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.

Posted by Even Pay at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Even Pay at 8:22 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by Even Pay at 6:18 PM | Permalink