Recycling the Dream.
Sunday’s South China Morning Post had a story about an array of rumors which are driving people from the countryside into Guangdong Province’s thriving recycling industry [subscriber only]. The essence is here:
Zhang Wulong is an unlikely looking bounty hunter. A gawky 19-year-old in a shabby T-shirt and jeans, his face still bears the marks of teenage acne as he chatters excitedly about his hopes of stumbling across a secret fortune so huge that he will never have to work again.”I came here to try my luck,” he said, explaining why he left his home village 1,000km away in Hunan province with a group of young friends to come to Guangdong province. “That’s why we all came here. If we find what we’ve come here to find, it will be like winning the lottery.”
… The motivation is not the miserly wages, but instead a succession of fantastical stories that have spread like wildfire in recent months in rural provinces that migrant workers are finding bundles of [bank]notes accidentally thrown out with the trash by wealthy westerners.
Simon Parry, who wrote the story, attempts to find sociological significance in these stories, which he labels “apocryphal” and “rumors,” via an anthropologist: “an oddly distorted perspective on wealth creation and its morality among ordinary mainlanders who have seen so many fortunes apparently made overnight in the course of the country’s economic revolution.” However, on the all-important topic of who actually started the rumors, Parry dodges:
“… the crucial aspect was not who first told the story but why the story was so enthusiastically passed along from person to person.”
Actually, no.
Nearly five years ago, on my first trip to Guangdong’s scrap yards, I heard the same rumors about banknotes being tossed into loads of overseas scrap metal and paper sent to China. When I inquired, one owner of a yard explained – with a smirk – that other yards (certainly not his!) would purposely slip US dollar bills and other valuables into sortable scrap so as to improve the overall productivity of the small army of labor necessary to sort through the mess that is – typically – an overseas load of mixed scrap paper and cardboard. The SCMP story didn’t provide any photos of what this kind of sorting looks like, so I’ll volunteer my own images to fill in the gap. Here, for example, is a sorting facility just outside of Zhengzhou, in Henan Province. Now, imagine how productivity would be improved if a few dollar bills were suddenly scattered among the old pizza boxes:
Below, one more photo, taken in a plant outside of Jinan, in Shandong Province. Here, the paper is Canadian and baled, and the workers are breaking up the bales. Most (if not all) scrap paper and cardboard shipped to China is baled, and thus I have to wonder how plant managers are able to slip banknotes – convincingly – into the bales … but that’s a topic for another day.
[UPDATE: In response to an email - I did not intend this post to come off as insensitive to Chinese scrap laborers. I've documented the lives of Chinese scrap laborers in several places (and will again, soon), and I understand and respect their sacrifices and conditions well.]
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[...] With those thoughts in mind, I’ve a few observations of my own. I’ve managed and attended a lot of press conferences in China, and have seen Chinese journalists to ask some tough, penetrating questions and deliver some hard-boiled interviews. I’ve also seen press releases and press event stenography (commonly distributed to attending journalists) published more or less verbatim in apparently credible media. I think it’s relatively hard to generalize about Chinese journalists with regards to their credulousness at PR events. TIME China Blog – Simon Elegant – Crime and punishment in Beijing : Grim and stern as an old friend would say. The People’s Daily online just carried a story announcing that Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (see here for story on his crimes), was executed this morning. I thought Zheng’s appeal of the death sentence handed down on May 29th was still pending but the story also noted that it had been rejected on June 22nd. I guess that it still seemed likely he would receive some sort of last minute reprieve, given how senior he was and the fact that his deputy was just given a suspended death sentence, which usually means effective life imprisonment. I don’t know why I was even a little surprised, though. As we observed earlier, Zheng’s timing was awful if he was hoping for a pardon. With the current international hullabaloo about safety regulation in China there was no way he was going to be let off the hook. Will his execution make a difference? Hard to say. Certainly it’s got to have some impact in the short term, but memories fade and the allure of stacks of those crisp, roseblush 100 renminbi bills is strong. The Nation – Elizabeth Economy – China vs Earth :If there is a meaningful Chinese discussion about tackling climate change, it takes place largely behind closed doors, well out of sight of foreigners. Perhaps recent natural disasters will motivate Chinese leaders: Over just the past year China has suffered floods in the east that have affected more than 10 million people, while drought this spring left 13 million people and 12 million farm animals without enough drinking water. The Communist Party’s argument over the past fifteen years has been: Since China came late to the industrialization game, the core economies, with their significantly greater historical greenhouse gas contributions, must pay for a global transformation away from fossil fuels. Now it is China’s turn to develop, so deal with it. Image from Shanghai Scrap. [...]
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