Tag: China

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Foxconn

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.” Ny Times, 2012-01-21

I couldn’t get over that quote: The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need. Oh woeful day– America doesn’t even educate it’s own people properly and they can’t keep up with those backward Chinese.

Apple computer, selling itself to us as the totemic object of enlightened consumerist fantasy… but we aren’t the kind of people who can produce these objects. The Chinese are out there feeding us, suckling America, clasping the American consumer to it’s massive breast…. and guzzling American dollars and jobs in the process.

Is your iPhone made by slave labour? And if it was, would it actually be possible for you to own a other electronic communications device– say, an Android phone– that was not manufactured under somewhat odious conditions somewhere in China?

It has been estimated that an iPhone would cost about $65 more if it were assembled in the U.S. Would American consumers be willing to pay about 10% more for a product if it produced thousands of good-paying jobs in America instead of China? I think they probably would, right now. But nobody is campaigning on that strategy. And probably rightfully so– a trade war would not be helpful to anyone.

Foxconn is a very, very large company. It is actually owned by the Hon Hai Precision Industry Company based in Taiwan. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of it. It is the world’s largest producer of electronic devices.

All those U.S. dollars flowing to China to pay for the iPhones and iPads and Acer laptops, etc., etc. ,etc… what will they do with all those American dollars? Nobody really seems to know. Whenever I see an article on the subject, I read it, but I still can’t figure out what people think is likely to happen eventually. Keep in mind, that China is now increasingly competitive with the U.S. in one other area: guzzling oil.

Wiki on Foxconn.

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McPrisons

Congratulations America– you just passed a remarkable milestone this year. Well, actually two years ago. First time, more than one in every 100 adults in the United States is… what? Smart? Rich? Single? A heroin addict? Alcoholic? Educated? A member of the Tea Party? Mexican? Dutch? Drives a BMW? Bikes to work? Has a PHD? Works for the government? What?

In prison.

That’s not one of every 100 males. It’s 1 of every 100 adults.

I would suggest to you that any nation that would incarcerate 1% of it’s population, barring the most ridiculously extreme set of circumstances, which I can’t even imagine, is collectively psychotic. This is an unsustainable circumstance, a cesspool of repression and denial, a cancer of social and political malignancy.

One in every 100 adults is in prison.

This is a society that has completely failed to deal with crime and justice in a responsible way. It is the path of a third world dictatorship, a tin pot fiefdom, a colonial outpost, a medieval manor with witches and heretics and plague.

Put it together with the empty factories and warehouses and plants in Detroit and Buffalo and the mid-western states… this is a country that needs to go back to the drawing board and redefine what it understands as the social contract between citizens and government, between workers and employers, between police and suspects.

So, America, what is the meaning of this? Bad luck? Godless atheism? Religious fanaticism? You are among the most repressive, authoritarian states in history on this issue: you love locking people up.

One in every 31 adults in the U.S. is either in prison or on probation or parole.

Yes, the rate of incarceration in the U.S. probably far exceeds that of any other country on the planet, with the exception of North Korea– and nobody knows for sure about that.

What’s different about Minnesota? It has the lowest incarceration rate in the U.S. at 171 per 100,000. Louisiana has the highest at about 700 per 100,000. I know– the figures don’t jive (“over 100” means 1,000 or more per 100,000, which obviously is not possible if the highest state only has 700). Not sure why. The “over 1 per 100” number is supplied by the Pew Center on the States.

Iniquitous Denmark has 59 people in prison for every 100,000, which is lowest in the world. That’s less than 1/10th the rate in the U.S.

China: 117.

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Chinese Science

I came upon this marvelous item in the New York Times today that made me want to move to China:

“There is really no debate about climate change in China,” said Peggy Liu, chairwoman of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, a nonprofit group working to accelerate the greening of China. “China’s leaders are mostly engineers and scientists, so they don’t waste time questioning scientific data.”

They don’t “waste time” questioning scientific data? Wow. Imagine that. Leaders who make decisions based on science.

So what do our leaders here in Canada and the U.S. base their decisions on?

But let’s not get glib about it. “Men of science” can have creepy overtones.

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G20 Opium Wars

The biggest Security Theatre show in the world takes place in Toronto this week. The people who are supposed to represent us, the voters, will do everything they can to keep as much distance as possible between their lavish affair, their snack bars and drinks, their banquets and soirees, and us, the smelly, worried, unprivileged mob.

In fact, they clear the expressways so the cavalcade of bulletproof limos and security mobs can proceed from airport to conference center without having to meet the gaze of frustrated travelers. You wait so Obama can glide. You have to wonder if any of these leaders have the slightest clue anymore of what real life is like for their own citizens.

It’s not surprising that some terrorists out there might think it’s a good target: the display of monumental privilege must surely excite them. The fences and guns and helicopters — it’s all like a wonderful, violent opera.

It also creates a perception among the easily persuaded that these leaders are so important, so indispensable– such marvels of brilliant leadership and vision– that no expense can be spared in keeping them safe. In fact, every one of them is very dispensable— the graveyards are full of them, as De Gaulle observed. The security services don’t mind colluding with the politicians because, if politicians are important, the jackboots protecting them are necessary.

If you think, well, it’s a lot to put up with, but, after all, these meetings are important. No, they aren’t. The idea of public disagreement is so horrifying to the organizers that they have their cronies work out all of the language of all the announcements weeks before hand. If there is real disagreement, the announcements only cover the areas where they agree: we will improve the environment, encourage economic growth, seek justice and purity and the preservation of our bodily fluids. Amen. So, surrounded by security theatre, we have political theatre.

Have you considered… how come they don’t shut down the nation’s capital every time parliament is in session?

History is full of oddities.

In the 19th Century, Britain and other European nations were trying to develop a healthy trade relationship with China. Chinese ceramics, silk, and tea were in huge demand in Europe. Britain sent a delegation to the Qing dynasty to show them some of Europe’s most exciting new technologies to be offered in exchange. The Chinese were not impressed, and demanded silver instead. As supplies of precious metals began to dwindle, the European nations settled on a different product they wished to offer the Chinese. Wait for it: opium. Yes, the British East Indian Company was your local drug pusher.

Those crazy Chinese– they didn’t see the wonderful upside to this innovative trade relationship, and decided to ban opium. This led to the First Opium War, in which the European powers humiliated the Qing dynasty and forced it to sign a humiliating armistice, the Nanking Treaty, granting the European powers the right to brutally exploit Chinese markets and labour. The treaty also ceded Hong Kong to the British, if you’ve ever wondered why the British eventually ceded it back.

I’m always impressed by the righteous outrage expressed by oppressors when their victims summon the courage to fight back. The Boxer Rebellion was portrayed in the West as an attack on missionaries and Christian Chinese. The missionaries themselves only seemed dimly aware of their function as cultural emissaries of British and American imperialism. They didn’t see any problem with associating Christianity with gunboat diplomacy.

Another historical oddity:

In 1945 when Japan surrendered, Chiang’s Chongqing government was ill-equipped and ill-prepared to reassert its authority in formerly Japanese-occupied China, and asked the Japanese to postpone their surrender until Kuomintang (KMT) authority could arrive to take over. [From Wikipedia entry on Chiang Kai-shek]

This is not the only time an ally– a freedom-loving, democratic, liberal, enlightened, western power– actually asked the Japanese– spawn of Satan just moments before– to hold a population down so a new oppressor could take over for the old oppressor without the local people being given a chance to form a representative government.

Well, let’s all not get patriotic here. This is what governments do. They do it with far more sophistication and polish in the west, but they do it nonetheless: pin you down long enough to have your pockets picked clean. You can spot the patriots easily: they have flag pins in their lapels. They get teary-eyed when you play the anthem. They invite the press to view them touring the graveyards for the men they sent to die for your sub-prime mortgage, your derivative, your Enron stock, your gasoline.

You almost never find them in uniforms themselves.

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How Wars Start

Suppose for a minute that the Chinese regularly sent a spy aircraft down the coast of California about fifty miles from land. Suppose there was a collision between this plane and a couple of American fighter jets and an American crashed into the sea and the Chinese spy plane was forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco.

The Americans, of course, would return the plane and the crew immediately, and apologize for accidentally colliding with the Chinese plane.

!

Obviously not. When a Russian pilot defected with his rare Mig-25 back in the 1980’s, the U.S. held onto the plane for a couple of years, until they had exhaustively analyzed it, and then politely returned it… with the wings on backwards.

The truth is that the Americans were spying on China and the truth is that the Chinese jet probably crashed into the Americans in an idiotic demonstration of bravado that Americans usually adore, as in movies like “Top Gun”. If only the Chinese pilot had been Tom Cruise, with lovely, horny Kelly McGillis waiting breathlessly for him back on the aircraft carrier…. all would have been well. We would have admired the macho, testosterone-soaked will of the groovy little spunky powerhouse pilot.

Are we sorry? No. I mean, we feel really, really, really, really bad, but we’re not officially, legally, diplomatically guilty of anything, so, no, we’re not sorry. Please give us our spies back.

The whole thing is really rather boring except as a demonstration of how macho politics can sometimes– not this time, but sometimes– lead to increased tensions and anger and shorter fuses and more macho pilots making bravado gestures and submarines playing chicken and diplomats issuing warnings and gestures and assholes like Jesse Helms calling for holy retribution and eventually war, and then you have to wonder if the baby sitting in the charred ruins of the bombed-out village really cares about whether George Bush Jr.’s weenie was really all that frighteningly big.

Back off, big boy, the missiles are on the way.

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Wei Jingsheng

Wei Jingsheng is a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned for almost 20 years because he had the courage to stand up for the basic human rights you and I take for granted as citizens of a free country. He was expelled from China in November 1997, probably because he was one of the most well-known of China’s many prisoners of conscience.

Jingsheng traveled to Paris where only the junior minister of “cooperation” would meet with him. In London, Prime-Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook were too busy to see him– probably had a party with OAISIS scheduled or something– so only an obscure bureaucrat would agree to talk with him.

The Clinton Administration had made a point of demanding that China honor the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, until about 1994, when more and more U.S. corporations insisted that Washington’s hard-line stance was harming business with the Communist giant. A lot of U.S. corporations salivate uncontrollably at the thought of a billion households that don’t yet have telephones, microwaves, or cable TV.

Cuba, on the other hand, only has about 7 million people, so it’s quite all right if you want to get all righteous about human rights under Castro. When it comes to China, however, you’re talking big bucks. As Bob Dylan once observed, before his own sell-out, “money doesn’t talk/it swears”.

A lot of people–especially corporate types–will argue that human rights should never be tied to commercial relationships. Oddly, this argument does not polarize along the political leanings you might have expected. Some very conservative U.S. congressmen support the demands for greater accountability for human rights abuses in China, while Clinton himself appears to be folding under pressure from the big corporations, and, as observed, Tony Blair and his Labour Party doesn’t have the time of day for a pro-union Chinese dissident.

You may recall that we went through this whole debate during the South African crisis, and Maggie Thatcher led the opposition to economic sanctions on the basis of the argument that they don’t work, and that they only harm the average citizen, not the powerful elite. Does Thatcher support sanctions against Iraq? The U.S. insists on tightening the sanctions against Iraq until they admit the U.N. weapons inspectors: isn’t Bill Clinton in a position of hypocrisy?

We ought to be more consistent on this. If sanctions worked against South Africa (they appear to have helped) and if they are believed to work against Iraq (this is somewhat questionable), and if it is hoped they will work against Cuba (dream on), then they ought to be applied to China.

What we have to do is remove the element of hypocrisy from the idea of sanctions. We constantly insist that we apply sanctions out of high moral principles, but we drop them as soon as we realize that there is fast buck or two to be made. The U.S. didn’t seem to mind the human rights abuses committed in Nicaragua or Chile, as long as U.S. commercial interests were served. Many European nations, like Italy and France, want to rebuild their business relations with Iraq, and thus they want to drop sanctions against Hussein. The U.S. won’t apply sanctions to China because U.S. corporations want to do business with the Chinese.

As China’s pursuit of the 2000 Summer Olympics demonstrated, the Chinese government does want relations with the West, and they need the technological and economic assistance only the West can provide. But such assistance ought to be dependent on well-defined and verified progress on human rights issues, democratization, and some measure of self-determination for Tibet.