Crowd Control

By Shuggiefisher

I don't envy any major policy maker in China. Every national policy decision affects 1/5 of the worlds population. Any egalitarian ideals forces a yuan to split 1.3 billion ways. It's precisely the same conditions that make China the world's factory that keep men and women in poverty even through endless hours, days, weeks, and months of labor. There's just too many damn people. A college degree in boomtowns like Shenzhen will earn about $250 a month. They move thousands of miles for this kind of wage. Anything less can easily place in a factory making 50 cents an hour, fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. They also move thousands of miles for this wage.

China's population is set to hit 1.5b by the end of this decade, which has China adding something like 1/3 America's population every year. So what's a policy maker to do? Welcome to one of two One-Child Policy nations on the planet (correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Vietnam is the only other one). Because the Communist Party of China isn't the strong top-down structure most people think it is, government policy is enacted differently in different parts of the country.

In Shenzhen, the policy seems only to act as a tax to the super rich. 1/3 to half the kids at my (boarding) school have brothers and sisters, if that's any indicator. I've read that most farmers get away the practice because they need the financial help that multiple children bring once they're old enough to work. In Tianjin, I have a friend who's father lost his job as a teacher because he had three girls to finally have a son.

Officials in Guanxi (the province of Guilin/Yangshou) took things a bit too far though. The NY Times writes that, "officials in several parts of Guangxi mobilized their largest effort in years to roll back population growth by instituting mandatory health checks for women and forcing pregnant women who did not have approval to give birth to abort fetuses." In addition to this, "[they] slapped fines starting at 500 yuan and ranging as high as 70,000 yuan, or $65 to $9,000, on families that had violated birth control measures anytime since 1980."

"The family-planning officials were just like the Japanese invaders during the war. They took everything away, and destroyed or tore down the houses if people could not pay the fines," said one villager surnamed Wu.

"In some families, even the gate and bowls were taken away, leaving them with an empty house." [Washington Post]

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"....gangsters used hammers and iron rods to destroy people’s homes, while threatening that the next time it would be with bulldozers,” [NY Times]

The villagers responded by, "clash[ing] with officials and police armed with guns and electric cattle prods, pulling down a wall surrounding the government office, turning over cars and burning part of its main building."

"The government office was a big mess," a villager, who witnessed the scene, said by telephone. "The big gate and two cars near it were all burnt and black, and broken glass, bricks and rubbish were everywhere." [Washington Post]

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man [Review]

I picked up John Perkin's latest book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in Hong Kong this week. It was a hefty sum - 115 HK dollars(!) - but I needed more books. I'd seen this one referenced around MetaFilter and picked it up when the bookstore we were visiting failed to produce any substantial modern fiction.

Perkin writes a cloak-and-dagger account of being an obviously underqualified "Yes Man" economist for one of the original multi-national construction and energy companies called MAIN. He outlines a clear and systematic approach of trapping developing nations like Indonesia and Columbia with massive loans to develop their economies in the early 1970's. His company specialized in energy so his job was to invent electricity demand forecasts, tie them in with potential GDP growth, and use the reports to justify massive loans.

The loans themselves were too massive to be repaid. That much is obvious today when countries like Argentina and Ecuador are spending half of their national budgets supporting ancient loans. Furthermore, the loan money never made it down to those most in need because it circulated amongst the corrupt government officials and the American contractors who planned and built the power stations and electrical grids.

Anyone who follows current events closely should know this. There's not much of a confession yet, at least not a useful one. So what we get out of the book are two contentions he makes from this. The first is that this was on purpose, the second is that the NSA was involved.

I think the first contention is very plausible. American companies and the US government colluded to shackle developing countries in massive debt so they could be easily manipulated later for UN votes, military bases, and other services. His first boss at MAIN pretty much verified this when he said that, "what John's book says is, there was a conspiracy to put all these countries on the hook, and that happened."

The NSA contention is sketchy at best. He draws as his only source for NSA intrigue was that he was profiled and offered a job by them before he decided to join the Peace Corp. Someone in his wife's family sets him up with the interview and tells him it's OK that he's going to go into the Peace Corp because there will likely be a lucrative job at the end of his service. When he gets offered the lucrative job, he assumes it's an NSA front. He wavers in his own belief that this was the case, but ultimately he sides with it when he outright calls his first MAIN boss and recruiter an NSA liaison. Furthemore, a State Department rebuttal of the book is correct in saying that the NSA is a cryptographic [codes] and SigInt [tracking telecommunications] intelligence agency and isn't involved in the same kind of intrigue as the CIA.

I just wished he'd leave his NSA hunches as just hunchs and stuck with the facts. Perkin delivers in showing what happens when the "jackals" come out when politicians don't play the game: air crashes, riots, and coups. These aren't mere conspiracies, but documented practices of the corporocracy in action. He demonstrates vividly the links between government and the companies that get massive rebuilding contracts. Cheney being CEO of Haliburton is just the latest in a long history of tainted dealings in "development" and "aid." Americans need to know what's been done by their government and business leaders in the name of altruism and modernity.

Tags: Treyopia news current events current events book reviews John Perkins Perkins confessions of an economic hit man globalization development aid China NSA corporocracy

The Other China

I remember the second night I was in Tianjin we were having a small BBQ on a large outdoor patio on the 4th floor of the office building ACES is in. We have the 4th floor largely to ourselves. While we were eating sheep kababs I kept noticing the top floor of a building about 80 meters away. Later I would deduce it was on top of the Carrefour supermarket and KTV karaoke building that also hosts the new restaurant called "Hans" that features Chinese girls dressed as 19th century Dutch maidens.

What caught my eye was that there were men walking passed a window wearing what looked like chef's clothing. White hats, white clothes, the whole outfit. I laughed it off. It was a curiosity. Why would there be cooks on the 10th floor of a building? Other than Dru asking if I'd seen it too, I didn't think about it after that..

From different angles, inside my classroom, I noticed the building wasn't in the greatest condition. Windows were broken out on the top floors but it wasn't abandoned. I could see people walk by occasionally. The mystery deepened... what was going on up there? The photographer in me wanted to sneak around up there.

A week ago, in the middle of a class, I realized what it was. It was a dormitory. A dormitory filled with men of all ages. The structures I couldn't make out inside were bunk beds. It was obvious when I saw men laying down on them now at 8:30 at night.

I don't know who they are. I don't know where they work. My best guess is that they're unskilled laborers from the country. You hear of them in the Western press, but you never really see them. Brian told me they typically live at construction sites. This was confirmed a few weeks ago when I was looking for the antique market and found a construction site with a huge wall around it. Looking from a distance I could see cargo trailers piled three high with the walls cut off filled with bunks.

On my walks home I sometimes catch men near the same building standing outside at night with a hose and a bowl of soapy water. They stand in their underwear and bathe in the streets once the resteraunts close up and people start going home. I know who these men are. They are the cooks at one of the better, if slower, resteraunts in our neighborhood. They live in a dorm behind the resteraunt. Five-hundred yuan ($60) a month, free food, and lodging is their pay. The wage is about half of the GDP per capita ($1,700/year USD at current exchange rate, $6,800 USD if adjusted for purchasing power parity [a relative and sketchy measure of buying power that quadruples their GDP from 2.2 trillion USD to almost 9 trillion USD]).

I'm glad I'm seeing it. I've been getting a false exposure so far. Everyone I meet is educated. They're the only ones who speak English. Most everything I see is in one of the posher neighborhoods in town. I hang out at expat bars and college clubs. Even the mountain village I spent two weeks in was financed by tourist seeing the restored Wall. On Sunday I'll begin a 27 hour train ride to the bottom of China. It's a 1200 mile voyage nearly straight south. I think I'll see the real China there.


The red line running the length of the country is my voyage. Click to Enlarge.

Tags: Treyopia current events poverty Tianjin China trains train network poor