Shanghai Scrap

Here in Shanghai, we are finally putting some distance between us and the concluded Chinese New Year. But, in microblogging terms, it feels to me like there’s still a bit of a holiday hangover. Only in the last two days, with all kinds of interesting political news, does one get the sense that things are back to normal in the wild world of Weibo. My Bloomberg World View column for this week reaches back into the Chinese New Year period, however, to a story that I was eager to write since I first heard about it, and – due to some slow news days – received the chance. It concerns the considerable online heat that was generated when Beijing’s leading women’s group modified the criteria it uses for naming model families, to include items that, well, cost a lot of money. Like going on vacation. Or owning 300 books. You can find the piece at Bloomberg World View.

And a quick note on World View. There are five of us World View columnists, each of us doing a weekly piece on issues typically flying beneath the radar of other foreign correspondents in our respective regions. And there’s some absolutely fabulous stuff being written on the site. Two pieces, in particular, from the last week, stick out for me. Why not give them a look?

• “A Bewildering Online Hit, Now Brazil’s Biggest Star,” by Dom Phillips, World View’s columnist in Saõ Paulo, might be the funniest thing I’ve read in 2012 (so far). It concerns a young reality star, Luiza, who is in Canada … well, you just have to read it.
• “India’s Top Newspapers Battle for Hearts and Souls,” by Chandrahas Choudhury, World View’s Columnist in Delhi, is a brilliant and very funny explication of the differences between India’s two most venerable newspapers. It should be noted that Choudhury, a novelist, writes his column with a literary flair to which others (like me) can only aspire.

A lot of thought and work goes into these columns, and I think the above two really prove it. I hope you’ll have a look.

If contemporary China had a national martyr, it would’ve been Peng Yu. In 2006 he was stepping off a Nanjing bus when he saw an old woman had fallen to the ground. While others passed her by, Peng not only helped her up, he took her to the hospital and even paid her bill. In thanks, the old woman sued him for injuries sustained when he allegedly knocked her to the ground. The story became a media sensation, and in the years following, Peng Yu’s name was always the first to be uttered when strangers failed to come to the aid of an injured stranger in China. Hundreds if not thousands of articles have been written about the case and the phenomenon.

And now, they’re all going to have to be revised. Because, on Monday, Peng Yu confessed to knocking over that old woman, after all.

It’s hard to overestimate the shock value packed into that revelation. But I do my best to distill it in this week’s column over at Bloomberg View, “China’s Infamous Good Samaritan Case Gets a New Ending.” I hope you’ll take a look.

And, if I don’t get around to saying it next week, best wishes to all of my readers in the Year of the Dragon. My sense is that it’s going to be a good one.

I’m very excited to announce that I am participating in the Innovation Policy Summit at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This is a first for me (both visiting and participating), and I have to think that – among the 100,000+ attendees – I must know somebody. So, if you’re there, look me up. I’m participating in the “Product Refurbishment and Reuse in the Developing World: What is its Current and Future Role in the CE Industry?” panel on Thursday, at 15:00, in LVCC, North Hall N264. Among other topics, I’m going to offer a more nuanced view of Guiyu, China’s notorious electronics recycling town, and its role in the global re-use and refurbishment industry, than what’s typically presented in the media. The other panelists, including my pal Robin Ingenthron of Good Point Recycling in Vermont, are definitely worth hearing. Below, used, recovered microprocessors for sale at Guiyu’s electronics market (of the sort that I’ll be discussing).

In other news … allow me to offer the strongest possible Shanghai Scrap recommendation for James Palmer’s outstanding, just-published “Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China.” It’s a beautifully written account of a) what it was like to live in a small Chinese city at the end of Mao’s reign; b) Mao’s court politics; c) how the Tangshan earthquake served as a catalyst (among others) to end Maoist excesses; e) an extraordinary and moving account of the quake and its aftermath. This is history, and it’s instructive. My highest recommendation.

Though little noted outside of China, pregnancy and contraception have been among the most commented upon topics on Chinese microblogs and newspaper editorial pages over the last month. The thread was kicked-off by a CCTV report on the anti-radiation clothes that many Chinese women wear during pregnancy, and hit a feverish pitch shortly after Fuzhou announced that it would require real name registration for women seeking to buy emergency contraception. Both stories are important in themselves, but also for what they tell us about the evolving social contract between the Chinese and their government, and – in the latter case – the expanding understanding of a privacy right in China. My commentaries, both for Bloomberg View, are here:

• China’s Mother’s Rethink Anti-Radiation Clothing.
• In China, Morning After Comes With New Aftermath.

If you prefer your Bloomberg View with a bit less China in it, allow me to recommend Virginia Postrel’s tremendous “How Art History Majors Power the US Economy.” As a gainfully self-employed philosophy major, I appreciate the sentiment.

A few years ago I was walking through a Chinese scrap yard when I came across a small pile of Christmas tree lights. There weren’t many there, but the encounter stuck in my mind. How on Earth did those lights move to China? And why? Like many writers, I keep a mental file of questions that I’d like to answer if and when I find the time … but never get around to answering.

Well, as it happens, this fall I found myself traveling with somebody who – one afternoon – revealed to me that there was much more to that small pile of Christmas tree lights that I’d originally assumed. That conversation became a phone call that, in mid-November, sent me to Shijiao, a small town in Guangdong Province that, by estimation, qualifies as the Christmas Tree Light Recycling Capitol of the World. On an annual basis the town’s recyclers import, and recycle, at last 20 million lb of the lights.

Part of my visit – not all of it – is outlined in a dispatch that’s just gone up at the Atlantic’s site, “The Chinese Town That Turns Your Old Christmas Tree Lights Into Slippers.” The text is accompanied by video that I took inside of one such factory (a first for me). If you’ve never been inside of a Chinese scrap recycling plant, well, this is a good place to start.

In other news: long-time readers may recall that this blog has a long, two-year tradition formally known as 141 Shanghai Christmas Trees. It was my intention to do a third edition of the series in 2011. But, alas, other commitments – such as chasing down Christmas tree recycling plants – has gotten in the way of doing that. Maybe next year.

A few weeks ago I was in Foshan, a thriving city on the edge of Guangzhou, and I happened to ask one of my hosts about the cost of the apartment buildings going up all around the city. He gave me a number, which struck me as high, and then he told me that the price was off by 30% over the course of the last two months. That encounter, and more, can be found in my column this week at Bloomberg World View, running over the weekend.

Related, further listening can be found in an excellent episode of the Sinica podcast featuring David Pierson of the Los Angeles Times and Daniel Kroeber of Dragonomics. And it’s definitely worth reading Pierson’s widely circulated piece on the return of the China bears, here.

Bear with me, for a moment, as you read a passage from a dispatch now available on The Atlantic’s website:

[Alice Waters] put me to work beside her, cutting grilled slices of locally Beijing-made sourdough bread (from a bakery with the jaunty name Boulangerie Nanda) already soaked in olive oil from the McEvoy Ranch, in Petaluma, California; the oil, along with five donated Californian wines, was the only American ingredients used. I spread the bread with a crumbly, nicely cheesy handmade ricotta made by Liu Yang–a Beijing native who spent six years in France making cheese before moving back and starting a business he calls Le Fromager de Pekin–and drizzled more oil on top. And I broke into bite-sized chunks a Parmesan-like gouda made by Marc De Ruiter, a Dutch cheese maker in Shanxi, for his Yellow Valley cheese company (he recently closed it, unable to afford the expensive milk-testing equipment the government told him he must buy).

This is not, despite every indication, the account of a novelty dinner held at Waters’ famous, and famously expensive Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, but rather the truthful account of a meal recently held at, and partly sponsored by, the US Embassy in Beijing, ostensibly to “build awareness of organic food being grown by Chinese farmers for Chinese food.”

No doubt, that is a laudable goal. As someone who has been eating in China for nearly a decade, I’m quite aware – indeed, probably more aware than most of the organizers – of the food scandals that have plagued China for years. But I am also aware that food inflation is a serious quality-of-life issue ( and sometimes, a life issue) for hundreds of millions of Chinese, and thus I have no doubt that the visit of a wealthy Western chef promoting more expensive food is more likely to be ignored by, rather than improve, contemporary China. Alas, the effect of food inflation on a developing nation, it seems, was of little concern to Waters or the organizers of the event (I’m looking at you, US Embassy staff), who apparently couldn’t see past their own stomachs, to notice the needs of the Chinese stomachs just past the embassy gates. Writing of the fine cheese served at the event, the Atlantic’s correspondent, Corby Kummer, made it clear – and without irony! – that this event was first and foremost an opportunity to satisfy Western appetites (according to the Wall Street Journal, less than 1/3 of the attendees were Chinese):

Cheese is a great rarity in lactose-intolerant China, and many of the guests wanted to know where they could find it.

I’m sure they did.

There is much low-hanging fruit to shoot here (the image of Waters, and her well-known eco-grounded belief in locally-sourced produce, jetting over to Beijing with her staff and bottles of olive oil to cook a feast that is both unaffordable and unappetizing to 99.9% of China, is but one). But what really troubles me about this dinner is the lack of introspection that led the organizers, Waters, and the correspondent to believe that, via their own gluttony (and visits to expensive organic farms), they are somehow promoting healthy eating in China.

They’re not. (more…)

Last week my Bloomberg View column took a look at the sustained howl of pain emitted by Chinese soccer fans at the failure of their national team to qualify for the 2014 World Cup. You can find it here.

I had a lot of fun with that one. And a lot more material than I could actually use, including a withering tweet to Sina Weibo from Zhang Xin, one of China’s most prominent female authors, who made it clear that she’d had enough of all of the testosterone-fed hand-wringing by China’s ranks of male soccer fans.

I don’t understand these men. Since they knewthat  Chinese football is over, why did they still seize the TV and rail words like “Chinese football is over”? Don’t tell me that you’re expecting to win a big prize like a lottery ticket. Does this belong to a gambling psychology or a consolation psychology? Or do you just find that, compared to the Chinese soccer team, you are not so bad?

My kind of woman.

The complete column is here. No column this week, though, in light of the Thanksgiving holiday. Which I plan to enjoy.

For various reasons known to my long-term readers, I receive news alerts whenever “scrap metal” pops up in a news story somewhere in the world. So, a week ago, I was going through the list (it’s not long), and I came across an unusual story of a group of professors in China who knelt down to halt the operations of a steel mill in Hubei Province.

It’s a fascinating story, and the topic of my latest column at Bloomberg WorldView, “Wanting change, Chinese get on their knees.” The job – and the tendency – of reporters is to blow up relatively small incidents into metaphors for social currents, and so that’s what I attempt in this week’s piece. But whether you agree with my conclusions or not, I think you’ll find the story of the professors to be engaging in its own right. In China, it was an internet sensation, with leading voices speaking out on it. For example, Liu Yuan, a newspaper columnist quoted in the piece, wrote:

We should never propagate this kind of feudal signal. A hundred years has passed since the Revolution of 1911. If we think of ourselves as an ignorant common people as low as dirt, instead of as citizens of a modern society, officials will treat us with even more disregard.

More at Bloomberg View.

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In other news. This past week I’ve been traveling through the heart of China’s scrap recycling country, in large part for my forthcoming book on the globalization of waste and recycling. It’s remarkable how much China’s scrap recyclers have changed over the last decade, going from an industry based primarily on hand labor, to one that’s mechanizing at an astonishing rate. This, too, is a metaphor – a metaphor for a China that’s moving away from its low-end industrial origins. On Wednesday, I’m moderating a panel on this very topic at the World Recycling Forum in Hong Kong (Nov. 16). Nevermind me, though, the panelists themselves are the ones who really know what they’re talking about, including Li Jinhui of Tsinghua University (Beijing), my friends Michel Dubois of Recylux (Luxembourg) and Stephen Greer of Hartwell-Pacific and Oaktree Capital (Hong Kong), and Joe Yob of Creative Recycling Solutions (USA). It should be a great discussion, and if you’re in Hong Kong, and interested in the development of the Chinese recycling industry, that’s the place to be. Make sure to say hello.

On September 4, an elderly Chinese man collapsed on the street in Nanjing, China, and suffocated in his own blood. Why didn’t anybody stop to help him? The debate raged on China’s blogs, microblogs, and newspapers for a week. As I outlined in a September 8 column for Bloomberg World View, the answers were several and unsatisfying, ranging from a lack of legal protection for Good Samaritans, to a lack of Confucian obligations to strangers. But whatever the reason, or reasons, they all seem rather academic in light of the video that surfaced, earlier this week, of a two-year-old being run down and then ignored by pedestrians in Foshan. China’s Good Samaritan problem seems more real than ever.

Helpfully, on Wednesday, Shanghaiist posted a quote from Lu Xun that reminded readers that the Good Samaritan Problem isn’t a new one:

“In China, especially in the cities, if someone fainted on the streets, or if someone was knocked over by a car, you’ll find lots of gawkers and gloaters, but rarely will you find someone willing to extend a helping hand.”

Alas, prescience, though comforting, doesn’t explain why so much appears to be unchanged since 1933. And, in my opinion, it also make it far too easy to suggest that there’s something fundamentally wrong with Chinese society without specifying what, in fact, might be causing that fault (and without a cause, there can be no cure). Unexpectedly, yesterday, I received a thoughtful explanation that appeared in a three-way email conversation that included my friend Josh Goldstein, Associate Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures at USC. It’s sober, thoughtful, and worth a read, I think. So, with Josh’s permission, I’m copying it, below.

About this samaritan stuff: i’d say in part the “problem” has existed for centuries, on some level strangers are not part of most confucian obligations and certainly not poor unknown folks.  Local elites certainly would help local poor elderly when approached, but they would typically not be strangers and would not initiate help.  Remember, the urban context of people falling while getting on a bus is historically pretty new. (more…)

Few topics are as near and dear to me as Shanghai’s world-beating subway system. In the space of nearly a decade in this city, it has made accessible places and people that once felt like an adventurous pain-in-the-neck to visit. That’s progress. Alas, there have long been indications that all this convenience has come at a serious price – in safety. And on Tuesday afternoon those indications became something tangible: human error resulted in a collision that injured more than 270 people on line 10.

This week, my Bloomberg World View column takes a look at the reaction to the crash – the Party’s, the city’s, and mine. You can find it here.

Regular readers, if they’re still stopping by, have probably noticed that things have ground to a virtual standstill around these parts. This is the result of a number of factors, but the two key ones are a) my time and attention is very focused on a book project at the moment; and b) I’m now doing a weekly column for Bloomberg. I’ve had almost nothing to say about either project here, so – on the occasion of the mid-Autumn Festival – allow me to point my readers to this week’s column, and announce that future columns will be available – on a mostly weekly basis – at the World View section of the new Bloomberg View site. It’s an unusual column, as columns go, in that it’s specifically concerned with public opinion in China. Thus, this week’s missive concerns the so-called Good Samaritan problem in China, and how Chinese folks are talking about it.

In addition to my piece on the Good Samaritan issue, you might also have a look at Tania Branigan’s excellent piece for the Guardian, a fascinating look at the issue from a Confucian perspective at the (always fascinating) Useless Tree blog, and a lengthy, three-part look at the issue (from 2009) at the ChinaHopeLive blog (part I, II, and III).

In the meantime, I’m going to make a concerted effort to do a better job of updating here – at least, updates re my Bloomberg pieces. Watch, too, for images from some of the world’s hidden recycling and waste processing zones, taken as part of my book project.

[UPDATE, 10 minutes later: While I'm at it - I think the world would be a better place if more people knew the tale of Hank Mizell and Jungle Rock.]

Back in 2002, when I first started riding in Shanghai taxis on a regular basis, the flag-down rate was RMB 10, if I recall correctly. Back then, the dollar was pegged at $1 = RMB 8.2. So, back then, and today, too, that struck me as a hell of bargain: US$1.21 was less than a rush hour bus fare back in Minneapolis. Of course, to the majority of Shanghainese (per capita income at that time was well below US$10,000 per head), of course, it was still a luxury. But the beauty of sprawling Shanghai is scale: back then, as now, there were approximately 45,000 licensed taxis working the city (and a sizable fleet of pirate ones, too), and it couldn’t have been just the dollar-denominated riders, like me, employing them.

In 2006, the city fathers, under pressure from the taxi companies, taxi drivers, and – most important – oil prices, raised the flag-down rate to RMB 11, or US$1.35. The per kilometer charge also rose, by RMB .1, or roughly US$.01/km. As I recall, most of the Shanghai taxi riders I knew were more annoyed at the coins they’d receive in exchange for handing over RMB 20 notes to taxi drivers, than they were by the actual bite of the fare increase.

Two years later, in October 2009, fares were jacked again, to RMB 12 for flag-down. Put differently though: the price of getting into a Shanghai  taxi had gone up 20% in two years. By then, the RMB had appreciated significantly against the dollar, lifting the dollar-adjusted fare to $1.76 – or more than 30%.

Which brings us to Friday, and a new rate hike – RMB 1 was added to the flag-down fee, along with an RMB 1 fuel surcharge (a fuel surcharge that doesn’t, the government says, come close to covering the increasing cost of fuel). So, in Shanghai, the cost of a taxi rose RMB 2, or roughly 17%. In five years, that’s a 40% hike if you go by the local currency. And if, like me, you are unlucky enough to measure your income in dollars, still, it’s a real whopper: $2.15, or up roughly 80% since 2006. (more…)

Late this afternoon, while recovering from food poisoning acquired on a China Eastern flight, it hit me: Shanghai Scrap turned four-years-old just a few days ago. And then something else hit me: activity on this blog has ground to a near standstill over the last two months as I’ve dealt with a family illness in the US, travel, and a new set of work commitments. In addition to writing a book that will be my nearly full-time job over the next year, I’ve also agreed to write a weekly column, about which I’ll have much more to say when the first one appears (probably over the weekend). This last development – the column – is particularly exciting to me, in part because I’ve finally found an outlet that welcomes me to write with the informal voice that I use here, at Shanghai Scrap, and not the more formal one that I use in most other publications.

Of course, Shanghai Scrap isn’t just a place for me to use an informal voice; it’s also a place for me to place reporting, ideas, and interviews that I can’t publish elsewhere. And I’ve done a whole lot of that: this post, believe it or not, is #781 in the storied history of the ‘Scrap – not bad for a one writer blog. However, as long-time readers have no doubt noticed, I’m doing less and less posting these days. In part, it’s because I’m really busy right now; in part, it’s because I can’t really post some of the things I’m reporting at the moment; and in part, it’s because, well, I only have so many words in me every day, and I’m trying to be more sparing with those words – and my time – so that I can devote them to my book and forthcoming column. For the hell of it, a photo of something that I can’t post about, but will be writing about:

That’s right: shredded coins.

Anyway, as much as I love blogging, and the readership that I’ve developed over the last four years, I find myself inclined to devote myself to different kinds of writing these days. In an ideal world, I’d figure out the magic formula that allows certain Atlantic bloggers to produce superb long-form projects while, at the same time, they keep up readable blogs. Alas, I am still in search of that formula, and until I find it, I’m not sure that I’m going to be returning to the three, four, or even five posts per week rate that characterized this blog right up to the end of 2010.

That’s not to say I’m going away. Rather, I’m going to start being a bit more selective with my time and words, offering – at most – one post per week. That seems like a reasonable rate – though, admittedly, it’s not very blog-like. Then again, this blog was never very blog-like: no space-holding posts of favorite youtube videos here, sir, no large blocks of somebody else’s text masquerading as content. No, at Shanghai Scrap, we report original material and you, well, you read. So let’s see how this new posting rate will work out. For the moment, it looks promising: after the weekend I’ll be sharing an interview about which I’m very excited, and then … I’ll keep my eyes open and hope that you, my beloved readers, will continue to keep me in your twitter and RSS feeds.

And, with that out of the way, and following four years of Shanghai Scrap tradition, I give you the top five Shanghai Scrap posts of the last 12 months.

• Fact-Checking the New York Times’ China coverage
• As the flight ascended, the knife descended
• Bye-Bye Best Buy (China): You had it coming
• Another Side of Dylan, China, and the nature of “Protest.”
• How could this happen? A reporter’s guide to USA Pavilion Debacle at Expo 2010.

See you next week.