A brief note that “Keeping Faith,” my profile of Bishop Jin Luxian of Shanghai in the July/August 2007 issue of the Atlantic, has been translated into German and published in Stimmen der Zeit. It’s quite an honor. The original is available to subscribers on the Atlantic’s website, along with some extras.

Also, the current issue of Recycling International has published “Contaminated Exports … From Where?,” which originally appeared as a post on Shanghai Scrap. And just as it did in the comments section of this blog, the essay is generating heat in the international recycling community that reads RI (or so I am told). More on that soon

A story from Friday’s China Daily:

Lucky phone number not all that lucky
(China Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-29 08:49

A businessman in Qingdao, Shandong Province, was almost driven mad after he paid more than 10,000 yuan ($1,316) for an “auspicious” phone number, which brought him endless troubles instead of luck and fortune as he had expected.

Last year, the man, surnamed Liu, bought the phone number “66-666-666″ from one of his friends. (Many Chinese regard the number six as a sign that everything is going smoothly.) But since then, his life has become a nightmare, as he receives at least 100 calls a day from strangers. Some call to test whether the phone number really exists and some call asking to borrow money, believing “only rich people could offer to pay for such an auspicious number”.

Now Liu hopes he can get rid of the troubles by selling the number to someone else.
(Qingdao Daily) Continue reading →

Count me among those not celebrating Beijing’s late acknowledgment (as in, this week) that the Three Gorges Dam is an environmental and human catastrophe. According to today’s China Daily story:

Problems mentioned included disruption of the ecosystem, more frequent natural disasters, severe erosion and landslides, land shortages and ecological degradation.

Not bad for a project that hasn’t been completed yet. But as bad as that reads, there’s even more. As I reported in the July 2005 issue of Scientific American [subscriber only], the placid waters of the Three Gorges Dam are directly responsible for a spike in schistosomiasis infections around Poyang Lake (China’s largest). Though relatively unknown in the developed world (except among backpackers), schistosomiasis is one of the world’s most common and feared parasitic diseases (symptoms are initially fever, aches and pains. however, if left untreated, severe liver and other organ damage can occur). In 2005, when I reported the SciAm article, China had 850,000 total cases (likely, an under-count) and a researcher from the Shanghai-based China Institute for Parasitic Disease told me that it was “the most serious parasitic disease situation in China.” Continue reading →