Look, I know that firms such as Cisco value the massive potential earnings from China, but this sort of story – if it is true – does leave a nasty taste.
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The Prime Minister of China has just been on the television news (more on the story here) telling “Britain” (by which he seems to mean the British government) not to indulge in “finger pointing” about China’s human rights record. He loves Shakespeare, he said. Do any of China’s critics know anything about Chinese literature? It’s an interesting idea, that you need to acquire a love of Chinese literature before you can reasonably complain about circumstances like this (just lately linked to by Instapundit):
But it is not enough of an explanation of such events to say that the people of Guangdong don’t like being horribly treated. My question is: how come they now feel able to be so angry? I mean, it’s not like they have never been maltreated before. Answer:
It sounds as if finger pointing by the likes of David Cameron won’t be necessary to make China’s bosses, political and economic, start to become a tiny bit nicer, year on year. Supply and demand, of and for labour, is now working that trick. The Forbes piece, with its headline about “Conflict handbags”, implies that soon there may be calls for boycotts of handbags made in China. But is it not the willingness of richer people to buy such stuff that is bidding up the price of labour in China, and making such things as the denial of toilet breaks so unsustainable? Meanwhile, where is the voracious demand for the services of Britain’s public sector workers, who are also threatening strike inaction? The government is going to stop! State teachers will stop teaching! Here is a case where a strike is being triggered by a fall in demand for the relevant labour. The paymaster is feeling the pinch, and wants to cut their pensions. I wonder what the Prime Minister of China thinks about that? Seriously, I would like to know this. Even better, I would like to see him doing some finger pointing. That would be a real laugh. I don’t know how many illusions Britain’s state pen-pushers and button-pushers have about how loved they are by the rest of us. When we encounter them we tend not to discuss any feelings of rage towards them that we may be engulfed by, which is all part of why we often get so enraged with them. On the other hand, they talk about the “front line” services that they supply, like they know they are in a war, rather than serving anyone besides their bosses. Their calculation has to be that the government needs them, in order for the government to go on being the government. But, the threat by them to stop the government … spending money, won’t necessarily come over as much of a threat to the nation as a whole. But those state teachers might also want to be a bit careful. If they go on strike too enthusiastically, they might find that people might work out how to get along okay without them, and maybe with humiliating speed. June 27th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
– commenter ‘twostix‘ on this Catallaxy thread As someone who has lived in the rapidly developing part of Asia for the best part of four years thus far, I cannot stress how strongly the above is true. Oh, sure, people worry about Climate Change (in fact, I would say they are less skeptical about it than the average westerner), but virtually no one would sacrifice development in its name. I have said it before, and the greens really need to get it through their thick skulls – if global warming is real, it is now inevitable. For the reason so eloquently stated above. June 2nd, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
  If sport were a drug, there would be no option but to institute a mandatory death penalty for people partaking in it, and nobody would want that My apologies for the blurriness of the first picture. I find that people in uniforms in secure areas of airports can lack a sense of humor when I start taking photographs, so I try to do it surreptitiously. This can sometimes detract from the quality of the photographs. May 15th, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Roger Pielke Jr, who got it from Lowy Interpreter. A commenter on Pielke’s blog writes:
Indeed. April 20th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
How to give the proper sort of nod towards the Japan earthquake? Not by saying that we are right in some opinion that we already hold that we can somehow hook onto it, that’s for sure. A disaster means uncontroversial urgency. To use it to pontificate about mere importance, and controversial importance at that, is to change the subject. Importance is important, but it can wait. I went to Flickr, to see what “japan earthquake” yielded, and my favourite discovery so far, although I realise that is not quite the proper adjective, is this:  Which I found among these. That is going to take a lot of sorting out, not least because cranes will be needed, and look what happened to the cranes that were there. Yes, every one of the thousands of deaths (did anyone die in those cranes?) is terrible for all of the dead and for all of their loved ones. But I’m guessing that the typical, as opposed to worst, stories will involve the immense labour of cleaning up all the mess, and the immense derangement done to various plans, business and otherwise. Because of the shapes involved, and their repetitiousness, this picture reminded me – in a kind of compare-and-contrast way – of pictures like the one I put on my personal blog at the time of Hurricane Katrina, of semi-submerged school buses in New Orleans, when water made a rather more slow motion mess of that city, nearly five years ago. And I see that I had very similar thoughts then to now, although this disaster is far greater. It’s good, I think, when disaster strikes anywhere on earth, that thanks to things like Flickr we can feast our eyes and minds on the wreckage and adopt the appropriate attitude, but without all of us getting in the way. LATER: Uncontained chaos. I have to admit that when it comes to big time disasters like this one, which is getting bigger by the day, the old school media really do come into their own. I think that’s because there are so many facts, and those facts are so very, very photogenic. It also makes a big difference that this particular disaster is massively better to comprehend if a few people (it mustn’t be too many) take to the air to photo it, with really expensive cameras. LATER: Richard Fernandez talks about urgency. LATER: Maybe the old school media are not doing so well (thank you Michael J):
So, we’re back to contained chaos. And to talking about importance, but in reaction to other importance talk that is importantly wrong. Says Michael: “The big deal is that Japan has lost as much of 25% of its electricity generation capacity.” March 13th, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is an article that caught my eye from the Wall Street Journal about some of the effects of China’s “One Child” policy, a policy that has led to a significant imbalance, as high as 60-40, between men and women. Yet another reason, you might think, to resist the coercive nonsense of some of the population control folk. Mind you, perhaps one reason for a relative dearth of marriage-potential Chinese women is that many of them, as far as I can tell, seem to be in New York at the moment. I have been in Manhattan for a business trip – here until Friday – and I have never seen so many beautiful Asian ladies in my life. And I am off to San Francisco for the weekend, where the Asian population is even more pronounced. Good to be back in the USofA, by the way. New York is as magnificent as ever. March 9th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I wish to buy cheap low end computer accessories (cables, card readers, laptop batteries, etc), I find that it is much cheaper to buy them on eBay from foreign sellers, rather than from anyone in the UK. I have been doing this for five years or more, and it is interesting to see where the items then come from. Five years ago, they were almost always from Hong Kong, with return addresses in places like Yuen Long. (“The unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the New Territories”). The markets where the sellers get them from are actually over the border in Shenzhen in China proper, so I suspect that these sellers make regular trips to the markets over the border, bring stuff back, and then post it to buyers in the West. I still get items from Hong Kong, but in recent times it has become more common for then to come from Shenzhen. I am not sure if this is due to another set of eBay sellers having come into being on the other side of the border, or if the same ones are simply posting from a post office on the other side of the border because this is cheaper. (How international postal services relate to one another, and whether and how much money is paid from the sender to the recipient national post office is a complete mystery to me, alas. I suspect it is as baroque as the equivalent system of international telephone call settlements (which I did understand) was before it collapsed under its own insanity. There are undoubtedly some hidden and probably unintentional subsidies somewhere here). My hunch is, “a little of both”. Some Hong Kong sellers posting in Shenzhen – some Shenzhen sellers. In recent times, the items have occasionally been posted from Dongguan, part of essentially the same economic and manufacturing cluster as Shenzhen (although not a Special Economic Zone, but politically speaking just an ordinary prefecture level city in Guangdong province). However, far enough away from Hong Kong that Hong Kong people are not going to go there to buy and send stuff. Therefore, these sellers are definitely mainland Chinese. And today, I received an item from Zhangpu in Fujian province, a good way north up the coast. This is one of the more prosperous regions of coastal China (south of the Special Economic Zone in Xiamen), but Hokkien rather than Cantonese speaking and far from recent European influence and probably a centre more for trade and investment from also Hokkien speaking Taiwan. It is interesting to see this sort of activity moving up the coast, but there is no sign of it moving inland. Of course, it is always going to be close to the factories. However, write a little English, and the fact that you can sell stuff to people throughout at least the English speaking world has clearly been learned. As an observation, I have found such Chinese sellers to be reliable and honest in their dealings with me. They send you exactly what they say, the products all work properly, and if there is any kind of problem (such as a missing item due to postal problems) they are eager to resolve it. An excellent eBay reputation is very important to such people. This works so well that I don’t actually bother looking at eBay feedback from Chinese sellers before buying: I simply assume that the system has weeded unreliable and dishonest sellers out automatically. On the other hand, this particular purchase was a card reader, for which I paid a total of £1.67. including postage. eBay fees might amount to about 20p. The postage label says that postage cost ¥9.60, which is at present equal to about 90p. This leaves about 57p to pay for the card reader. Allowing the seller a modest 17p profit, we are left with a card reader coming out of the factory no more than 40p (and possibly a good deal less, depending on how many middle men there are), which is a miniscule sum of money. My preferred conclusion from this is that economies of scale are wonderful, capitalism is grand, and modern technology is awesome, in that technological products all become so cheap so fast that almost nobody has to be excluded from owning them. And this is true, of course, although I worry about something else. When capital is too cheap due to excessively easy credit, all kinds of capital intensive businesses appear to be profitable, when in reality they are receiving a subsidy from the banking system. (Another, non-Chinese example: a large portion of Europe-Asia air travel has in recent years been taken over by airlines based in the Middle East Gulf states. The cost of capital of these airlines is artificially low, as they are implicitly backed by the oil wealth of Abu Dhabi. Whether they would be profitable with out this, it’s hard to tell). China’s banking system is incredibly opaque. The bits that we can see aren’t especially pleasant to look at. And of course, opaque = bad, pretty much by definition. When everything unwinds, the consequences will be unpleasant, featuring scenarios that will appear oddly familiar to us. Government bailouts of banks, savers being robbed of the value of their savings, and inflation, perhaps. And perhaps this is already happening. £1.67 is actually a bit on the high side, compared to prices I was paying for similar items a few months back. March 2nd, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Why is it that the BBC, in its reporting of David Cameron’s visit to China, keeps banging on about the supposed dilemma faced by the Prime Minister over whether to raise human rights abuse, and in particular the plight of Liu Xiaobo, a prominent Chinese dissident unable to collect his Nobel peace prize because he’s serving an 11 year sentence in a Chinese jail? There’s no dilemma here at all – except in the vague terms already referred to by Mr Cameron, this is not an issue which needs to be explored at all on a visit which is meant to be wholly about trade. Only the BBC, would, in oblivious disregard for the national interest, keep on trying to make something out of it. I seem to recall some ‘sensible’ commentator of the day made similar remarks about those who deprecated comparable government to government relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s over that whole tiresome ‘human rights’ thingie November 9th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I ran across this item in a Jane’s Newsletter this morning:
Rare earth elements, with names like Yttrium, Scandium, Lanthanum and Praeseodymium, are critical to a modern industrial society. They appear in lasers, high tech alloys, superconductors, and much else. China is applying Mercantilist practices to corner a larger share of the global market in high end electronics. They are the largest producer of the strategic REE’s and see this as an advantage in a geopolitical sense as well. It will not work however. They may well be the current largest producer, but these elements exist all over the world. In the short term they will gain an advantage. Over the medium to longer term they will accomplish the same thing ITAR regulations accomplished for the United States. They will create a thriving industry elsewhere and it will eventually ‘eat their lunch’. To paraphrase an old saw: “You can’t fool Mother Market.” November 3rd, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Recently, I was wandering along a back street in the former Vietnamese Imperial capital of Huế, perhaps best known outside Vietnam as the site of one of the bloodier battles of the Vietnam War. This was a street full of the sort of shops that would once been have referred to as a “General Stores” in English: shops full of many goods that are likely to be useful to many people, but that sometimes seem to have a tenuous relation to one another. In such a store, I stopped and started photographing a colourful display of western trademark violating motorcycle helmets. After I had been doing this for a short while, the shopkeeper came up to me, basically just to say hello. He didn’t mind me photographing his merchandise and was not putting any pressure on me to buy anything, but he clearly didn’t get Westerners wandering into his shop to take photographs every day. Huế is a tourist destination, but despite its easy accessibility (the Americans having built an airport) it is not nearly as big an attraction as places such as the nearby ancient town of Hoi An. One does not have to walk far from the centre of town for the presence of foreigners to be rare. What happened next was more interesting. He gestured for his son to come over and pose for a photograph. The lad must have been only about two years old, but there was a serious amount of proud father syndrome on display. This gentleman wanted the whole world to see how proud a father he was. So they posed and I took a photo. Alas, the white balance isn’t perfect.  As an added bonus, the father decided that he would pose for the photograph with a cigarette in his mouth. Of course, this gentleman had no idea how many western taboos he was breaking. If he had, I am sure he would have thought we were all idiots. Quite accurately. October 31st, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Hanoi, Vietnam. October 2010
Apparently, it takes about a third of a century for the remains of a B-52 that fell into a lake after being shot down to turn into an interesting piece of municipal sculpture in a nice part of town.  Okay… October 28th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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