up (read: improvising) a scary story. It ended up involving the demise of a little town called Spoon River, where the main industry was a spoon factory (what else?). Through a combination of the village drunk starting a fork craze and the trend of mudslides in the town everyone ended up dying horrible deaths. After that short into piece, the group launched into more classic improv games, most of which made for wonderful entertainment. After nearly two hours of laughing, giving the performers suggestions, and enjoying myself thoroughly the show was over. Fan Rong had to meet someone in Sanlitun, but we had some time before that so we were joined by Duoyi (a friend from improv workshops) and we all strolled over to 46 Fangjia Hutong (and here), where we stopped at the Hot Cat Club. I was pleasantly surprised to find a local ska band ripping it up, and I enjoyed their music immensely. After whiling away some time with Jenga we hopped in a cab to go to the Sanlitun and meet up with improv people. I ended up dancing at Tun with some of the improv performers of the evening and their friends. I hadn’t been dancing in soooo long. I loved it. I have always been an early sleeper though, so I went home a little after 2 in the morning. Unexpectedly, I got a phone call from Fan Rong around 5, at which point she told me that the friend she had expected to spend the night with had bailed on her and she needed a place to stay. She knew that I had an air mattress, and I told her that it was fine if she wanted to crash there. I let her in, and then crashed again. Due to my sleeping habits, I was naturally awake at around 9 the next morning… and I have been tired ever since. I met another friend for lunch, and we talked about all kind of things, from the rising importance of China in the world to all the dirty work that the CIA has done throughout Latin America. It was really nice to have such a good talk. I spent the rest of the day relaxing at home, not even going out to see David Cooper’s band, The Red Pirates, that evening.

All in all, it was a SUPER enjoyable weekend. The video game, the improv show, going out dancing, and spending time with old friends made for a great couple of days. It makes me wish that I didn’t have work Mon-Fri.

At least there is some good news in the world (or, a billion links with what I read recently)

I am so glad to find news that is not related to the mid-term elections in the United States. Even all of my regular foreign and international focused news sources have been running material about the elections.

Other than a new mysterious writer in China, the PRC government trying to throw it's wight around (once again, like an immature schoolyard who has suddenly realized that he is bigger than most of the other kids on the playground) bully to influence European governments and some entertaining multicultural iconic romance, there has been a lot of writing about India recently, presumably due to the upcoming Obama visit. I assume it will made away after Obama leaves south Asia.

I just read that, according to a UN study, the world is now better off since people are, in general, "healthier, richer and better educated than ever before, with most developing countries registering huge gains over the last 40 years." With a more critical perspective, however, a Foreign Policy article on the subject mentions how inequality is still high. Fortunatly, alternatives do exist, even if many of them are a bit idealistic rather then practical, some make a difference.

In what I see as positive news, two fairly bright fellows have made a comparison between China's current state and that of the United States of America in the mid 19th century. I think zooming out to this kind of a big picture is something that Americans (myself included) do not do often enough, but I suspect that it may be a basic part of Chinese culture to look at the bigger picture and interpret things more holistically and with more context.

Okay, so add in a plane nearly crashing into Singapore and a volcano and I guess that more things are happening in the world than just the U.S. mid-term elections.

A few quick references

Just a quick reference to a blog entry written by Daniel W. Drezner of Foreign Policy (a blog that was introduced to by through the writings of a former classmate, actually): it speaks fairly straight forward and clearly as to the domestic political issues of the Unites States and the tension that these issues have with Foreign Policy issues.

Also, a fairly long narrative about the political experiences of Thomas M. Engelhardt and his view of the most recent mid-term election. It struck me as a piece which was very nicely put together, and it lacked a lot of the anger or the passion that it often present in political writings. I very much enjoyed reading such a calm and contemplative piece.