I found this fella sleeping inside of a wire stripping operation in Qingyuan City, Guangdong. His parents were working nearby.
All posts in Scrap
Scrap in … North Korea?
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…
China to Australia and Brazil: More Price-Fixing, Please
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…
Vietnam Scrap
[Your Inadvertent All-Vietnam Double-Header Thursday at Shanghai Scrap] For more than a decade, China has been the world’s leading importer of scrap metal and paper. And for more than a decade, the world’s scrap exporters have been mostly content with this lucrative state of affairs. Mostly, but not entirely. In recent years – and particularly…
Couldn’t Get Much Worse: Greenhouse Gases and the Chinese Steel Industry
Last Tuesday the International Iron and Steel Institute announced that the Chinese steel industry is responsible for approximately 51% of all carbon emissions released by steelmakers worldwide. No surprise, right? After all, China is the world’s largest steelmaker, with roughly 35% of the world’s production capacity, and – despite government efforts to rein in the…
Hammer of the [Recycling] Gods
On Friday I was standing on a bridge south of Wuxi when a woman wielding this thing walked by: I ran back to the car, grabbed my camera, and followed her down to the banks of the Grand Canal. I wasn’t sure that she wanted to be photographed, so I (very quietly) tried to take…
Art for Export: Liu Jianhua’s Scrap
One of the standout works at the 2006 Shanghai Biennale was a pile of cheap Chinese export products that flowed from an open shipping container grafted to a wall in the Shanghai Art Museum. “Yiwu Investigation,” as designed by Liu Jianhua, reflected upon the unsteady relationship between the developed world and China. By choosing products…
“Design flaws” Responsible for Shandong Aluminum Explosion
The August 19th explosion of the Shandong Weiqiao Group’s aluminum plant in Zouping County, Shandong Province has received far less media attention than the Xintai mining disaster. But, at least from the standpoint of China’s industrial modernization, it is far more consequential. As I noted in a post to this blog on Monday, the Weiqiao…
China’s Recycling Economy … Defined! Sort of.
China Daily is reporting that China’s draft “circular economy” law has been submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (danwei reports that the Beijing News is also carrying it). As a translation, “circular economy” is not only awkward, it is also regularly substituted by “Recycling Economy” and “Sustainable Economy.” For the purpose…
Price-fixing, Chinese Style, Pt. 2
I guess price-fixing isn’t acceptable in China, after all. According to just-published accounts in the South China Morning Post [subscriber only] and China Daily, the National Development and Reform Commission has issued a notice prohibiting the formation of cartels – including restaurant cartels – for the purpose of pushing up commodity prices. Note to NDRC:…