Sheepishly, I concede that this is the second or third post in which I’ve promised to get back to regular blogging shortly. But, you know, Chinese New Year leads into a new year of work, and now I’m bogged down in a couple of projects that require my fixed attention. In the case of one…
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Resumption of Transmissions …
The Chinese New Year holiday is coming to an end, and so is this blog’s reticence on a range of issues. We should be back to full-strength – or pretty close – early next week. For now, one quick Chinese New Year item that I meant to post before the holiday, and forgot. Here’s the…
China’s Migrant Laborers Enjoy the Downturn, take a Year in the Countryside
I spent the first half of November on assignment in Guangdong Province, and though I can’t say too much about what I was up to down there, I did come across some interesting labor-related items unrelated to my assignment. So. In the space of two weeks I managed to visit 11 factories tightly connected to…
Exclusive Shanghai Scrap Interview: The Guy Hanging Outside My Window
While the rest of Shanghai’s media and blogs have been concerned with ethnic uprisings, military parades, and trade wars, Shanghai Scrap has maintained an unwavering focus on the ongoing renovation of his building’s exterior in advance of Expo 2010. As many others have noted, Shanghai is spending an inordinate amount of money to clean-up the…
Resumption of Hostilities: The Scrap is Back! [Updated]
Posted on Author AdamPosted in Appreciations and Recommendations, Business and Trade, Labor, US-China Policy4 Replies
[UPDATED: Not sure how I did it, but somehow I managed to delete this entire post – including the comments – earlier this morning. Thanks to the generous help of an anonymous citizen at NFG World (who read my tweeted cry for help!), the full post has been restored – minus the half-dozen comments that…
A Northern Chinese Plastic Farmer
If you spend time in the Chinese countryside you’ll eventually run into factories filled with entire farming villages now displaced by industrial development. I’m not one to romanticize an agrarian lifestyle that I wouldn’t to live, myself, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I find the disconnect from the land – and…
Plywood Infernal.
Generally, I never turn down the opportunity to visit a factory. At a minimum, they’re invariably interesting, especially if – like me – you’re at all interested in how the things that one takes for granted are created. At best (in my case, at least), factory visits might lead to new stories. So I was…
The couple that granulates Thai fruit baskets together …
I spent the weekend in a part of Northern China that I can’t reveal, but suffice it to say that they recycle a whole lot of plastic there. Anyway, a quick photo to share before I get back to multiple looming deadlines. When I first came across this couple in the early afternoon the pile…
The (year of the) Ox Arrives in Blue
Just looked out the window and saw the bluest Shanghai sky that I’ve witnessed since … the Olympics? Of course, the blue sky Olympics were achieved through a series of stringent regulations that choked off economic activity and – by extension – air pollution. In contrast, this evening’s lovely winter dusk is attributable to the…
How to absolve yourself of negligence in forty words or less.
Below, a minor classic in the under-appreciated art of pinning blame for a workplace accident on the injured party. The complicated and highly refined nature of this craft makes solo performances exceedingly rare, and this instance is no exception: for here we have a stark duet, between the city agency responsible for running the Shanghai…