Ape Rifle

Is North America’s love affair with large, gas-guzzling vehicles finally fizzling out? GM suddenly seems to think so, much to the detriment of workers at one of its truck-producing Canadian plants. The story has dominated Canadian airwaves over the past week, rich in the intrigue of corporate betrayal and linked as it is to the media darling of the moment: high oil prices. Old vs. New Economy, Jobs vs. the Environment, Labour vs. Capital- no familiar framing of the issue has been left dormant. 

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of this whole affair is the perception that the North American collapse in truck sales came out of nowhere. You would figure that a major global corporation such as GM would have at least a few strategists looking beyond the next quarter. Sure, trucks are much more profitable to sell than small cars, but even your average layman would be hard pressed not to notice the economic and geo-political storms gathering over the industry. GM should have been all over this years ago, not days ago.

But then again, blaming GM is the easy way out. In recent years, the national governments of North America have been notoriously unwilling to put any real pressure on the automobile industry to clean up its act or reduce the size and fuel consumption of its vehicles. Freedom has meant twenty miles per gallon, and forward-looking energy policy reduced to developing the oil sands in Alberta, and developing them quickly at all cost. It’s not hard to see how car manufacturers could get so complacent in such a permissive and supportive environment. Gaz-guzzling had protection from the very top.

With governments and manufacturers mired in their do-nothing myopia, it’s refreshing to see change come from those so often labelled as least willing to alter their behaviour: the consumer (or as known outside of government and academic circles, ‘normal people’). The consumer, in fact, has been a convenient straw man for interests opposed to any real progress on environmental and energy issues: environmentalism is too expensive, the average consumer isn’t willing to pay for it, the reasoning went. Well, this ‘consumer’ in North America has apparently turned the tables: wasting energy is now expensive, and people are no longer willing (or even able) to pay for it.  

North America is built around the automobile, its societies and economies dependent on the gas pump to get anything done. Perhaps this, alongside government complicity, gave GM comfort that its trucks and the like could rule the roads for a while yet. But the error in this logic is that while North Americans can’t go ten minutes without driving, they can easily do so in a vehicle other than a souped-up pickup truck or a Cadillac Escalade. How many SUVs and pickup trucks in your average urban area are necessities to the driver? Probably not many. How many of those drivers could get the exact same utility out of a smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicle? Probably quite a few. It’s strange that ‘utility’ is one of components of the SUV acronym, since to a large proportion of their current owners they are effectively useless. Unlike oil, demand for large vehicles is rather more elastic. The era of the Soccer Mom Monster Truck is likely in its welcome twilight.

At least in North America, that is. 

China is many things to many pundits.

An ancient civilization. A huge population. A powerhouse. A communist state. A rising superpower. A faltering basketcase. A construction boom. An insatiable market. A military threat. A vision of the future. A major polluter. An opportunity. A development model. A theory. An idea. Sometimes, deep in the scrum of geopolitical debate, economic analysis and media generalizations, it is all too easy to forget that China is also, to so many, quite simply a home.

And in Sichuan, millions of people have seen their homes and livelihoods collapse into rubble, many loved ones lost beneath it. At the outset, Western media channels tried to funnel the story through the usual China coverage paradigms: will this cause social instability? Will people’s anger turn towards their (un)elected officials? How was the cherished economy affected? Was a certain infamous dam to blame? But as the scale of the disaster emerged, it became apparent that no repressive government or global economic forces could really be held responsible, as shoddy as building standards might have been (perhaps the worst kept secret in modern China). The people of Sichuan had been betrayed by the very ground beneath their feet.

With this realization all the posturing, back-and-forth propaganda and righteousness that have been such staples of discourse on China seemingly dissolved. Bickering over Olympic torch movements went from being ‘a defining moment of our time’ to nonsense of the most intense triviality, a category in which it should have landed to begin with. The rigid, media-shy mandarins in Beijing let the mask fall enough to reveal a genuine concern for the devastation wreaked on its people. Chinese people mobilized in a truly endearing way. Those who had not too long ago supported a punitive Olympics boycott were now thinking of ways to donate or help. Tragedies have a way of shocking people out of their usual preconceptions, of reminding many of us that underneath all the squabbling and petty games lies a common humanity.

This is a humanity which, despite all our hubris and infrastructure and habitat management, still exists at the mercy of an environment we don’t really understand. The indifferent shifting of tectonic plates, a mundane blip in the geological grand scheme of things, is enough to wipe out swathes of our built environment and ruin many thousands, if not millions, of hard-earned lives. This is as humbling as it is horrifying, and perhaps unites us all in the fear that sometimes these things happen for no particular reason to people who don’t deserve them.

It is tempting to try and blame someone, to pretend that human agency one way or another has control over planetary destiny. But the truth is that the human condition is still hostage to the weather and the mountains, no matter how much our industrialized selves try to pretend otherwise. But it is heartening to see, as in the response to the Sichuan earthquake, that the human condition also contains compassion deeper than the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves on maps. It is unfortunate that it invariably takes the brute force of nature to highlight this aspect of ourselves.

Mr. Spielberg’s much publicized about-face regarding his participation in Beijing’s upcoming summer spectacle is a media dream come true, a potent attention-grabbing mix of Hollywood celebrity, African misery and Chinese power. Coming soon after a similarly themed mini-scandal in Britain, this development bodes ill for the host government, so intent on keeping this sporting circus framed solely through the prism of smiling pandas and dancing ethnic minorities. As the usual activists get fired up by the renewed publicity of their cause(s), it could be a long and laborious run-up to August for internet censors in the Middle Kingdom. 

It is, perhaps, unfair that Beijing is singled out for its amoral pursuit of black gold via tainted regimes when numerous other nations undertake similarly unsavory ventures in other, less publicized locales. With so many bloody hands on the international stage, it is difficult to even fathom the number of boycotts that, in an ideal world, would grind to a halt any major transnational gathering in 2008. After all, Mr. Spielberg’s native land has in recent years invaded (and continues to occupy) another nation in an unprovoked attack. Post-Soviet Russia has spent a good amount of its time and energy reducing Chechnya to rubble. Canada, with its rapid development of the carbon-suicide oil sands in Alberta, could feasibly be accused of grave crimes, albeit of a more environmental nature.

While it is highly questionable whether international politics should entangle sporting events, Beijing has nevertheless managed to shoot itself quite squarely in the foot in this instance. Its calls for an ‘apolitical’ event fall on disbelieving ears since it has effectively made the hosting of this two-week sporting event a defining element of its own agenda. Its messages of sports unity and non-interfere translate, beyond Chinese borders, into “if anyone is going to play these games for political gain, it’s damn well going to be us”. When you play with hubris, you have to expect to get burnt. Position the Games as a flexing of your muscles, and those who disapprove of your actions (for reasons founded or unfounded) will seek to humble you. This is not rocket science.

Beyond this debate, however, lies a much deeper and more disturbing question: what was Spielberg doing as an artistic advisor to the Beijing Games in the first place?I have trouble believe the organizers of these games imagined the ideal opening or closing ceremony to resemble a Universal Studios theme park, with dinosaurs crashing about or an aging Harrison Ford being chased into the Bird’s Nest by a boulder. A segment about Munich, perhaps? Tom Hanks carrying in the torch dressed in vintage WWII GI gear or, dare I say it, Zhang Ziyi in full geisha attire? 

A culture as rich and spectacular as the Chinese should not need recourse to the talents of an American blockbuster king to throw together a few song-and-dance routines. Evidently the whole affair smells of a publicity stunt, albeit one now gone wrong. That the Chinese organizers felt they needed a recognized celebrity from a foreign land to add some credibility to their party plans reveals a rising giant that is still insecure in its own skin, an awkward teenager on a growth spurt that craves approval. Unaware of its own attractive qualities, China seeks to imitate the popular kids in the hope of fitting in. Enter Rem Koolhaus, Sir Foster and the usual suspects to play off this for the sake of realizing their wildest architectural fantasies. 

And I, for one, find this extremely unfortunate. The Chinese have so much to offer in their people, history and culture, but it is questionable whether any of this will truly be on display come August. The need to impress at all costs long ago gained primacy over such humble considerations. And so visitors should be forgiven for any confusion when they encounter Chinese culture  as a haphazard collection of berserk architectural monoliths designed by Europeans. At the very least, however, they can now be relieved that a mechanical Jaws will not be attacking the opening ceremony.   

If Bali were a glass house, the stone-throwing at the UN climate change conference would already have reduced it to a heap of shards. A few days ago, China said the West should take the lead on fighting climate change by reducing its extravagant lifestyle. Then, Brazil and the US took the opportunity to bicker publicly over trade issues. While there are certainly substantive issues underlying these pronouncements, I’m nevertheless left disheartened that the conference is devolving into the usual global warming blame game rather than acting as a space for constructive dialogue. The story is now a tired one and many are weary of hearing it. ‘Developing’ countries blame large industrialized states for producing the historical lion’s share of emissions, and dump the onus on them to spearhead change. Major ‘developed’ countries refuse to move ahead unless their less industrialized counterparts commit themselves to action. And of course, neither side dares question the sacred mantra of economic growth for its own sake.  It is hard to imagine a more potent recipe for inaction. 

In these disputes, all sides involved have recourse to some long-standing myths to defend the stubbornness of their positions. These myths run deep throughout the global economic, political and cultural consciousness, and are quick to emerge in any context where transnational issues are at stake, be they environmental or trade-related. They are at the core of how people order the world and understand their place in it. Unfortunately, these myths are also increasingly mismatched to realities on the ground and impediments to constructive change. The difficulty in addressing climate change, for example, rests as much on the persistence of these myths as it does on the technical feasibility of limiting emissions.

The most persistent of these myths is perhaps the conceptual division of the world into ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, or ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nations if you will. China, for example, is quick to decry its poor, wretched state as a ‘developing’ country whenever its development path is called into question. “How can we worry about the environment?”, the argument goes, “we are a poor country just trying to provide for our people”. While few would argue that many hundred of millions of Chinese are still struggling for basic survival, I nevertheless find it increasingly difficult to stomach this argument. While most Chinese people might indeed be ‘poor’, Chinese society in the aggregate certainly is not- in fact, it is completely awash in money. If a government can spend untold billions on a sporting event lasting only two weeks, or pack its urban avenues with more Audis per square mile than any other place on earth, it can hardly claim to lack wealth or resources.

It is thus quite rich that China is pointing a finger at the West for its excess and extravagance. Many Chinese cities, I would argue, have utterly usurped their Western counterparts in the departments of glitz, glamour and luxurious waste for its own sake. Of course, this is not to say that vast swathes of the country and its people are not lacking in basic resources and services- in fact, that is exactly the point. There is a difference between a lack of resources and a misallocation of resources. I would argue that, increasingly, countries such as China which are labelled ‘poor’ are in fact nothing of the sort- rather, its wealth is just so tremendously misspent or misallocated that the large majority of its people remain wanting.China certainly has enough funds and wherewithal to address its environmental concerns- it is just unable (or unwilling) to do since so much of its wealth gets sucked into a corrupt vortex of neon lights, redundant vanity mega-projects and official extravagance.

This environmentally devastating development-on-the-cheap benefits a minority of well-connected urbanites, often to the direct detriment of China’s much more unfortunate masses. And that is why I find it twisted that the plight of these masses be invoked by these same elites in defense of polluting business as usual. The persistence of whole countries being labelled ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ does little but provide an excuse for self-serving elites not to get serious about issues such as climate change- and then allow them to blame their inaction on their fellow citizens whose conditions are much more unfortunate. This will have to change. 

Lest you think only China is in for a drubbing in this post, I will let you know that I am an equal opportunist and will not leave other deserving targets unscathed. Governments in countries such as the United States and my beloved home, Canada, are also particularly attached to self-serving and increasingly counterproductive myths. One of these myths is the conception of the world as a collection of clearly defined nation-states with corresponding economies. Sure there is all that talk about globalization and economic integration, but these are still largely portrayed as actions by states and between states.

Why does this matter? Because when it comes to issues like climate change, this simplification of utterly complex transnational realities only serves to obfuscate responsibility- or in other words, let some major industrialized nations off the hook for the consequences of our consumption habits. For example, it’s very convenient for us to blame China for all its emissions, as if it were some self-contained economy devilishly intent on flooding North American markets with a sea of cheap junk. The reality, however, paints the West in somewhat less of an innocent light- our politicians consistently fail to mention that it is our very own corporations that have essentially built the Chinese economy as a manufacturing backlot. It has been estimated that fully 25% of Chinese emissions result from its exports to the Wal-Marts, dollar stores and Best Buys of the world. 

Pretending the world is an orderly place of neatly divided nation-states might make for some colourful maps, but it doesn’t help us realize the transnational consequences of our own actions. It allows for countries like the US and Canada to claim that China “needs to do more” while conveniently papering over our own fundamental complicity in its mess. It is quite sobering to realize that a major portion of China’s devastating ecological footprint in fact belongs to us North Americans, swelling our already immense impact on the planet. We fight tooth and nail to get our corporate fingers into every global nook and cranny, to hellishly industrialize other places for our own benefit- and then get to blame other governments for everything because there are supposedly in complete control. That’s a pretty good deal. It’s no shock, then, that there is little incentive for Western governments to truly address the massively inefficient wealth allocation in ‘poor’ countries like China- the right people are too busy getting rich, and us peon consumers just simply don’t know or don’t care. This will have to change.

These myths will need to give way if constructive action is to be taken against climate change. We live in a world that is no longer neatly divided between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nation-states, and these outdated labels should be shelved so that those who would hide their greed and complacency behind them can no longer do so. Increasingly, people must expose the usual excuses for what they are: self-serving farces. China a ‘poor’ country? Please. The resources are there for action- they are just being grossly misspent. Industrialized Western countries at an economic disadvantage if ‘developing’ countries are not subjected to emissions caps? Please. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve already moved our manufacturing industries offshore in a wholesale swoop of cost-cutting glory. How much more is there even left to lose?

It would be wonderful if our politicians and government officials in Bali exhibited the seriousness and maturity that climate change deserves. We all have a part to play in affecting positive change, such as examining our own consumption habits, but what is truly needed now is leadership from someone- anyone ! -as opposed to smug, self-serving bickering and empty soundbites based on tired economic ideologies. Unfortunately, all the usual myths remain entangled in the process to mire the proceedings, as they are just too profitable for those interests holding such a death grip on the politics of our globe that I fear our elite classes can no longer even distinguish a difference between corporate profit and societal good. Now if only they would stop treating the global public, be they Chinese or Canadian, as consumption-bloated idiots with no understanding of the issues as stake, our leaders might be shocked at the number of us ready to sacrifice and compromise for a common good. Yes, even in extravagant dens of luxury like Canada. 

Having recently committed myself to office-bound employment in a nondescript Montreal office tower, it’s little surprise that I’ve been struggling with the occasional bout of wanderlust. The thrill of travel, the awe and excitement inherent in experiencing new places, have given way to a routine of shirt-ironing, lonely food court lunches and windows that can’t be opened. This hermetically-sealed world can certainly feel stifling with its overabundance of plastic and artificial light. The decision to embark upon this road, however, is not one I regret: the time had come in my life when I needed to trade in the global wandering for a little more stability, both personal and financial. As a major bonus, the work I have taken on is both challenging and rewarding.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t find my mind wandering, on occasion, back to the road, back to those distance places I’ve lived- often, back to China. I struggle to keep my experiences there alive and relevant to my current life, perhaps out of fear that I will be consumed by routine and lessen my engagement with the world outside my own small circle of movement. I have heard it said that debt is a driving force behind the political disengagement of so many in the West, but it would seem to me that work-related fatigue is an equal, and not wholly unrelated, culprit. Who has time to ponder the state of the world when there are bills to pay?

Being geographically tied down for the time being, I thus satisfy my wanderlust through reading. In this age of up-to-the-second online news and more streaming video content clutter than you could possibly know what to do with, it is still hard to beat a Sunday afternoon nestled up with a good newspaper, magazine or book. I’m an avid user of the internet, granted, but I cannot help but be irritated by the attention deficit format of most major portals and news services- I tire of digging through all the videos and multimedia gimmicks to find something substantial that I can actually read. Put me down on the side of opinion which considers talk of the demise of printed media as greatly exaggerated; the internet still has a long way to go (and as an added bonus, books don’t burn out my eyes).

And so I regularly tear into Harper’s and The Economist (sure its economic dogmatism is a bit tired, but the breath of its coverage and the quality of its political and business commentary have me hooked regardless), and check out solid Canadian fare such as The Walrus and Maisonneuve. In terms of books, I put Amazon through the motions a few months back and ordered myself an eclectic little stack, ranging from Lullabies for Little Criminals to A Long Way Gone and Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (a great, nasty little anthology about the deep inequalities inherent in the world’s oft-celebrated urban development stories).

Needless to say, I couldn’t resist grabbing a few titles relating to China. I got China Shakes the World, China: Fragile Superpower- both of which I have yet to read - and China Road by Rob Gifford. This last one I tackled first, as it appeared more travelogue than armchair policy analysis, and that offered the chance to hit the road vicariously, to re-enter that strange world where everyone is mangling some dialect of Mandarin. It was the sort of book I felt would offer me some mental escape from the office and remind me of life in the back of bumpy buses, even if the cover hinted at some of the dreadful clichés so common in modern China punditry. I didn’t have many expectations beyond figuring it would wet my nostalgia for life and travel in the Middle Kingdom, and that was good enough. Anything to take me back for a while.

But the book was a very pleasant surprise, and I have to commend Mr.Gifford for putting together one of the more refreshing readings on China I’ve come across in quite some time. It isn’t that Mr. Gifford’s approach is particularly groundbreaking; a Beijing-based journalist moving on to the UK after spending a good amount of time in China’s embrace, he travels across the country from Shanghai to the Kazakh border and reflects upon the country and his experiences there. What makes China Road stand apart from so much China punditry is its disregard of the common economistic perspective in favour of a more deeply engaging humanistic approach. We are so bombarded with talk of China’s ‘economy’ that one could be forgiven for forgetting that flesh-and-blood people actually live there, and it is frightful how readily our economics-obsessed societies can reduce so many lives to a statistics sheet.

Rob Gifford, thankfully, puts the focus back on the Chinese people he meets, as he writes about their dreams, ambitions, fears and frustrations. He further complements this with commentary on his own experience as a foreigner in China, and some of these passages certainly brought a smile to my face as I remembered my own life circa 2002-2004. The writing is brisk and engaging, deftly touching on politics and history without getting weighed down in dense academic analysis. China Road is certainly rooted in a travel experience, but uses its accounts of particular lives and incidents to explore China’s complex history and wax cautiously on future implications. Gifford manages this in a manner that demonstrates his deep knowledge of Chinese history and politics and avoids getting lost in the theoretical ether. He also feels no need to shy away from the usual sensitive topics, but approaches them from a welcome perspective devoid of any condescension or sense of cultural superiority. It is clear that the author has a deep fascination with and respect for the Chinese people, but at the same time he doesn’t let that obfuscate his view regarding the serious problems inherent in the society they’ve built for themselves.

All in all, I think Rob Gifford has written a great book. While it certainly plays to the China expat crowd - which can identify with many of his experiences  - it also provides a balanced, realistic and accessible glimpse into life in the Middle Kingdom for anyone interested in going beyond the numbing economism of the mainstream media.

In particular, I find there is strength in Gifford’s refusal to offer any solid theoretical prognosis on China’s future. In a crowd where some warn of an imminent collapse while others trumpet an inevitable and untouchable rise to global domination, China Road presents the country (properly, in my opinion) as one of such contradiction that no one can reasonably predict how the whole thing will turn out. This is a theme that Gifford touches upon throughout the book, and is perhaps the best analytical tool with which to approach a society country empire civilization so huge, complex and convoluted that any pundit or hack can find ample evidence to support their particular view.

China is both a strong state and a decentralized, chaotic empire where the edges are held together by brute force; it’s bursting with optimism and festering with hopelessness, its greatest source of instability its obsession with stability; it’s a land of unrelenting grand-scale urban development and crumbling stagnation; it’s a society dripping with wealth where most people still fight for basic survival; it’s an unimaginably overcrowded country yet a land of vast, remote landscapes haunting in their quiet beauty; it’s fiercely nationalist yet rudderless and struggling for identity; it ruthlessly destroys its own history to restore its former glory, weighed down by the past while trying to escape it; it calls capitalism communism; it offers freedom yet crushes dissent; it inspires awe and derision; wealth, opportunity and the good life have never been so available to (some) of its citizens, and yet the land is careening precipitously towards environmental suicide. The Chinese have never had it so good- or so bad. There is a saying that the more time you spend in China, the less you should understand it.

China can be anything to anyone, given its size and turbulence- it’s would be no surprise, in the end, if the place simultaneously collapsed and took over the world. Thankfully, to Rob Gifford it simply provided the opportunity to write a thoroughly enjoyable book called China Road, which allowed me to travel once again on those kung fu movie bus rides through the desert, as my present life is increasingly reduced to hermetically-sealed office space. It brought me back to a time in my own life when I crashed through the deserts of Xinjiang or the backwaters of Henan, staring out the window and being wonderfully confused and conflicted about the Chinese world passing by outside.

Just in case you haven’t heard, a certain city in China will be hosting a major international sporting event in exactly one year’s time. The press, of course, is having its usual contradictory field day, collectively slack-jawed by the onslaught of unthinkably large mega-projects while simultaneously trying to balance the story with the usual talk of politics, labour conditions and environmental degradation. The one-year countdown point is apparently the perfect time to bash our heads in with the latest China Rising stories, which are fulfilling their annual obligation to sensationalism by rediscovering- once again - that the country is undergoing tremendous change. At this point, I’m just confused: is China rising more than usual? Are they talking about a general rise or one that is specifically confined to 2007? Is Beijing transforming more now than it was in 2006? or 2004? Do they have someone on the payroll counting construction projects to decide whether the change is substantial enough to run another China Rising story?

And for their part, Chinese officials are busy insisting that the Olympics and its grand spectacle not be politicized- well, at least not by anyone but them. Unfortunately, history is not on their side: the Olympics of the past century have been nothing if not a stream of political statements (think Berlin 1936, Munich 1972) and boycotts (Melbourne 1956, Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984). In this context, the agitation surrounding the first Chinese games is hardly something out of the ordinary. In a way, the Chinese government did it to themselves by positioning the event as a declaration of success for their still-quite-shaky development model. Throw a little hubris onto the scene, and the usual critics will come running- or alternatively unfold a banner demanding freedom for a certain disputed western region.

For seasoned China watchers, however, this is all old news. The growing instability of the Chinese development model is hardly the story of these upcoming Olympics, much less the actual athletic events or medal count. Rather, the main questions are: Will Beijing manage to pull it all off? Will this event manage to impress the world as intended?

My answer to both these questions, which might surprise some of my regular readers, is a cautious yes.

Naysayers, I believe, are getting muddled on the question of scale. Beijing, or China as a whole for that matter, does not need to solve all of its problems before next August- it merely needs to figure out how to sweep them under the rug for two weeks while the global media spectacle is in town. For example, much fuss has been made about Beijing’s sickening levels of pollution and permanent gridlock traffic- alleviating the root causes of these woes will take years, perhaps decades if ever. But Olympics do not last that long. The event’s success depends entirely on drastic short-term and temporary interventions which gloss over deep deficiencies rather than fix them, a game of image-making in which China is second to none.

Thus, the Chinese government doesn’t need to reconsider its pollution-intensive industrialization or questionable encouragement of private car ownership, it only needs to order them out of existence just long enough to produce the desired effect. Beijing has invested way too much of its reputation in the Olympics to have it shrouded in smog, and I imagine its officials will resort to some pretty drastic measures to ensure gorgeous blue sky next August. There has already been much talk about plans to massively restrict vehicle use in the city, control weather with cloud-seeding and so on, but frankly I would not be surprised if a decent swath of northern Chinese industry suddenly goes quiet next summer. The only realistic way of ensuring clean air for these games is a complete lockdown on industrial emissions in the region, and they will do it if they have to.

Of course, some will scoff at the sudden mysterious improvement of air quality during the Olympics (perhaps secretly wishing the event went on longer for the sake of their lungs), but this cynical attitude will have little impact on the spectacle at hand. This brings me to address the second question: will Beijing wow the world? Definitely. Hold on a second, you might be saying: what about all the massive evictions, demolitions and labour abuse that have paved this golden road? Shouldn’t the questionable means employed affect our judgment of the glitzy end? Personally, I do have trouble appreciating urban spectacles anywhere knowing they have left a bloody trail of corruption, exploitation and injustice in their wake (and let’s face it, China is hardly the only place in the world where this happens).

But I would gather that most people don’t bother to read about this stuff, or worse some might just simply not care. As much as we go on about sustainability, justice and cultural sensitivity, we are still a species deeply in awe of raw power and its manifestation in monumental structures. It is no coincidence that China and Dubai are permanent fixtures in the gushing press. These places have got it right: treating people like human beings might be nice and all, but it doesn’t impress anyone. When was the last time you were awed by a community meeting or a small, tightly-knit neighbourhood street? And so we get a continuous stream of world’s tallest buildings, world’s largest malls and instant monumental skylines, of mind-boggling demolition to raise towers which exude might. In the face of such brute, structural power, any considerations for the questionable practices which made these monuments possible quickly fade away. After all, how were the pyramids made? Beijing will deeply impress with its enormous skyline and engineering marvels, regardless of how or why they were built, with those pushed out of the way nothing more than ghosts unheard in the roar of flag-waving and Olympics crowds.

I do still, however, hope these Olympics are a success; not as any vindication for all the megalomania on the part of the government, but rather for the pride of the average Chinese person. On a whole, they’ve had a pretty rough ride throughout the 20th century and the 21st is fixing to be interesting, to say the least. So hopefully it will be their moment to shine, welcome the world with their deep hospitality, to cheer on their athletes and bask in some national pride. After all they’ve been through as their government cleans house for the event, they certainly deserve it.

After several years as a Western media darling full of flashy skylines and get-rich-quick stories, it would seem that China has been having a bit of a bumpier ride as of late. First came the stories of tainted exports products, then came the uproar over slavery in rural brick kilns; now, a Dutch environmental group has estimated that China may have already overtaken the US as the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. This announcement comes at a particularly bad time for the Chinese government, what with the Olympics on their way and the public in many industrialized countries deep in the throes of global warning worry (well, at least in between driving their SUV to the corner store). China as the world’s top polluter is obvious ammunition for the anti-China lobby, but Beijing is not taking this loss of face lying down. The Foreign Ministry spokesman was recently quoted firing back this repartee:

“The developed countries move a lot of manufacturing industry into China. A lot of the things you wear, you use, you eat are produced in China,” he said at a regular news briefing. “On the one hand, you shall increase the production in China, on the other hand you criticize China on the emission-reduction issue.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. As a media junkie, I’ve always been a bit bewildered about all the accusations flying the Middle Kingdom’s way regarding Chinese-Western (well, largely American) relations. China, revalue your currency. China, clean up your act. China, jump through this hoop and do a somersault. Meanwhile, those of us in the more Western reaches of the globe might want to check out what our own multinationals have been up to over the past decade or so- there’s a good chance that if I ply the aisles of some suburban big-box warehouse, the junk filling my shopping cart is from everyone’s favourite East Asian nation. As much as we might loath to admit it, as eager consumers we are all responsible for the Chinese environmental meltdown and its growing effects on the world at large.

So it’s almost comical to hear members of the American political class, for example, taking China to task; I have some bad news for you guys. You know that military/economic/environmental threat you keep going on about? Well, it’s a lumbering Frankenstein largely of your own creation. While economists go on about about the genius of Chinese planning (a sequence of words that might seem rather strange to those who have actually spent some time in the country), an equal salutation should be given to the West’s voracious and guilt-free appetite for cheap consumer goods, without which the Chinese ‘miracle’ would never have been possible. Of course, as the few regular readers of this site should know, this does not mean I’m excusing China’s bulldozer-happy, growth-at-all-costs-including-your-life approach to societal change. The sustainability of this frenzy has yet to be truly tested, and the wholesale destruction of environmental quality might well be the first- and ultimate- manifestation of its limitations. Yet, I do not think it is constructive to pile the emissions blame largely on China, as the West has been just a bit complicit in its mad industrialization in the first place.

So where do we go from here? Well the Chinese government has released a climate change plan that promises to address the issue, but of course not at the expense of those cherished growth figures. And seeing how the Chinese approach economic development with an “All Smokestacks Go!” mentality, I suspect we won’t be seeing meaningful reductions in emissions anytime soon. As for the strategic waffling and delay of many Western governments on the issue, enough has been said already that I don’t need to remind anyone how pathetic the whole situation is.

While it is tempting to imagine that all of this is caused by cartoon-like villains at work, hellbent on planetary destruction, I propose there is something less sinister going on. A recent headline, equally as newsworthy as global warming but likely to garner much less attention, notes that for the first time in history humanity will be more urban than rural. Simply put, ever more people are joining the ranks of those already thoroughly alienated from their environment, through desperation as much as choice, and this is reflected in the actions (or inactions) of leaders of lands industrialized, rapidly industrializing or somehow hoping to industrialize. While the urban condition has provided much that is good to humanity, I would argue that its principal drawback is in the way it distances us from the relevance of the land on which we depend. We are so removed from the processes which sustain us that many of us urbanites no longer even consider them within the scope of our daily lives. Urban survival depends on the accumulation of a virtual wealth which designates who can do what with how much- with precious little regard for the ultimate physical effects this may have on our surroundings. The urban condition allows us to convince ourselves that we are above and beyond ‘nature’ and its whims- or that we can at least forcefully control it through engineering.

And so it is no surprise that environmental issues have to such a large extent been considered a societal niche, a compartmentalized matter alongside and equal to politics, business, sports and entertainment in the classification of our busy lives. Environmentalism can thus be portrayed as a luxury, a left-wing annoyance, something to get around to eventually so that things look nicer and smell better- this is what happens when we imagine ourselves as above and beyond our own environments, in no way connected to the particular lands which we occupy. In this sense, the ‘environment’ is some separate entity which can be preserved or destroyed without much relation to the compartmentalized urban spaces in which we increasingly conceptualize ourselves. Cities may set us free in many ways, but they also provide a very false sense of security.

This alienation of humanity from its environment, embedded so forcefully in the Western doctrines of modernism and industrialism and happily pushed worldwide under the friendly guise of ‘development’, runs so deep in our societal consciousness that it can even be found within environmentalism itself. Hence the talk of preservation, of conservation, as if there is some desirable ‘natural’ state of the world apart from human activity. Our environment becomes something to be managed, but from the outside. This is the sort of mentality that leads to the creation of large national parks from which people are cleared out, as if their presence on this landscape is somehow ‘unnatural’.

And then we get to that whole issue of whether climate change is natural or man-made. Well I would say this whole debate is completely pointless: this is a false dichotomy. Something can only be man-made or natural if you understand these as two mutually exclusive spheres, which I would argue they are not. Human beings are part and parcel of this earth as much as any other creature, as are our actions. So anything we do, including spew pollution into the atmosphere, can and should be considered a natural process. I think it is high time that we relink our idea of ourselves, our cities and our industries with the wider world around us.

So if climate change and pollution can be considered natural, does this mean they are acceptable? Well, I guess it depends on how you approach the issue. From the perspective of the planet, these are neither good nor bad: they just are. I do not believe we can attribute any moral state to the machinations of our planet; continents move, species come and go, weather changes, life goes on in some form or other. The one constant seems to be dynamic change. And part of this change is certainly the work of the particularly busy and industrious species that is humanity. Is it evil or wrong that we so fundamentally affect the way our planet works through industrialism? No. But what if we turn it into a barren, smoggy rock? Hey, shit happens. The dinosaurs cashed out, someday it will be our turn. But the earth will still be the earth and life will go on somehow- maybe it will be the age of cockroaches.

Of course, from a human perspective, we could be in a bit more trouble. We might not be destroying the earth in a cosmic sense, but we are most likely changing the earth in a way that is increasingly hostile to us. From a species-selfish perspective, I worry we are at the very least setting ourselves up for some serious pain in the standard of living department. The more we alienate ourselves from our environment, the more we gleefully allow its ability to sustain us to diminish. Climate change might not be bad for the planet on the grand scale of things, but I have a sinking feeling it could mean a pretty bumpy ride for us humans. Has anyone ever tried eating money or metal? I can’t imagine it’s a very pleasant or nourishing experience.

So while many would accuse our contemporary politicians and unelected autocrats of pandering to short-term interests and their cronies’ pockets, I would argue the opposite: it would seem that our pollution-happy politicians are adhering to a long-term view, perhaps too long, as in “we are all dead in the end anyways, and nothing more than insignificant blips on the grand scale of things”. While it is perhaps admirable to demonstrate such cosmic consciousness, somehow I don’t think these are the best guidelines with which to run governments and states.

But is this lack of real action any surprise, after all? While superficially panicked about global warming, most people are just as unwilling to affect any sort of meaningful change in their lives as their politicians are hesitant to put any hard-hitting policies in place. We can consider ourselves environmentally conscious, or maybe “worried” about the environment, but this often does not reflect at all back onto the habits of our daily lives. We can sit in a fume-belching SUV stuck in traffic while lamenting the crazy weather and threat of climate change- and not even recognize the lunacy in our position. Thanks to our complete conceptual separation from our environment- fueled by modernism, industry and urbanism -we can decry the state of the environment (not our) while not considering for even a few seconds how our own behaviour plays any part in this whole spectacle.

For argument’s sake, there is always the possibility that climate change and growing pollution are not the dire threat to humanity they are often made out to be. As a species, we have proven to be incredibly adaptable, and we could very well evolve to survive on a radically different earth. But then climate change and pollution become an even starker socio-political choice: do we want to live on a polluted planet? Do we truly accept that an industrial world and all its consumer goods mean an increasingly spoiled environment as we understand it? Do we accept that the number of smog days will keep rising? The trade-off for pursuing our current ideas of wealth, happiness and modernity- largely to be found in plastic and redundant packaging - is a planet that is dirtier, more unstable and likely much less beautiful. Are we willing to make that sacrifice? I would argue that many of us already have without even thinking about it.

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.

In 2006, China sells. From over-hyped IPOs of mismanaged, loan-happy banks to the nuclear test in North Korea, the world’s favourite post-socialist country is all over the news as usual. Most recently, the Middle Kingdom has dominated the satellite signals beamed into my humble abode by way of a little party Beijing put together for Africa.

The China-Africa Summit- in which Hu and crew invited more than 40 African states to talk trade, aid and gloss over state-sponsored abuses –is yet another event tailor-made to bolster the popular narrative predicting China’s takeover of the world sometime in the next 20 days or so. Quite sadly, one of the few ways to get Western media to even notice Africa apart from wars and famine is to throw the word ‘China’ in front of it.

Watching this spectacle unfold from thousands of miles away in southern Africa, I found myself bemused and waxing nostalgic for the surreality that is Planet China. Beijing welcomed its esteemed guests in that most Chinese of ways- by shutting down factories and construction sites, banning 500,000 cars from its streets and praying for blue sky. It also plastered giant billboards of badly Photo-shopped African wildlife across town and spiced up the usual song-and-dance craptaculars with some African beats. Just another day in China’s endlessly fascinating attempt to convince the world it is not crowded, chaotic, polluted or composed of anything other than smiling people and beautiful skyscrapers.

Of course, questions have been raised in the usual circles as to whether China’s newfound love for Africa will amount to anything more than a business-as-usual, opportunistic plundering of the continent’s resources. I, for one, highly doubt the Chinese leadership loses any sleep over the plight of African peoples beyond their ability to mine and cut down trees. But at least you can give them credit for consistency: Chinese leaders have, on numerous occasions, shown precious little concern over the plight of their own people. China is thus offering a blind eye to the usual state-sponsored human misery in some of its newfound trade partners, not because it believes in any inherent morality of ‘non-interference’ but rather because it has its own collection of internal “issues” to pretend don’t exist.

It is also no shock that some of these African leaders are jubilant to be wined and dined with such pomp and circumstance, using the opportunity to take potshots at the West for “ignoring” them. What head of state doesn’t enjoy being treated as the centre of the world by someone important? The Chinese are masters at this game, based on their own history of self-congratulatory officialdom, and as a result put together just the right kind of lavish reception. Beijing realizes that opening up Africa to its advantage necessitates giving the continent’s leaders, at least superficially, what they crave: respect. Whatever happens to the people of the various African countries involved is obviously of much less concern.

The Chinese leadership, I believe, approaches Africa as a two-fold opportunity. In the more immediate term, the continent offers up a wealth of resources in countries such as Sudan where Western interests fear to tread lest they sink under a barrage of public outcry. In the race for resources, China has the distinct advantage of having even less qualms than self-interested Western powers in dealing with questionable regimes to get what it wants (and given the low standards set by Western countries, that says a lot). The Chinese will be busy pumping oil in places that Western-based, multinational oil companies can now only quietly dream of exploiting.

In the longer term, however, the Chinese leadership also understands the need to foster new markets for the incredible, and still growing, amounts of trinkets and consumer goods that China pumps out on an annual basis. And from an industrial-consumerist point of view, the African continent is commonly perceived as the last, great untapped ‘market’ on earth. Fueling the material growth of Africa would satiate China’s dangerous addiction to exports for a few years if not decades, particularly if trade friction with traditional markets such as the US and Europe grow to unbearable levels. Engagement with Africa offers the opportunity to both feed and satisfy the Chinese industrial behemoth.

But then there is the other side of the coin: what does all this mean for African countries? It is perhaps in places such as Pemba that we might begin to find some answers. Far from the world of extravagant receptions and mass production, this quiet little town isn’t exactly a nerve centre in the machinations of international commerce. And yet these dusty streets are also the frontlines of geopolitical change, a place where the dynamics of China’s engagement with Africa hit the ground running under several guises.

First, it is fairly common knowledge around here that Chinese businessmen are illegally logging old growth trees in the region, some even operating within the nearby national park. This is the sort of thing that fuels arguments questioning China’s ‘good will’ towards Africa: taking advantage of desperate rural poverty and extremely weak enforcement capabilities to clear-cut pristine forests aren’t exactly the sorts of actions that win ‘responsible international player’ awards. However, given China’s quasi-apocalyptic levels of environmental degradation at home, in which industrialism gone wild has turned swathes of its land into noxious cesspools, in these actions it can hardly be accused of hypocrisy or double standards unlike many Western countries. Utter disregard for environmental consequences is a trademark of the Chinese development model, and one that might unfortunately spread as the country increasingly engages the world.

At the same time, however, Pemba just recently launched a city bus service with three shiny new (and decidedly out of place) municipal buses of Chinese provenance. This is a particularly welcome addition: despite being a ‘small’ town, Pemba is remarkably spread out across three areas- the old port, the newer town centre and the beach strip - all several kilometers apart. It is the sort of place where the fundamental lack of public infrastructure means a private vehicle is essential to getting around if you do not wish to walk for hours like the large majority of the population who cannot afford either. So it’s very refreshing to see some public transportation initiatives, and personally it’s nice to know I can now get to the beach on weekends for 1/20^th the cost of a taxi (well, unless I walk like I often do, but that takes an hour and a half). In this case, we can be happy that China does have double standards: while its own streets are an absolute mess of gridlock going nowhere fast thanks to short-sighted urban planning and a baffling push for private car ownership, across the world it helps a small Mozambican town get around a little better. Thank you, China.

So what to make of all this? What do events in Pemba have to say about the nature of China’s relationship with Africa? I suspect they tell us that, once the hyperbole of alarmist politics is stripped away, we are left with both positive and negative aspects as tends to happen in this place we call reality.

Whatever else has been said about the ‘developing’ country you have just arrived in, it never ceases to amaze those who think exotic is a country in Europe. Its history as a cultural crossroads has produced a fascinating multiethnic mosaic of a people ready-made to have cameras up in their face; you will be hard-pressed to find a warmer and friendlier place on earth, with a genuine smile accompanying every scam and request for money. With its snow-capped mountains, tropical beaches, vast deserts, dense jungles, desolate steppes, lush valleys, rugged canyons and pretty much any other landscape you could possibly imagine, the sheer diversity of the land is unparalleled on the continent- even though we say pretty much the same thing about every other country on the continent.

After decades of revolutions, civil wars, dictatorships and disastrous experiments with various economic systems, real optimism is at last in the air as ‘globalization’ worship becomes the latest ideology to screw the overwhelming majority of the country’s inhabitants. And nowhere is this more visible than in the country’s teeming megacities, where impoverished people haul garbage past expensive cars and shiny glass buildings in cliché photo opportunities. Experience this fascinating collision between old and new- often literal, given driving habits – and watch as the country strives to embrace a mythical ultra-modernity by bulldozing anything that looks old and poor. Soak up these westernized metropolises with their bright lights and well-dressed people- ‘western’ because any wealth, sophistication or infrastructure obviously cannot emanate from any other culture than our own. Settle into your hostel and listen to other travelers’ spiritual experiences carving flutes and surviving on berries in a remote village in the “real” part of the country, despite the fact the city you are sitting in is home to half the country’s population.

Pay triple the local rate to see overrated historical sites, bad-mouthing other tourists for being tourists while battling throngs of touts. Visit a famous marketplace that has become a caricature of itself due largely to its immense popularity with your lot. Avoid the large majority of the city that isn’t mentioned in your guidebook. Experience the wonders of a smoky internet café, filled with other travelers and local teenagers playing loud computer games. Indulge yourself in the city’s vibrant nightlife, world famous for consisting of bars, clubs and people drinking alcohol. The truly adventurous might want to sample a beer not available in their home country. Order by yelling in English over bad 80s music played at ear-splitting levels.

When you’ve had your fill of the skyscrapers and traffic jams, the ‘real’ country awaits- the part that is rural, materially poorer and more in step with your stereotypes of what a ‘developing’ country should look like. Make sure to “step back in time”, because rural subsistence lifestyles don’t exist in late 2006. Visit a village, take pictures of dirty children and witness traditional life as it has been for centuries apart from the motorcycles, burning garbage, industrial trucks, cell phones, Snoop Dogg t-shirts, sheet metal roofs, blaring televisions, Nestle products, power lines, girls dressed like Britney Spears and cat-calling loiterers. Chat with a smiling, toothless old man, basking in the genuine cultural experience until he asks you for money. Insulate yourself in the bubble of a backpacker hostel, meeting more Europeans than locals. Listen to a self-righteous dinner companion decry how tourism is destroying local culture as you both dig in to standard Western fare ordered from a badly translated menu. Go further off the beaten track and discover a place largely untouched by the outside world except for the hundreds and thousands of people who bought the same guidebook you did.

Whether you are looking for photogenic poverty or exploited historical sites, mind-bending traffic jams or religious temples shrouded in the ‘mist’ of a nearby chemical plant, you will not be disappointed. From the isolated reaches of a remote province that you will never visit to the various bus stations and airports where you will spend most of your time, this ‘developing’ country has got it all. With its smiling people carrying baskets on their heads, strapping live animals to vehicles and selling things in markets, there is enough to keep your digital camera busy for days and your stereotypes perpetuated for life. By preserving the more superficial aspects of its cultural traditions to cash in on them while madly industrializing for the benefit of a small elite, the country will leave you breathless (and we aren’t only talking about the air quality). But then again we’ve also said the exact same thing about dozens of other countries as well.