Shanghai Scrap

This morning the South China Morning Post [subscriber only] reported that Father Joseph Gan Junqiu, the Vatican-approved candidate to become bishop of Guangzhou, has received Chinese government approval and will likely be ordained on December 3. This will be the third ordination of a Chinese bishop since the Pope’s June 30 letter to China’s Catholics – and it will be the third performed with the joint approval of the Pope and the government-supervised Chinese Catholic Bishop’s Conference. As the SCMP story notes, government approval for Father Gan’s appointment was delayed almost ten months (Papal approval was received in January 2007), causing more than a little apprehension in certain quarters. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago Jim Fallows mentioned that he is snapping a daily photo of the Beijing sky(line) from his apartment window for “later chronicling purposes to see how and when the campaign to clean up the air [in advance of the Olympics] finally kicked in.” That’s a fine idea. Fallows isn’t posting the photos now. But I hope that he will – come next August – post them in some kind of chronology.

The Fallows Project got me thinking: is anybody (as in, “any China blog”) chronicling the air quality situation in the other six Chinese cities that will host Olympic events? Shenyang, in particular (pun intended), is notorious for its poor air quality, and Tianjin isn’t much better. As it happens, this week I had the chance to visit two of the six host cities, and so – for later chronicling purposes – I present photos of the current air quality situation in them.

First, Tianjin (120 kilometers southeast of Beijing), which is scheduled to host football matches. Below, a photo of the airport tarmac at roughly 10:00 AM, Tuesday.

I choose a tarmac photo because – in theory, at least – airports are generally built upon wide, flat plains providing many kilometers of visibility. On Tuesday such visibility was not available. (more…)

I’ve just returned to Shanghai after a long flight delay in Tianjin, most of which was spent in newspapers, magazines and – later – blogs. Three hours of reading on various topics and what sticks with me is “The Social Problems Embodied in 11 Yuan” – a post and translation (of an op-ed) by Danwei (the original was published by Southern Metropolis Daily). It is pointed, relevant, insightful, and elegantly written (the title is proof enough of that last fact). Highly recommended.

[For readers outside of China: the editorial concerns a deadly stampede for discounted cooking oil that took place earlier this week in Chongqing. The value of the discount was 11 yuan, or US$1.49.]

[I am on the road - with the flu - for the next couple of days. So posting will be light. Cough, cough.]

Below, a few photos of a cable stripping operation in Qingyuan, about 1.5 hours north of Guangzhou. The process in the first photo reduces imported North American (in this case) communication cable to its constituent parts, ie, copper, insulation, etc. Everything is then recycled. I don’t know the salary base of the workers in this particular workshop, but my somewhat educated guess is US$75 – US$100.

Readers of Shanghai Scrap not familiar with the particulars of the Asian recycling trade (most of my readers) might be surprised to learn that this process is actually a great boon to the environment. Indeed, even five years ago, cables such as these most likely would have been stripped of their metal casing and then burned. Today, burning is uncommon in China and, as a result, the rubber and plastic that used to be incinerated and emitted into the air, is now fed into China’s thriving secondary plastics trade. (more…)

I found this fella sleeping inside of a wire stripping operation in Qingyuan City, Guangdong. His parents were working nearby.

This morning I received an email from my colleague Kenneth Tan, editor of Shanghaiist, asking whether I had heard about the reports that Beijing had added the Bible to a list of items that Olympic athletes were prohibited from bringing to China in 2008. Indeed, I had: I looked into it on Friday – for about five minutes – and quickly determined that it was utterly false. At the time, I chose not to write about it because I’m not a big fan of fanning a bad story; but now that Kenneth has mentioned it on shanghaiist, and a US Senator is making an idiot of himself complaining about it, well, I might as well jump in, too.

Here’s the deal. The English-language report claiming the Bible Ban was published by something called the Catholic News Agency [CNA]. But CNA didn’t report the story; it didn’t even try to follow-up on the facts. Instead, it cribbed the entire story from “reporting” done by La Gazzetta dello Sport – a newspaper devoted to – yes – sports. So, in its report on the Bible Ban, La Gazzetta claims that the list of prohibited items includes “materiale promozionale usato per attività religiosa o politica.” Translated into English (thanks to my college Italian), that means “materials used for the promotion of religious or political activity.”

And from that, la Gazzetta infers the Bible.

Mind you, La Gazzetta’s report never quotes anything mentioning the Bible. It just infers the Bible from other quotes. (more…)

On Wednesday, South China Morning Post ran one of the oddest stories that I’ve read in quite some time. Entitled, “Closer watch on mental patients during Games,” it quotes Li Wenyong, deputy superintendent of the Chaoyang Mental Health Centre and a professor of psychiatry, as saying:

There have been incidents in previous sporting events when mentally disturbed patients have interrupted the competition … [D]uring the Olympics, there will be many guests and tourists in our city. We have to make sure the Games are held smoothly and that our patients will be well taken care of.

Elsewhere in the article, Professor Li claims that sporting competitions “could excite mentally ill patients.” As a result:

Psychiatrists from two Beijing mental hospitals said they would expand care for mental patients during the Games, including providing more frequent home visits and medical appointments. They were speaking at the Beijing-Hong Kong medical exchange conference in community psychological medicine, held in Beijing at the weekend.

In all sincerity: does anyone out there know whether and how many mental patients have rampaged through Beijing during sporting events? Perhaps the real significance is this story’s tacit acknowledgment that Beijing lacks sufficient care and care providers for its mentally ill residents. According to SCMP, of the 2.8 million residents of Chaoyang District, alone, 7000 have serious mental illnesses “such as psychosis and schizophrenia.” I suppose it’s easier for Beijing to state that the mentally ill will receive adequate care during the Olympics than to concede that they won’t – or don’t – get it at other times.

For a moment there, it felt like he was singing only to me …

As mentioned in this week’s earlier posts, I’m on deadline and on-assignment this week, so content is going to be a little on the light side. Tonight’s floor show (the soldier was followed by a dude who juggles tennis rackets) represents a small portion of the on-assignment part.

George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, wrote of feeling inferior, as a man, to the British coal miners he documented risking life and limb in cramped mines. That particular passage, and sentiment, has come to mind often during my visits to foundries that I leave – after only a few minutes – choked and sweating.

I took the photo three weeks ago, north of here, when I wasn’t supposed to be snapping away. Thus, no identifying info.

[travel and deadlines this week, so content will be light]

[with special guest appearance by Steve Buscemi]

This weekend I had dinner in Shanghai with some expatriate American friends who – like me – earn most of their income in US dollars. It’d been several weeks since we’d last sat down, and in that time all of us had become roughly 1% the poorer – due to the declining dollar. And though that’s nothing compared to the almost 10% decline in our dollar-based income since China removed the yuan’s peg to the dollar (in July 2005), the accelerated depreciation of the last month has left us all feeling as if we’ve been pistol-whipped, financially.

It’s not just the dollar, either. It’s the yuan’s appreciation, and it’s the inflation that’s been running up prices on everything from scrap computers to KFC value meals (believe me, I know). So, quite frankly, a 10% decline in the dollar’s value is merely the financial hit that I can calculate based upon data and math skill. The reality is that – for Americans who earn dollars in China – the overall hit has been much more severe. Not that I’m expecting anybody without a US passport to break down in tears over this news. (more…)

I’m in the midst of multi-lounging between this morning’s Bucks v. Bulls game and the Sunday South China Morning Post — which contains this item:

Batman may be able to save Gotham City from all types of evil, but it seems he’s no match for Hong Kong’s polluted waterways. The caped crusader was scripted to jump from a plane into Victoria Harbour as part of a stunt for the filming of the latest movie, The Dark Knight, part of which is being shot in Hong Kong this week.

But two sources involved in the production of the blockbuster claim the Hollywood production company found the water quality was so bad it decided it could not possibly complete the stunt without risking the health of a cast member.

How bad is it? According to the SCMP, it contains:

“… all sorts of things, salmonella and tuberculosis … “

First, yuck.

Second, Christian Bale is playing the Caped Crusader in this edition, and though I understand his reluctance to contract TB in Hong Kong, I still think that there’s something very un-superhero-like about opting out of this (and that goes for his stunt doubles, too). Which is the likely explanation for the production’s unwillingness to speak on-record about the canceled stunt. After all, real superheroes don’t mind salmonella.

The nifty North Korea Zone site has an interesting post reporting that the Chinese have “slowed down rail transport to North Korea in response to the disappearance of Chinese trains crossing the border.” And what, pray tell, happens to those missing cars? According to Reuters and the Financial Times, the leading theory, propagated by unnamed “analysts,” is that they are “sometimes disssembled and sold as scrap metal.”

As the Chinese blogosphere’s resident English-language loudmouth on all things scrap-related, I must weigh in with some commonsense: the North Koreans may be nuts, but they are not imbeciles, which is what they’d have to be if they were cutting up perfectly decent railcars for scrap metal. The value of a working rail car – and especially the precision -machined axles and wheels that are its most expensive parts – is far more than its scrapped value. Leaps and bounds more. (more…)

I’ve argued on this blog, and elsewhere, that Beijing really doesn’t mind price-fixing and cartel behavior – so long as the cartels and price-fixers are working in Beijing’s (perceived) best interests. And those interests are usually best represented by state-owned industries.

For Beijing’s economic policy-makers, few commodities need to be “fixed” more than the the 400 million+ tons of iron ore that the China Iron & Steel Industry estimates that China will import in 2007 – all to fuel its world-beating steel industry (with something like 35% of the world’s total production in 2007). Yet despite being a key international commodity, there’s no actual open market or index for iron ore. Instead, European and Asian buyers looking for the rock have two options: negotiate a one-year “benchmark” price with the consortium (read: cartel) formed by the the world’s three largest iron ore producers (Australia’s Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, and Brazil’s CVRD) or go looking for whatever ore you can find in India and elsewhere, and bid the “spot price” – basically, a market price on demand for whatever’s left over after the big three sell their supplies to their preferred buyers. (more…)