Searching for Impurity – Part 3/3

May 23, 2012

On page 23, Worst Polluted.org reported, “Almost every country in the world has some kind of industrial estate, with Vietnam and Sri Lanka estimated to each have 50 to 60 industrial areas, and India and China reaching hundreds of industrial clusters…”

On page 32, the report said, “Studies in China have found that certain crops, such as corn, are particularly susceptible to lead accumulation when grown in close proximity to smelters.”

There was also a list of four countries at the top of page 32 on regions most impacted by lead pollution and lead smelting. China was in last place with seven sites impacting 158,100 people. The other three countries/areas totaled more than 1.8 million people impacted by this type of pollution.

On page 43, there was a picture of a lead-zinc mining facility in China.

On page 59, there was a picture of a chemical manufacturing plant in China.

That was it. In seventy-six pages, China was only mentioned five times. What a disappointment. I was expecting so much more considering the amount of criticism heaped on China by its enemies and critics.

One city in China was listed as the most polluted in the world in 2006. I wondered why it didn’t make the list for 2011.

Linfen, China is situated in China’s southern Shanxi province along the banks of the Fen River.  In 2010, this city had a population of about 4.3 million inhabitants.

Then in 2007, Times Magazine said that China was home to 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities, and said, “Only 1% of China’s 560 million urban residents breathe air that is deemed safe by European Union standards.”

However, it was tragic to learn that China is now leading the clean economy race. The Chinese government is “going for the gold” and “taking this challenge much more seriously than others … doing things differently, making longer-term, sustained commitments that are much larger,” wrote Andrew Winston in the Harvard Business Review. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]

China is investing about US$75 to $100 billion EACH year in clean energy for the 10 years between 2010 and 2020, according to the “country’s ten-year plan that made some jaws drop”. [ Harvard Business Review “China Leads the Clean Economy Race” Sept. 23, 2010 ]

China retained the top spot in 2010 as the world’s leading investor in low-carbon energy technology, according to a report by the US Pew Environment Group, which wrote that China’s “ascendance has been steady and steep … With aggressive clean energy targets and clear ambition to dominate clean energy manufacturing and power generation, China is rapidly moving ahead of the rest of the world.” [ Pew Environment Group report “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race 2010?”; BBC News “China tops global clean energy table” March 29, 2011 ]

On an end note, Worst Polluted.org mentioned the United States three times, Canada once and India twenty-three times. I didn’t check for any other countries on this report. As I finished posting this series, I realized that I could not score any points with China’s enemies and critics, since it was a country that many in the West love to hate. In addition, I suspect India is mostly ignored by these same people because it was a Western style democracy.

Return to Searching for Impurity – Part 2 or start with Part 1

For more on the topic of pollution, see The cause of China’s pollution or Contaminated Water and Soil is a Global Problem

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Searching for Impurity – Part 2/3

May 22, 2012

Desperate to prove China’s enemies and critics right, I decided to search Google for a bigger list, which led me to Forbes.com where I learned that “all cities are positioned against New York, the base city with an index score of 100. For the Health and Sanitation Rankings, the index scores range from the worst on the list—Baku, Azerbaijan, with a score of 27.6—to the best on the list—Calgary, Canada, with a score of 131.7.”

Forbes used the Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Health and Sanitation Rankings. As part of their 2007 Quality of Life Report, they ranked 215 cities worldwide based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

In last place, number 25, was Port Harcourt in Nigeria. I then crawled through the list one page at a time to find cities in China and there were none. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself and click on the Forbes link and take a trip through the world’s 25 dirtiest cities in pictures.

Knowing China’s critics and bashers would be angry and disappointed and probably call me stupid, a liar and a China lover, I dug deeper struggling to find polluted cities in China that made the list—any valid list.

In September 2011, The Guardian in the UK reported, “Cities in Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia are among the worst on the planet for air pollution, while those in the US and Canada are among the best.”

China wasn’t mentioned. I was crushed.

Still desperate to find dirt and soot on China to satisfy its critics and enemies so they could bash her more, I turned to Worst Polluted.org, which used data collected over a three-year period from thousands of toxic hotspots. I then discovered that this site only listed the world’s top ten toxic pollution problems for 2011—not the worst cities. However, I downloaded the seventy-six page pdf document anyway and searched for any mention of pollution in “China”.

It looked like I may have hit pay dirt, or should I say toxic pollution, and started to copy and paste every sentence on those 76 pages that mentioned China.

Continued on May 20, 2012 in Searching for Impurity – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Searching for Impurity – Part 1/3

May 21, 2012

My goal with this post was to prove China’s critics and enemies were correct when they claim China is a horrible place to live and due to pollution—the worst country in the world.

I failed. Sorry guys. I should have only focused on air pollution and the rivers where most of China’s industries are located and stayed away from the global comparison lists.

After having read so much about “horrible” China due to its pollution, I decided to see how many of its cities made the top ten lists and was shocked to discover none made the list in 2011.

Time Magazine has a Blog called Ecocentric, and it is about all things green. Here’s that list of the world’s top-ten most polluted cities for 2011.

1. Ahwaz, Iran

2. Ulan Bator, Mongolia

3. Sanadaj, Iran

4. Ludhiana, India

5. Quetta, Pakistan

6. Kermanshah, Iran

7. Peshawar, Pakistan

8. Gaberone, Botswana

9. Yasouj, Iran

10. Kanpor, India

Did you see China on that list?  You have no idea how disappointed I was.

Ecocentric says that all of these cities have one thing in common—they are fairly poor except for number eight in Botswana, which is considered a middle income country/city. “Residents often burn heavy, polluting fuel for heat and energy—including firewood or even dung, which can produce heavy, thick smoke. Add in old, diesel-powered cars that belch black carbon and growing population density in urban slums—plus weather conditions like Ulan Bator’s extreme cold, which worsens air pollution – and you have an ugly mess.”

But what about China? After all, there is so much attention focused on China by Western Blogs and the media about China’s pollution problems, while often ignoring the same problems in the rest of the world, one would think that with more than 800 million rural Chinese living in near poverty using coal to cook and heat their homes, the air would be a thick, black pea soup one could swim in let alone breathe.

Then I visited the top  ten list at Mibazzar.com and discovered that two cities in China’s made that list: I was overjoyed, and then I saw that the date for that list was 2007. Darn! Failed again!

Those two cities that made the list in 2007 were Linfen, China (3,000,000 people affected) and Tianying China (140,000 people affected). Wow, that wasn’t even one percent of China’s population.

Two of the cities on Mibazzar’s 2007 list were in India, one in Zambia, one in Peru, one Azerbeijan, Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and Norilsk in Russia.

Continued on May 19, 2012 in Searching for Impurity – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Return of Innovation to China – Part 2/2

May 15, 2012

Before counting how many Nobel Prizes in science have gone to Western/American scientists, it should be mentioned that “Ashkenazi Jews (European/white Jews: i.e most Jews) make up just 3% of the United States population, yet were responsible for 27% of the US science Nobel Prizes and 25% of the Turing Awards in the 20th century.”

Jeff Weintraub says, “It’s well known that overseas Chinese have often been compared to the Jews (by themselves and by others).

“Chinese and Jewish cultures are the two oldest civilizations in the world and share a lot in common. Both highly emphasize the family tie function and educational value, and although both have absorbed various exotic cultures, their central core has never changed since birth.” Source: Jews in China: Legends, History and New Peresepectives

“Moreover,” Weintraub says, “it seems like my friends were more or less correct that their Chinese diaspora constitutes the ‘Jews of Asia.’ From Hanoi to Bangkok to Jakarta and beyond, the merchant classes are overwhelmingly peopled with well-educated ethnic Chinese whose connections to the homeland and each other — the ‘Bamboo Network’ — constitute a huge business advantage. They are also, like the Jews, periodically expelled (from Vietnam), repressed (under Indonesia’s Suharto) and rioted against (in Malaysia, Thailand and really everywhere else). Like Jews, they are fiercely proud of their heritage, assimilating somewhat while maintaining temples that assert identity.”

In addition, China’s government has thrown billions in recent years into building a top-notch research establishment, hoping to keep its best scientists working here and lure back those who are abroad. Moreover, there are more foreign students from China attending US universities than from any other country—more than 150,000 annually spending over $4 billion for their US educations, and those students first went to school in China and then came to the US as a college student. In fact, China’s next president has a daughter attending Harvard. When these students return to China with their university degrees, they will be bringing the innovative, critical thinking, problems solving skills home with them.

One example of the results of this investment in “top-notch research” may be seen in a recent breakthrough in carbon nanotube-based cables technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Source: Science Daily

To the hardcore skeptic demanding more evidence, in early 2012, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the world’s most prestigious research foundations, announced Tuesday that it was honoring 28 biomedical researchers who studied in the United States and then returned to their home nations. Each will receive a five-year research grant of $650,000.

Seven — more than any other nation — were from China.

“They’re incredibly energetic, extremely smart, highly productive and accomplished,” Robert Tjian, president of the institute, said of the Chinese winners in a telephone interview.” Source: New York Times

Return to The Return of Innovation to China – Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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The Return of Innovation to China – Part 1/2

May 14, 2012

The China History Forum asked, “Which dynasty was most technologically innovative?”

Of the few responses, less than 6% said the Qin and Han Dynasties. More than 70% answered the Sung/Song Dynasty and about 18% voted for the Ming Dynasty.

The Dynasties ruled by the Mongols (Yuan) and the Manchu (Qing) minorities received no votes. The Qing Dynasty (the Manchu) ruled China 1644 to 1912 and repressed the Han Chinese so that earning rank or recognition through merit, which was an element of Chinese civilization for more than two millennia, broke down possibly allowing the West, for the first time, to become more technologically advanced than China.

In fact, when the Sung Dynasty fell to the Mongol invasion led by Kublai Khan many of the innovations of the Sung renaissance were destroyed by the invaders.

Today, some critics of China often claim that the Chinese cannot innovate and that they are copycats stealing ideas and concepts from the West.

The most common reasons given are Confucianism, rote learning, and piety, which encourage obedience of authority.  However, if this were true, what explains the Chinese inventions of silk, paper, porcelain, gunpowder, the printing press, the compass, a cure for scurvy, modern ship building techniques, the multi-stage rocket, the assembly line, napalm, the stirrup, the crossbow and much more—all centuries before those innovations appeared in the West.

When challenged, the critic will often use this flawed reasoning as evidence: “How many Chinese have won the Nobel Prize?”

In fact, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 about the time of the Boxer Rebellion in China and the first Sino Japanese War—long after the innovative glory of the Sung Dynasty (960-1276 AD). The stability necessary for innovation to take place would not return to China until after Mao died in 1976.

Then thirty-four years later, in 2010, four Chinese won the Nobel Prize in Physics, and one Taiwan born Chinese was a Chemistry Prize winner.

Howard Steven Friedman, writing for the Huffington Post, reported, “”No one born in the mainland China has won the Chemistry or Physiology/Medicine until this year, and all four of the mainland China-born winners of the Physics prize (Charles K. Kao, Daniel C. Tsui, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee) received their graduate training and did their prize-winning research outside of China (three in the US, one in the UK). The one Taiwan-born Chemistry Prize winner, Yuan Tseh Lee, did his graduate work in the US…”

However, these Chinese Noble Prize winners were all raised by Chinese parents and went to school in China or Taiwan before attending colleges in the West.

Friedman then asks and answers, “So when will we see a Nobel Prize winner in science who was trained in China and did their prize-winning research in China?

“Not for a long time,” he says.

Then Friedman explains why, and it has little to do with Confucianism, rote learning or piety. He says, “Although the Chinese government has been investing in its science technology as well as luring established scientists of Chinese descent back to the mainland, it will take years to build a strong infrastructure for cutting-edge research… Delays will also be due to the typically decades-long lag between when research occurs and when an award is granted. This lag, which allows for validation of the scientific merit and importance, means that great scientific discoveries that occur now will most likely not be awarded until 10, 20 or even 40 years in the future.”

Continued on May 12, 2012 in The Return of Innovation to China – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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