Migrant Worker

I caught Newsweek’s “Four Hours in Kunming” piece online, part of their continuing series of pared-down travel recs, and was inspired (or perhaps uninspired) enough to write a couple of my own:

Four hours in Kunming for the bourgeoisie:

Instead of Yunnan Nationalities Village, check out Yunnan Nationalities Museum. Granted, there are no giant stone phalluses surrounded by crowds of half-naked Wa minority dancers, but the overall picture you’ll get of the ethnic minorities of China will be a bit less exploitative. This is one of the best museums in Kunming (read: actually worth going to) and boasts a wide range of textiles, jewelry, and displays of the art, archetecture, and traditional tools of the 25 official minority groups represented in Yunnan.

Climb Xishan if you’re feeling energetic, but if you’re super lazy like me, catch a bus to Golden Temple, north of the city. Make the much shorter trek to the top for a decent view of Kunming and then explore the temple complex and surrounding parks and gardens. Bring a frisbee and take advantage of some of the only open grass in the province. If you’re rich, head next door and pony up the 100 (or is it 200?) RMB to visit the World Hortacultural Expo 99 gardens, then feast at the excellent Thai restaurant inside.

Skip 1910 La Gare du Sud and try out ShiPing Huiguan for Yunnan fare in a historical courtyard complex just south of Green Lake Park. Same food, half the price, half the tourists, and better local atmosphere (although the place is upscale and really clean). Periodic performances of traditional Yi minority songs by beautiful girls in costume are unintrusive and actually add to the experience. Stroll down to Green Lake Park after dinner and watch all of Kunming come out to play. (For the adventurous, try out any one of these restaurants specializing in Yunnan mushrooms. It’s all in Chinese, I know, I know, sorry.)

Instead of drinking Pu’er tea to relax, head to the natural hot spring spa, Dianchi Spring Spa, near lake Dian. Forget four hours, because for just over $10 US, you can the whole day relaxing in beautiful outdoor pools of scalding hot water. Throw in a few more bucks for massage, rubdown, fish eating your skin off, bowls of delicious ramen and pitchers of ice cold beer etc. This place is posh and clean and will give you fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and enormous towels and will not steal your swimsuit if you leave it behind. Oh yeah, they’re open ‘till 3 AM. Find them here.

Four hours in Kunming for the proletariat:

Check out the awesome free (or very cheap) exhibit on the minorities of Yunnan at Yunnan Nationalities University on 1-2-1 Street. Bus 10 and/or 55 will get you there, get off at the Minzu Daxue/ 民族大学 stop, walk through the main gate and ask around, someone will direct you to the museum.

Grab a map and stroll through Yunnan University’s campus south to Green Lake Park and then over to Yuantong Temple. Admission to the temple should be around 5 RMB, it’s a legitimate working temple filled with average Kunming people and few tourists. Don’t be afraid to wander off the main streets into some of the tiny alleyways and explore along the way. If you notice a wet market, step in and check out the selection of unidentifiable produce, tofu products, and animals you’d never want to eat. Help yourself to some grilled tofu, deep fried corn cakes or potatoes, fruit on a stick, or whatever other street food you happen across.

Eat at Heavenly Mana (located just next to Salvador’s Coffee Shop on Culture Alley). The menu boasts all the local Kunming specialties and has been fully translated into English. It’s a challenge to spend more than 15 RMB/person on a meal here, but if you’re looking to splurge, grab some homemade ice cream (10 RMB) at Salvador’s after dinner, or walk north along the alleyway about three minutes and get a cup of pure mango (5 RMB?) in the blender from Fresh juicebar.

If all the walking around tired you out, go to Linna’s Massage for a fantastic massage in a very unadorned little shop. Linna is blind, fluent in English, and reads English braille fluently as well. Her mother and a couple other staff also give massages — prices are clearly marked and last I was there it cost 25 RMB/hour for full body massage. Linna’s is located a 5 minute walk past the main gate of Yunnan University on Qingyun Jie/ 青云街.

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As someone who routinely complains about the fluffy crap in the international press on Asia, this article in Asia Times Online (written by Clifford McCoy, a freelancer after my own heart, it appears) is basically the most awesome piece of journalism I’ve seen in a long time. And it has everything: toxic conventional agriculture, international trade in food, opium and heroin, armed resistance, ties to Yunnan province, property rights disputes, and the UN World Food Program. Seriously, GO READ IT.

For those who are short on time, the article basically describes a process by which the Chinese government, ethnic Chinese living on both sides of the China-Myanmar border, and a Burmese-Chinese paramilitary that controls the Shan state are using an opium-crop substitution program to get rich, bankrupt ethnic minority farmers, and acquire huge tracts of land. Central to the problem is the fact that the Chinese-produced varieties of hybrid rice being distributed in the area require heavy pesticide and fertilizer inputs - driving farmers into debt - and absolutely no technical trainings are being provided, leaving farmers at a loss for how to deal with toxic chemicals and a new and fussy crop. In the meantime, governments, militaries, and traders are making huge profits off the sale of seeds and chemicals in the region. Further, it is likely that the emphasis on rice-crop in this area is largely export-oriented, since Myanmar is perennially short on foreign exchange.

The article touches on quite a few of the most critical issues in agriculture: ‘modern’ vs. ‘traditional’ varieties, small subsistance farms vs. large managed farms, illegal crops and their microeconomic effects, property rights, tenure security, and political stability… playing out in what is really a very bizarre and singular political-economic situation. I got so excited that I did a bunch of background research that I look forward to putting up on this site in the very near future… in the meantime, GO READ THAT ARTICLE! I’m considering writing a personal letter to Asia Times to thank them for bothering to cover something well.

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A rousing article on ‘nationwide scrutiny’ of rural food safety systems in Xinhua last week caught my attention, particularly because on sensitive issues like food safety and quality standards, what Xinhua releases is likely to be not only the official government articulation of a given issue, but also the only articulation of the topic that will be allowed in any Chinese media, government-run or otherwise. So here we have a (mouth)piece that notes, astutely,

People in China’s rural areas are easier to be victims of inferior goods and unsafe foods because of lax supervision and financial difficulties.

How profound. But why is the government suddenly advocating this campaign in the first place? (If you answered ‘saving farmers from food poisoning,’ you might want to pick up a copy of anything written on China in the last ten years). Pressure to address food safety problems comes largely from the comparatively more informed and empowered urban Chinese as well as international businesses hoping to appease foreign consumers who are now terrified of buying Chinese products. The inspections are likely to largely target the same farms and factories supplying the urban and export market. Interesting, though, that Xinhua (and thus the government) are bothering to justify this push as benefiting rural areas at all. Maybe they’re having a difficult time getting the local government buy-in, and think it’s easier to explain that controls are tightening for their own personal safety than the bottom line of international pet food manufacturers.

Let’s take a minute and let that sink in: More pressure for food safety reform in China has come from the death of a handful of American pets this year than from the potential tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who die each year from similar toxins in food. Why the disparity? An official US total of 16 cats and 1 dog died as a result of feed grade gluten and rice protein tainted with Melamine, unofficial estimates reach thousands of pets. I know this because I can find it here and here and here. I can also find the US government’s food safety monitoring data, as it is regularly released and published, good or bad, in the popular press. International newspapers, those not subject to government content control, know that scandal sells, and almost no scandal sells better than one that potentially jeopardizes the entire readership (or their beloved kittens). Companies are desperate to keep their salad dressings, toothpastes, and frozen bagels off the front page, so they double and triple-check their production line for risk.

The Chinese government, in contrast, works hard to disguise the scope and degree of the food safety problem from the general public. Routine monitoring results at the local level are generally either not released or highly suspect. Investigative journalism on issues like this is discouraged, and reporters who push the envelope in controversial areas do so at what appears to be fairly significant personal and professional risk. Two prominent, recent examples: it is common knowledge at this point that reporting on Blue Ear Disease in China’s pig population is being heavily downplayed and controlled, second, when domestic reporters uncovered cardboard being used in steamed bun production in Beijing last June, the journalists were skewered in the domestic press for staging the whole thing, which (the rumor mill indicates) coincided with a convenient purge in freelance (non-contract) television journalists affiliated with CCTV. The reporters involved hired some migrant workers and staged their footage of cardboard bun production, but it is still widely believed that they acted in response to actual information that cardboard was being used in steamed bun production.

Asking local governments to “severely punish producers of fake or substandard goods” assumes that these governments have the technical expertise, resources, and incentives to aggressively enforce food safety policies… which they largely do not. My bottom line is this: the central government’s goal would be better served by turning a profit-motivated journalist corps loose on producers of shoddy, toxic food (or whatever else) and watching these producers go under as their names are smeared across the headlines.

If you read Chinese, check out the Economic Observer’s coverage of media and product safety for more on this same issue. I’m quoted here, although my professional qualifications are somewhat suspiciously inflated.

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A long (long) hiatus has left me with plenty to say and an increasingly messy space to say it in. I’m hoping to work out a few technical glitches and start blogging again here soon. For those of you who have commented and emailed over the last six months, thanks for the encouragement, sorry for disappearing, and I hope what I’ve been doing in the meantime will only make what I write here more useful to whoever stumbles across it.

In the meantime: a big thank you to the folks at ChinaTattler for mentioning me in their list of (just barely acceptable) laowai blogs about China. Not entirely sure I agree with their assesment of western vs. Chinese media, but I do agree with the better part of their blog related rant, particularly that that ‘a wise man says a lot with few words, while a fool says nothing with many words.’

And on that note…

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Year of the Piglet?
Originally uploaded by PEAC.

Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year in China, is approaching fast. That means those of you teaching English at a Chinese university probably haven’t been working since Christmas-ish and may very well have vacation until the end of February.

The rest of us ‘migrant workers’ have to wait until China’s central government officially announces the holiday vacation dates, at which point we charge to the nearest train or bus station to get in line for tickets home. People regularly spend full days waiting to buy tickets, and often are forced to camp out in the hopes of getting a reasonable seat home. A fairly accurate depiction of this phenomenon is presented here, in the hilarious (Chinese) satire film entitled “Spring Festival Travel Evil Empire.”

I was considering bypassing the charge this year and booking a flight somewhere until I noticed an article in Shanghai Daily about a price freeze on Spring Fest train tickets.

Saaa-weeet! This means they won’t jack up the prices an extra 20% just in time for everyone to be socially, culturally, and morally obligated to go home for their single yearly visit. As one of my coworkers put it last year, “It’s not like if you charge me more I will tell my grandma, ‘Grandma? Sorry I am not coming home for Chunjie this year.’”

The article mentions the fact that China’s 150 million migrant workers make up a large part of those travelling home for the holiday. Since these workers make very little, and are often owed thousands of RMB in unpaid back wages (see previous post), many get increasingly desparate when it comes time to get in line and buy those train tickets. Which leads to:

A huge outbreak of theft every year in the month or two leading up to Spring Festival. Shanghaiist Zat Liu reported on her personal experience with this phenomenon, a missing pair of “masculine” riding boots, as well as some information on where in Shanghai theft is most rampant.

I can identify, as I have had a cell phone cut out of my purse on a public bus and mysteriously “lost” a wallet in a crowded bar in the last two months. Needless to say, I’m getting a bit paranoid.

I was able to find a collaberative map of thefts in Beijing, but it is in Chinese and there are only a few additions. This article (Chinese) also details cooperative online maps of high-theft areas, and highlights the Sanlitun, Xizhimen, and Gucheng areas, as well as major hospitals (where people often carry large amounts of cash to cover medical bills).

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Harvesting Rice
Originally uploaded by Even Rogers Pay.

After kissing the fresh fruit and blue skies of Kunming goodbye, I made my official migration to Beijing just before Christmas with two papayas in my carry-on luggage. I’ve spent the last month moving and the last week or two in a cesspit of holiday debauchery, but I am, at last, back on track with the latest in agricultural and migrant-related gossip, not to mention a healthy dose of Yunnan and Beijing hearsay.

It Sucks to Live in Rural China

I may have been on hiatus, but People’s Daily was still hard at work, bringing us insightful and groundbreaking news like this article: China’s rural life still harsh. Now that’s a shocker.

The story follows two migrant workers who, after the repeal of agricultural taxes was announced last year, returned to their home village to work the 4 mu (.65 acre or .2 hectare) allocated to them. A typhoon hit, and flooding submerged most of their land, and the husband was diagnosed with cancer. With no insurance, the family spent their entire life savings (just over $1,000 US) on hospital bills.

Two things worth noting about this article:

The couple had been working in an urban area as ‘migrant workers’ - the typical translation for 农民工 or farmer-workers in Chinese. They worked in the city long enough to save a substantial amount of money - and yet the 4 mu of land in their home village was still there, awaiting their return. Would this couple be better off if they could sell their farmland to a neighbor and use that capital to relocate permanently to the city? Under the current legal system, agricultural land is state property, and farmers can’t sell (and in some cases, can’t even lease).

Second, this is a classic example of the fallacy of a “poverty line” - in many cases, Chinese farmers’ savings level pushes them above the line and disqualifies them for all kinds of aid, but in practice, lack of access to insurance and inability to access the value of their land, they immediately return to poverty if they must pay tuition or hospital bills.

More rough life for the poor after the jump…

Continue reading "China's poor have it rough. Still." »

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Just ran into this article on South Dakota State University president Peggy Miller, who has just retired. I don’t have much of a personal connection to SDSU, although I spend a couple weekends there back in high school competing in their debate tournament. On the other hand, I did run into a group of SDSU reps, including Mrs. Miller’s husband, on the campus of Yunnan Normal University in 2004. I heard some rumors floating around that there were people from South Dakota on the campus, so I headed out and managed to find them finishing up a dorm tour. I exchanged some cards and contact info with the reps, but never heard back from them.

One way she has done that is by expanding SDSU’s international studies programs. Students now are able to attend universities across the globe, paying only what they would for tuition at SDSU. Last school year, almost 175 South Dakota State students studied abroad. In September 2004, she and her husband, Bob, led a contingent of SDSU staff and students to Kunming, China to visit Yunnan Normal University and discuss an ongoing exchange with that school. She not only wanted students to check out the study opportunities there, but the nightlife and the social opportunities to ensure it was a place young Americans would want to go. Matt Anderson, a 21-year-old biology and pre-med major from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, was on that trip. A product of the prairie who had never strayed much beyond the Midwest, Anderson said the culture shock was enormous - but the experience was priceless. “It was incredibly valuable to meet students over there and get their perspective on America,” Anderson, a senior, says.

I always hoped that there would be progress on the study abroad program they were hoping to establish, but haven’t heard anything about it in the last 16 months in Kunming. Most kids from South Dakota, even the brightest and most successful ones, don’t consider out of state options for college, let alone international study abroad.

A cursory search seems to indicate that SDSU has made a few exploratory trips to Kunming but has yet to establish a formal exchange program of any kind. They’ve also published a serious mis-estimate of Kunming’s population (they say 1 million, accurate figures over 4 million).

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I’m about a month behind in my email and in responding to comments here (sorry), but catching up fast… and in the backlog, I discovered this article on climate change from The Asian Reporter. Some choice bits are copied below.

Last year, last storm season, in several countries lining the far side of our moody Pacific, ferocious wind and rain, suddenly hungry rivers and streams, took away 700,000 Thai and Malay homes, destroyed 1.5 million Chinese dwellings, ruined 3 million Indian, Nepali, and Bangladeshi houses. And these losses represent only three of 2005’s record-breaking 73 storms in and around Asia. Those numbers are numbing. That’s more houses washed away than family homes standing in Oregon and Washington combined.

In fact, in a dozen more weather-sent calamities following the Leyte disaster, in other just as vulnerable areas of our aching earth, families sunk into misery even deeper than the poverty they endured before those storms. Poor people in poor countries got poorer still. The good news is In each instance also, we hasten to add, immigrant Americans responded immediately to their homeland’s suffering. Millions of U.S. dollars were sent or hand-carried back to where our hearts linger and our ancestral bones lie. It’s no secret that remittances from American Asians keep families back home, indeed keep entire developing countries, afloat. Foul weather on not.

The article goes on to ask whether immigrant communities can/ should take a larger role in changing US government climate policy formation, since disproportionately, it will be people in tropical coastal areas (and not Americans) who are affected by warming and related weather issues.

It seems like immigrants from coastal areas might have more at stake than the average American… but I don’t see coastal Texans leading the charge for progressive environment and energy policy while Minnesotans drag their heels. The larger problem is that no one wants to think about the implications of warming — not even those most likely to feel direct affects.

Similarly, I don’t see many Chinese Americans lobbying for increased public health projects that fight childhood diarrhea, one of the top killers of children across Asia — but I do see them sending money back for medical emergencies, and I also see them warning their immediate families not to eat the food or touch the water when they travel to China. Awareness of a problem does not necessarily beget a movement to solve it.

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Plastic Trash
Originally uploaded by Keith Tam.

This article on the German grocery superstore Metro charging for bags in Kunming from China Central Television (CCTV) floated across my radar today — it piqued my interest since I spent Tuesday trying to track down more information on trash bags in Northwest Yunnan.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of the ban on plastic bags in effect in Lijiang and Zhongdian (technically, all of Lijiang and Deqin prefectures) but never thought much about it until last August, when I travelled to Zhongdian with a friend who asked me what the deal was with the strange pseudo-cloth, pseudo-paper yellow bags we kept getting whenever we bought stuff. I mentioned that plastic was banned and guessed that this was some sort of biodegradable alternative material. We’ve been trying to figure out where these bags are coming from ever since, and it came to a head on Tuesday, when responsible travel company WildChina expressed interest in buying a few.

We’re not having a lot of luck tracking down the supplier of these bags in Northwest Yunnan — online research and some cursory asking around hasn’t even determined for sure if the bags are being distributed by a non-profit, for-profit, or local government. On the other hand, we have learned the following:

The ban on plastic bags seems to have been implemented in 2002. There is some interesting related information in this report from the Yunnan Environmental Protection Bureau, including the fact that .7 million plastic bags were confiscated. The whole report is worth a read if you are into that kind of thing. The backstory of the ban is explained in this article (Chinese) , and basically adds up to the local governments realizing that if millions of domestic and international tourists were going to show up each year and shop, they needed to do something about the pollution. No one wants to go to a world heritage site that has been buried by a waste dump.

In my hunt for more information on the ban on plastic bags (and possible biodegradable replacements) in Lijiang and Zhongdian, I turned up this article on the larger waste issue in Lijiang by Jo Kent, a new friend here in Beijing. She writes simply and honestly about the incredible trash problem here in China, particularly the “just throw it on the ground” culture that prevails everywhere from rural Yunnan to the big city (at a somewhat lesser degree).

Free Chinese Lesson! Biodegradability: 生物降解性 sheng wu jiang jie xing Biodegradable bag: 生物可降解袋 sheng wu ke jiang jie dai Sub in any Chinese noun in the blank to say that thing is biodegradable.

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I didn’t have many good things to say about Elong.com when I blogged about them back in late October. Since then, I’ve made a few bookings through Ctrip and I have nothing but good news:

Although the English is a bit fun and creative at times, it is perfectly possible to book through the English language website but input your delivery address in Chinese. This means I am less concerned about first time booking mistakes, but still can receive my tickets without trying to explain my address in Kunminghua over the phone.

It is possible to select (right on their website) an option that allows you to hold your tix with a credit card. This guarantees that you can make the booking even though you can’t or won’t take delivery for a day or two. You may also be able to pay on a credit card… but I can’t remember.

So far, they have had every ticket I booked on their website at the price I booked it… and I haven’t heard from any friends that ticket prices changed. This was one of my biggest frustrations with Elong as it further delayed my purchase of alternative tickets.

Local travel companies are good too, and I have yet to have any problem with them. But I can’t usually save my name and identification numbers at their offices… and Ctrip does that for me. Oh yeah, and also? Ctrip sends me a text message the day before my departure with weather in the city I’m flying to. Beat that.

I continue to have utterly no affiliations in this sector, I just like a cheap and efficiently delivered plane ticket.

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