Radioactive question

It says in the newsy media that China has "contained sources of radiation" in the rubble of quake-damaged areas. The first graf indicates containment of 15, but further down, it says:

He [Wu Xiaoqing, China's vice minister for environmental protection] said 50 sources of radiation were buried by debris from the massive earthquake in central China, 35 of which had been secured. The rest lay buried or located but unreachable under collapsed buildings. He gave no specifics about the radiation sources.

Why hasn't anybody else asked precisely what were those "sources"? What the heck was going on, there? They seem to be awfully vague in their explanations ("they" being both the Chinese and the media).

I pray as much as the next agnostic for a speedy recovery from this disaster, for the people of China to rise from the ruins well and with minimal pain. I just worry what their government isn't telling them (and us) about what's under their feet and potentially in their water and air... and how & why it got there.

Threat to freedom of speech: Yahoo, Google, Microsoft

Well, really the threat comes from the government of China, but the three major internet companies have signed contracts with China which have the potential for serious damage. They've agreed to provide that government with the personal information on bloggers who post "offensive" material -- including any statements made against the government, and the hard-line government of China gets to decide what qualifies as "offensive".

Yahoo has already buckled under the intense pressure of hearing "pretty please or we'll stop all your business connections in your second-largest market". As a result of surrendering just such information, one blogger was carted away to prison in China. As Roger L. Simon put it,

In the case of Yahoo, their cooperation in providing an IP address to Chinese authorities led to a ten-year sentence for journalist Shi Tao for “divulging state secrets abroad”.

In his September 2005 report, Simon quoted Reporters Without Borders this way:

"Information supplied by Yahoo ! led to the conviction of a good journalist who has paid dearly for trying to get the news out. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government's abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate."

Roger Simon has a suggestion for dealing with this threat to liberty, and it sounds like a good tool, to me.

From this moment on, I will not write about the Beijing Olympics unless the subject at hand is censorship and repression in China. And – unless the Chinese government changes its policies – when the Olympics do come, I will not blog about them at all. I will take the opportunity to write as often as I can about the lack of Freedom of Speech on the Chinese Internet and on the suppression of bloggers and journalists in that country.

Read the rest of it. Then consider the potential if we all follow his lead.


(HT: God's right-hand keyboard enthusiast ;-) )

The threat from (or to) China

Via Instapundit: More really bad news about Chinese import items -- several people in Chicago became ill after eating "monkfish" from China.

This on top of the news of the toxic toothpaste in Australia and Panama and the pet food terror.

It's hard to keep myself from seeing a conspiracy in the recent spate of woes -- please, somebody show me this isn't some sort of internal sabotage to screw up the capitalist, internationalist bent developing in this newcomer to industrialization. It would be so very simple for a handful of "true believers" to completely undo any modernization and outreach, simply by making international trade impossible and forcing them inward, to become a militaristic slave society again.

I genuinely hope it's just half-assedness, and not malice. At least dipsticks who can't tell the difference between glycerin and diethylene glycol can be replaced fairly easily in a growing economy. Scary would-be international and political murderers are tougher to clean out, especially if they're super-scary and in positions of power.

Dangerous rise of unrest in China

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has the news that there has been a massive riot in China, complete with torched police cars and injured citizens and police. The official excuse for the unrest is the "rising public transport costs", but commenter Jacksonian has a bit more background on the troubles:

The official corruption is, I believe, the cronyism being shown for handing out loans by the Beijing government, which has caused the rate of non-payment on those loans to skyrocket. Estimates place between 30-60% of China's GDP to be grounded on bad loans. If you start to foreclose on the loans people go out of work, if you don't foreclose the infrastructure collapses under debt load as investment dries up and the production capabilities are seen as unsustainable. Which they are. The rapid 'modernization' and 'capitalism' introduced in the 1980's has been funneled to those that are well connected with the Communist regime.

The surface affluence still does not address the vast number of rural poor, poor living conditions even in cities, the rapid overpopulation of cities, no pressure to repay on loans, no market pressure to use work-efficient equipment as there are so many unemployed as to make labor cheap, and a slow liquidation of civil society as the information revolution puts cheap, modern telecom and storage into the hands of the unemployed. This is a confluence of crony capitalism, at best, and State directed capitalism at worse, rapid decay of family structure, large movements of populations to anywhere good jobs might become available and the slow undermining of the agricultural base of China by that rapid movement of mostly young and educated Chinese to the cities.

Please, read the whole thing.


Of course, similar problems plague the state of IL, on a smaller, nonlethal scale (one hopes it will stay that way). Cronyism, corruption, half-a$$ed financial management, the collapse of family structure and values... who'd a thunk they might bring about chaos? Is there some way our own small problems can be solved? If so, could the solution for us be applied to China? or is it too late for both?

It does grow harder to remain optimistic about anything.

Wal-Mart buying Chinese retail chain

Wal-Mart is looking for room to grow, and have, quite naturally, gone toward the sort of market ultimately designed for them: China. Since the Mart of Wals carries affordable, not-too-chic-and-therefore-practical products, the expanding shopping base that is modern China's middle class is a natural fit.

Still, I have to wonder:

Who's gonna make the cheap products to sell to the Chinese?