China Study Group
red book on black list? nope.
The original story turned out to be a hoax.
by Joshua Muldavin
This month’s toxic spill into China’s Songhua River forced the evacuation of thousands of people; poisoned the water supply for millions in northeast China, including Harbin, the region’s major city; and now threatens the supply for as many as 70 downstream Russian cities and villages. Thus far, most analysts following the disaster have focused on the challenges faced by urban Chinese and the real problems of lax environmental regulatory enforcement, corrupt local officials and delayed sharing of crucial information with affected populations.
But they have missed two far more significant points about the spill, which involved 100 tons of benzene, a powerful carcinogenic petrochemical that causes leukemia. First, it is not a singular event but a manifestation of a much larger structural problem within China that disproportionately impacts rural areas where the country’s majority lives. And second, the world as a whole to varying degrees is implicated in this predicament, and can no longer afford to pretend otherwise.
Far from the bustling megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai are China’s rural hinterlands – the engine and the dumping ground of China’s unprecedented economic growth and trajectory. These rural areas provide the country’s booming cities with cheap, unorganized labor drawn from extremely poor peasant communities in the midst of their own social and environmental crises. It is also here that many toxic industries are located and through which the benzene spill first flowed and will soon flow again – out of sight of the world’s media.
Rural laborers work in some of the world’s dirtiest, most dangerous conditions in these far-flung township and village industries spread across the whole country. These industrial subcontractors to Chinese and international corporations spew pollution into the air and water and onto the land. And when rural workers’ health is destroyed in these factories, they return to tilling the decimated lands surrounding their villages – toxic waste dumps for this unregulated production.
I spent a good part of the 1980s living along the banks of the Songhua River. I vividly remember drinking purple contaminated well water in a village with no other water source than the one polluted by the small local factory. The choice for local residents was to drink the water or leave and join the 200 million peasants searching for work in China’s cities on any given day.
continue reading at the International Herald Tribune
(Joshua Muldavin, a professor of geography and Asian studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is writing a book on the environmental and social impacts of post-Mao China’s development path. Photo by AP)
According to a report in the China Youth Daily,
China’s migrant workers – now numbering 150 million – are collectively
owed 100 billion yuan (about 12 billion US) in back wages. Nearly half
of migrants surveyed have had their wages held back at some point. The
article also claims that surveyed workers on average spent three times
their owed wages trying to get their back wages paid. Small surprise,
then, that many workers don’t try to get their wages back.
(Picture of workers in Zhengzhou holding banner announcing a news confernece calling for the return of their back wages. They had been contracted to complete office blocks on the campus of Henan University. From: Yahoo China, via CSR Asia)
By Doug Henwood
Turn on the TV, and there’s always something new to fear. Not the really scary stuff, necessarily, like bombs in the subway (though the talking heads do their best to maximize those fears) but the daily sensations that are the lifeblood of cable TV: disappearing in Aruba, getting attacked by sharks—or being taken over by the Chinese.
The China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), 70 percent owned by the Chinese government, is putting in a bid for Unocal. Unocal had already agreed to being taken over by Chevron. But, as often happens when corporations start dating seriously, another suitor butted in. In this case, because China’s involved, the usual forces of nationalist fervor are up in arms.
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continue reading at The Nation
