Toxic...China...

I am not sure how much people understand the problem that is being posed by China’s cavalier attitude to product and environmental safety. If you think the toys your children are playing with are the only threat for toxicity you are wrong. Hidden problems exist.

Exactly what do you think is being done with the millions of tons of toys being recalled from lead and other heavy metal contaminants? I can tell you it will be one of two things. First, the toys will get distributed into countries with no standards for toxicity. Second, the products will be recycled. Now that may sound like a good option, but truthfully, it is not. The recycle process will separate and segregate the various parts for reprocessing. Metal pins and rods will get melted down and reformed. The plastic will get be reground and put back into the raw material supply chain.

The lead in these parts will not disappear by reheating and remolding into a new product.

On the plastic side, it is possible some of the regrind will be used for seemingly inert products, like dimensional plastic lumber. But others will be sold to plastic producers who will make who knows what with them. Most likely a lot of it will get molded into black plastic parts. Why black? Because black is the only color that will mask ALL other colors. I know this because I’m a plastic manufacturer. Internally, we reuse our scrap by regrinding and introducing small amounts back into the production process on certain parts. When making black parts we’ll increase the use of regrind. Because we are selective on the parts we will use our regrind on, we don’t use as much scrap as we make and sell it on the open market. So trust me, this is happening in China too.

The potential for toxicity is still very high and will require even more diligence on companies who are purchasing the finished products to test for heavy metal additives. There are lead test kits that home-owners can purchase, but what about all the other heavy metals such as Arsenic, Beryllium, Cadmium, Hexavalent Chromium, and Mercury.

Again this goes back to survival strategy. How will China’s disregard for human and environmental safety affect your personal survival, let alone the human species? This is something each of us needs to address on an individual level before contamination spirals out of control.

CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS

CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS

Posted by wmmbb in Environment.
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China is now emitting more CO2 than the United States. In 2005 China’s emissions were 2% below the US, and in 2006 they were greater by 8%. Kyoto did not hold the Chinese to any targets. They argue that did not cause the problem of global warming, so they should not be held to account for it.

Shuozhou, China: Morning commuters pass under the cooling towers of the Shengtou Power Plant , Shanxi Province. The Shengtou plant is one of the country’s largest coal burning power plants.
Photograph: Qilai Shen/EPA via The Guardian.

Tough and pure nonsense, I contend. To continue to pour out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, with it multiple environmental implications is sheer negligence. It is now, and it was ten or twenty years ago. Unless the coal industry, regardless of country can sort out the environmental impacts it has little future. They should have been investing and researching alternative energy sources. The nanny state, in the persons of American, Australian and Chinese governments is going to the rescue of incompetent and negligent industries. In this instance governments and industries have to rely more on environmental signals rather than market signals.

Tested positive for performance enhancing drugs.

China On The Juice
What was first an Olympic problem and then an American problem has now become a Chinese problem. Four athletes who won gold medals in central China's Henan provincial games last month have tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. These athletes earned their medals in wrestling and weightlifting (no surprise) but their names and the specifics of the drugs used have not been released. Of the 274 athletes competing in the provincial games, 78 were subject to random drug testing, said national news source Xinhua. This bust comes on the heels of a massive August raid in which Chinese authorities seized 450 doses of EPO, testosterone and steroids from an athletic training school in north China's Liaoning province where the staff of the school were caught injecting students with the drugs. The students at the school, the type of school Yao Ming attended for basketball, ranged from ages 15-18 and all have Olympic potential. China, in preparation for the Beijing Olympic games, has been aggressively fighting the war against performance-enhancing drugs to assure that it does not face embarrassment as the world's host. So, as this news from China surfaces, it becomes clear that doping is officially a global problem and not an American one. Other than the NBA, there seems to be a steroid abuse problem in every sport in the world from pitchers in Arizona to wrestlers in China. American cyclists rely on testosterone boosts to win. Baseball, it's safe to assume that half those guys are on something. Football players all look juiced. And even soccer players, playing "the world game" (I hate that), have faced steroid allegations in the past few years. And with Olympic athletes, it's gotten to the point that you have to start assuming they are all taking drugs. Every U.S. track star I've ever heard of except Maurice Greene-- Carl Lewis, Flo-Jo, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin--all used steroids during their Olympic careers. Clearly, these athletes are not isolated cases of steroid use, but rather they are small parts of a systematic cheat ring in sports. Nowadays, it would be naive to assume an athlete won an event without 'roids. Drug use, as we can see from the raid in China, has become the norm in athlete development all around the world. And therefore, I think the 2008 Olympics should serve as a test of which country has the best athletes, but rather, the first test of which nation makes the best drugs.

How the world’s priorities have changed over China

How the world’s priorities have changed over China: not so long ago the US Congress was earnestly debating China’s human-rights record. Today all anyone cares about is that China’s economic wheels keep turning, so it goes on filling its shelves with our goods. Far from worrying about China’s repressive regime, foreign politicians are mainly concerned that it keep a lid on the discontent caused by widespread official corruption. That’s why the outside world got a graphic glimpse of the rioting recently in Hunan last week. The crackdown on the 20,000 or so demonstrators was incredibly vicious, yet remarkably, a BBC TV reporter was allowed to film it. You can be sure that was no accident. Hu Jintao’s regime is the most media savvy in China’s history: it wanted to show the world that, fine words about justice aside, it has the situation well under control, even if it means sending in a couple of thousand baton-wielding troops and declaring martial law.

It’s a pity China wasn’t as tough on curbing the terrible price exacted by the steep economic growth. Once sleepy rural towns are now boxed in by factories and power plants belch acrid smoke. Even with a face mask it’s hard to breathe when you go outside. The sky is black - cars always drive with their headlights on; the soil is chemically contaminated (vegetables that grow there are covered with ugly black patches); and people are getting sick from skin infections, breathing disorders and cancers. Drinking water is the biggest worry: 90% of China’s water is now seriously polluted.

Europeans also make things worse by sending China all their supermarket packaging and plastic bags. Britain alone dumps around two million tonnes of waste in China every year. What can’t be recycled is melted down in acid baths, or burned, creating noxious fumes and appalling health problems for the locals.

However, China’s main problem is that most of its growth is fuelled by coal. Within a few months, its emission of greenhouse gases will exceed that of America: in 25 years, if left unchecked, it will be twice that of all developed nations put together. Yet China’s leaders remain reluctant to take any steps to stem it, fearing that to curb growth would be to invite social unrest which is crazy since pollution itself is now a prime cause of public anger. Two years ago, there was rioting when four million people had their water cut off following a chemical spill in the Songhua River. Other such accidents, albeit on a lesser scale, occur every other day, and it’s local politicians and businessmen, putting careers and profits before environmental safety, who are blamed for them.

Chinas leaders used to blame the West for global warming, pointing out China has contributed less than 8% of CO2 emissions since 1850. But now they’ve signalled that they’re ready to engage in international negotiations on global warming. Beijing might well commit itself to binding caps on emissions (thereby robbing the US of its key excuse for not doing likewise). Better still, it aims to raise energy efficiency by 20% in four years - mainly by greater reliance on renewable sources and cut-backs in iron and steel production. This is ambitious as these targets far exceed those set by Western countries. Still, there’s an encouraging precedent. In the Sixties, Tokyo and Osaka were as polluted as China’s cities are now, but thanks to tough policies, Japan is now more energy-efficient than any other country. Let’s hope, for the world’s sake, that its neighbour can pull off the same trick.

Thermometer Factory Pollutes Farming Town In China

Severe environmental degradation has accompanied China's rapid economic growth and industrialization since the early 1980s, with serious pollution from factories now a major problem across the country.

by Staff Writers
Beijing (AFP)
A town in southwest China is wrestling with a serious pollution problem after a thermometer factory contaminated its vegetable fields and rivers with mercury, local media said Monday. The residents of Dongyang town in Chongqing municipality may face the loss of 20 hectares (49.3 acres) of farmland because the mercury has seeped into the soil, the Chongqing Evening Post said.

Farmers had for a long time used the water from nearby rivers, which are contaminated by the factory pollution, to irrigate their vegetables, corn and melons, the report said.

The factory, which closed on Sunday after filing for bankruptcy, had a section that produced mercury and droplets of the chemical can still be seen around the grounds of the complex, according to the report.

The plant had once directly discharged into one of the rivers, poisoning all the fish in fish farms nearby, it said.

Mercury is listed by the World Health Organization as a possible carcinogen that has many other severe health side effects for humans if exposed to high levels.

Experts from the local environmental protection department and a local agriculture college have confirmed soil and vegetables contain mercury levels exceeding safe limits, but it was not clear by how much, the report said.

Severe environmental degradation has accompanied China's rapid economic growth and industrialization since the early 1980s, with serious pollution from factories now a major problem across the country.

China's Future...

Beneath Booming Cities, China’s Future Is Drying Up

Du Bin for The New York Times

A construction team works an underground tunnel that will allow water to flow beneath a local highway.

SHIJIAZHUANG, China — Hundreds of feet below ground, the primary water source for this provincial capital of more than two million people is steadily running dry. The underground water table is sinking about four feet a year. Municipal wells have already drained two-thirds of the local groundwater.

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Choking on Growth

This is the second in a series of articles and multimedia examining the human toll, global impact and political challenge of China's epic pollution crisis.

Go to Complete Coverage »

• Video: Sending Water North
• Interactive Graphic: Where Water is Scarce
• Expert Roundtable: Submit a Question

In Translation

Summaries of articles in this series will be made available in Mandarin Chinese.

• Download a written translation of this article. (pdf)

Listen to a reading of the translation. (mp3)

Multimedia

Map

South-to-North Water Transfer Project

Above ground, this city in the North China Plain is having a party. Economic growth topped 11 percent last year. Population is rising. A new upscale housing development is advertising waterfront property on lakes filled with pumped groundwater. Another half-built complex, the Arc de Royal, is rising above one of the lowest points in the city’s water table.

“People who are buying apartments aren’t thinking about whether there will be water in the future,” said Zhang Zhongmin, who has tried for 20 years to raise public awareness about the city’s dire water situation.

For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.

China is scouring the world for oil, natural gas and minerals to keep its economic machine humming. But trade deals cannot solve water problems. Water usage in China has quintupled since 1949, and leaders will increasingly face tough political choices as cities, industry and farming compete for a finite and unbalanced water supply.

One example is grain. The Communist Party, leery of depending on imports to feed the country, has long insisted on grain self-sufficiency. But growing so much grain consumes huge amounts of underground water in the North China Plain, which produces half the country’s wheat. Some scientists say farming in the rapidly urbanizing region should be restricted to protect endangered aquifers. Yet doing so could threaten the livelihoods of millions of farmers and cause a spike in international grain prices.

For the Communist Party, the immediate challenge is the prosaic task of forcing the world’s most dynamic economy to conserve and protect clean water. Water pollution is so widespread that regulators say a major incident occurs every other day. Municipal and industrial dumping has left sections of many rivers “unfit for human contact.”

Cities like Beijing and Tianjin have shown progress on water conservation, but China’s economy continues to emphasize growth. Industry in China uses 3 to 10 times more water, depending on the product, than industries in developed nations.

“We have to now focus on conservation,” said Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist. “We don’t have much extra water resources. We have the same resources and much bigger pressures from growth.”

In the past, the Communist Party has reflexively turned to engineering projects to address water problems, and now it is reaching back to one of Mao’s unrealized plans: the $62 billion South-to-North Water Transfer Project to funnel more than 12 trillion gallons northward every year along three routes from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050. The eastern and central lines are already under construction; the western line, the most disputed because of environmental concerns, remains in the planning stages.

The North China Plain undoubtedly needs any water it can get. An economic powerhouse with more than 200 million people, it has limited rainfall and depends on groundwater for 60 percent of its supply. Other countries, like Yemen, India, Mexico and the United States, have aquifers that are being drained to dangerously low levels. But scientists say those below the North China Plain may be drained within 30 years.

“There’s no uncertainty,” said Richard Evans, a hydrologist who has worked in China for two decades and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and China’s Ministry of Water Resources. “The rate of decline is very clear, very well documented. They will run out of groundwater if the current rate continues.”

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Chinese baby traffickers???

Jail for Chinese baby traffickers

Baby trafficking is seen as a growing problem in China

A Chinese orphanage director and nine other people have been given jail sentences for buying and selling dozens of babies who were then adopted abroad.

Another 22 officials in central China's Hunan province have been sacked over the trade, which ran from 2002 to 2005.

In 2005 alone, 78 babies were bought and sold on to orphanages which offered them to adoptive parents, who made donations, Xinhua news agency said.

The nationalities of the foreign adopters are not known.

The court heard the infants trafficked were bought in China's southern Guangdong province and sold on to six orphanages for 3,200-4,000 yuan ($400 to $540) each.

Chen Ming, the director of Hengdong Social Welfare Home in Hengyang, Hunan, was sentenced to one year in prison for his role but is on the run. Most of the sacked officials worked at the children's homes involved.

Three human traffickers were jailed for 15 years and six others given sentences ranging from three to 13 years.

Baby trafficking is seen as a growing problem in China.

The country's strict "one child" birth control policy, coupled with a traditional bias for male children, has led to widespread reports of child abductions

Denim...in china???

Cowboy trousers and the cosmology of denim in China

When Mao Zedong became head of the newly formed People’s Republic of China in 1949 he resisted pressure from his chief of protocol to don a suit and black leather shoes as expected of world leaders, instead opting for a blue tunic and trousers (Finnane 1996:99). The ‘Mao suit’, as it is called in the West, came to be viewed within China as a representation of the country’s independence from the rest of the world, while to the West it became a symbol of cultural homogeneity imposed by the socialist state.

The prevalence of blue denim in today’s China is a marked contrast to the Mao suits worn by its population during the years of the Cultural Revolution. This project will investigate the hypothesis that if the Chinese cosmology of movement is related to a system that lies between the static and the dynamic, then the trajectories of clothing in (a) the denim commodity chain; and (b) the historical evolution of the fabric in relation to the earlier ‘Mao suit’ will be dictated by strategies of a setup and its efficacy. In addition to illuminating traditionally studied areas such as ethnicity, nationality and gender from a material culture perspective it will provide a space for unexplored divisions to be made apparent, and contribute to an understanding of denim as a global fabric. Ultimately it seeks to use this case to explore the Chinese cosmology of movement.

This project, which is dependant on funding, is intended ultimately to contribute to anthropological studies of cosmology, and lived practice as anthropology’s analogy to conventional philosophy. The route it plans to explore is to seek to advance a theory of movement as a means of understanding societies, addressing the philosophical question of what is movement? How does the modern clothing industry encompass Eastern (Buddhist, Daoist) philosophies of movement as the antithesis to stillness, and stillness being essential to enlightenment; with the Chinese communist work ethic as the route to building an harmonious society?

Sinologist and philosopher Françoise Jullien (1995:15) provides the basis of this notion of efficacy in his analysis of the Chinese term shi. He posits that Chinese thought interprets reality solely on the basis of itself, founded on the logic that exists in the processes of motion. Chinese art and wisdom lies in the calculated exploitation of the propensity that emanates from a particular configuration of reality to the maximum effect. Jullien exemplifies this in the successful general who conducts his war from a distance, simply by exploiting the factors in play. This research speculates that such a strategy can be observed in denim consumption in everyday life.

The ubiquitous nature of jeans (niuzaiku, literally ‘cowboy trousers’) in China means that by adopting a commodity chain approach in investigating the hypothesis we fully expect to revisit oft-considered themes in the anthropology of China, such as gender, ethnicity, nationhood and rural-urban inequality, but uniquely movement in the denim commodity chain will act as a prism through which Chinese society is refracted, making unexplored divisions, power structures, economic systems and cultural practices visible.

A prime example of one of the questions raised by the appropriation of denim can be given in the widespread adoption of tight-fitting jeans by young women in China (Ho, 2003). In this mode of denim adoption are we seeing the material realisation of what has been called “China’s Great Sexual Leap Forward” (Zhang, 4 November 2007)? By exploring how consumers and retailers exploit strategies of setup and efficacy in the buying and wearing of denim, a new perspective on the means by which gender roles are played out through clothing will be reached.

China’s denim industry is undergoing rapid growth in the country’s South, with Hong Kong as a major point of trade (Li, Yao and Yeung 2003). In addition to international export, researchers often ignore the considerable proportion of denim intended for domestic use. Here the opportunity exists to understand how the Chinese cosmology of movement affects such growth.

The theory of shi provides a useful starting point with which to explore the relationship of the body to these systems of movement. By approaching this issue through the cosmology of denim it is envisaged that an insight into how movement acts upon the body, and how the body acts to create, control and regulate movement may be achieved, contributing to our understanding of phenomenological experience.

Bibliography

Finnane, A. 1996. What Should Chinese Women Wear? A National Problem. Modern China, 22:2, pp 99-131.

Ho, J. 2003. From Spice Girls to enjo kosai: formations of teenage girls' sexualities in Taiwan. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 4:2, pp 325-336.

Jullien, F. 1994. The Propensity of Things: Towards A History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books.

Li, Y., Yao, L. & Yeung, K.W. 2003. The China and Hong Kong Denim Industry. Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing.

Leslie, D. & Reimer, S. 1999. Spatializing commodity chains. Progress in Human Geography, 23:3. pp. 401-420.