LiamScheff.com — The Conspiracy Realist

China, Friend or Foe?

With the arrival of the shopping season (and what season isn’t for shopping these days), we welcome, with open arms and purses, and wide eyes, the million tons of plastic, electronic paraphernalia from China and East Asia.

Earlier this year, I spent a month in China, home of American goods and products. The experience left me a little wide-eyed. Or, more than a little.

I wrote about it a little bit, Here and Here, but haven’t quite had the heart to get back to it in full. Somewhere inside, there is a voice that says, “If you don’t have anything nice to say….”

But, nice or not, I can’t sit on these thoughts anymore.

You see, having been to China, I am now afraid of China. Or, more to the point, I am afraid of our massive intertwining with China.

I see the PBS specials on the wonders of the place, with gongs and pentatonic scales sounding over images of the rose and gold-lensed landscapes. I hear about the growth and opportunity, but mostly, what I hear, having been there, is a denial of what it is actually like to be in China. Or, to be poor in China. (And poor is the way most people in China are, have been, and will remain).

There is a tendency for reporters to shy away from the difficulty, the tragedy, the deep unpleasantness of the lives of most Chinese people. The often mortal burden placed on individual Chinese by their government, which does not seem to worry much about individual human or civil rights…After all, they’re building the new regime, to compete, not with the old, but with us.

This year I witnessed what I came to call “the building of the pyramids,” 2007 style. When the Pharaohs built the Pyramids, they didn’t build them. Their workers, and slaves did. Every day, blocks of stone rolled up gangways, pushed and pulled by rope and lever and wheel. Every day the stones were piled higher. And every day handfuls of slaves met their end under those stones.

And so, in China, every night, you go to bed with the sound of steel against steel, hammers pounding rivets on the thirty second floor of a scaffold. Every morning the buildings are a little higher, and the air and water, a little more polluted. And you can bet a number get caught in the gears and steel of the new pyramids dotting the emerging, brown and dusty skyline.

(What price, progress, is only a rhetorical question. “Any price,” always seems to be the answer.)

We can be assured that it is not these individual workers who are benefiting from this labor. They’re only blunt instruments. This work is always said to be for the “betterment of future generations;” and maybe it is. But, at present, the spoils are those of foreign investors, and a handful of top-tiered Chinese businessmen, who are comfortable using the vast majority of their citizenry as fodder.

“But that’s the way it was here,” says the historian, referring to the railroads, and cities, and Rockefellers and J.P. Morgans, and the building of America out of the wilderness; and the historian has a point. But it’s 2007, and what I saw today, in Shanghai, in Beijing, and along the tracks from Hong Kong to the North, was a rowdy, hungry, tired, aggressive population, (in this sense, much like America in an earlier incarnation), willing to do anything for a way out of destitution, being ground into dust by a government that does not give a nickel for any individual life.

The people of China, having lost their Maoist fervor (because Maoism failed in so many ways), now are ordered into a kind of slavery for the purpose of winning an international competition. That is, the powers that be in Beijing, Shanghai, etc, now want oh so badly to compete with (and to bury) the Western markets and nations.

My trip took me up the coast, from Hong Kong to Shanghai, to Nanjing to Beijing. I witnessed the brutal poverty in the countryside from the train windows, as we passed through landscapes of working agriculture fields littered with garbage from the construction sites – buildings going up all day, all night, all year – beehive apartment blocks (60 two-room apartments wide, by 60 deep by 60 high – an entire family in each); these, rigged up in no time on the landscape, for the displaced agrarian society, now working to supply Best Buy USA with its “must have low-price” electronic chotchkies.

Then, in the cities, seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting the construction going on and up and up, all day and all night. The air gray and brown from cement dust and dry earth, and full of chemicals from building skyscrapers.

You see the new China being built everywhere, everyday. Day laborers, on the eighth floor in Nanjing:

Do you see a harness?

On the Rails to Shanghai: New, modern apartment construction. Again, no harnesses needed:

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The construction goes up in terrifying places, with no concept of safety. What good is a cooling-tower view to your health? A ridiculous question…and here it is:

Over and over:

The nation-wide construction project goes on everywhere, all the time:

All day, and all night, every night.

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At the main station in Shanghai, people sitting exhausted, waiting for long train rides back to their home inland, in the countryside. Many look to be coming from all-night work on construction sites, or other temporary city jobs.

Kids being cops, in baggy, hand-me-down uniforms:

At night in Nanjing, the day workers stuff themselves into this little abandoned storefront, onto plywood bunk bed/platforms:

But it’s just an on-street storefront.. and nobody pays any attention to it.

As a result of the constant construction, environmental degradation. Landscapes littered with garbage:

Cities, too:

I saw too many fields flooded with garbage from construction sites, and still growing food, and then, many fields simply in operation by the railroad side:

Seeing what I have seen in China, it is my opinion that we are too invested, too dependent on China, for our, or their own good. Witness:

• The Chinese government owns far too many US treasury bills for our economic security. [Here]

• The ongoing Chinese bid for the security firm 3Com, a company that guards Pentagon military secrets. [Here]

• 3Com, the Olympics…and warfare: The Chinese government is letting us know, in no uncertain terms, that it wishes to be prime mover in world affairs. This month, for example, a Chinese submarine straddled US ships in Naval exercise. [Here]

The free-marketeers will say that the markets equalize everything, and solve all problems. But the markets only work when a more equal playing field is in place.

To be blunt, if US firms cannot get away with the ‘on the job’ deaths of dozens to hundreds of its employees per day or week, then neither should those with whom we do the vast majority of our trade and business.

Demand transparency in mainland China’s labor practices. Demand parity in human and environmental legislation between the US and its major trading partners.

The end of this road is not cheaper, better iPhones and HD DVD players. The end of this road is the degradation of the workplace – the US workplace. Because if cheap production is the bottom line, with no concern for workers’ safety or rights, then our citizenry – our workers – are going to end up in that same line in a very short time.

Of course, that’s why so many in Washington favor ‘limited work visas’ for illegal immigrants. And so, I have no easy answer, which is one of the reasons I’ve had trouble writing about it. It is true that better treatment for workers costs more. I would personally be willing to pay twice as much for a computer, or i-gadget, if it weren’t made by someone who risked, or earned, their demise in the process of production. Better yet, I would be happy to or to go without these constant “upgrades” of technology, if we could all make do a little bit with what we already have

But Wall Street doesn’t feel the same. And neither do most people, who work long hours for the good money that they do make, and seek cheap and easy entertainment from the shelves of the superstores.

Like I said when I started, having been to China, I am now afraid of China; but I think what I fear the most is our appetite for cheap goods made by cheaply-paid, captive labor, and our short term view of what our wants cost us.

Merry Christmas, Happy shopping…shop mindfully, if you can. And good wishes to the hard-working citizens of China, who are doing all they can to build a better quality of life for themselves. I hope their government will grant them the ability to enjoy it, with a little more protection.