kunming log

On being cynical

2007-07-24T08:28:00.000-07:00

I have avoided posting for the last few weeks out of fear that my posts may sound too cynical or negative. I probably surpassed experience overload quite a while ago, and my brain is starting to shut down....resist anything else. I realize that its going to take quite a long time for me to process what I have learned/seen/done in this very short period of time.

While lots has definitely happened in the last few weeks, including me working on a film about rural development which is premiering tomorrow, or me volunteering to teach street children at an outreach center beginning tomorrow, or me being sick for yet another time, or the independent research I have done on Yunnan tobacco, I want to focus this post on one of the best aspects of my experience here: meeting people.

As Larissa and I were at dinner tonight, I thought, damn if it weren't for this place I wouldn't have met any of the people at this table. We could have passed each other a million times and I would never had the opportunity to know them the way I know them now.

Yeah this stuff happens all the time whilst traveling. People are in a different state of mind. Especially when one comes from as dynamic a city as New York, where you can lose yourself, be alone in the crowd of a thousand, or (my favorite part) live multiple lives all at the same time. I've met tons of people while traveling. Some nice, some jerks, I'd some fun, never had my heartbroken, but I think my experiences here have been slightly different.

What I find the most overwhelming at being here is the feeling that I have to be "turned on" all the time. Meaning I can't be a cynical, negative bastard like I can in NYC. I have to be 'nice' and act like I care. Well, I probably always do care, but I like to pretend I don't...NYC allows me that much.

Anyway, my point. As difficult as its been at times, I am grateful to have come here and met the people I have met. I sincerely believe that I have met a good group of very positive people. I hope to stay in contact with a lot of them and hopefully see them again in the near or distant future.

It would be lame for me to say I changed because of my experiences here. Hell, maybe i have, but most likely I will return to NYC and go back to nearly the same life as I had before. Will I look back on my pictures/videos and cry? Doubtful.

What I will take away from this experience, and what will remind me of my time here most, is remembering the people I met. The people who passed through my life for a brief time or, in some lucky cases, a lifetime. In both cases, only time can tell how it all plays out.

One of thousands

2007-07-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

I just had to share this picture with everyone. This picture (taken by Tashi) shows our Kunming-based coordinator, Professor Zhao, in a field of tea trees. To me its conveys the genuine warmth of this wonderful man. I wish that everyone single one of you could meet him. He has really gone out of his way to make our stay here as comfortable, safe, and educational as possible. Yeah there have been some disappointments along the way, but we all learned a lot, and have lived to tell about it.

A collections of recent China articles of interest

2007-07-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update with some links to a few news articles that I have found of interest in the last few days. I didn't dig for anything here, just ran across them on the front page of a few websites I visit regularly.

I am not going to pretend that I really understand 100% what is really going on here, but whatever it is its been heating up lately.

With out further ado, below are the articles in no particular order.

Enjoy!

-----

China: 7 U.S. meat importers banned

BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Chinese food inspectors have banned meat products from seven U.S. companies from being imported into their country after finding a range of contamination issues in shipments checked on Saturday, according to China's official news agency Xinhua.

The suspension of meat imports from the American companies -- including Tyson Foods -- comes just weeks after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it would hold all farm-raised catfish, basa, shrimp, dace and eel shipments arriving from China until they are tested for residuehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs from drugs not approved by the U.S. for use in farm-raised fish.

Source: CNN

Carving Plight of Coal Miners, He Churns China

IT is not easy to forget an encounter with Zhang Jianhua’s sculptures of Chinese coal miners; that is, if one is lucky enough to see them.

Many of the life-size works depict miners sitting on the ground in their black rubber boots wearing looks of sheer fatigue. Some stare blankly into the distance or prop up their heads with both hands, their faces fixed in nameless agony.

Source: New York Times

Collection of information relating to the recent speeches of President Hu

There is a bunch of things here, for example:

CPC recruits 12M members in five years
The Communist Party of China (CPC) recruited 11.85 million members from 2002 to 2006, an average of 2.37 million per year, according to the organization department of the CPC Central Committee.

Official: Transparency key to public faith
A senior official has urged local governments to be more open and transparent, saying their attempt to block media coverage of negative incidents was "too naive".

Hu stresses scientific development
President Hu stressed the importance of implementing the scientific concept of development, promoting social harmony and building a well-off society.

Progress and problems mark elections
Democracy is making big strides in rural politics but corruption and vote-rigging plague some village elections, the Ministry of Civil Affairs said. Vote-buying Scandal

Source: China Daily

China Bars U.S. Trip for Doctor Who Exposed SARS Cover-Up

BEIJING, July 12 — A Chinese doctor who exposed the cover-up of China’s SARS outbreak in 2003 has been barred from traveling to the United States to collect a human rights award, a friend of the doctor and a human rights group said this week.

The doctor, Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, was awarded the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award by the New York Academy of Sciences. His army-affiliated work unit, Beijing’s Hospital 301, denied him permission to travel to the award ceremony in September, Hu Jia, a Chinese rights promoter who is a friend of Dr. Jiang’s, said Thursday.

Source: New York Times

A Chinese Reformer Betrays His Cause, and Pays

BEIJING, July 12 — Zheng Xiaoyu once ranked as one of the most powerful regulators in China. He rose from modest beginnings to help create and lead Beijing’s version of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.

But last March, locked up in the Qincheng Prison here, he wrote a short confession. “Why are the friends who gave me money all the bosses of pharmaceutical companies?” he wrote in his letter, entitled How I Look on My Mistakes. “Obviously because I was in charge of drug administration.”

Source: New York Times

For 2 Children, Ban of a Drug Came Too Late

BEIJING — While visiting relatives a year ago, Du Haipeng, 5, came down with a sore throat. Doctors prescribed a Chinese antibiotic, Xinfu. The boy’s reaction to the drug was so violent, he had to be taken to a nearby hospital.

“I remember clearly that I was shearing sheep when I got a call from my sister and her husband,” said Du Xinglong, 36, Haipeng’s father. “When I rushed to the hospital my son had already fallen into a coma.”

Source: New York Times

To Beijing Games, Bring Your Own

American athletes who normally sling a duffel bag over their shoulders for event travel may opt to lug a steamer trunk as they begin descending upon China in advance of the 2008 Beijing Summer Games — or the B.Y.O. Olympics.

Bring Your Own Crest. This go-to item is important for gymnasts who prefer a pearly Mary Lou Retton-sized smile for a Wheaties box pose instead of the nasty side effects from the recent batches of Chinese toothpaste tainted with a poison found in antifreeze.

Source: New York Times

Printing Memories

2007-07-15T22:55:00.001-07:00

Most of us will be moving on from Kunming in the next few weeks, or days in some cases. We are all (except one who has already left) stay in China till at least August. As a surprise for our China-based coordinator, I've decided to coordinate the collection of the groups' favorite (individually shot) photos, have them printed, and put them all in an album.

Wow! Some of these pictures are simply amazing. It's so crazy that we have seen and done so much in such a short period of time. Larissa and I went to Carrefore already and bought an album that holds 160 pictures. I plan on getting them printed sometime this week at one of this print-on-demand (they have a bunch of them here) places. I am telling you, its really been hard to pick just 160 out of the thousands of outrageously beautiful ones that we have complied over our short stay here.

Once I have everyone's photos complied, I plan on uploading them all to flickr. I will be sure to pass on the link.

GPIA Guide to Party Hosting

2007-07-11T06:52:00.001-07:00

Can China Reform Itself?

2007-07-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

(Will reserve my comments for a future post)

PHONY fertilizer destroys crops. Stores shelves are filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose is passed off as honey. Exports slump when European regulators find dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.

More product safety scandals in China? Not this time. These quality problems prompted a sluggish United States government to tighten food and drug regulation 101 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the act that created the Food and Drug Administration.

Like America’s industrializing economy a century ago, China’s is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act like pirates. Both countries suffered epidemics of fatal fakes, and both have had regulators who were too inept, corrupt or hamstrung to do much about it.

Source: New York Times

In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions

2007-07-11T05:07:00.001-07:00

For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.

But in recent months, economists have engaged in an impassioned debate over the way their specialty is taught in universities around the country, and practiced in Washingthttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifon, questioning the profession’s most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy.

“There is much too much ideology,” said Alan S. Blinder, a professor at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Economics, he added, is “often a triumph of theory over fact.” Mr. Blinder helped kindle the discussion by publicly warning in speeches and articles this year that as many as 30 million to 40 million Americans could lose their jobs to lower-paid workers abroad. Just by raising doubts about the unmitigated benefits of free trade, he made headlines and had colleagues rubbing their eyes in astonishment.

Source: New York Times

Favorite pictures of Shanghai

2007-07-10T23:30:00.001-07:00

Here are a few of my favorite pictures of Shanghai. I tried to post ones that captured the spirit of the city, along with its rapid development, and their startling effects (e.g. that ain't fog you're seeing). All over the city you see remnants of the its not-too-distant past, or what I like to call "out with the old, in with the expensive." My friend told me that in the past (like her family) people were moved to outer areas, in 50-year lease, government-owned apartments. Now, unofficially I am told that, people are given money to move. They can refuse maybe once, maybe twice. After that g-men *may* come in the middle of the night bearing an offer you simply can't refuse. If you're interested, more pictures can be found here.

The best reason to visit Shanghai: Bund Sightseeing Tunnel

2007-07-10T02:22:00.001-07:00

Agghh...I tried to post the embedded HTML here for youtube, but it doesn't work! Here is a link to the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel. But be warned...its really out of this world! Enjoy.

Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis

2007-07-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

Source: Wired Magazine

Shanghai: What the f*** am I doing here?

2007-07-08T21:16:00.000-07:00

For many, place like Shanghai and Beijing are as far as their exploration of China goes. Many come with planned tour groups, hitting the "highlights" of China in a neat 10 or 14 day tour. Upon returning to wherever they call home, most can barely contain their excitement when they can brag to their friends about their adventures. Most likely they will skip the negatives and highlight the perils of this exotic country with its unique culture.

Some will feel it necessary to speak loudly (and give authoritative commentary) to (at first) their friends and families and later (when the former merely walks away) to complete strangers about the wonderful development and progressive policies of China.

Meanwhile, others will begin to track news about China, shaking their heads. They will be convinced that they knew all this would happen when it finally does. Although in reality it had been happening for decades before direct, overnight flights to Shanghai even existed.

Still, for most they will probably file their 5-star escorted adventure as another successful summer trip: quite enjoyable, not too pricey.

Then there is me. Pitiful. Unrelenting. Unimpressed. Cynical.

While I sincerely doubt it was my first thought upon landing in Shanghai, I am pretty certain that my thoughts quickly turned to exactly why I chose to spend my non-existent income on a visit to here. Sure, I visited a friend, whom I rarely see. I also got away from Kunming for a long weekend. Not to mention I've now seen another side of China (aside from Hong Kong).

My impressions of Shanghai, in no particular order:

There isn't much for cultural exploration here. Ok, you can find a few gardens that were "preserved", but they are no where near the city center (the city has been gradually expanding over the last 20 or so years---out with the old, in with the very expensive).

It's hot as hell here. For example, it was about 90 degrees F at 10pm last night. (my friend is convinced that the use of ACs has forever altered the summer environment).

It is way too expensive (I went from paying 23 yuan for dinner for 4 to paying 80 yuan for a simple, light lunch--prices only reflect what the market will bear).

The environment is completely f****ed up (I have pictures to prove it!). Counting the stars is completely out of the picture in Shanghai! We are forever encased in perm-o-smog. After thinking about it for a few days, I'm now convinced that its worse than Mexico City.

Malls. malls. malls. Oh and luxury condos. That is the biggest physical feature here. Besides that lots of expats. And not the mildly harmless types you find in Kunming. Nope, these people are dangerous! (Sorry, very hard to describe in a few sentences, but most will know what I am talking about).

And now for the reasons why I am so very glad I came here:

--The malls, the lack of historical context outside of a few tourist traps, the messed up environment, and the outrageous prices.

These things are as important to witness as the quaint, underdeveloped side of China. The Chinese development that I have experienced for last two months has been largely represented by the repressed and poor south. My experiences alone are one thing, but it has been so very helpful to have a local friend to show me around--all while she openly laments about the past.

--The chance to live in a "typical" Shanghai 50 year leased, government-owned apartment.

It's something that you will really never experience in your lifetime unless you come here. My friend's family was literally moved from the downtown (when there was still not so much of a downtown) to what was then a remote suburb. They were given an apartment that was assigned based on the size of their family. They own nothing and the government can (as they have in the past) rapidly changed their policy. You can't fully appreciate the implications of ever-changing Chinese property rights until you experience it first hand (of course 4 nights is just a start).

--The Bund Tourist Tunnel.

It was truly one of the most unique experiences of my life. I made a video of it. Will post it ASAP. In the meantime, I urge you to google it.

Overall, I am really glad I came here. Yeah it was boring at times. Yes the condition of the environment is really depressing. But its another side of Chinese development, a side that simply can't be missed by even the most casual of observer.

I'll be landing in Kunming this time tomorrow. I never thought I'd hear myself say that I can't wait to be back in my little provincial city again; where I see the same people everyday and practically eat at the same restaurants every night--but I am.

PS: I will update this post with links to pictures and video as soon as I upload them!

Consumption survey of "post-1980s" people

2007-07-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

In China, those who were born in the 1980's and are now aged between 17 and 26 are called thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife "post-1980s" generation. In the next few years the 200 million people belonging to this generation will play the leading role in China's consumer market. Having experienced economic globalization and Internet development as well as growing up in a market economy, the "post-1980s" generation has a totally different consumer attitude to their parents and an increasing influence on the social consumption structure.

Source: People's Daily Online

Sunday @ The Bird & Flower Market, Kunming

2007-07-02T04:24:00.001-07:00

South of the Clouds: A good article about Kunming

2007-06-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

Came across this a few weeks ago, but forgot to post it. Here is the link via ephost. If you don't have an ephost login, below is the information about the article.

A two minute read....

South of the Clouds. Atlantic Monthly (1072-7825), Jul/Aug2007, Vol. 300 Issue 1, p142-146, 3p.

A critical read of the media

2007-06-29T21:50:00.000-07:00

Ran across an article this afternoon re: a major progress in the move toward Chinese labor's collective bargaining. After reading through the article, which sounds all warm and fuzzy, I used the word search tool to find instance of "state". The reason I sought out this particular word was because, amongst many other things not discussed in this article, it also failed to address that there are two types of factories: privately-owned and state-owned. Additionally, they failed to recognize which sectors would be covered (I can't believe its all sectors!).

The articles lack of detailed information about exactly whom is covered by this breakthrough in collective bargaining makes the wonderful news that they are conveying a little suspect.

One can think of China as a machine. The major moving parts were first established by macro state policy, which brought 1) capital improvements (roads), 2) opened the way for trade (obviously still closely guarded), and 3) foreign direct investment (again very closely regulated). Yet, as in many other places in the world, the grease that keeps this all going is cheap, ever-marginalized labor.

And in China there is certainly no shortage of cheap, ever-marginalized labor. 1.3 billion people to be exact.

Yeah, sure, China has made amazing strives in education. They have opened up more slots than ever in Universities. This increased enrollment in universities in some cases has even far exceeded capacity. Beijing's "Go West" policy has brought further improvements to the most underdeveloped regions. Beyond a doubt, all of this is certainly good news.

But still the problem persists of massive workplace abuses and migration to the east by people who were barely making it as it was in their rural villages. These rural migrates often times lack basic education, despite free universal primary education (addressed in previous posts).

Short of making a few hundred million individuals magically disappear, perhaps the government should concentrate more on the reasons why people migrate. Yes, they have begun to address issues of education/health care/employment, but there is so much more ground to cover.

In short, if massive migration of marginalized individuals, who are in large part subject to wide-spread workplace abuses, is the grease that keeps the machine going. Continuing to produce incredible leaps in China's GDP. Then the incentive to stop it is very much not a priority.

That being said, I welcome any improvements that help even just a few individuals. But I believe that anyone who truly cares about the lives of these individuals should look beyond these policies and demand more. These workers lack the ability to resist the system for a wide variety of reasons, which I will get into at a later point. On top of that, investors are less than enthusiastic about the prospects of their cost of goods sold (COGS) suddenly increasing because some unknown workers can send their kids to school.

All I am saying is that there needs to be a balance between the needs of the people and the needs of the system that all keeps it going. With the recent bad press that China has been getting in the west, its no wonder that they would quickly push through such measures in an attempt to calm the beast.

The article:

As Unrest Rises, China Broadens Workers’ Rights

BEIJING, June 29 — China’s legislature passed a sweeping new labor law on Friday that strengthens protections for workers across the booming economy, a response to increasing signs of restiveness among tens of millions of migrant laborers.

Source: New York Times

What's going on with China?

2007-06-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

China's been quite a naughty boy! Someone, someones, or something obviously wants China to do (or stop doing) something. Three recent bad press items:

Chinese Tires Are Ordered Recalled
Federal officials have told a small New Jersey importer to recall 450,000 radial tires for pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles and vans after the company disclosed that its Chinese manufacturer had stopped including a safety feature that prevented the tires from separating.
Source: New York Times

F.D.A. Curbs Sale of 5 Seafoods Farmed in China
In the latest move against Chinese imports, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday effectively blocked the sale of five types of farm-raised seafood from China because of repeated instances of contamination from unapproved animal drugs and food additives.
Source: New York Times

Tough English test could ground Chinese pilots*
BEIJING, June 22 (Xinhua) -- Besides flying aircraft, more than 7,000 Chinese pilots are grappling with a tough new problem -- The Test of English for Aviation (TEA).

In 2006, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) decided that all airline pilots who fly overseas must have a minimum level of English and would have to complete the level 4 test, the minimum acceptable level, before March 2008.

China currently has more than 14,000 pilots, of whom 8,600 pilots flying on international air routes must meet the standard, sources with General Administration of Civil Aviation (CAAC) told Xinhua.
Source: Xinhua Online

* Article blasting Chinese pilots for their lack of English has been running in American press. Youtube even has video of it.

Notes from visit to Social Work Research Institute

2007-06-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Just some quick notes before I forget.

Today I visited with the Social Work Research Institute to talk to some of their graduate interns about the projects they work on. Last week I visited their offices to discuss anyway that I could help their organization. They gave me some translations to edit.

Anyway, I visited them as a follow up and to ask (after gaining their trust with the work I did) to allow me some site visits. Not that I am particularly interested in what they study (that to follow), but I am at the point where absolutely any experience that I can have here will be of benefit.

Their programs include (not sure if this is all of them):

1. Migrant worker education
2. Drug rehab
3. Street children informal education
4. Community care center

What initially surprised me was the progressive nature of these programs. The language and concepts that they use was quite familiar to me. Like all things, this program did have some objectionable elements, namely that its funded in part by some Christian missionary organizations. Yes, I know that the faith-based donor community is quite large and important, but the idea of religion being anywhere near progressive social outreach still makes me feel icky.

Our conversation today centered on the student's particular interests in relation to the organization's work. Instead of going through each problem, I'll just reflect on my overall impression of their work and why its necessary. That being said, I understand that my core interests (socio-economic development/security studies) frame the way in which I process the information they are relying.

Bottom line:
Migrant workers are leaving rural areas to seek work in urban areas. Up until a few years go the government more closely controlled their movement and restricted their access to urban areas. Yes, people still moved to the cities, but they were rounded up and sent back to the countryside. This situation reminds me a lot of the USA. We bitch and moan about illegals, but we know we need them. They do crappy jobs for low pay, suffering massive workplace abuses, and we tolerate it because we need them.

Additionally, the central government has a major incentive to continue to rely on these marginalized people. Anyone who knows anything about the founding of the PRC knows that officials like big numbers. For the last decade, China has officially reported % of change GDP in the near or higher than 10% per year range. The deep dark underbelly of migrant labor is necessary to continue this trend.

Secondly, education is lacking. Despite universal free primary education (except book fees), and the availability of scholarships after primary education, many of the children of migrant workers still fall through the cracks. Some parents push their children to beg on the street/collect cans/anything they can sell. Other children can't attend school because they lack the proper permits, while the schools lack the space/teachers/funding.

China's a great place with lots of resources. Yet problems continue to persist. China's policy of capital improvements ("built a road and industry will come") is a good start. Free primary education is also a wonderful addition. Yet many of the problems China faces can be directly related to its massive population and lack of development in many areas.

I am still extremely interested in the ideas of rural/urban migration and wage determination. I resisted for a while, but now understand that its nearly impossible for me to study these things now. First I need better contacts who are willing to get me the required permits. I am hoping that I can make at least a few of these contacts while I am here. The people at the the Social Work Research Institute are certainly a good place to start.

Text Messages Giving Voice to Chinese

2007-06-28T18:31:00.001-07:00

Text Messages Giving Voice to Chinese
Opponents of Chemical Factory Found Way Around Censors

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 28, 2007; Page A01

XIAMEN, China -- By the hundreds of thousands, the urgent text messages ricocheted around cellphones in Xiamen, warning of a catastrophe that would spoil the city's beautiful seaside environment and foul its sweet-smelling tropical breezes.

By promoting the construction of a giant chemical factory among the suburban palm trees, the local government was "setting off an atomic bomb in all of Xiamen," the massive message sprays charged, predicting that the plant would cause "leukemia and deformed babies" among the 2 million-plus residents of this city on China's southern rim, just opposite Taiwan.

Source: Washington Post

Lecture Notes (audio to follow)

2007-06-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

Economic Development in China and in Yunnan Province*
A Lecture by Dr. Jianhua Xhang, Yunnan University (Kunming, China)

Part I: China

1.3 billion people (2005)
10.5% official growth rate (2005) est. to be closer to 8%
Population: 9.6 million sq km.
56 nationalities

Governance structure: province-->city-->county-->district, town, village

2006 GDP: 20940.7 Yuan

Sectors of China
Agriculture 11.8% (employees 45% of all labor)
Manufacturing 48.7% (incl. mining activities)
Service 39.5 (incl. tourism, finance, transportation)

Progression
1949 - 1978: centrally planned economy
1978 - 1984: rural area economic reform
1992: reform extended to urban areas (begin market economy)
est. 20 years to complete transition to full market economy

Exports
#1: Electronic goods, #2: Textiles

Part II: Yunnan Economy

44 million people
most diverse Province with 26 nationalities
39459 sq km land
245880 Yuan 2003 GDP -- 5647 Yuan per cap income
2003 urbanization rate: 26.6%
2006 GDP - 400187 million Yuan/ 8300 Yuan per cap
2006 urbanization rate: 30.06%

GDP - 2005 - 9%; 2006 - 11.6%

Sectors
agriculture 18.8%
Manufacturing 42.7%
Service 38.5%

FDI: 10% GDP
most exports to South East Asian countries
112 million Yuan (2003)
798 million Yuan (2006)

Largest industries
Metallurgical (tin, copper, lead, zinc, iron, steel)

Machine tools (lathes, tools)

Chemicals (phosphate rock, fertilizers, industrial perfumes)

Electricity (hydro, some thermo)

Food processing (sugar, tea, condiments) <--2nd largest sugar producer in China

Cigarettes/tobacco (#1 highest quality tobacco in China; ideal climate, soil, conditions; Virginia tobacco introduced 100 years ago; sell cigarettes around world; sell raw tobacco to factories around China; 70% of Chinese adult males smoke)

Construction materials (marble, cement)

Tourism

Historical background
Yunnan part of "South Silk Road" 2K years ago; home of great explorer (Zheng He (1371-1433)); French built Hanoi-->Kunming railroad (100 years ago); WWII: Yunnan Flying Tigers (American Volunteers)

Major Issues
Continued underdevelopment; bi-structure economy (modern/traditional); pollution

Prospects
Rich natural resources; improved infrastructure; location to ASEAN; reform & open policy

Misc info:
member of Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) (created in 1992 by Asian Development Bank, UN, etc)

Nov 2001 - ASEAN meet with China; "10+1 -- free trade area"; CAFTA; currently common effective preferential tariff (CEPT)

Beijing "Go West" Policy: $ for improved infrastructure/capital improvements; "built it and industry will come"

40% of all Chinese oil is imported

*audio to follow once I get a faster Internet connection!

Endless Assembly Lines & Giant Cafeterias; Inside China's Vast Factories

2007-06-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

Some pretty neat pictures taken inside of China's vast factories.

I WAS A CHINESE INTERNET ADDICT

2007-06-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

Great article. Not just about the internet, but many other amazing things that makes China a great place.

-------------

I WAS A CHINESE INTERNET ADDICT McKenzie Funk. Harper's Magazine. New York: Mar 2007. Vol.314, Iss. 1882; pg. 65, 8 pgs
Copyright Harper's Magazine Foundation Mar 2007
[Headnote]
A tale of modern medicine

I had read online about the Chinese Internet-addiction clinic, but I didn't know if it would accept me until I was actually there. The clinic was run by Chinese doctors and soldiers in a two-story block of concrete on the heavily congested grounds of the Beijing Military Region Central Hospital. Its entrance was a sloped hallway lined with inspirational posters: images of winding highways, palm-fringed swimming pools, empty beaches lapped by tropical waves. Flora, a film student who'd agreed to be my translator, read the captions as we walked in. "Overprotection will make your children disabled," she whispered. "Courage has unbelievable power."

A squat woman with blackened front teeth and a lab coat was standing expectantly in the waiting room. She wore white running shoes with Velcro fasteners, and her hair was cut into a tight bob that faded into a mullet. She smiled warmly and introduced herself as Dr. Yao. I thanked her for seeing me.

"How long do you go on the Internet each day?" she asked. I stared into space. "That would be, average, uh, eight to twelve hours," I said. "Sometimes less."

"What do you do on the Internet?"

"I read the news a lot. The New York Times online-every story. All of Google News, at least everything that's interesting. The Washington Post. Sometimes I send messages to friends and other people. Sometimes, when I have to buy an airline ticket..."

"Do you play Internet games?"

"No. I just talk to friends and read. But I've watched cartoons on cartoon sites, and I look at things I could buy online."

"Do you have anxiety when you can't get on the Internet?"

"I do wonder if I'm missing messages from friends-emails I really should be reading-and I wonder about the news. Maybe there's a story, American politics or something, and every hour I want to know what's changed. When I have the opportunity, I check those things, and it feels better."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine."

I explained that my girlfriend, Jenny, was half Chinese, and let Dr. Yao assume that this had something to do with my being here. I said that Flora was a friend of Jenny's cousin and was helping me on behalf of the worried family. This was a lie.

A nurse in a pink cap walked by, then a soldier in camouflage fatigues. A girl of twelve or thirteen passed next, waving an exuberant good-bye to Dr. Yao while her father toted her suitcase. On the wall of the waiting room, I noticed, was an illustrated poster explaining the inner workings of computers: the Windows operating system, a Web browser set to Google, the interface of the popular Chinese chat program QQ.

"Do you have the ability to take yourself away from the Internet?" Dr. Yao asked. If I had to go to dinner with someone, I could go, I said. But I was often late.

She asked if I had other compulsive behaviors. I admitted that I sometimes read magazines all the way through from the front page to the back page, and that I felt compelled to watch movies, even bad movies, to the very end. She asked if "small things" got stuck in my head, if I often stayed up all night, and if I thought about the Internet while doing other activities. "It's not the Internet itself that I think about but the things inside it," I said.

I was led to a small room furnished with a pullout futon and a gray computer. The hallways were empty; the director and most of the patients, Dr. Yao explained, were at the set of Tell It Like It Is! one of the oldest and most famous of China's talk shows. She seated Flora and me in front of the computer. Its desktop image was a field of blooming flowers with characters that read, "I really want my psychological health."

On the computer was a diagnostic test. Dr. Yao said there were ninety statements, and I was to rate their truth on a scale from A (not at all true) to E (very true). She helped me fill in my biographical details-level of education, date of birth, profession (I said I had none)-then left Flora and me in private.

"You have headaches," the computer offered. I chose "B." "You get agitated." I chose "C." "When you have headaches, your head is filled with unnecessary thoughts and words." I pondered the necessity of my thoughts. "C" again. "You feel dizzy or faint," the computer continued. "You have less desire for the opposite sex. You have no desire for food. You check things again and again. You hear things others cannot. You feel that others control your mind. You can't control your temper. You blame your troubles on others. You blame yourself. You are forgetful. You feel lonely. You feel scared. You feel bored. You feel sick. You feel irritable. You cry easily. You worry about your appearance. You worry too much. You can't fall asleep. You have a hard time breathing. You feel your brain is empty. Your heart beats too quickly. You have chest pain. You are afraid of open spaces. You want to smash things. You think about death. You want to end your life. There is something blocking your throat."

I lied outright only a few times: claims of lethargy, lack of appetite, indifference to sex, and isolation from others. I managed a sort of exaggerated honesty, sticking at least to the contours of the truth. If a statement merited a "B," I might give it a "C." But an "A" was always an "A," an "E" always an "E." None of the ninety questions mentioned the Internet, and after an hour the test was done.

A new doctor, younger and much taller than Yao, with fine features on a narrow face, came in with a printout of the instantaneous results. I received decent marks for anxiety, depression, interpersonal communication, and hostility-nothing over what the doctor said was the threshold, 1.50. But my level of paranoia was worrisome: 2.00. Worse was my obsessive-compulsive rating, 2.20. "This is bad," the doctor said. Toward the bottom of the page was a number that seemed out of place: 60.1 asked what it signified. She didn't hesitate: "That means you're an Internet addict."

That afternoon, I sat in Dr. Yao's office, looking at translations of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud as she asked about my successful father and mother and my history of small colleges and good grades. Two doctors, both men, strolled by carrying a pirated DVD of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which they started watching in the room where I'd taken the ninetyquestion test. I signed a release authorizing the treatment and paid Dr. Yao 2,100 yuan, enough for the first four of the twenty days I was asked to stay.

I retreated into my new room, #27, and listened to the clatter of feet in the hall: my fellow patients, back from their television appearance. At 9:00 P.M. there was a rap on the door. A nurse came in, handed me seven pills, and waited. One was a red gelcap, another a chalky white half-capsule. Four were small white tablets, and a fifth tablet was red. I put the pills in my mouth, hid them in my cheek, and pretended to cough. She kept staring, so I filled a paper cup with hot water from a thermos and drank. When I realized I'd accidentally grabbed two cups that were stuck together, I used my tongue to make a space between them and spit out the rapidly dissolving pills. I crumpled the cups and tossed them into the trash. The nurse didn't seem to notice. She flashed a proud smile and returned to the hall. I was left with the sinking feeling that I'd swallowed the chalky half-capsule and spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out if I felt dizzy, if something was wrong in my head.

It was a dark season for the Internet users of China. Just weeks before 1 checked in, during the holiday marking the fifty-sixth birthday of the People's Republic, one of their own was killed. Her screen name was "Snowly," and she'd been playing the online game World of Warcraft nonstop for days on end, preparing to join her guild of fighters against the black dragon Nefarian. She collapsed from exhaustion and died in real life before the virtual mission could succeed. Two dozen warriors held her virtual funeral a week later. They kneeled in the digital grass and bowed their heads as words of remembrance floated off toward a range of jagged virtual peaks.

In Shanghai, a court sentenced forty-one-year-old online gamer Qiu Chengwei to life in prison for the murder of a fellow player. It was a complicated case: Qiu had lent his cyberweapon, a "dragon saber" that he'd won in Legend of Mir II, to a younger player named Zhu Caoyuan, who in turn had sold it for $870 and kept the money. Enraged, Qiu went to the police, but they couldn't help him; China had no laws protecting virtual property. So Qiu broke into Zhu's one-room apartment while he and his girlfriend slept, and Zhu barely had time to put his pants on before Qiu stabbed him in the heart with a real knife.

The number of Chinese Netizens (the preferred translation of the term wangmm, literally "network citizens") recently surpassed 130 million: the world's second-largest online population, after America's, and growing at 30 percent a year. Broadband is cheap, fast, everywhere; Internet cafés number in the tens of thousands; all-night passes cost as little as 5 yuan, or about 60 cents. At any given moment, more than 2 million Chinese are battling one another in virtual worlds, and at one record-breaking moment 22 million users logged on to the chat and social-networking portal QQ. Last year China's online gaming industry posted revenues of $670 million-up 45 percent from 2005, when Netizens spent more than $ 12 billion on Web access.

Chen Tianqiao, the thirty-twoyear-old CEO of Shanda, distributor of Legend of Mir II and other multiplayer games, had recently become a billionaire-one of only ten in the country. Another billionaire was William Ding Lei, who founded NetEase.com. Yahoo! injected a billion dollars in cash into the e-commerce site Alibaba.com, and China Mobile announced that it had spent more than a billion dollars in two years to bring Internet and phone service to 25,862 rural villages.

Cracks appeared everywhere. Bloggers such as Sister Hibiscus, Rascal Swallow, and Stainless Steel Mouse were vaulted to awkward, inappropriate levels of celebrity. A server crashed after 50,000 people simultaneously tried to download twenty-five minutes of lovemaking sounds from online sex diarist Muzi Mei. A new kind of sweatshop appeared in cities up and down the coast: warehouses packed with young Chinese who played Mir II or World of Warcraft in twelve-hour shifts, winning virtual gold and weapons that rich foreign gamers would buy with real money. A song called "Mice Love Rice," which had been posted online by an unknown lounge singer and music teacher named Yang Chengang, became a national mantra: "I love you, loving you/As the mice love the rice."

Fueled by QQ, a culture of one-night stands infested urban centers. Girls logging on after midnight were barraged by instant messages. "ONS?" they asked. "ONS?' Meanwhile, role-playing Netizens began registering for wanghun (cyber-weddings) and raising digital children together. Hundreds of thousands of strangers engaged in the fantasy at sites such as Virtual Family, and real-life courts granted divorces to reallife spouses as the online bigamists were exposed. Some 30 percent of marital troubles in Guangzhou were said to be caused by virtual affairs and marriages.

In November 2005, a 22,500person, thirty-city study by the China Youth Association for Network Development confirmed what everybody in China already knew: one out of every eight Chinese young people was an Internet addict. This was followed by the even darker news from the Chinese Academy of Sciences that 80 percent of college and university dropouts had failed due to Internet addiction. A respected Beijing judge, Shan Xiuyun, reported that 90 percent of the city's juvenile crime was Internet-related. In Hunan Province, Internet-related crimes were said to be increasing by 10 percent every year.

In Jiangxi Province, a computerscience major rendered penniless by his addiction killed a homeowner in a burglary gone awry. In Chongqing, a train crushed two middle-school students who'd fallen asleep on the tracks after forty-eight hours online. In Lanzhou, the story was told of a fourteen-year-old who killed his greatgrandmother with a brick to the head, took 390 yuan from her body, and went to spend it at an Internet café.

Also in Shanghai, it was reported that a young man who'd played online games for six years would be stuck forever in a sitting position. His back was fused at a 90-degree angle; doctors said there was nothing they could do. In Tianjin, a thirteen-year-old played World of Warcraft for thirty-six hours in a row, then rode the elevator to the top of his twenty-four-story building and jumped. He left behind an 80,000-character diary about the virtual world and a suicide note saying he was off to meet the game's characters. His parents sued World of Warcraft's distributor for 100,000 yuan.

Perhaps more remarkable than China's crisis was the response: mass shutdowns of illegal Net cafés, regulations that now kept them 200 meters from any primary or high school, national addiction help lines and "safe surfing" programs, and a thirtyeight-episode anti-Internet addiction sitcom, The Story of Shan Dian Mao. The clinic was part of an all-out counterattack by a people who were certain they saw a danger that the West, in its more incremental steps to modernity, largely hadn't. It is normal for humans to become lost, to drop out of society, and perhaps just as normal for them to lose themselves but tell themselves they're fine. It is rarer, I thought, when we dare name the culprit.

The next morning, I awoke in the fetal position in my hospital bed, shivering underneath a Winnie-the-Pooh comforter. It was 6:40 A.M. My room was cold and dark, and I could barely make out the Pooh poetry on my matching beanbag pillow: "When the/twinkly stars/fill the pretty/night sky,/they all wave/good-bye/with a smile/and a sigh." Another patient, a mustachioed fifteen-year-old, was standing over me. "Time get up," he said. "Hurry, hurry." I stepped into the hallway, where eight bleary-eyed teenagers were lined up against the wall, standing rigid, as a young man in military camouflage examined them. I was the last in the lineup; they'd already been waiting ten minutes.

The soldier was known as Xiaohei, or "Little Black," a nickname that distinguished him from our other minder, the older but shorter "Big Black." His skin was dark, his uniform perfectly starched. Little Black was over six feet tall, lean and muscular, with spiky hair and a face oddly reminiscent of the action hero The Rock. He was the perfect role model.

Little Black led us through a wing where adult alcoholics were packed three to a room, wearing wifebeaters and tattoos while chain-smoking in bed with the television blaring. Once outside, we began to jog. We ran counterclockwise around an enormous new outpatient building, passing hedges trimmed in the shape of a small intestine and a crowd of old people practicing tai chi in a courtyard. One patriotic red banner after another stretched across the road: "We have no weekends so we can create a harmonious society," the first said. After the last banner-"Concentrate on work, speak the truth, try real things ... and you'll achieve"-we raced each other for 200 yards to our workout zone, a basketball court. I came in fifth.

Our first exercise was a stretch that started with fists together and ended with one arm raised in a triumphant, Travolta-like pose. We repeated it eight times, first with the left arm up, then the right, counting in English for my benefit. We then approximated a circa-1996 raver's invisible-ball dance, in order to loosen our wrists. We did twenty pushups in unison. We spread our arms like wings, seemingly for balance, and did twenty squats. Off to the side, a minuscule seventeen-year-old patient worked on his own program. His name was Qin Xiangzong, and he was here in part because he had tried to stab a fellow cadet at his officers' academy. The boy soldier put his hands on his waist and kept his feet planted in one spot, then gyrated wildly as if swinging an imaginary hula hoop. He stared intently at the ground, unable to make eye contact with anyone, his face fixed in a demented grin.

Basketball, when it got going, was not a team sport. No one passed; everyone charged toward the goal alone. There were two air balls and six shots off the rim before any went in. My teammate Hu Yimao, a fifteen-year-old with spiky Rod Stewart hair, double-dribbled every time he got the ball. If he pulled down a defensive rebound, he threw up a shot immediately, never mind whose basket he was under. But the game was more unpracticed than unathletic, and the boys took it seriously. My team, aided by a slightly older patient named Su Xu-who dressed in black pants, a black shirt, and black, Japanimation-style cut-off glovesand a tall, thin boy from Xian, He Cong, won 26 to 7. Our opponents dropped to the ground and did another twenty pushups.

I ate breakfast-bread and a watery rice sludge-alone in my room, and at 9:00 A.M. a beaming Dr. Yao came in to give me my medicine. I used the same double-cup trick. Ten minutes later, the door opened and a man wheeled in a cart. Atop the cart was a device the size and shape of an old dot-matrix printer but with wires connecting it to three jumper cable-like calipers and six small, color-coded suction cups. He had me lie down on the bed, lift up my shirt, and stretch my arms above my head. He swabbed an area abutting my right nipple with alcohol and affixed the red suction cup. The other five cups-purple, yellow, green, blue, and brown-were placed around my heart after further swabbing. He clamped the calipers around both wrists and my left ankle, and after that I wasn't allowed to move. He leaned over the machine. I had no idea what he was doing. I gritted my teeth and genuinely expected a jolt of electricity-I had heard that the doctors would send 30-volt shocks to pressure points on the most recalcitrant patients-but I never felt a thing.

Barely eight months old, the clinic was already famous-the subject of glowing coverage by CCTV, the China Daily, and the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Since it opened in March 2005 on the grounds of the military hospital, its all-army staff had helped hundreds of patients. It claimed a cure rate of 80 percent, a phenomenal degree of success that was attributed to the expertise of the clinic's founder, Tao Ran, who'd been treating various addictions for twenty years. The clinic was often full, and plans were under way to expand it from 20 beds to 150.

It was not cheap. At 410 yuan a day, about $50, a typical twenty-day stay was equivalent to the average city dweller's annual salary. Food was an extra 30 to 50 yuan a day if you ordered Chinese takeout rather than suffer hospital fare-which we all did-and gym access was 15 yuan a day. Every patient left a 200-yuan deposit in case he decided to break something. But the steep price bought a comprehensive program: a cocktail of abstinence, forced basketball, weight lifting, daily sessions with a therapist, oral and intravenous drugs, and, for extreme cases, the aforementioned 30-volt electric charges.

The condition being treated at the clinic did not, according to Western medicine, officially exist. But it was not without advocates back home. The first paper on Internet addiction was presented in 1996-soon after the birth of the Web itself-at the American Psychological Association's 104th annual meeting, in Toronto. Its author, Dr. Kimberly S. Young, proposed that the disorder be diagnosed using modified criteria for pathological gambling. Addicts were those who answered "yes" to five of eight questions:

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet?

2. Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?

3. Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use?

4. Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?

5. Do you stay online longer than originally intended?

6. Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of a significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet?

7. Have you lied to family members, therapists, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet?

8. Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood?

Young, who runs the website www. netaddiction.com and a practice in Pennsylvania, was bolstered in her controversial work by Connecticut psychologist David Greenfield and Harvard's Maressa Hecht Orzack, who run www.virtual-addiction.com and www.computeraddiction.com, respectively. In his 1999 book, Virtual Addiction, Greenfteld underscored the hidden danger of the Internet's "endless boundaries and unending opportunity." He described the satisfying sensation of a process without close, "the principle of incomplete Gestalts." The Internet was an echo chamber, Young believed. Like drugs or alcohol, it could magnify existing problems-"as the alcoholic's marriage gets worse, drinking increases to escape the nagging spouse, and as the spouse's nagging increases more, the alcoholic drinks more."

One of the most rigorous investigations into Net abuse was led by Dr. Nathan Shapira of the University of Florida and published in 2000 in the Journal of Affective Disorders. He tentatively classified it as an impulse-control disorder, like kleptomania or trichotillomania (the irresistible urge to pull out one's own hair): an increasing feeling of tension or arousal before logging on, nearly impossible to fight, followed by a pleasurable release.

But whether it was called Internet-Addiction Disorder (IAD), Pathological Internet Use (PIU), Impulsive-Compulsive Internet Usage Disorder (ICIUD), Maladaptive Internet Use, Excessive Internet Use, or Netomania, the condition was denied an entry in DSM-IV, the West's gold-standard manual of mental illnesses. The case for a new classification was muddy. By treating the vast Internet as a monolith-something to be addicted to rather than through-researchers ran into definitional hurdles. Was someone with an online-porn problem an Internet addict or just a pornography addict who indulged via the Web?

Skeptics argued that people lost themselves in socially acceptable diversions (books, television, jogging) all the time. The major difference, they claimed, was bias against the Web. And Shapira's research, consisting of face-to-face psychometric evaluations of twenty subjects, found that so-called addicts had a raft of other mental problems: More than half of the people in his study were determined to be manic-depressive; 60 percent had anxiety disorders. Fifteen of twenty had been treated with psychotropic medications; nineteen had a history of mental illness in the family. On average, each subject had five major psychiatric issues.

Before arriving in Beijing, I'd had my own theory about China's addicts. I hadn't been to Beijing in nine years. I'd pictured a peasant nation susceptible to the dazzle of technology, suddenly come from the fields and into the Internet cafés, and figured that the addicted Netizens were attracted to the Internet's novelty-taken in by newness itself. As a Westerner steeped in modernity, I was largely immune. By this logic, China's crisis was a Gods Must Be Crazy parable, with the Netizens playing the role of the Bushmen, the Internet the role of the Coke bottle. But the longer I spent in the clinic, the less this explanation made sense to me.

My companions were Netizens, but more precisely, I found, most were jiaozhu (kung fu masters)-people who played Internet games all night and slept all day. The best gamers among them were zhanshen: giant heroes in war. For them, the first hurdle here was simply to adjust to the 10:00 P.M. lightsout, when a doctor's hand would reach through their door and flick off the switch. New arrivals were often sedated with a clear IV fluid and left for twenty-four hours until their sleep cycles normalized.

The business of "calming the brain and correcting hormonal imbalances," as Dr. Yao put it, was done by a different IV fluid, a maple syrup-colored sedative of unknown provenance. I was the only patient who didn't receive the sedative daily, because upon checkin I'd pleaded with Dr. Yao to keep the needles out of me. I had an honest phobia. "Once I had a knee problem," I'd told her, "so they took a blood test and they stuck a needle in me and I watched all the blood drain into a bag."

The boys told me that the sacks of sedative took half an hour to drainlonger if one was better hydratedand left them feeling lethargic, dizzy, and extremely thirsty. One showed me the eight needle holes clustered near the wrist on the top of his hand. My new friend Zhang Dong-the mustachioed boy who'd woken me up and spoke the most English of any of them-had eleven holes. It was like counting rings in a tree: he'd been at the clinic eleven days.

Dong told me I was lucky because I'd been assigned to his psychologist, Dr. Xu, the best the clinic had. "He has a Ph.D.," Dong said. "He will ask you lots of questions about private, very, very personal things." I replied that I was ready-but this was only partly true. I'd never seen a therapist before, and I've never been one for much introspection.

I soon learned that I was the only patient who used email, who didn't play online games, and who didn't have a chat account. But this was unremarkable: While I was in China, Quo Liang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences published a study showing that only two thirds of Net users had email accounts, and only a third of them checked their email on a daily basis. Forty-two percent of Netizens did not use a search engine. Seventy-five percent had never made an online purchase.

Instead of replacing encyclopedias, newspapers, storefronts, travel agencies, and the U.S. Postal Service, Chinese people-both addicts and non-addicts-seemed to be replacing the television with a more interactive way to entertain themselves. This was not the businessoriented Web of the West. Guo's study explained that Chinese people overwhelmingly used the Internet to chat, play games, download music, and read about celebrities. The Web lives of the Netizens-whose QQ profiles featured not photos, as on MySpace, but personalized avatars wearing clothing and jewelry bought in a digital store-had very little in common with their real lives; they went online to escape.

The question of how Netizens became kung fu masters had lately taken a surprising turn: instead of looking at what they were escaping to, researchers dared ask what they were escaping from. The man asking the toughest questions was Professor Tao Hongkai, an historian who'd returned to China from the United States in 2002 in order to retire. In May 2004, he'd decided to invite high schooler Qu Qian, a top student turned addict whom he'd read about in his local newspaper, to his house for ad-hoc therapy. He'd cured her in a miraculous nine hours. Word got out. He began receiving phone calls day and night. Mothers sent letters, some written in their own blood, begging for help. Soon he was treating other teenagers, hundreds of them, for free; he packed thousand-seat lecture halls in seventy cities in twenty provinces in sixteen months. His method: actually talk with-not to-the child, and actually listen.

The professor's explanation of Chinese Internet addiction amounted to an indictment of Chinese society. He railed against the one-child policy and the xiao huangdi (little emperors) it had created: children whose every material need was met even as spiritual needs were ignored. Instead of having hopes of their own, spoiled teenagers carried those of six other people-their parents and two sets of grandparents. They were overprotected but underdeveloped, without discipline or a sense of meaning. "They have nothing to hold on to," he said. "They are empty inside."

He believed an even bigger problem lay with China's intensely testbased academics: a child's entire scholastic path-in some ways his or her life-could depend on one exam, the gaokao, the sole criterion for college entrance. The pressure was crushing; peers became competitors; teachers became slave drivers. Students had time only for rote memorization-not for singing or Volleyball or after-school fun, otherwise defined.

Professor Tao noticed that Mir II and World of Warcraft were games not of gore but of wits and teambuilding and winnable battles. He ventured that they gave teenagers something society, and especially schools, did not: freedom. "If they want to fight, they can fight. If they want to curse, they can curse. If they want to marry, they can marry." Back in real life, he said, "every child is like a little donkey. The teacher grabs his two long ears and pulls and pulls. The parents get behind him and push and push." I thought about my life in America. A little push didn't sound so bad.

I had my psychotherapy sessions in the afternoons. Dr. Xu was softspoken but direct, and he had a habit of pausing dramatically before every question. When I gave an answer, he'd raise his eyebrows and say, "Hmmm," then scribble notes on his clipboard. I tried to be honest. Dr. Xu asked about my parents-did I love them, did I respect them, did I live up to their hopes?-and about problems with Jenny, which I said had contributed to my addiction. "Is there such a thing as true love?" he wondered. "Do you think true love must have two sides? Can you truly love someone who doesn't love you back?" I said it was possible. You could fall in love with someone's potential.

Dr. Xu discovered I'd been a philosophy major in college, and he asked me abruptly what the meaning of life was. I didn't know. It was something more important than being happy, I said. "If you had just seven days left to live, what would you do?" he asked. I threw out an awkward answer about going home to my parents in Oregon and writing letters of farewell-not because I was trying to keep in character but because I didn't want to think honestly about death and had no idea what I'd do. "Why don't you and your father talk about feelings?" he asked.

He had me draw a picture of a house, a picture of myself, and a picture of a tree. My house had a chimney and a window and a mailbox; my tree had pinecones like the evergreens in my parents' back yard. But it was ungrounded, I later noticedno base and no roots, just a trunk floating in space. Dr. Xu didn't believe me when I said I rarely remembered dreams after waking up, but it was true; I rarely do.

The boys always filled my room once he left. The grungy, ten- by twenty-foot space, with its three mismatched chairs, TCL brand television, ceiling hook for an IV drip, and yellow fake flowers, was becoming the clinic's social nexus. Dong, who one winter had protested being cut off from the Internet by hanging himself upside down from his parents' balcony, shivering violently with spittle dripping from his mouth, was my most frequent visitor. He told me he'd once stayed online for seven days in a row. A lanky, easygoing boy I called Sam (he reminded me of a friend's brother), whose online record was four days, often joined him.

The first time the pair came over, Dong immediately stared at the television as if something was amiss, then leaned over and turned it on for me. "Okay?" he asked. A boy with a blue-striped sweater and slicked-down hair that made him look like a drowned cat, Song Zhixuan, also appeared. He leaned against the doorjamb because he was too shy to enter, and a few others came all the way in. They took over the bed and chairs and began discussing the relative merits of Beijing and Shanghai. "Beijing is bigger," Dong said. "Shanghai is," said Sam. "Beijing." "Shanghai." "Beijing." "Shanghai." "Beijing!" "Shanghai!" "Beijing!" "Shanghai!" I was the first foreigner any of the boys had met.

Another time, when we were alone, Dong told Flora and me about the Tell It Like It Is! television appearance with Director Tao. It had not gone well. With the boys at his side, Tao had been arguing against Shanda CEO Chen Tianqiao about Internet addiction. At one point, Tao invoked one school of Confucian philosophy: that human nature is essentially good. Something odd happened. The boy soldier, the would-be stabber, ran to the middle of the stage and began to argue against Tao, point by point.

"There's nothing unhealthy about playing Internet games!" he squeaked, standing as tall as he could in his cadet uniform. Due to his small size, he said, classmates in the real world had done violence to him for the last seven years-they'd tortured him, laughed at him. He spoke for ten minutes, telling the crowd that the only true philosophy was that of Xunzi, a Confucius disciple who came to believe that man was essentially evil: "One is born with feelings of envy and hate, and, by indulging these, one is led into banditry and theft." After the boy soldier was done, the TeIi It Like It Is! host said he had an urge to hug him. He did so. Director Tao didn't get to finish, and the crowd had seemed to side with the Shanda CEO, who'd employed an argument some have made to keep Internet misuse out of DSM-IV: today's "addicted" Netizens were like the people transfixed by television in its early days-this was nothing more than a honeymoon period-and their obsessions would subside.

Dong tapped his feet and crossed and recrossed his legs as he told us about the boy soldier's outburst. He rubbed his hands together and rolled his head back and forth, blinking constantly. "He is very extreme, very extreme," he said. "When he attacked his classmate with a knife, it took six soldiers to restrain him." I asked if he believed what the boy soldier said about human nature. "I agree with Director Tao," Dong said, "but sometimes people do evil things for no reason-like in 1999, when America bombed our embassy in Belgrade for no reason."

He told us he had prepared a speech of his own for Tell It Like It Is! but never had a chance to share it. During the Qing dynasty, he said, there was a famous official named Lin Zexu who had stood up to British opium importers. Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium and destroyed them; he barred British ships from trading in the ports of Canton. He also sent a letter to Queen Victoria:

We find that your country is sixty or seventy thousand it from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. ... By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience?

Lin's patriotic acts precipitated the disastrous first Opium War, in 1839, but earned him an honorable place in history. Now Chen Tianqiao and his company, who had profited greatly by importing Legend of Mir II from South Korea and were soon to bring an online Dungeons & Dragons from America, were the barbarians. "They are criminals," Dong had planned to say, "and Director Tao and his comrades are like Lin Zexu-the heroes of the nation."

As the days passed, I came to understand the essence of the doctors' fight. It was to make our actual lives more real than our virtual lives-to show that it was most fulfilling to be engaged in a world, however imperfect, that had a physical existence. It was a constant struggle. One afternoon, Little Black and Big Black took us to the nearby PowerHouse Gym, five stories up an office tower of blue glass and polished marble, where Dong and I galloped side by side on walking machines at 13 kilometers an hour. The other boys played Ping-Pong. The soldiers themselves ignored us; they were immediately engrossed in the computers at the gym's four-PC Net café. After an hour, Little Black stood up and began rubbing his eyes and slapping himself in the face. We got ready to leave, but Big Black stayed glued to his computer. We walked back without him.

But we were learning the lesson even if they were forgetting it. We learned to face the challenge of standing like real soldiers, keeping our knees perfectly straight and our heads perfectly straight and our shoulders back and our hands flat at our sides. We felt the real pain of sets of thirty, then forty push-ups. We practiced folding our Pooh blankets in the military's "bean curd" style-the ideal was a perfect, tofushaped block-until each of us mastered the art. We hung out in the hall sometimes, the wonderful Dr. Yao watching over us like a mother hen, laughing, asking us questions. We got used to conversation, used to caring about what others had to say, used to having others care about what we had to say.

We learned about consequences. The Rod Stewart wannabe and his thin friend from Xian sneaked off to a store during one morning's run and filled their pockets with 10-yuan packs of Beijing Cigarette Factory filter lights. Little Black patted them down, found the contraband, and made them do a hundred push-upsthen forced them to stand perfectly still for five minutes in the middle of the basketball court. The same day, Dong wandered into my room with a plastic soda bottle, shook it vigorously, and idly opened it. It exploded. He learned to mop.

"Everyone has psychological barriers," Dong declared after one of his injections. "For the people here, the barriers are just bigger." He sat in the blue chair that had become his usual perch. The shy boy in the bluestriped sweater, who'd finally gotten up the courage to come inside and discuss Internet games, sat on the bed. He smiled awkwardly and draped an arm over Sam in a show of camaraderie. Dong admitted that he'd sneaked through the clinic at night and tested every computer-none of them had Web access. Do you know "Mice Love Rice"? he asked me. "Mice love cheese," I said. He and Sam played a version of "paddy cake": "One, two, three, four, we'll play Internet games no more."

The boys were half my age, but I began to feel like one of them. One morning, Dong got a text message from a friend at the prestigious Gansu Province high school he'd dropped out of. The friend was in the midst of an English test; I was a native speaker. We rushed out an essay for him-the topic was "rules of the library"-and texted it back, experiencing the thrill of sticking it to the bigger world. We laughed like idiots. "My classmates study fifteen hours a day," Dong said. "School is corrupted," said Sam.

I wanted to go home, so after four days at the clinic, I set an alarm on my cell phone, and when it began ringing, I pretended to answer a call. I told Dr. Yao that it had been Jenny-that she'd found a treatment center for me in Pennsylvania and booked me a flight departing the next morning. I could be closer to her but still receive help. Dr. Yao seemed sad for a moment, but she understood. "We will support whatever is good for you," she said. I began to feel guilty. Dr. Yao was a kind woman, and I'd stopped believing that her cure was so far out of proportion to China's crisis. When she tried to return the money I'd overpaid-a few hundred yuan-I donated it to the clinic.

The boys were shocked at my departure. We posed for photos: me with Dong, me with the boy soldier, me with black-clad Xu, me with the shy boy in the blue sweater, me with Rod Stewart, me with Sam and bunny ears, me with Sam and no bunny ears. I went into the hall and took more photos with Little Black and Dr. Yao and the nurses. I met Director Tao for the first time, and he sat with me as his staff's cameras flashed. "You studied philosophy," he said. "Chairman Mao was our greatest philosopher, so I'll give you this." It was a gold Mao pin in a red box.

I was allowed a final meeting with Dr. Xu. "Did you have any dreams last night?" he asked. I actually remembered one: I'd dreamt that I'd lied to Dong and the others about my real age, and that I'd been caught; they'd realized that I wasn't one of them just as I'd begun to think that I was. Dr. Xu brought up Heidegger and Sartre, and I had to reveal how embarrassingly little I remembered from my college studies. He flipped through his notes, which had become so thick that they fell off the clipboard. He looked me in the eye. "You are looking for some advice, I think." I was. "Read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus." I still haven't. He asked me to do a story stem: he'd start the story, and I'd finish it. "Imagine that you're a small tiger walking alone in a tall forest," he said. For a moment, however fleeting, I truly did.
[Author Affiliation]
McKenzie Funk is a writer living in New York City.

Juding an English Contest in Kunming

2007-06-17T08:34:00.000-07:00

Update #2

2007-06-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

Just a quick, informal update.

Thus far I haven't been given anymore leads.

As an alternative, and much to my dismay, I've started researching the least desirable of Yunnan's three major industries: tobacco. I would much rather concentrate on steel, but its less likely that I would be able to visit any steel mills. A shame!

I think the tobacco industry of Yunnan may make a very interesting case study for my thesis. Without much research, and from the casual conversations I have had so far, it seems as if the industry may touch on a few things, namely 1) land rights (farmers rent land from the state), and 2) agricultural subsides and price controls (all tobacco is sold to the state at a set rate).

In short, the prospects of me actually working with a NGOs or other seem very low at this point. Of course I am still very open-minded to any opportunities that may come my way.

The lectures are language classes are going OK. I met with the American economist today. Very nice guy. Gave us some helpful tips about navigating the system here.

A note of interest

2007-06-11T03:29:00.000-07:00

The "Great Firewall of China" is very very real. Included in the million pages that I can't view is "blogger.com". So if a typo or spelling error gets through to the published blog, I am officially blaming the Chinese government.

Progress Report: 1

2007-06-10T01:47:00.000-07:00

On Friday, June 8, 2007, this researcher met with a representative of the Gender Mainstreaming Exploration on Rural Development Policies in Western China (GME), whose main offices are physically located at Yunnan University, Kunming, Yunnan, China.

With a goal of gender equality in rural development, GME’s proposed programs, ranging from village development to animal husbandry and the tracking of patterns of rural labor migration, has received funding approval from the Ford Foundation. Currently, CME is concentrating on authoring its budget and top-level policies, all of which this researcher has extensive experience.

Unfortunately, this researcher will not be able to participate in these sensitive negotiations due to her foreigner status, which is understandable. GME’s director offered her regrets that this researcher was not available two to three months earlier when GME was still in its initial planning stages.

As an alternative, GME’s director suggested that this researcher consider seeking permission to visit the Center for Rural Development Studies’ Yunnan Ethnic Minority Research and Well-Off Society Demonstration Base, specifically the Lisu Research Base.

Located in the Nujiang gorge, some 1,000 km from Kunming, the Lisu Research Base provides an “interactive base” for the study of, amongst other things, ecological environmental construction, socio-economic development, and the protection of “national tradition.”

In light the Lisu Research Base’s distance from Kunming, and inaccessibility via airport, this researcher has been advised to seek the counsel of Professors Liu Zhi and Zhao Bole for possible alternatives. Currently, both professors are trying to find an assignment within closer geographic proximity to Kunming, or whose location is more easily accessible, and suited for a shorter duration field stay.

As a second alternative, this researcher suggested visiting local factories and centers of economic development. As part of preliminary research, this researcher visited the 15th Annual Kunming Export/Import Fair. Her initial impression, based on the types of industries represented, was that Yunnan does not possess much heavy manufacturing and is instead engaged primarily in light industries, agricultural trade, and commodities extraction. Additionally, she is now aware of the Xishuangbanna Gn Jinghong Industrial Zone Development.

If acceptable, this researcher would enjoy exploring this topic further. In the meantime, this researcher has continued to speak to individuals, read articles, and gather data, awaiting information about whom she will visit next for possible assignment. Most recently, this researcher has discovered and reached out to a University of Colorado-trained economist teaching trade theory and policy at Yunnan University, whom she hopes to discuss the economic development of the region.

This document will be appropriately updated when further information becomes available.

Rockin' Out @ The Kunming Import/Export Fair

2007-06-09T06:21:00.001-07:00

Open crotch pants going away

2007-06-02T20:44:00.001-07:00

You still see them here, but apparently they are falling out of favor. Interesting.

Beverage Tabs

2007-06-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

The reason for on soda cans in Kunmihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifng is probably that used machinery in
overseas.

The likely explanation for pull tabs on soda cans in Kunming is probably that the machinery that makes soda cans with pull tabs is used machinery, purchased from places that didn't want them anymore.

Stay tabs were introduced in 1975 and have completely superseded the old-style pull tabs in the United States.

Explanation here.

Arrived in Kunming

2007-06-02T03:30:00.000-07:00

We arrived last night in Kunming and met our minders at the airport. Silly me, my minder is a man! I have no idea why I thought he was a girl. Either way, nice guy.

Here is Chong Hui (first one to the left).

We had a very nice welcome dinner. It was family-style with tons of food. God, I hate wasting food.

Our hotel room is modest, but good. I call my bed a funeral pyre because it feels like I am sleeping on a table top. They say its good for your back.

We had our big meeting today to introduce us to the program. So far so good.

Bought a pre-paid card for my cell phone. Wanted to buy a new cell phone, but the prices are about 3-4X what you can get the same "cool" phone for in the US. I guess the two most interesting things I learned today were that 1) people pick out cell phone numbers based on how lucky they are, paying a steep premium for 'lucky' numbers, and 2) labor is so bloody cheap that there are ten shop clerks for every customer. I will write more on that later.

Still haven't figured out a topic for thesis, but labor/wages is still looking interest.

Oh, so far it seems as if our minders education is extremely narrow. No surprise there, but need to learn more about them and figure it out.

In Hong Kong

2007-05-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Arrived in Hong Kong a few hours away. Thankfully this place has free wifi. Trying desperately to get onto Skype or something like it. Should be in Kunming by early afternoon.

So Embarrassing

2007-05-30T16:20:00.001-07:00

Today my minder asked me to buy her a CD that she can't find in China. I ran all over town looking for it. After calling six places I finally found it at J&R. It makes me icky even touching it.

2007-05-29T10:05:00.001-07:00

This quote says a lot about the current state of China.

After the massacre of 1989, [Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping] in effect said, 'We will not stop economic reform; [but] we will, in effect, halt political reform.'"

Thus far I have concentrated most of my energies on looking at China some economic and social stats, even by looking at the official stats one starts to understand a lot.

I am going to try to watch this very relevant episode of Frontline before I leave tomorrow.

I have also been trying to rectify the relationship between MNCs, FDI, and policy for quite some time. The attempt by the Chinese government to erase tank man out of Chinese cultural history (thanks to google) is quite interesting.

Strictly by the official numbers you can clearly see that there are two, or even more, Chinas. Curious to see if the reality is grimmer.

Chinese Factory Workers

2007-05-22T20:48:00.001-07:00

Working 'inside' huge metal press. I hope to god this isn't real!

Source: liveleak.com

Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields

2007-04-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.

But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

Source: New York Times

Calcutta's Industrial Ambitions Clash with Tradition

2007-04-05T04:55:00.000-07:00

Not directly about China, but they do mention how India, seeing China as a thriving example, would like to create similar export processing zone (EPZs) in hopes of spurring development. Yet a strong faction of Indian citizens are resisting.

Source: National Public Radio

Bulldozers break China stand-off

2007-04-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

Authorities in China have torn down a stubborn couple's house after a three-year stand-off that hindered a construction project and captivated the nation, a witness and state media said.

Wu Ping and Yang Wu have been fighting off bulldozers in downtown Chongqing since 2004, when they were one of 280 households asked to make way for a redevelopment project in the booming southwestern city of nearly 28 million.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Stolper-Samuelson Theorem

2007-04-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

The original paper (cited below) is here.

Stolper, W.F. and P.A. Samuelson (1941). "Protection and Real Wages." Review of Economic Studies, 9: 58-73.

A recent paper that explains the theorem is here.

THE SCHWARTZ CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY ANALYSIS RELEASES A NEW STUDY ON WORLD TRADE

2007-04-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

The World Bank underestimates the risks and overestimates the benefits of multilateral trade liberalization, according to a powerful new study released this month by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. Written by Lance Taylor, the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development, the study comes as many economists and policymakers are debating the future of the Doha round, the world trade talks that began in Doha, Quatar, in November 2001 but have repeatedly collapsed.

Some commentators have cited intractable differences between poor and wealthy countries regarding protection and development policies as a salient reason for the collapse. Yet any possible Doha agreement, Taylor shows, would offer developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, only limited gains, given the variability of such macroeconomic indicators as employment, income, government deficits, and trade deficits.

“When the analysis allows for a changing rather than a fixed government budget deficit,” he observes, “the African public balance often deteriorates, whereas the rest of the world’s fiscal position improves. Our study finds that if employment and income are variable, they may increase in sub-Saharan Africa, but in tandem with mounting trade deficits and foreign debt, rendering such advances temporary.” Taylor's conclusion is therefore that “developing countries would be ill-advised to follow the radical recommendations of the World Bank’s liberalization strategy insofar as it rests on results from the current trade models. At this point, there is every reason to demand serious revisions to proposals from developed countries prior to any revival of the Doha process.”

SCHWARTZ CENTER FOR ECONOMIC POLICY ANALYSIS is here.

Multivariate Regression

2007-04-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Basic Regression Model Multivariate regression is the primary statical toolfor applied statistics in the social sciences. Consider two applications: here.

Employment, wages and income inequality in the internalization of China's economy

2007-04-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

An excellent case study of Chinese wages.

Download here.

Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in China

2007-04-02T11:57:00.000-07:00

Excellent paper, commissioned by the BLS, assessing the quality and usability of avaliable stats on China's manufacturing employment and labor compensation, and estimating annual, monthly, and hourly labor compensation for China's manufacturing employees.

Download here.

Bargaining Power and Foreign Direct Investment in China: Can 1.3 Billion Consumers Tame the Multinationals?

2007-04-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has become a much desired commodity by nations, regions and cities throughout the world. Indeed, governments bid for FDI because it is commonly thought to be an important engine of economic growth, job creation, and technological upgrading. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), the developing world’s largest recipient of FDI and one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is often cited as evidence for the beneficial effects of FDI. Given the PRC’s size and the huge allure of its cheap labor force and customer base, one would think that if any country had the bargaining power vis a vis multinational corporations to benefit from FDI, it would be China. But does FDI really deliver these commonly perceived benefits? To answer this question, we study the impact of inward FDI on wages, job creation, investment and tax generation in the PRC from 1986-1999 by running panel regression analysis on provincial level data. An innovation of our analysis is to distinguish the impact of FDI inflows from that of economic liberalization, per se. We find that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, inward FDI has a relatively small positive impact on wages and employment, while having a negative impact on domestic investment and tax revenue. We suggest that the decentralization of the FDI bidding process in China contributes to these negative outcomes, and argue that the limitation on FDI management tools associated with China’s WTO entry is likely to further reduce the benefits of FDI for Chinese workers and citizens.

Download here.

Section 301 Petition

2007-04-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

Section 301 Petition of American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations concerning Chinese labor practices.

MIT OpenCourseWare: Chinese

2007-04-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Free audio/video lectures, notes, sample tests, etc of different levels of Chinese taught at MIT.

M.I.T. Education in China, Minus the Degree

2007-04-02T09:29:00.000-07:00

LUCIFER CHU, a 31-year-old from Taipei, Taiwan, is as good an example as any of the shrinking distances between East and West.

Mr. Chu has become a millionaire by creating Chinese translations of fantasy novels. Using much of the $1 million in royalties from his versions of “The Lord of the Rings,” Mr. Chu says he devotes himself to distributing free translations of material from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Web site.

When M.I.T. introduced its OpenCourseWare project six years ago, it was a radical departure. The project was intended to make virtually all of the institute’s course materials available online — free — over a 10-year period at the cost of $100 million. (The material is provided under a Creative Commons license, which, among other things, forbids its being used for commercial purposes, but allows it to be copied and used for other purposes.)

The university’s good intentions came with some concerns: it’s not easy to share the lecture notes, slide presentations, sample tests, syllabuses and reading lists that go into an M.I.T. course. First, faculty members have to agree to go along. Also, the 25 people who work on OpenCourseWare have had to obtain permission to use other people’s creative work that crops up in the slides and lectures.

Source: New York Times

Re-education

2007-04-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

Can China create schools that foster openness, flexibility and innovation? And what happens to China if it does?

Source: New York Times

2007-04-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

excellent preview of Kunming

Homeowner Stares Down Wreckers, at Least for a While

2007-04-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.

Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.

Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.

Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.

It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.

Source: New York Times

Ant Fraud Yields Death Sentence

2007-04-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

YINGKOU, China -- To hear Chinese authorities tell it, Wang Zhendong is a danger to society, the worst kind of person, one who took advantage of his fellow citizens' naivete and trust. Last month, a court here gave him the death penalty for his crimes.

Wang's misdeed: selling overpriced ant farms to the public.

As China moves fitfully from a planned economy to a free-market system, cracking down on fraud, embezzlement and other financial schemes has become a major priority for the government. Among the cases taken most seriously are ones that harmed common people.

In Wang's case, for instance, investors shelled out 10,000 yuan, the equivalent of about $1,300, for cardboard boxes full of black ants, purportedly rare ones sometimes used in China to make medicines and wine but actually worth about $25.

Source: Washington Post