See what really happens when government tries to interfere with people’s language.
Archive for the 'communism' Category
If I could understand my friend P’s fascination with monasteries? I mean, he’s a heterosexual male. The one outside Xining, capital of Qinghai (green sea) province, would be the third one he visited in as many days. The second, tucked away in the mountains outside Xiahe, was mercifully closed to women (another proof that although they’re buddhists and very good looking, Tibetan monks are still religious freaks) but at the third one I thought I’d toddle along.
It was described even on Chinese tourism websites as a tourist hellhole according to P, so we both had relatively low hopes.
It had been such a great trip from Xiahe through a stunning landscape
so it was quite a downer to find Xining, which I had loved for its small town charm and advanced hovelage only two years ago, turned into a screaming construction-filled megapolis where every bloody hotel was full of beardies attending a halal festival. Or was it conference? I forget which. Why do they even need it? “Kill the animal with the ultimate pain and mental torture” - isn’t that pretty much it?
Or was it “halal” as in “things that are allowed according to sharia law”? That would have been a short conference.
Anyway - after all those beards it was visually very relaxing to be surrounded by Tibetan monks after we finally found a hotel and could escape to the countryside where the famous Tan’er monastery was. Tibetan monks … and about 20 000 Chinese tourists in cowboy hats and baseball caps, and the inevitable guides.
Stopping under a tree, I said to P that although I have no respect for any religions, I don’t like taking photos of for example people doing the prayer wheel thing. I would hate it if, every time I took Piles for a walk in the morning, 200 Chinese tourists took photos of me.
“Don’t worry,” P said. “They have no interest in the Tibetan monks. All they photograph is themselves.” I looked again. It was true. But still!
That’s when two Tibetan monks started talking to us and invited us to their gaff. Or humble abode or whatever. We drank tea and chatted. One had been helping out during the earthquake in Qinghai, 800 kilometres from where we were, earlier this year. He pulled out his laptop and showed us some photos that hadn’t quite made it to the front page of the South China Morning Post. It was basically earthquake-corpses in all possible shapes and forms, with a National Geographic-like quality and colour.
We were lucky to catch the monastery while it still had some old buildings, because the bulldozers were hard at work modernising the place by tearing down everything. What was being built in its place was a monastery in the Chinese Tibetan style. Just like … oh, the old city of Kashgar, which is now probably complete - a gigantic shopping mall but with mosaic. And low to zero visibility because of cement dust.
In the year 2000, the Chinese government started an enormous campaign to modernise the western provinces. It’s really working! Now you can go deep into the mountains, grasslands or countryside of any western province and still feel, with every breath, that you’re in the most polluted country on earth. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is.
Although I am a tourist, I, like all other tourists, hate other tourists. That’s why I’ve managed to visit Xian probably six times, without having been to see the Terracotta Army. Why should I? I’ve seen it a million times in pictures and on film, and, most importantly; like all other famous tourist spots in China, it’s bound to be a screaming hell hole of guides and what not.
But this time, seeing I went with somebody who actually wanted to go there, I thought: Well, there have been a couple of times in my life when I have gone somewhere against my will or instinct, only to find that I didn’t regret going. Maybe this would be one of those times. Maybe I would stand in awe in front of the warriors, being transported back to the year 240BC.
Yes that could have happened if it hadn’t been for the “hell is other people” people. Or actually, the whole set-up. When we finally got there and managed through some trying and failing to get a ticket (90 yuan), we found that the terracotta warriors were just an excuse to build the largest, most pompous and grandiose tourist trap ever.
It took so long to walk from the bus to the actual warrior pit that we had nearly fainted when we got to the building. It was mile after mile of trinket stalls spread over a huge, gently escalating staircase; all without a shadow of shade. Then there was a gigantic open space with the inevitable fascisticly trimmed flower beds and grass that was forbidden to even look at - again miles on a shiny white granite surface without even a willow tree for shade, all to better set off the building where the soldiers are.
Finally I would see what “everybody” had been talking about. I expected a kind of hush, maybe some oohs and aaaahs and possibly “waaaaah…” But nothing. People were talking loudly, laughing and acting like they were taking photos outside 7 eleven or something. This is supposed to be a grave chamber really, isn’t it? But the guides led the visitors in a cacophony of screams and shrieks.
And although it said “no flash” on the poster, there were more flashes continuously going off than at a pop concert. It seemed some of the poor terracotta geezers hadn’t been able to stand all the voices, camera flashes and laughter, for they had collapsed in heaps of dust with only the heads left, staring emptily into times gone by.
In another building, a huge replica was hanging from the ceiling, inexplicably holding a girl’s hand:
For some reason this depressed me more than all the Germans and Koreans acting as if they were at some school party in a hangar with some rocks.
When I came out after having looked at this odd display, I glanced at some books in English and Chinese, about the T. Army, the Silk Road and of course about Mao (who identified so closely with Qin Shi huang, the first emperor who had commissioned the stone army for his protection.) After three seconds of glancing, the shop woman came up to me: “These are books.”
So yeah, I get a bit depressed at these tourism places. And if the actual pit of soldiers, officers, horses and chariots is the size of a matchbox, then the stuff around; tourist trinket stalls, coffee shops and emptinesses of lawn is bigger than Tiananmen Square. Such a build-up, such a come-down.
The Terracotta Warriors are clearly among the things that I don’t need to physically see to know what they look like. But that night I had a great stroll around the city walls of Xian and a perfectly divine meal of Fish fragrant Aubergines and Dry-fried Potato Sticks. For up here in the north, the Sichuan restaurants get better the farther west you get! And now I’m in Lanzhou and life is great.
No, give me living people and history I can see all around me! No need to go to museums. I hate shards. No matter how old they are.
The debate about Canto rages on. Now mainland officials are weighing in, in an about-turn saying the government would “release a policy outline and new regulations to boost Cantonese cultural heritage.”
So it’s all over then. When the mainland government start boosting heritage, it means lots and lots of concrete, razing to the ground and building fake old, and lots of four-lane motorways leading to it.
Just stay away from Cantonese, okay? It’s a big boy and can look after itself. Just let it be. And whatever you officials are itching to do to further aggrandise yourselves and line your pockets with stolen cash, don’t do it.
But funnily enough, this whole debacle has been beneficial for me, because after some interviews in Chinese language papers, my YouTube channel has been swamped with views. The latest one, The Dudes, The Sad and The Envy, has had 5000 more views now than it did yesterday morning. So, excellent! All the viewers are young Chinese people who picked up the link in a popular internet forum, and they leave comments like: “A foreigner cares more about our language than local people do! Embarrassing!”
It was yesterday’s interviewer from Apple Daily who told me about next Sunday’s demonstration in Guangzhou
July 25th, 5pm, Jiang Nan Xi metro station exit A, wear something white. I think we should go! I think we should all go! Well, I’m definitely going.
Down with linguistic imperialism!
What do we want? CANTO! When do we want it? NOW!
CCP, CCP, how many languages did you kill this wee …k?
That’ll definitely be my first demonstration on mainland soil (although I have written self-criticism on two occasions) and I’m really looking forward to it. If you care about Canto, come along!
Ahhrghhhh … When I set out to make Cantonese a world language, I was mostly concerned with Hong Kong and its people - the way they look down on Cantonese (their own language!!!) calling it a “street language” a “dialect” and advising foreigners to “learn Mandarin instead.”
After the handover in 1997 though, I’ve noticed that the written Cantonese has been gaining ground, being increasingly used in adverts, as captions and headlines in newspaper and magazine articles, and when quoting interview objects.
What I didn’t realise - or rather, not didn’t realise but didn’t see as quite so urgent, was that the central government has been working steadily, openly as well as behind the scene, to eradicate Cantonese completely.
I got my first inkling of this a few years ago when I walked into my local branch of HSBC and was greeted by a bint whose job it was to stand at the entrance going “Ni hao ma!” to everyone who entered and sporting a big badge saying “Promote the usage of Putonghua!” Here I was in Hong Kong, whose official language is Cantonese, being talked to in a different language by a local person with whom I had been communicating in Cantonese for years, just because an edict had come from on high that everyone in the bank should be quacking in awful Mando for the whole month.
That’s when I opened an online HSBC account.
A month or so ago I mentioned here how the authorities have been destroying the older areas of Guangzhou to “celebrate” (or whatever) yet another grandiose sports event on the mainland: The Guangzhou Asian Games. That’s only to be expected; after all there’s nothing like a sports event to spur the mainland government on to undertake city destruction on an enormous scale.
But now it gets worse. Much worse. Last week I was interviewed on the phone by Ming Pao, a Chinese language newspaper in Hong Kong, about my views on the eradication of the Cantonese language. For behold: To “enhance” “national” “harmony” etc. (I’m running out of inverted commas) - the government has decided to close down Cantonese language TV and radio stations. I was too shocked to speak coherently to the poor journalist; I think the gist of what I managed to gurgle forth was “Kill them all!!!”
Yesterday this monumental piece of news finally found its way into English language stalwart the South China Morning Post.
I quote the article in its entirety:
“Cantonese is in trouble in its birthplace.
Already threatened by the influx of migrant workers to Guangdong and unfavourable government policies, the ancient dialect is the target of a recent proposal to switch the language of prime-time TV programmes in Guangzhou to Putonghua as November’s Asian Games approach.
This has triggered a new round of the debate in the province about “cultural strife”: just how much must local ways of life be given up in the name of national unity?
Guangzhou’s People’s Political Consultative Conference submitted a proposal to the local government on Monday urging the city’s main television station, Guangzhou Television (GZTV), to stop broadcasting in Cantonese and switch to Putonghua in prime time on its main channels, the Nanfang Daily reported yesterday.
GZTV has nine channels, and most of its programmes are broadcast in Cantonese - spoken primarily by people in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and some parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region . It is also widely spoken by overseas Chinese around the world.
The proposal says GZTV should use only Putonghua on its two main channels, to cater for Putonghua-speaking visitors and athletes at the Asian Games. (My italics, as are those below) The idea met with strong opposition from Guangzhou residents. But GZTV has decided to go ahead.
Mainland media quoted an unidentified GZTV executive as saying that although some concessions would be made to Putonghua on the two main channels, not much would change overall, as the idea was not popular in the areas to which GZTV broadcasts most.
The Guangzhou PPCC’s own survey last month shows more than 80 per cent of the 30,000 respondents - two-thirds Cantonese-speaking and one-third Putonghua-speaking - opposed the official plan to switch to Putonghua in TV programmes.
When GZTV previously switched some programmes to Putonghua, ratings dropped and it was forced to switch back to Cantonese.
Still, the proposal called for more Putonghua programmes.
With 110 million people, Guangdong has rapidly become the most populous province. But most of the recent increase has been migrant job-seekers, and now half its residents do not speak Cantonese.
Guangzhou, the provincial capital, once spearheaded the mainland’s economic reform. But rivals such as Shanghai and Beijing have caught up and even surpassed it. The dialect seems strange to outsiders.
So local authorities see the Asian Games as a chance to remake Guangzhou’s image and reaffirm its status as one of the mainland’s key cities.
But the cultural preservationists have a voice - a loud one. Some have called for the protection of the dialect, in thousands of online posts against the proposal. They say regional dialects are being swamped by the relentless tide of Putonghua.
There is a two-pronged attack on Cantonese - internal migration on the one hand, and the government policy of a “common language for a unified country and harmonious society” on the other, says Jiang Wenxian , a Chinese-language specialist at Sun Yat-sen University.
The 1982 constitution enshrined Putonghua as the official language. Beijing’s resolve to ensure all Chinese speak it has led to bans on dialects at many radio and television stations. Television stations in Guangdong are allowed to broadcast in Cantonese only because of the proximity of the province to Hong Kong.
“It is national policy to promote Putonghua,” Jiang said. “The government will not stop us from promoting local culture, but it is not going to support us. Guangzhou now boasts 14 million residents, and half of them are new settlers and do not speak any Cantonese.”
But the city’s residents who do, such as clerk Luo Bihua , advocate peaceful coexistence.
“All young people in Guangzhou can speak Putonghua. But the dialect presents the Canton culture. We have to support and use it in daily life,” she said. “There are already dozens of television stations broadcasting in Putonghua on the mainland.
“Please let us enjoy our culture in our hometown.” “
Bastards! But this is not unexpected. While hiding under a cloak of “openness” (reporting outbreaks of deadly diseases only a few months after it became clear they couldn’t be hidden) and a new-found kindness (premier Wen Jiabao patting children on the head and shedding tears during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008) the communist party has never stopped consolidating its grip on power. Many say it has never been more powerful and had more deep-reaching control of what’s going on in the mainland than now.
So it must irk them no end that there are millions of people who, right under their noses, keep speaking a language unintelligible for the dyed-hair, black-suited brigade in Zhongnanhai. Yes of course, many Cantonese speakers are communist party members. But Guangdong has always been a rebellious province going its own way. And that’s dangerous in China.
Now, if everyone were to speak Mandarin and only that, think how much easier it would be to keep them in check?
And so, armed with the excuse of “national harmony” the government has continued its relentless drive to bring everybody to heel. Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, wherever there are Han Chinese, the local people have been forced to learn Mandarin or else.
Now the dreary power-mongers have cast their hungry eyes on the last outpost of non-conformity: Guangdong.
Only a naive person will believe that this shutting down of the Cantonese-speaking media is for the “benefit” of outsiders during the Asian Games. When the games are over, of course the Mandarin prime time broadcasts will stay firmly in place; then eating their way into the non- prime time slots as well, until there is no Cantonese language broadcasts in the province.
And when that is done, guess what: Hong Kong will be next.
With our dear un-elected useful idiots at the helm, don’t you think we’ll see ever more “Speak Mandarin, you know you want to” campaigns, cloaked in “useful” “good for the economy” “compete with Shanghai” “win-win” meaningless drivel.
Soon we will also, like the mainland, have trains called “Harmony” and Hong Kong government officials singing the praises of dull, un-inventive, communist speech-making, imperialist Mandarin.
Many Hong Kong people have been actively trying to get rid of Cantonese for years, without really being able to speak Mandarin. It used to be English that was top of these self-hating weaklings’ list, now it’s Putong Bloody Hua.
This kind of linguistic and cultural imperialism used to work well in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Nowadays, people know well that just because you can learn to speak one language doesn’t mean you have to ban/look down on/belittle your own.
I’m Norwegian. I learnt English, German and French at school. When I came to China, I learnt Mandarin first, and then Cantonese. Does that mean I should get rid of Norwegian???
What are these people ON?? Oh, I know what. A total power trip.
But it won’t work. Cantonese people in Guangdong will, if anything, crank up the Canto. The more stations that get shut down, the more they will speak their wonderful, ancient but always fresh, vibrant and totally cool language.
For that’s what those fuckers up north have against Cantonese, apart from the fact that it irks them so that they can’t understand it and therefore won’t know if someone is plotting against them, isn’t it.
Cantonese is cool and happening; something Mandarin hasn’t been since 1949.
After having been anti everything in my youth and after “careful consideration” (no, not Hong Kong government speak for “glancing at a piece of paper, then chucking it”) I have come to think that nuclear power isn’t so bad. At least not compared to no electricity or electricity powered by coal.
Then again, when an atomic reactor is based on the mainland, a place where for example 40 companies can get together and decide to start manufacturing powdered baby milk without an ounce of nutrition - well, then I don’t embrace the idea of nuclear with the required amount of enthusiasm.
And now there has been an “incident” in Daya Bay, our nuclear neighbour 50 kilometres from Hong Kong; an incident of which no-one knows the severity. No one except the mainland authorities and CLP, that is. So, bearing in mind the impressive track record of openness in these two entities (we still remember CLP’s effort to permanently ruin Pui O beach by laying a cable to Cheung Chau a few years ago: The notification of that was an A5 size piece of paper sello-taped to a telephone pole on the far end of the beach) I think we should be thankful to be told of it not even one month after it happened.
But, as both the trustworthy mainland authorities and CLP can assure us: It’s nothing! A trifle. Not worth mentioning - that’s why nobody’s mentioned it. Nothing, just something about an improperly sealed fuel rod and an “insignificant” increase in radiation … and then there was the tiny matter of whether said rod was manufactured in France or on the mainland. Shall I venture a guess?
Between May 23rd and today, they are still talking about a “likely cause.” Does that mean they haven’t investigated it, hoping nobody would notice? One can speculate. And one will speculate. And maybe there will be the sacking of a low-ranking official and some full-page adverts from China Light and Power-Power in local newspapers showing shiny children playing in a meadow with some cows looking fondly on: “CLP Power: Openness. Progress. Power. Light. Future. Care. Family. And You. Because You Deserve It.”
That’s my guess. And being an optimist and with only 20 years of studying the Chinese government, I’d say we should, as always, shut up and keep making money. Like Mao said during the days when China didn’t even have a billion people: “We can afford to lose 400 million.”
Heh! Interesting. Remember the Sichuan earthquake? I know, there have been so many disasters after that, so nowadays the two words only appear together in connection with “things that happened in 2008.”
I remember my shock and nausea at the time, and how I even donated money. I thought I’d better give it to a charity I already support by autopay, World Vision. (How I regretted it when I realised they are a Christian organisation, but never mind - each year I get a report on how well “my” kids are doing and how they both go to school, etc. Seems that WV don’t preach christianity but actually act it.) So, all is well there - and then I read just a few weeks ago about the all the money pouring into Sichuan at the time, helping everyone … except it didn’t. No, the central government took it to use it as it saw fit.
In the quake-hit towns, thousands of people are still living in “makeshift homes,” waiting for meagre handouts. No surprise there, really.
The million or so people displaced to make way for the Three Gorges are also still waiting; the fantastical sums set aside by the government for that particular group’s seamless shift to a new and better life having mostly ended up in local cadres’ pockets.
So when the Qinghai earthquake happened, I thought: Bugger it. I’m not paying for some beer-bellied bastard’s new house and four-wheel drive. Yep, that’s what I thought, and I’m standing by it. And I’m not giving a penny to the poor starving millions in Africa either, famine, flood and drought or no.
For if not even our trusted, caring and sharing central government can find it in their hearts to share the wealth with their own put-upon masses, how can we expect the regimes of Sierra Leone, Somalia and Chad or whatever, to even think of doing the right thing?
An article in this week’s Sunday Morning Times proved me right. In her book War Games, The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Linda Polman says that instead of helping people by our endless donations (and through supporting the steady stream of celebrities being photographed in stylish safari gear, holding black infants and shedding a tear) - our need to massage our completely irrational bad conscience is causing us whiteys to actually increase the bloodshed and misery in those countries.
“Humanitarian Aid” has become a huge business and milking-cow for greedy and unscrupulous Mickey Mouse-regimes all over the world. In for example Sierra Leone, according to the book, “the 2001 announcement that [the country] had once again been named the world’s poorest country was the occasion for a festive gathering in Freetown.”
It goes on to show that the big NGO donors never actually (dare to) check out what the donations go to - like Hong Kong government departments they know that they must show that money is being spent on no matter what, to be eligible for an even bigger handout next time.
So it’s actually in those countries’ leaders interest that the population keeps being poor and frequently massacred; if no bloodshed and devastation, no aid - therefore no income to prop up their armies.
If you look at the amount of money well-meaning westerners have spent on aid to for example Africa since let’s say 1970, (all right, I don’t have the exact number) you’d think that many of those countries would now be up and running with enough for everyone. Instead it seems most of the countries are sinking deeper into misery, corruption, war and lack of basic essentials.
Meanwhile western countries like Britain are still donating huge sums of money every year to China, the world’s now second largest economy. Or third - whatever: If they’re doing so fantastically well, why do they still insist on receiving handouts?
This misplaced bad conscience for something that some people’s great-great grandfathers did when they didn’t know any better, has got to give way to realism. Pouring money into so-called third world countries obviously isn’t working. If it was, they wouldn’t be third world anymore.
It’s time we stopped patronising adults around the world by thinking only we know how to take care of them. We don’t. It’s not working. This relying on handouts is actually keeping people in servitude. It’s like communism; when everyone gets paid the same no matter if they’re working or not, it creates an entitlement-minded society which, again, for example China, only snapped out of when the country turned to raw capitalism.
The Chinese people have done quite well for themselves after they were forced to stop relying on the government to take care of them. Surely other countries can do the same. All the countries in Europe have at one stage been desperately poor. Only those countries’ inhabitants’ hard work and insistence on a better, more democratic leadership have brought them to where they are today.
By stopping the handouts, awful a it may seem for our vulnerable consciences, we could actually be forcing a lot of people through what may at first seem to be callousness, to take care of themselves.
Guangzhou has been my favourite big city in China for years, certainly after the government finished the destruction of Beijiing in the name of the sacred olympics.
Two weeks ago I was there again, probably for the 100th time, strolling around the insanely beautiful neighbourhoods just north of the Pearl River, with their warrens of no-car streets, washing hanging out to dry, bougainvillea and unique “qi lou” (riding house) architecture. Two- floor houses in village style alleys right in the middle of a huge, mega-huge metropolis - where else can you find that? In China, I mean? Nowadays? Even two weeks ago everything was as it’s always been and Chinese New Year was finally over so all the people had returned, the myriad shops re-open for business in a big way.
I’ve sung the praises of Guangzhou before more than once in this forum, and was really looking forward to taking some important clients there this weekend.
I’m so naive! What only two weeks ago was beautiful Guangzhou at its finest is now: The biggest construction site on the planet. It started with the taxi stand right outside GZ East Station; it is no more. Now you have to walk 500 meters from the station to get a taxi because a large shopping mall is being built right outside the station. Yeah, when people get off the train they no longer will want to get a taxi, what they want to do is go shopping. With their large suitcases.
I should have known…
It got worse when I hit my favourite place on earth, the crazy wildness of tiny streets where only bicycles and hand-pulled trollies can go. Every house is now covered in tarpaulin and scaffolding to make it into this:
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This house was one of the few that had kept the old doors and windows; most of them now had metal doors and windows with more metal bars than a high security prison.
This is obviously set in motion by the government; not that many house owners can have decided to turn their gaff into Alcatraz in one week. This can only mean one thing: Guangzhou is being spruced up for the ASIAN GAMES.
We hurried away from the city to find some respite in beautiful Yunfu two hours’ bus ride away. Since my clients had to get the 4.56 train back to Hong Kong today (we already had the tickets seeing my clients were flying out of Hong Kong early tomorrow morning) I thought leaving Yunfu at 12.30 would give us heaps of time. Get there 2.30, get the train at 4.56, oodles of time!
We hadn’t reckoned with the Asian Games. What only the day before had been a two hour bus trip now took three and a half hours because the road had turned into a nightmare with traffic jams starting about 40 kilometers outside Guangzhou proper and spreading all over the city - because they are making flower beds for the games.
Remember flower beds? Those which in the case of the Beijing Olympics caused people’s houses to be knocked down right up to the eve of the event to make way for flower beds so foreigners could look at “beautiful” flowers spelling out “Harmonious Beijing” and “China rules the world,” and whose incessant need for water meant that people in the surrounding provinces would have none?
That’s the one.
It seems the Chinese authorities will spare their citizens no end of inconvenience for six or seven months, to accommodate a two week (or whatever) event. It took that particular bus 35 minutes to even reach the bus station from what would have been a two minute walk if we’d been allowed off the bus.
As it was, we missed the 4.56 train by about an hour and a half (even if we had got there on time, the walk from the new, now distant taxi stand to the train station would have killed our schedule completely) and I had to buy new tickets as they wouldn’t transfer the 4.56 ones to the 6.15 train.
It is therefore with a heavy heart I have to tell you this: Don’t go to Guangzhou for about seven months. It’s not worth it to be sitting in a bus, taxi or anything for two hours to travel 15 kilometers. And as for those beautiful old houses and winding old streets - I was so naive fearing they would one day be razed to the ground to make way for highways and shopping malls. Now they’re being preserved to look like some kind of super-security morgues. Tiles on the outside, tiles on the inside, covered in metal bars and with every scrap of history peeled off with industrial-strength history-removing acid.
And again it’s a bloody sports fair that’s the culprit. I’ve said it before: Sports kill. Goodbye, dear Guangzhou, you were so good while you lasted.
So I was so happy on Sunday, right? The dense fog had finally left the beach and there was some kind of sun in the sky. So what if it was a bit misty?
Then I received this email yesterday forwarded from Anthony Hedley, chief of … air or something, at the something university. You know.
“This is a north / easterly air mass impact on Hong Kong’s air quality following several days of intense exposures to mainly HK and PRD pollutants.The air movement appears to have brought in fine particles ( as they register in the PM10 meters) but pushed local pollutants away presumably in a westerly direction.
The last few days will predictably have had a major impact on local health; many of those who have not so far become sick will have
sustained significant injury and now have to contend with a new intense insult to cardiopulmonary systems. Unfortunately there is very little one can do for health protection apart from (i) avoidance of lifestyle risks such as tobacco smoke and low antioxidant diet
(ii) avoidance of increased exposure through vigorous exercise (iii) indoors may be marginally safer and certainly roadside exposures potentially lethal for some.”
Damn! I thought the picture above of three fishermen fishing for three centimetre long fish was a bit, well, picturesque. Then it turns out they’re not only fishing out the last of the lead-ridden future fish from a toxic soup, they’re also sitting around in a toxic soup!
Disappointed? Not half! Then I read in the paper today that the particles, crashing through the pollution index meter at a hefty 500 (with 100 being the limit for people (with lungs) to go outside or whatever) are in fact a sand storm from northern China.
Yes, because the Chinese want to emulate the Americans in everything but everything, they have now chopped down what few trees they had left in the north, to accommodate more and more cows for their burgers and because of some wild notion that milk is a health drink. Chopping down trees leads to desertification (of course this has been going on since probably before the US was even a running dog lackey revisionist enemy of China’s) which leads to longer, harder winters and hotter summers with less harvest, less grass for the hungry cows one must assume, but who cares; they can always import wheat and other cow-feed from other countries, countries willing to chop down their rain forests to keep China and the world in food and furniture.
And so it goes on.
Nobody is willing to give up anything and why should we? We’re the 21st centurions! We have the moral right to everything that exists! Soon it’ll be gone, but who cares? I won’t be around and what happens to my nieces and nephews and my friends’ children - well. Not really my concern.
Still, so much better than fog!
Whew, that didn’t half take long! But here it is: Guangdong province from the inside:
Come with, come with. You won’t regret it.
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