Now after the successful completion of the Olympics, China is once again in the news but this time for all the wrong reasons. No this time it isn’t for human rights violations, or for Tibet or for the unsafe toys that they import all over the world and which were recalled last year.
This time it is toxic milk. Some 54,000 children are said to have been affected by a milk and milk powder contaminated with melamine, the industrial material used to make plastic items. At least 4 children have reportedly died from ingesting the toxic material present in the milk. When this is added to milk it can make the milk appear richer in protein.
The immediate reaction to the crisis is that many countries have banned Chinese milk products and some of the top officials involved in the milk scandal have been dismissed. In a sequence of events that started in March of this year, when China’s top infant milk powder brand Sanlu received complaints about discolored babies’ urine and that some infants were admitted to hospital after drinking its milk, it has taken up till September for the authorities to sit up and take notice when babies actually started to die from the melamine poisoning. Now dairy products including liquid milk, milk power, and products made from milk such as milk lollies etc. have all been recalled from the market.
What this has done in renew the suspicions of the people regarding the Made in China label as being a case for CAVET EMPTOR or Let the Buyer Beware! This and all the other crises that China has been embroiled in makes one wonder if China is not a bit too focused on development, economic progress, advancement and financial prosperity. In its race to be a world leader in the economic sphere perhaps some short cuts are being taken, in the bid to make cheap products, quality control, safety procedures and business ethics are perhaps being sacrificed somewhere along the way.
It is now coming to light that a dairy firm knew about the toxic milk for months. I think that the cavalier attitude that has caused the present scandal is encapsulated in a nutshell by Michael Man, marketing manager at Full Champion Ltd, which makes toys in the Pearl River Delta city of Dongguan who said “there’s too much testing required now. The testing costs are high.” A sorry comment on the Chinese dragon.
The Olympics, the pinnacle of all sporting events, the much awaited athletic extravaganza that comes once every four years is starting in about a week and China is in full show off mode. After all you just can’t afford to ‘lose face’. All kinds of measures are being adopted to clean up Beijing’s lamentably polluted air and high incidence of smog. And a daunting task this is, seeing that China has 16 of the world’s 20 cities with the worst air quality (according to a World Bank report). However spending 40 billion dollars on infrastructure has not made as much of a difference as it should have.
Well it becomes very clear that this is not a democracy when you read that “half of Beijing’s 3.3 million vehicles are to be peremptorily pulled off the roads and many polluting factories will be shuttered. Chemical plants, power stations and foundries left open have to cut emissions by 30 percent and dust-spewing construction in the capital will be halted.” Public transport is being drastically expanded and people have to stagger their work hours so that the authoritarian regime can make a good impression. And yes millions of trees are also being planted, apart from all these band aid solutions.
Another cleanup measure that is attracting a lot of attention is the cat clean up drive. Animal activists are calling this the ‘cat death camp’. Pet owners are dumping their cats on the street which are then being rounded up and crammed into cages so small they cannot even turn around. Then they are trucked to what animal welfare groups describe as death camps on the edges of the city.
The authorities have also pulled out all the stops to create some stunning and arresting pieces of architecture in preparation for the Olympics, such as this China Central Television headquarters building which consists of two angled towers connected at the top to form a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections.
Then there is the birds’ nest national stadium seen here in its fully lit glory.
This is the water cube or the national aquatic center, not far from the bird’s nest stadium.
And this is the ‘Egg’ or the national grand theater. For more photos of Beijing architecture look here; this is where these photos are sourced from. There are many more Olympics related photos if you want to see them.
What is Mount Everest? The highest mountain in the world you will answer. Well it is that, but dismayingly, what Mount Everest is now increasingly being known as is The Worlds’ Highest Garbage dump. It is hard to reconcile the image of the pristine, snow covered, wind-swept crags of the mountaineer’s ultimate challenge with that of a rubbish tip, but that is grave concern right now. The roof of the world is filthy dirty place!
When I read this news story here, about China’s plans to clean up Mt Everest, I realized what problem climbers can pose to the very peaks that they look to conquer. When people climb Everest, they inevitably leave behind climbing equipment, food, plastics, tins, aluminum cans, glass, clothes, papers, tents, specially along the most popular route to the summit—the Southeast Ridge. The trail consists of a base camp at 17,600 feet and four additional camps closer to the summit. Since the first successful expedition, at least 50 tons of trash has accumulated.
Admittedly, collecting litter becomes rather less of a priority when you are struggling for survival at the higher altitudes when your body and brain is severely oxygen deprived and hypothermia a constant threat. Some estimates suggest that there is some 120 tons of litter on Mt Everest!
Apart from litter there is another rather grim leftover of climbing expeditions to Everest: there are about 120 dead bodies of climbers claimed by the mountain who are frozen in eternity somewhere along the slopes of the mountain.
So according to reports, China is now planning to restrict access to the summit to climbers to allow for a clean up by several of their environmental teams. This will clean up at least some of the litter that has accumulated on the Chinese side of the Everest which is in fact the less popular access route. The Nepalese side evidently is even more popular and presumably more littered.
One person, Jeff Clapp had a good idea, to collect some of that litter (oxygen tanks etc) and turn it them into bells such as this picture, bowls and other stuff such as this glitter ball. Great idea I thought, make a statement against the litter which represents our historical negligence of one of the world’s treasures and make some money while you’re at it!
This article I read in the Washington Post about the apology tendered by the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to its indigenous people shocked me. The reason it shocked me is because I did not know that Canada, a country I perceived to a benign, egalitarian and welcoming democracy has actually been guilty of a kind of abuse of human rights that Tibet is accusing China of doing today!
The Prime Minister tendered an apology to tens of thousands of native Canadians, mainly of the Inuit and Métis communities who as children were torn from their families and sent to boarding schools, where many were abused as part of official government policy to “kill the Indian in the child.” This almost barbaric attempt to ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’ the aboriginal people of North America into the ‘main stream’ (read European, Caucasian way of life) I found to be most repugnant.
The aim of the government in the early part of the 20th century was, to quote Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” Scott is said to have coined the phrase “kill the Indian in the child”.
We are now living in more enlightened times when European Imperialistic policies and colonization of the past have no place. Earlier, might was right and there were no agencies in the world to redress the balance in favor of invaded and colonized peoples. In the last 500 years Europeans conquered and colonized Africa, Asia, America and Australia, often wiping out or at any rate perilously marginalizing ethnic cultures and endangering their way of life.
The tide has turned in the other direction today there is an attempt to preserve tribal customs and social structures, to preserve rather than wipe out aboriginal cultures and native communities. Tribal cultures of Africa are sought to be preserved, there are certain aboriginal tribes on the Andaman and Nicobar islands of India whose islands people are not even allowed to set foot on lest they disturb their fragile social structure and way of life.
For, if centuries old cultures and ethnicities are permitted to be wiped out, they are lost for ever and we as citizens of the world are much the poorer for it. Your thoughts?
I remember going to Dharamshala and Mcleodganj some years ago (the Namgyal monastery, where the Dalai Lama is based, is there). At the time, China had just won the contract to host the Olympics and even then the Tibetians were circulating flyers telling everyone to boycott those Olympics and other Chinese products etc. I remember thinking at the time, that this is not much of a protest or struggle, ensconced safely in India hundreds of kilometers from their actual homeland. Ever since India offered the Tibetians and their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama a safe haven in Dharamshala, Tibetians moved to India in their thousands and settled here, continuing to wage their agitation against Chinese oppression from afar. I had thought to myself they are living a comfortable enough life here in India, not really putting them in the line of fire, so do they really deserve support?
In a word, Yes! The fact is that they have been agitating for many years and not only have their pleas fallen on deaf years thru the years; the Chinese have been oppressive and unconcerned and have presented a false picture to the world. A recent media event organized in Lhasa (capital of Tibet) was a disaster from China’s point of view. Wailing, protesting monks (who China would not have wanted anywhere near the cameras) could be seen telling the world of their woes and this blew the lid off China’s pretenses.
The Tibetians have been suppressed and denied basic rights such as religious freedom under Chinese occupation and these factors are only now coming to the fore with the Tibetian call to the world to boycott the Olympics and to support their struggle against Chinese oppression. Tibetians who have been able to escape continue to live in India or elsewhere, unable to return to their homeland because of this. In this article the Dalai Lama appealed to the world community to “please help” resolve the crisis in his homeland. He was so disturbed by some of the protesters turning violent that threatened to resign as the religious and spiritual head of the Tibetian people.
World leaders, including George Bush have been urging China to hold talks and have a dialogue with the Tibetian people. The reason why I think that Tibet deserves support is the imperious and impervious manner in which China has behaved in this issue, by refusing to even hold talks or negotiate. The Dalai Lama has said that he would like to “remind the Chinese that in order to be respected hosts of the Games human rights in Tibet must improve” I agree with this, do you? What are your thoughts?
evawhite on September 26th, 2008
What is Mount Everest? The highest mountain in the world you will answer. Well it is that, but dismayingly, what Mount Everest is now increasingly being known as is The Worlds’ Highest Garbage dump. It is hard to reconcile the image of the pristine, snow covered, wind-swept crags of the mountaineer’s ultimate challenge with that of a rubbish tip, but that is grave concern right now. The roof of the world is filthy dirty place!
One person, Jeff Clapp had a good idea, to collect some of that litter (oxygen tanks etc) and turn it them into bells such as this picture, bowls and other stuff such as this glitter ball. Great idea I thought, make a statement against the litter which represents our historical negligence of one of the world’s treasures and make some money while you’re at it!
I remember going to Dharamshala and Mcleodganj some years ago (the Namgyal monastery, where the Dalai Lama is based, is there). At the time, China had just won the contract to host the Olympics and even then the Tibetians were circulating flyers telling everyone to boycott those Olympics and other Chinese products etc. I remember thinking at the time, that this is not much of a protest or struggle, ensconced safely in India hundreds of kilometers from their actual homeland. Ever since India offered the Tibetians and their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama a safe haven in Dharamshala, Tibetians moved to India in their thousands and settled here, continuing to wage their agitation against Chinese oppression from afar. I had thought to myself they are living a comfortable enough life here in India, not really putting them in the line of fire, so do they really deserve support?
The Tibetians have been suppressed and denied basic rights such as religious freedom under Chinese occupation and these factors are only now coming to the fore with the Tibetian call to the world to boycott the Olympics and to support their struggle against Chinese oppression. Tibetians who have been able to escape continue to live in India or elsewhere, unable to return to their homeland because of this. In this article the Dalai Lama appealed to the world community to “please help” resolve the crisis in his homeland. He was so disturbed by some of the protesters turning violent that threatened to resign as the religious and spiritual head of the Tibetian people.
