What Goes Around Comes Around
From the pristine reaches of the Mainland….
…to the sweet comfort of your family fridge.
Some people seem to believe that transnational production processes thrive on inequality and exploitation. While countless numbers toil away in harsh conditions for long hours only to bring home paltry sums to their shack dwellings/dormitories set in fouled, apocalyptic landscapes, a more select group of individuals bask in the glow of endless consumerism, lattés, laptops and two cars in every garage. So that someone like myself in Canada can enjoy clean air, gorgeous vistas and encounter industrialism for the most part only in its end state of processed things in shiny boxes, someone somewhere in China must live neck-deep in environmental destruction, struggling to stay afloat above a sea of toxins, heavy metals and dangerous fumes. But hey, that’s life and capitalism, as someone cynical would say. Besides, things will change, as someone quite a bit more naive would say.
But perhaps things aren’t quite as unfair as they seem. Are people like me really getting away clean with cheap everything while China poisons its own? Well, apparently not. First, there was talk of air pollution from China making its way to the shores of this fair continent. Now, there is a chance that you are ingesting some of that polluted goodness, with China becoming a major exporter of food products. I guess you could say we are getting a taste of our own medicine in the end. We poison you, you poison us: that seems like fair global trade to me.
The funniest (or saddest) part for me is that one of the major factors weighing in on my decision to leave China all those years ago (ok, 3 years ago) was my health. I had a great experience but often couldn’t completely get over the feeling that I was doing bad things to my body just by living there. As much as possible, I tried to avoid imagining where my food came from- or how many factories were dumping untreated effluent into the field where it was grown. With the general and thorough toxicity of the mainland (forget for a moment unscrupulous outfits intentionally loading their products with crap), I have a hard time believing anything not grown, raised or processed in a hermetically-sealed government lab 50 floors underground- using all imported ingredients -is free of a sketchy substance or two. China is an environmental mess, and that can’t necessarily bode well for the quality of its food and food products. And thanks to my own society’s slavish devotion to the god of low cost, it seems I’m increasingly partaking in that feast. Bon appétit!
Update: more food for thought.
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:37 am
God damn, I’ve got to say, you’re blog is probably the best blog on China, and you’re not even living here. The dearth of comments on this site are perhaps the strongest indication of its quality.
“Things will change” is not such a naive thing to say–well, it is in the since that by the time things might/do change the ongoing environmental apocalypse that is modern China will have have already reached a point-of-no-return; but it’s not such a naive thing to say in the sense that there may very well be political change here, based on environmental advocacy, and similar to a number of revolutions that occurred in Eastern Europe in the 1980s (http://www.rec.org/REC/Publications/BeyondBorders/ch31.html). And of course, there may also just be the garden-variety political revolution here, started for unrelated reasons but leading to a tightening of regulations on pollution.
So in ten, twenty, thirty years, environmental change may happen in China. The air might start to get cleaner, and the rivers might start to be filled with water, not goo. And when that does happen, will the factories just pick and move somewhere else, somewhere that’s regulation free and capable of supplying endless cheap labor? Africa?
Hmm, actually, in the course of writing this comment I’ve changed my mind–maybe you’re right. If we’re talking on a global scale, I guess “things will change” is a pretty naive thing to believe.
June 25th, 2007 at 3:59 am
I like reading your articles. Especially those concern what’s goin’ on in China. I think most of your points are valuable.