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]

______

"....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]

Yellow Smocks

Before I went to Amsterdam I'd never seen a prostitute before. Well, I have a memory of a prostitute coming and putting her leg on our families rental car when we were in Miami in '93, but that's just too weird to have really happened. In Amsterdam they were more like zoo exhibits than anything else. They were presented as tourist attractions. I'd never seen one in her natural habitat though.

Even on the famed Emerson and Phillips intersections in Jacksonville, which I once lived not too far from, I never saw one. Ever. Everyone said they there with the crack dealers but I never saw them either. I think my parameters of "normal human behavior" are just too wide to spot someone dressed eccentric enough to scream, "approach me for solicitation of sex and drugs."

Everyone claimed that the late nigh barber shops in Tianjin were all sin dens, but every time I looked while driving by they were doing legitimate business. But Shenzhen. Wow. Different story. Obvious isn't even the word. Apparently, we compete with Thailand on the sheer numbers of women coming to look for work and deciding the indentured servitude at a factory just wasn't what they had in mind when they left the farm.

Within a five minute walk I could count at least ten businesses of scandalous intent. Juries out on what they really are, precisely, but they're neon lit establishments with big glass windows with couches overflowing with bored young girls in short white dresses. There's always one booth for cutting hair and not a single customer. For that matter, I've never seen anyone coming into or out of one of these places. They're just kinda there. Existing.

Though prostitution is against the law, I've never seen a crackdown on the brothels like I've seen with street vendors [or reporters, or...], so it came as some surprise to read this in an article about prostitution in China in the International Herald Tribune today:

At the end of November, officials in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown, got the bright idea of reviving the Cultural Revolution for the purposes of temporarily cracking down on its prostitutes.

This came to pass as a face-preserving measure after a regional television station broke with decorum by mentioning the existence of this industry in a city famous throughout Asia for its sex trade.

To send the message that Shenzhen was actually a clean and proper place, the police dressed several dozen prostitutes in identical yellow smocks and marched them through the streets of Futian district, to be shamed by a jeering crowd and have their names and hometowns announced to all.

What's even stranger is no one I know had any idea this happened until we read about it on international websites. The news here is strictly "happiness abides," so things like this rarely get reported. Curious though, ey?


Tags: Treyopia current events news prostitution Shenzhen China Chinese Asia Cultural Revolution persecution

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 Situation

There's not a lot about living in China that worries me. The situation in North Korea worries me a little bit. As I'm sure most of you are aware, the People's Democratic [Super Free and Happy] Republic of Korea has announced its intentions to conduct a nuclear test. Some are speculating that it might come as soon as this weekend.

So what is it about this affair, besides nuclear weapons exploding next door, that worries me?

Statements like this [Washington Post]:

"[North Korea] can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both."

"We are not going to live with a nuclear North Korea, we are not going to accept it."

- Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill

Woah, slowwwww down cowboy. Gettin' a bit existential, are we? North Korea can either test a weapon or it can have a future? It will cease to exist if it tests a weapon ... this is our response? [pssst, we've tested over 1,030 nukes - the last time less than 15 years ago]

That's an open declaration of war if I've ever heard one. Test it and die. Perhaps we can ponder whether Mr. Hill meant something different saying that America annot live with a proven nuclear armed N. Korea. Perhaps he meant something more polite when he said that N. Korea will not have a future if it proceeds, but this administration isn't known for it's subtleties is it?

So what happens when N. Korea tests? Are we going to sanction them [more]? Perhaps we could punish monks by depriving them of sex. Either Bush is blowing a lot of hot air or he plans a military response. A military response would be, in a word, horrific. We can run down a million scenarios for how it could be carried out, none of which involve open-heart surgery precision and the world cheering on our daring raids that didn't involve Seoul being pounded for weeks by 155mm artillery buried in the mountains along the DMZ.

China's relations and involvement with these issues are complex to say the least. I don't even fully understand them. I won't pretend to fully understand them. China has strongly rebuked N. Korea over this. It was front-page news in the state-sponsered media yesterday. Something is about to happen and China doesn't want it to happen. I hope China's response is something along the lines of what the Ralph A. Cossa recommends:

"Beijing should also note that economic sanctions imposed as a result of a nuclear test will be accompanied by an "open border" policy and the establishment of UN-sponsored refugee camps on the Chinese side of the Yalu River. China, at North Korea's insistence, presently forces most refugees to return, where they meet a most unpleasant fate. This policy must change."

and

"Beijing should also set a certain date for the next round of six-party talks, while making it clear that a "six-minus- one" session will occur if the North refuses to come."

My fear is that an American military response could send my coworkers and I home. China is a country where politics and popular thought can change on a dime, having gone from fuedalism to collectivism to free market economy in a single generation. The Chinese still haven't forgiven the Japanese for World War II and in fact openly hate them today. I wouldn't want to be around here when the public reacts to an unpopular American military campaign against a neighboring country. I also wonder how the Chinese Communist Party would respond and whether or not work visas would be a front in diplomatic warfare.

My own take on nuclear proliferation is simple: every nation deserves the right to self-defense in accordance with international norms and it's threat situation. Every permanent member on the UN Security Council including the "leader of the free world" is armed to the teeth with nuclear warheads with no intention of getting rid of them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NNPT] cuts both ways - that current non-nuclear nations withhold from going nuclear and that current nuclear nations make serious efforts to create a future free of nuclear weapons. No such effort has been made by the current nuclear armed countries, so why should we expect follow-through from the non-nuclear signatories? It's a mute point now with N. Korea, because it legally removed itself from the treaty.

If the White House wants a nuclear-free Third World, it needs to make serious overtures for liquidating existing stockpiles in the developed world.

Like any sane man, I think it's obscene that the DPRNK spends so much money on it's arms industry while it's citizens starve. I have no desire to see men like Kim Jung-Il possess such power. The fact of the matter is that he's daily threatened by a nuclear power with troops massed on his border and having a nuclear weapon is his only viable insurance policy to prevent an Iraq-style "regime change."