Soot on their hands

By Piers Boltbrechtsen

Applied Hermeneutics’ token right-wing commentator takes a rare foray out of semi-retirement.

China-watchers such as myself have watched horrified as a seemingly unending wave of self-immolations has swept Tibet, with the country’s Buddhist monks and nuns, in particular, regularly making that ultimate, grisly sacrifice upon the altar of their doomed, romantic notions of independence.

One may well wonder how these poor dupes can hope to stop the juggernaut of a surging, prosperous China. But the blame must lie, of course, with the trendy Green Left of the so-called developed nations of the West.

For the cause of Tibetan independence, with the Dalai Lama as its fashionable figurehead, has long been a cause celebre among many on the hard left of my side of politics. Worse, it’s further been given an unwarranted cache with high-profile celebrity support from the likes of Richard Gere and Steven Seagal.

And not only has a backward, medieval regime-in-exile been given credibility with a Nobel Peace Prize, but even the administration of George W. Bush succumbed to fashionable soft-headedness in awarding the Dalai Lama a Congressional Gold Medal.

All this has sent all the wrong signals to Tibetan independence apparatchiks, leading them to believe there is actually concrete support in the West for an independent Tibet, where there is in fact none.

As surely as Gillard’s Labor government has lured hundreds of so-called ‘boat people’ to watery graves with its soft-headed policies on illegal migration, so do trendy Western supporters of Tibetan independence incite their hapless third-world dupes to their fiery exits. Boosters like Richard Gere may as well be striking the match for them as they douse themselves with gasoline.

The anti-modernity boosters of the so-called Left should instead be encouraging Tibetans to embrace modernity and economic prosperity by welcoming the Chinese as their liberators from their feudal past. For only by bowing to the inevitable may Tibetans hope to achieve that which they hope to accomplish by their doomed, wrong-headed attempt to re-institute and entrench the ways of their past.

And anyway, at least the Chinese aren’t really Marxists, as indeed the Dalai Lama openly professes to be.

Still, you can almost hear the Left endlessly bleating... aside from law-and-order, roads, public health and sanitation, what have the Chinese ever done for Tibet?

—READ MORE—

Fertile and fresh fields for tobacco in China

This op-ed in The Lancet again highlights that China, while streets ahead of most western countries on some important indicators, has a long way to catch up in other respects, here particularly with regard to the scourge of tobacco.

It sounds like a public health nightmare: a country where smoking is socially acceptable, people can smoke in public places, cigarettes are cheap, cigarette packets are devoid of effective health warnings, government officials use public funds to buy expensive cigarettes as gifts, and the tobacco industry sits on public bodies charged with tobacco control. But this is, in fact, the reality in China today, as detailed in a new report by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

Given this situation, the statistics contained in the report are, perhaps, unsurprising. China has 300 million smokers and around 740 million non-smokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke: tobacco is the country's biggest killer.

China did ratify WHO's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in 2005. But the signing of the FCTC seems largely symbolic. The report finds that the country is doing poorly with implementation, with a performance score of only 37 points of 100 possible points. Underpinning this poor performance is lack of political will to tackle tobacco control and the tobacco industry.

According to the report, the tobacco industry in China has a Counterproposal and Countermeasure Scheme against the FCTC, it has distorted the Chinese version of the framework, denied the scientific evidence on the health hazards of smoking, abused public powers of government to counteract tobacco control, and encouraged tobacco consumption through covert advertising and sponsorship.

China's Government has allowed this situation to prevail because the country's tobacco industry is seen as a major taxpayer and employer. Although this is true, the report states that an integrated benefit analysis shows the net benefit generated by the tobacco industry is already below zero. In other words, the rapidly growing medical expenditures and loss of productivity from tobacco-related illnesses outweigh the economic benefits of the industry.

China has shown it can address health threats such as avian influenza and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is now time China tackles tobacco—its biggest health hazard and a serious economic threat.

For the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report see http://www.chinacdc.cn/n272562/index.html

It will be interesting to see how China fares in its struggle against the blood-sucking pushers of tobacco, whose resilience against public health measures in the west has been legendary.

—READ MORE—

Industrial disease

Suicides among industrial workers in China are occurring at an alarming rate.

In particular, a plant in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen operated by Taiwan’s Hon Hai Group (which manufactures consumer electronics such as iPhones and iPads) has just recorded its ninth suicide this year.

Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou offered the following “as he bowed at a press conference”:

“I offer my sincerest apologies to society, the entire public, all our employees and their families because we had no way of preventing these things from happening. Will it happen again? From a logical, scientific standpoint, I don’t have a grasp on that.”

Apart from improving general working conditions, one wonders have they considered maybe an immediate 15% pay rise might help perk everybody up a bit?

—READ MORE—

Milking the profits

As we all know, thousands of Chinese children have fallen seriously ill, while four have died, from ingesting dairy products laced with melamine, an industrial chemical.

Chinese authorities are apparently falling over themselves to be seen to be doing something:

Chinese police have detained six people suspected of producing and selling melamine, the chemical at the center of the country’s scandal over tainted dairy products, the official Xinhua news agency said...

The arrests follow the detention last week of 22 people in Hebei province suspected of being involved in a network there for producing melamine and selling it on to milk farms and purchasing stations.

But, while these suppliers may have had some idea of how the chemical was going to be used by their customers, surely the real culpability in this appalling scandal lies elsewhere.

And surely it shouldn’t be too difficult to identify those real culprits. They will be executive decision makers in, for instance, the Yili and Mengniu dairy companies, who were responsible for the conscious decision to actually water down the milk and spike it with melamine to artificially increase the apparent protein content of their product.

It’s not as if any of that could have happened by accident or even inadvertently. This can only have been a conscious choice to milk a further few lousy percentage points on their margins.

Xinhua did not say whether the suspects were connected to either of the firms. It cited Tian Min, vice secretary general of the municipal government, as saying the results of the investigation would probably be released in four to five days.

We may hopefully look forward to seeing the Chinese people crucify (figuratively speaking) those responsible, even if they likely will have to prod the authorities along into taking real action.

—READ MORE—

sweetheart like you 2

This year’s photo of ‘John’, our going-on-10 wee laddie in Yunnan province, China.

(Inset: John about a year ago.)

—READ MORE—

Aussie torch relay in some other foreign capital imagined

As many as 10,000 “China supporters descended” on Canberra yesterday for the Beijing Olympics torch relay through the Australian capital.

There were several incidents in which large, vocal groups of China supporters surrounded and taunted smaller groups of Tibetan activists.

Mr Stanhope says he is aware of contact between the embassy and Chinese organisations but does not know the degree of resourcing or support provided by the embassy.

Stanhope, however, seems fairly unperturbed by the unknown-ness of “the degree of resourcing or support provided” by agents of the Chinese government in Australia.

He says any Australian ambassador would probably do the same if the shoe was on the other foot.

“Just imagine if this had been the Australian torch relay in some other foreign capital,” he said.

“I’m sure the Australian residents in that particular country at the time would have flocked and would have perhaps expected or anticipated some support from their embassy, so I think it’s a quite reasonable thing to do.”

Well yeah, sure...

It’s quite conceivable that droves of Aussie expats, resident students and tourists would have “descended” on the streets of Beijing in order to “surround and taunt,” say, Australian Aboriginal activists protesting at an Australian Olympics torch relay in that city.

Agencies of the Australian government in China would almost certainly have provided some significant “degree of resourcing or support” for such activities.

Yep, it could easily happen...!

—READ MORE—

Brewed nieflets

Anyone who wasn’t aware that China was ranked 72nd in the world on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2007 would nevertheless probably take the following as indicative of certain problems facing China today:

A Chinese Government website encouraging citizens to report corruption has crashed on its first day under the weight of too many hits.

And the latest round in an argument that has raged for years, and will continue until the day we are either greeted as long-lost celestial brethren, or enslaved or zapped out of existence by the ETs:

Two senior scientists have resigned from an elite international study group in protest over a lack of public discussion about the possible consequences of attracting the attention of aliens by sending signals deep into space.

Almost forgot to mention that Tim Dunlop recently published an urgent News Flash over at his news.com.au gig, as apparently he’d detected some residual confusion over events that occurred almost a month ago.

—READ MORE—

sweetheart like you

Pictured is our dear wee laddie that we sponsor in China, whom we shall call ‘John’.

John lives with his family in the south-western province of Yunnan, a far-flung area of the People’s Republic that shares a frontier with Burma/Myanmar, Tibet, Laos and Vietnam. John and his family belong to one of around two dozen ‘nations’, or language groups, in that province.

John is going on nine years old, enjoys singing, and his favourite subject at school is language. We look forward to visiting someday and hearing him sing.

His health is thankfully quite good, despite malnourishment and preventable disease being regrettably endemic risks to children’s health in such parts of the world.

He’s probably just a little under optimum bmi for a boy of his age, which would not be at all unusual. My niece, on perusing John’s latest annual progress report, expressed surprise at his weight relative to her strappingly healthy 3 year old.

I said something in reply about ‘developing’ countries, suggesting that’s why programs such as World Vision’s child sponsorship are so essential.

—READ MORE—

The magic of Alex continues

Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer has admonished Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd for “showing off” with his foreign language skills.

Kevin Rudd this morning gave an interview in Mandarin to a Chinese television station.

Oh, the little show-off...! ...talking in Mandarin, to a Chinese television audience, no less. Needless to say...

... Mr Downer is far from impressed.

“Well, I think he should focus on speaking to the Australian people not trying to show off that he can speak a foreign language,” he said.

Yep, and Alex would be quite within his mandate to point out that Kevni is just a little girlie swot who eats his own earwax.

So there... nyah.

—READ MORE—