Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Tag: China

  • China Has a Shadow Government?

    By now, most people have heard about the recent tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo. As expected, the survivors who were attacked by the tiger have retained legal counsel. I was reading the biography of their attorney, Mark Geragos, and something stood out.

    In February of this year, Mark successfully won dismissal of all felony charges, including kidnapping and torture, for his client, Hung Bao Zhong, the recognized exiled leader of the shadow government of China, who has an estimated 38 million followers worldwide.

    How is it possible that someone is the exiled leader of the shadow government of China and I have never heard of him? I’ve heard of the Dalai Lama, but not Hung Bao Zhong. After some guessing, I tracked down his biography on Wikipedia, where he is listed as Zhang Hongbao. Political threat? Possibly. Leader of the shadow government? Not likely.

  • Chinese Adoption Blog

    The New York Times has a Relative Choices blog that focuses on adoption and the American family. One of their bloggers is Jeff Gammage who writes about the experiences of his two daughters, both of whom were adopted from China. He recently wrote about the Chinese language and culture classes that his daughter attends, and he asks whether these classes are enough or too much.

    I think this issue is pondered by all Chinese-American parents and not just those parents with adopted Chinese children. How “Chinese” do we want our children to be? Regardless of whether we send them to Chinese school, make them take erhu lessons, or learn Chinese kungfu, our Chinese-American children will never have an identical experience as those children raised in China. And that is okay.

  • Blame China

    Bloomberg.com: Chinese-Made Cribs Recalled After Three Children Die. The maker of Graco and Simplicity cribs recalled 1 million Chinese-made cribs after three children died.

    Another China scandal right? Or so the headlines would lead you to believe. However, if you delve deeper into the news story, it reports that “[t]he problem with the recalled cribs was caused in part by design flaws.” I’m guessing that the design work was the crib was done in America, not China. Why mention that the cribs were Chinese-made? It fits into the current hysteria around shoddily-manufactured Chinese goods.

    That’s not reporting. That’s propaganda. American-Designed Cribs Recalled After Three Children Die should have been the headline.

  • The Las Vegas of China

    New York Times: BiggerThanLasVegas?That’s Macao’s Bet. Las Vegas’s days as the capital of excess may be numbered. The $2.4 billion Venetian Macao Resort, scheduled to open here Tuesday, will give Sin City more than a run for its money.

    My favorite line from the article? “But Macao’s average gambler is still a day-tripper from Hong Kong or nearby Chinese cities in the Pearl River delta. These visitors are so frugal that they often bring their own food and do not rent hotel rooms.” 🙂

  • Tit-for-Tat

    Associated Press: China Suspends Some U.S. Meat Imports. China has suspended imports of chicken feet, pig ears and other animal products from seven U.S. companies, including the world’s largest meat processor, in an apparent attempt to turn the tables on American complaints about tainted products from China.

    This is great news! You know China is meticulously scrutinizing every shipment of American food products. To their credit, they discovered American meat products contaminated with salmonella, anti-parasite drugs and food additives. This is one instance where when governments play tit-for-tat, the people actually benefit. I hope they continue scrutinizing each other’s food products. It only means safer foods for the rest of us.

  • Final Score: 79-29

    Reuters: China Calls Official’s Execution a Warning Siren. China on Wednesday hailed the swift execution of the nation’s former drug safety chief as a warning to corrupt officials while detailing a web of graft that thrived for years without punishment.

    If China’s food and drug safety problem is truly limited to a handful of corrupt officials, then the execution of Zheng Xiaoyu should represent a good first step in a quick clean-up process. However, if the problem is cultural or institutional, then this execution was meaningless and will not solve the larger problem confronting China.

    As China has demonstrated, they can try, convict and execute a government official in a matter of months with chilling efficiency. However, rooting out the culture of corruption that pervades all aspects of society will be a more difficult task and not a task that can be resolved in months. It demands checks-and-balances, eternal vigilence, and institutional commitment to audit, probe and investigate corruption at all levels—high and low. And, it cannot be done on the cheap.

    China may or may not be aware that it now must play to two different audiences—the domestic and the international. In previous decades, China could afford to act alone domestically without regard to international pressure or perception. However, that is no longer the case now. If you sell to the American consumer, you must act in a manner that doesn’t breach the trust and goodwill you have earned with the American public. Because when circumstances reach the tipping point, all that trust and goodwill can evaporate suddenly. And, China will have to work for years, if not decades, to rebuild that trust.

    Earlier this week, I took a stroll down the street and counted cars. I tallied the American cars on one hand, and the foreign cars on another. The final score? 79 to 29. That’s 79 foreign cars to 29 domestic cars. In truth, I was expecting more of a 50-50 ratio instead of the lopsided margin. This told me why the Detroit auto makers are all struggling. If the American public has not forgiven Detroit for its past sins of pumping out poorly manufactured automobiles, what chance does China have?

  • Public or Private?

    New York Times: China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves. China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country’s exports come under greater scrutiny overseas.

    No question. China has been getting pounded by the press as of late for all kinds of safety lapses. Unfortunately, we no longer live in an era where environmental, health and safety problems in China are “their” problems. Because we breathe the same air and use the same manufactured products, “their” problem is “our” problem as well.

    So far, our government does not have a solution to this crisis and neither does the Chinese government. While the politicians can pontificate and legislate all they want, ultimately this will boil down to an enforcement issue. How can we “trust but verify” that Made in China products are safe?

    The answer will probably come from the private sector. Whichever company can step into the void by offering a solution to test the safety of Chinese products can act as a gatekeeper to all of China’s imports—and collect a treasure in tolls along the way. The cost of testing will be paid by Chinese manufacturers who must earn the trust of the world market now that the safety of their products is tainted. So, who will it be?

  • Giving Chinese Food a Bad Name

    Los Angeles Times: China speaks out on food safety. Clearly annoyed by the bad press China has been getting, officials Thursday also denounced media reports that they said exaggerated the nation’s flaws and overlooked the fact that more than 99% of Chinese food exports to the United States in the last three years had met quality standards.

    The problem with government-based or corporate-based logic in such a situation is that is is not consumer-based. Do I want to eat food with a 1% chance of being tainted? No. Do I want to eat food with a 0.1% of being tainted? No. I want my food to be safe and fit for human consumption. Because when our food supply is tainted with bacteria, pollution or unsafe chemical additives, people can get severely ill and die. And, there’s no upside to that.

    Besides, food safety is a two-way street. As the U.S. beef industry has witnessed, whenever a case of mad cow disease is found in American livestock, no one wants to import our beef. You can pull out all the statistics you want, but it’s a hard sell.

  • Left Behind

    Los Angeles Times: Taishan’s U.S. Well Runs Dry. Down a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village.

    The LA Times ran an interesting article about Toisan (Taishan) that deals with the nexus between the Overseas Chinese and those left behind. I remember my first visit to the place where my ancestors came from. In my case, it was a village in Xinhui, instead of Taishan. My first thought was that I should be deeply grateful that those that came before me had left the Chinese countryside long ago. Leaving your ancestral home is never an easy decision. Fortunately, all the difficult decisions and heavy lifting were done by others.

    For recent immigrants, if you still have a brother or sister in China, what will become of them or their offspring. In 50 years, when you become a grandparent, what impressions will your grandchildren have when they go to China and visit their granduncle or grandaunt.

  • Rogue in Vogue

    New York Times: An Export Boom Suddenly Facing a Quality Crisis. Hoping to investigate why melamine contaminated so much pet food, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration spent two weeks in China this month. […] After United States investigators left, China issued a statement asking the United States not to punish other exporters of food ingredients for the misdeeds of a few rogue companies, and not to let this become a trade quarrel.

    Somehow I am not convinced that only a few “rogue” companies were at fault. Nor was I convinced that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the work of a few “rogue” soldiers. In both situations, the problem was that the culture and the environment permitted, and perhaps encouraged, such misdeeds to occur.

    Now, what of this trade quarrel? The danger for all parties involved in the Chinese export trade isn’t a trade quarrel. Trade disputes are problems between nations that inevitably get resolved after protracted negotiations and political posturing. No, the real problem here is that not a quarrel with the U.S. government, but with the U.S. public. How do you resolve a quarrel with consumers who refuse to purchase your products? This is the type of situation that get ugly fast and not just for Chinese exporters.

    How will American importers of Chinese products react? Knowing that the products you import are basically unregulated by the Chinese government, what steps must you take to ensure the safety of your own merchandise? Because all the dollars and cents you are saving by importing from China can vanish in a flash when your product sickens or kills someone. Punitive damages anyone?