Category: China

“Growing Recognition of Economic Costs” of Koyoto Protocol

Commentary on the Kyoto Protocol:

(p. 3) . . . the current stalemate is not just because of the inadequacies of the protocol. It is also a response to the world’s ballooning energy appetite, which, largely because of economic growth in China, has exceeded almost everyone’s expectations. And there are still no viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases.

Then, too, there is a growing recognition of the economic costs incurred by signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, a proponent of emissions targets, said in a statement on Nov. 1: ”The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.”

This is as true, in different ways, in developed nations with high unemployment, like Germany and France, as it is in Russia, which said last week that it may have spot energy shortages this winter.
. . .
The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.

Enormous investments in basic research have to be made promptly, even with the knowledge that most of the research is likely to fail, if there is to be any chance of creating options for the world’s vastly increased energy thirst in a few decades, said Richard G. Richels, an economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit center for energy and environment research.

”The train is not leaving the station, and it needs to leave the station,” Mr. Richels said. ”If we don’t have the technologies available at that time, it’s going to be a mess.”

For the full commentary, see:
ANDREW C. REVKIN. “THE WORLD; On Climate Change, a Change of Thinking.” The New York Times, Section 4 (Sun., December 4, 2005): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Using a T-shirt to Tell the Story of Progress


Source of image: Amazon.com

The protests occurred on ”a cold day in February 1999.” Ms. Rivoli was watching as students gathered at the gothic centerpiece of Georgetown to demonstrate against the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and other putative villains of international trade. The crowd, Ms. Rivoli noticed with characteristic acuity, had ”a moral certainty, a unity of purpose” that permitted it to distinguish black from white and good from evil ”with perfect clarity.” One woman seized the microphone and asked: ”Who made your T-shirt? Was it a child in Vietnam? Or a young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour? Did you know that she lives 12 to a room? That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat?”
Ms. Rivoli did not know these things, and she wondered how the woman at the microphone knew. But she decided to find out. In the rest of her narrative, the author tells the story of ”her” T-shirt, which she purchased for $5.99 by the exit of a Walgreen’s in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. ”It was white and printed with a flamboyantly colored parrot, with the word ‘Florida’ scripted beneath.” A company in Miami had engraved the front, after buying the shirt from a factory in China. The Chinese manufacturer had purchased the cotton used to make the shirt from Texas. Eventually it will end up as part of a large but little-known market for used clothing destined for resale in East African ports.
. . .
By looking across history to the shifting center of textile manufacturing from Manchester, England, to Lowell, Mass., to South Carolina to Japan and, finally, the developing nations of Asia, Ms. Rivoli discovers a universal truth. Without making light of the horrors experienced by workers, she asserts that their jobs were a little better than other available options (usually farm work) and, what’s more, that textile factories led to advances in industrialization and, just as dependably, in living standards. It is not too much to say that she uses the T-shirt to tell the story of progress.

For the full commentary on Rivoli’s book, see:
ROGER LOWENSTEIN. “OFF THE SHELF; Travels With My Florida Parrot T-Shirt.” The New York Times, Section 3 (Sun., August 21, 2005): 7.
The book is:
Pietra Rivoli. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade. John Wiley & Sons, 2005. ISBN: 0471648493

Chinese Version of ‘Eminent Domain”: Villagers Die Protesting Theft of Their Land

“People here have tried everything you can think of to get the problem solved before this happened,” said a resident who gave his name as Chen. “They talked to the village committee, the township and municipal governments. One of them even went to Beijing. But nothing is done – the village officials just simply ignore them.”
Mr. Chen described the peak of the protests, on Saturday night, when the deaths occurred. “It was like a war, so real and so brutal,” he said. “I did not see who started it, but I saw policemen were beating the villagers and the villagers were fighting back with stones and firecrackers.”
Since then, villagers said, many residents are being forced to report each morning to the police, who detain them until late in the evening, when they are allowed to return home until the next morning.
As with so many recent rural protests, Panlong’s problems began with land. Many villagers told stories of having been deceived by corrupt local officials who they said had enriched themselves by selling off rights to the villagers’ farmland.
“Two years back, one day some villagers were asked to attend a routine meeting,” said a 42-year-old farmer who gave his name as Fang. “They went and they paid 10 yuan for participation fees, and they signed in as usual. Later, when we discovered our land was being sold, we asked the village committee to explain what’s going on, and they answered that we had signed the contract. Suddenly we remembered that meeting, and everyone understood that we had already been cheated.”

For the full story, see:
FRENCH, HOWARD W. “Panlong Journal: Visit to Chinese Anytown Shows a Dark Side of Progress.” The New York Times (Thurs., January 19, 2006): A4.

Freedom in Pulsating, Vibrant Hong Kong


Source of book image: http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/stmartins/Search/SearchBookDisplayLarge.asp?BookKey=3008997
Here is an excerpt from a review of a posthumously published memoir, by a well-known British author, recounting three years of childhood in the Hong Kong of the early 1950s:

(p. B12) He has written an extraordinarily happy book, filled with hilarious set-pieces and pulsating with Hong Kong’s vibrant street life. Unlike monochrome Britain, with its dull diet and pinched economy, Hong Kong offered color, variety and adventure.
. . .
Most of Mr. Booth’s encounters were curious rather than dramatic, like the incident of the plink-plonk man, a street musician with a monkey outfitted like a mandarin from the Ming dynasty. One day, as Martin watched, the monkey managed to bite through his leather leash. In a flash, he was up a tree, where, ignoring his master’s pleading and cursing, he carefully disrobed and flung his costume to the street below. Then, in one magnificent act of repudiation, he sent a perfectly aimed stream of urine down on the man’s upturned face, to the delight of the crowd that had gathered. Where in England could you see that?

WILLIAM GRIMES. “Books of The Times: Hong Kong Is Fantasy Land for a Young Adventurer.” The New York Times (Weds., December 21, 2005): B12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Information on the book reviewed:
Martin Booth. Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. St. Martin’s Press, 2005. (342 pages. $25.95.)

Courage and Cunning in the Defense of Freedom

LiAo9-19-05picNYT.jpg
(Li Ao on 9/19/05. Source: NYT online, see below)

BEIJING, Sept. 22 – China’s leaders may have felt they had no better friend in Taiwan than Li Ao, a defiant and outspoken politician and author who says that Taiwan should unify with Communist China.
But when China invited Mr. Li to tour the mainland this week, the Communist Party got a taste of its rival’s pungent democracy.
During an address at Beijing University on Wednesday evening, broadcast live on a cable television network, Mr. Li chided China’s leaders for suppressing free speech, ridiculed the university administration’s fear of academic debate and advised students how to fight for freedom against official repression.
“All over the world leaders have machine guns and tanks,” Mr. Li told the students and professors in the packed auditorium. “So I’m telling you that in the pursuit of freedom, you have to be smart. You have to use your cunning.”
. . .
Though Mr. Li did not criticize President Hu directly, he made pointed references to the lack of freedoms in China and suggested that the “poker-faced” bureaucrats of the Communist Party did not have enough faith in their legitimacy to allow normal intellectual discussion.
With several top university officials sitting by his side, he called the administrators “cowardly” for ferreting out professors at the school who were suspected of opposing Communism.

JOSEPH KAHN. “China’s Best Friend in Taiwan Lectures in Beijing About Freedom.” New York Times (Fri., September 23, 2005): A7.

Taiwan: “Barren Rock in a Typhoon-Laden Sea”

(p. 262) The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig deep inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people–men and women–rather than drill (p. 263) an oil well. Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea, with virtually no natural resources–nothing but the energy, ambition, and talent of its own people–and today it has the third-largest financial reserves in the world.

Source:
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
(Note: italics in original.)