china
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Decorative China
You are viewing stuff tagged with china.
Whenever I feel optimistic about human nature, I seem to make the mistake of reading more history:
Mao was also frequently compared to China’s First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, notorious for burying alive hundreds of scholars—and liked the comparison. During a speech to party cadre in 1958, Mao said he had far outdone Qin Shi Huang in his policy against intellectuals: “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive…You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.”
— Wikipedia, Mao Zedong
Mykala and I went on a weekend quest for lawn chairs. But, after watching The Story of Stuff on Friday, (which seeks to illustrate the wasteful, unsustainable, dead-end process generating the crap we buy) — we were less than enthusiastic about purchasing crap. You start to think about the stuff-making process. Oil that can’t be replaced is drilled for plastic. Raw plastic is shipped around the globe in container ships, which spill millions of pounds into the sea. Floating on the water, plastics follow currents and congregate in focal points the size of states. The oceans are trashed, the resources exhausted. Even worse, people are trashed. The latter is a contentious, ongoing issue. In this article about Chinese workers assembling Microsoft products, Chinese factories sound unbearable:
I don’t fully understand what’s going on in China. I do have some dispiriting facts, though.
In China, records of your schooling and achievements therein are tracked by a single, government-protected file. Sometimes, corrupt officials steal these files from poor, high achieving individuals. They then sell the files or use them for their own advancement. Victims are left with absolutely no recourse. They must find menial jobs far below their training. The article, Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future, goes on to explain what happened when a group of parents tried to petition for document recovery on their children’s behalf:
Because Beijing is so polluted, the performance of athletes could suffer due to the poor air quality. China has decided to take drastic measures to clean up the air:
Under rules to curb smog and traffic congestion that will last from July 20 to Sept. 20, owners of 3.3 million private cars can drive only on alternate days in China’s capital, based on whether the last digit of their license plates is even or odd.
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Freight trucks that don’t meet minimal emission standards were banned July 1…
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Over the weekend, the city also opened a $2.3-billion subway line linking the northern Zhongguancun area, the capital’s high-tech neighborhood, with its central business district.
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Beijing has gone on a spending spree, relocating factories, seeding clouds, retiring old vehicles, planting millions of trees and halting building construction amid concerns that athletes and visitors could suffer breathing problems.The prospect of competitors wearing masks during events has spurred authorities to set a goal of 256 “blue-sky” days this year, up from 100 in 1998. World record holder and asthma sufferer Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia has opted to pull out of the marathon and concentrate instead on the 10,000-meter event. Other teams are training for as long as possible outside China.
The British company “albam” doesn’t use Chinese manufacturers to make its high quality clothing:
We are an independent company so we can listen to you. We develop and produce our clothes in the UK because we think the extra cost is worth the great quality. If we don’t make a line in the UK it is because we haven’t found a quality high enough to hang our hat on.
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As someone told us “it doesn’t have to be radically different, just a lot better”, well we are sticking by this.
Unbelievable crime - A group of people in China faked AN ENTIRE BRANCH of NEC, producing products using its name, manufacturing new ones not officially recognized by NEC, and … the list goes on. This is diabolical.