Migrant Worker

Since I started blogging about 4 months ago, there has been a steady upswing in news coverage about Kunming and Yunnan. Now it’s getting to the point that I can’t keep up with the flow of interesting environmental and development news. Today was particularly bad:

Lots of famous directors make movies in Yunnan because it’s beautiful here. Unfortunately, their filming is high environmental impact and they usually don’t bother to clear away their mess when they go. But according to this article, Chen Kaige is apparently going to get a “Green China” award as a result of the environmental mess he left behind at Bigu lake in Northwest Yunnan. WHAT??? “Sometimes a negative example can serve as a warning,” Xinhua quoted Wang Panpu, deputy director of the awards committee, as saying.

Yunnan tea is hitting the big time: according to some gross marketing news that google was kind enough to send my way, Peet’s Coffee&Tea company considers Yunnan tea one of “the finest black teas from the 2006 crop” on a list that also includes the much more well known Darjeeling. Some searching around revealed that Twinings specialty teas also sells “Yunnan Tea” Although certainly debatable, many believe that southwest Yunnan is the origin of the world’s tea trees.

A new-ish strain of bird flu, HN51 “Fujian-like,” has been found in Yunnan province according to this article and about a million others on the AP wire right now.

…one out of every 30 geese and one out of every 30 ducks in live markets tested positive for H5N1 in six southern Chinese provinces during yearlong surveillance […] The study was conducted in Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and Hunan, densely populated provinces where people live in close proximity to ducks, pigs and other farm animals, making the area a common breeding ground for flu viruses.

The article also notes that the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture has yet to give a sample of the new strain to the WHO, and speculates that the Chinese are trying to get ahead in the race for a vaccine. Great.

Lots of exciting info on the South East Asia transportation links via the recent China-ASEAN summit meetings on Monday and Tuesday:

Wen Jiabao promised to consider increased assistance to the Mekong River Bridge highway project connecting Kunming to Bangkok. Apparently Laos is running a bit over budget. Wen went on to mention China’s commitment to the Kunming-Singapore railway in his keynote speech.

Malaysia will be donating used railroad tracks to Cambodia to expedite that leg of the Kunming-Singapore railway. The article estimates the project’s total cost at 15 billion dollars, and finance seems to be the major obstacle at this point. As a matter of reference, costofwar.com places the total cost of the Iraq war at 339 billion dollars as of this writing.

Last but definitely not least, go read this fascinating article about where Kunming’s seafood comes from. Apparently my delicious squid teppanyaki is coming across the Myanmar border like contraband.

The Chinese and Myanmar government are buying off insurgents in some areas in order to open up the road (and apparently add a rail link) through Ruili. Further, China is helping Myanmar to build a bunch of hydro-power dams and oil pipelines — most likely to provide China with oil shipped in to Myanmar from other places.

Industry analysts speculate that those Myanmar-situated pipelines will be designed to transport oil and gas arriving by tanker from the Middle East and Africa to inland China, potentially saving Beijing time and money now spent sailing through the choked, pirate-infested and vulnerable Malacca Strait to China’s east-coast ports.

Pirates??? What??? Needless to say, this is by far the most interesting article I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe I’ll make a trip back to Ruili to check out the seafood trade with my downtime in December.

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Chuck E. Cheese
Originally uploaded by ~db~.

Why are South Dakota lawmakers willing to take a forceful and risky position on abortion, but refuse to take bold steps by pursuing strong trade relations with China?

This is a tale of two places: South Dakota, where I was born and raised in the American West, and China, my current place of residence and ipso facto home. It is also a tale of two policies: one, supporting economic development, and the other, opposing abortion rights. This story doesn’t have a happy ending, so if that bothers you, go ahead and stop reading now.

Today I read this article in the New York Times, which reports on the ballot initiative about to be put to vote in South Dakota:

The South Dakota ban was passed by the Legislature in February but was pushed to a statewide vote by opponents. If the law survives, it would become a felony for a doctor in South Dakota to perform abortions except to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.

This bill received national media attention last January and February as it was considered and passed. And now, as a ballot issue, its divisive force is again being felt as national lobbying groups attempt to turn the tide one way or another with millions of dollars of out-of-state money.

I, too, was watching the SD state legislature closely during last Jan and Feb, but for another reason: A week or two before this sweeping ban on abortions hit the media, House Bill No. 1055 was introduced —”An Act to appropriate money for trade representation in China, and to declare an emergency.” I was excited to hear about this policy through the (very long) grapevine, a move to fund a modest office for trade representation on behalf of SD businesses seeking to enter the China market.

And then, the abortion bill dropped a bomb on the state and whatever small media attention had been paid to the China bill evaporated in a moment. The policy was extreme in the extreme: it carried no exceptions for rape or incest, a doctor could only legally perform an abortion if the life of the mother was at immediate risk.

The whole country watched as Rep. Bill Napoli went on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and explained the way this played out in practice:

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

With headlines like these in the state media, it is not a surprise that no one paid much attention when the SD state senate quietly stripped the word “China” from HB 1055. The bill’s sense of purpose was completely sacrificed. In its place, our legislature gave us a policy that advocates spending a very modest sum to, apparently, shower the world with SD trade cooperation offices. According to a number of state news sources, senators were too afraid of offending other foreign trade partners by prioritizing a strong trade relationship with China.

At the time (link is dead and gone now), the Sioux Falls Argus Leader quoted David Owen, president of the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce, with the following perspective:

“China is to this discussion is what Chuck E. Cheese’s is to my 5-year-old,” he said. “I can talk about other places to go to dinner all I want, but I know we’re going to Chuck E. Cheese’s.”

Nearly a year later, the abortion policy forcefully pursued by the SD state legislature is STILL a lightning rod for negative national and international media attention. It is still widely opposed, including among many opponents of abortion. And the time and money spent on this issue by the SD government (and therefore the taxpayers) is mounting each day.

According to statistics from the national Bureau of Economic Analysis, South Dakota’s state economy ranks 47th in the nation. I am shocked and horrified that the SD legislature will get behind this ridiculous abortion bill and fight, but was and is too afraid to commit itself to a strong trade relationship with China, a country with over a billion consumers where demand for high quality beef, high quality scoreboards, and many other South Dakota products has literally skyrocketed, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Most South Dakotan businesspeople have no idea how to tap into this huge market, nor do they have the luxury, as I did, of moving here to learn. HB1055 may have actually done something positive for someone in SD, I can guarantee you that this abortion crap won’t do anything positive for anyone.

Because of the general irrelevance of this blog to SD issues, my guess is that the readership back home is not large. That being said, however, I hope that all Americans who are heading to vote next Tuesday take the time to look at what issues their leaders are willing to fight on, and what issues they let slip. This is how the quality of a political representative should be measured.

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My office subscribes to Shenghuo Xin Bao, a local Yunnan daily newspaper whose name might be poorly/directly translated as “Lifestyle New Journal.” Coming back from lunch, I noticed it sitting on the desk in our entryway, and took a quick glance at the headline, which read “Construction on Yunnan’s tallest building will begin at year’s end” - and then I took a glance at the accompanying photo — the world trade center collapsing on Sept. 11th. Here’s a screenshot of the online version:

I added the red boxes around the WTC and the offending headline. Somebody in publishing totally screwed this one up. This is horrible! And the print version was even worse, because it was bigger.

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I really have no intent to write about drugs on a regular basis, but for some reason I have been hearing a lot about the illegal drug trade in the last few days. Tonight at dinner with some staff from CBIK, the topic came up yet again. A couple friends were about to head off on a trip to a few of the organization’s project sites in northwest Yunnan, and they were being accompanied by a British photographer who is travelling along the Mekong river. Being a photojournalist on his first trip to Yunnan, he was interested in all the usual squalor: drug trade, sex trade, HIV rates, illegals from Myanmar, and so on. And of course, our table of local NGO types were eager to oblige with tales of woe.

He asked briefly about whether meth is a problem in China, which brought to mind this article which I’d seen earlier in the day (the full text is copied here, apparently details are not forthcoming):

POLICE in Lincang City in Yunnan Province detained a drug-smuggling suspect and seized over 10 kilograms of methamphetamine hydrochloride, also named “ice.” Police said the suspect was attempting to smuggle the drug from Myanmar to China. The captured suspect said another suspect gave him 15,000 yuan (US$1,875) and asked him to carry the drug into China.

And indeed, the Chinese also refer to meth as ice - 冰 - which surprises me to some degree because I always thought of that as slang that originated in my hometown. I don’t have any personal experience with meth (does it look like ice?) but I have always been vaguely aware of it, due to the incredible prevalence of use across poor, rural areas of the west and Midwest (read, South Dakota). As an elementary school student, I remember my family speculating that the falling-apart house filled with 20-somethings across the street was a “meth lab,” with a complicated code for dealers or buyers based on use of their porch light. And indeed, one night the police showed up en force. As to whether the place was actually a meth lab, I have no idea. It was probably 10 years later that I finally figured out what meth meant.

Trolling around to see if meth use is ACTUALLY higher in South Dakota than other places, I discovered a great article on binge drinking (and a brief mention of meth) in yesterday’s New York Times. The headline points to “boredom” as a cause of these destructive behaviors, which I guess has some value. Apparently the difference between normal SD teens and us nerdy ones was that when we got bored, we climbed public buildings at night, researched federalism, and volunteered for Senator Daschle (RIP).

On an only somewhat related note, my search for meth-related South Dakota information on the web also turned up this piece by the folks over at stopthedrugwar.org

Although China has long waged war on drug users and traffickers, it has never had statutes aimed specifically at the drug trade and dealing with drug users. That is about to change. Chinese lawmakers Tuesday began debating a new bill that would expand police powers to crack down on the cross-border drug trade and set standards for drug treatment, the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported. […] Police would also be granted the power to force suspected drug users to submit blood or urine samples — a practice so far limited to primitive places like South Dakota — and owners of bars and nightclubs would have to post anti-drug propaganda on their premises. (emphasis added)

Primitive? Primitive? Hey. I resent that.

Photocred to Nada*

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The power was out in a large area surrounding my office on Thursday and Friday. This was not the first time that my office’s electricity was off for entire business days with little or no notice, but I’ve never really had much cause to complain about it, since it generally means I get to “work at home.” This time, however, I was feeling responsible, and ended up putting in most of a day on Friday to tie up some computerless odds and ends. It was a pretty lax day, and as usual my coworkers and I ended up talking politics over our extended lunch. There was a lot of speculation about the rolling blackouts, including that Yunnan province (which has an overall electricity surplus on the grid) sells more power than it should to the eastern seaboard where the price per watt may be twice as high.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to do some fact checking on Yunnan province and power generation, but instead I came across this in the China Daily:

At least two person (sic) is dead and 31 others injured, including 10 seriously, after an earthquake measuring 5.1 degrees on the Richter scale jolted Yanjin County, Zhaotong City, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, at 1:51 p.m Friday.

A couple of things occur to me. First off, this area is, perhaps, a 6-hour drive from Kunming, and yet I managed to go two days without hearing a thing about this. I can’t blame it on the language barrier, I could understand TV, radio, or newspaper reports on this issue without any effort at all. I could hardly imagine an earthquake hitting Des Moines, Iowa and not hearing about it for two days, even when I was firmly ensconced in the Carleton bubble. I hate all the hackneyed government-run news sources, but I need to find some palatable way of staying up to date.

Second, I had no freaking idea where this area is until I looked it up. I know the counties and even some towns and villages in the geopolitically interesting southern border region and the bio and culturally diverse northwest, but there is a huge patch of northeastern Yunnan province that is off the radar of most NGOs, expats, tourists, and probably even local Chinese. I’m sure these people had little going for them before the quake. It is a harsh reminder not to rest on my laurels of geographic awareness and social consciousness if I have only focused on “interesting” or shall we say “sexy” areas of the province.

The article goes on to include this little gem:

Earlier reports said the death toll was two proved erroneous when it was discovered that the same victim had been counted twice, a spokesman with the Zhaotong municipal government told Xinhua.

Ahh, rural areas. This sounds like something straight out of my childhood in South Dakota. If there is only one dead person, how in the hell do you count it twice?

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