Comments on: The price of growth in China

By: james

james — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:23:29 +0000

If this is such an issue, why did the Kyoto treaty exclude China from the restrictions faced by European countries?

By: Richard Bellamy

Richard Bellamy — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:35:03 +0000

“I had “home grown” (one word) instead of “native” in my original post, and the board wouldn’t let me post because of questionable content – odd, huh?” Many filters filter out the word “socialist” because it contains the name of pharma-spammer “cialis” in it. It took me a while to figure out why my political arguments were being filtered out for questionable content.

By: abb1

abb1 — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 15:08:26 +0000

Well, the ILO, of course, has no power. And their standards are only recommendations. What the ILO can do is to provide assistance to someone who does have real power, like WTO. I agree that it’s not likely to happen without a major politician making a crusade out of it. I thought Howard Dean came kinda close to making it one of his rallying points last year when he was flying high in the polls.

By: maureen

maureen — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:32:20 +0000

Abb1: we already have international labour standards – have had for decades. And guess which two sets of people both studiously ignore their existence and argue vehemently against them? That’s right – major economic players and politicians! On its record, the WTO seems an unlikely enforcer. How about a bit more support, a bigger budget for the International Labour Organisation? How about voters – in countries which have an element of democracy – questioning their potential leaders on this apect of their responsibility?

By: self

self — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 04:09:23 +0000

Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley offered some insights on this issue recently. http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20040901-wed.html#anchor2 His take is that while energy demand accompanied by high coal and steel prices are bringing wealth to Northern China, the labor surplus is keeping wages down and encouraging substitution of labor for capital. This results in lack of scale economies and thus heavy pollution coking factories. Modernization would cause unemployment pressure so local governments and their citizens are willing to tolerate the environmental costs. Xie opines that with all costs included (congestion, pollution, highway damage, etc.) there is probably negative value added. He also notes that the export sector may be too capital intensive, reducing gains to labor. Additionally, the service linkage to Beijing is a drain from other surrounding areas, discouraging infrastructure investment. It looks as though it will only get worse in the near future.

By: Dr_Funk

Dr_Funk — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:58:53 +0000

Man, it would be so easy to throw off a joke about MSG poisoning Chinese people for a change. But I will resist the urge. This kind of thing was part and parcel of what happened in the West during our rather painful transition to an industrialized society (our meaning westerners, not meaning me personally being there during the Industrial revolution). But it would be rather cheap of us to condemn the Chinese…they merely want the kind of life that most people in the West can have without much effort. The problem is to find ways to do where the Chinese can have the cake (industrial development) and eat it too (without having this kind of environmental devastation).

By: bza

bza — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:11:52 +0000

cure: “I had “home grown” (one word) instead of “native” in my original post, and the board wouldn’t let me post because of questionable content – odd, huh?” It was probably tagged as “drug-related” content.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:13:13 +0000

I think it’s pretty irrelevant what the company produced or who owned it. We have a pretty good indication of Chinese environmental conditions and environmental law there in the story. The story isn’t really about the MSG company per se.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 19:49:40 +0000

Not necessarily government policies. International environmental and labor standards (including minimum wage and the right to form a union) is, obviously a necessity. But there is no need for direct government involvement, some external organization (like WTO) should be able to monitor (by inspecting the factories) and enforce (by penalizing the offenders).

By: Rick Broadside

Rick Broadside — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:46:24 +0000

The problem with being a manufacturer in the US is that short term survival requires playing the China card (getting at least some things made there etc.)The only way to end this race to the bottom is internationally agreed upon government policies. Something we are not about to do with the current administration.

By: cure

cure — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:30:51 +0000

Zizka, another argument made by us free-traders is that the most polluting companies in a third world nation tend to be local companies, not MNCs. You’ll note the factory in question was making MSG, not Doritos. While MNCs tend to pay less money in the third world than they do in the first world, their wages and working conditions tend to be better than native third world countries; PR in their home nation, and a better k-l ratio than most third-world domestics explains this. (As an aside, I had “home grown” (one word) instead of “native” in my original post, and the board wouldn’t let me post because of questionable content – odd, huh?)

By: Lynne

Lynne — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:14:23 +0000

The blowback to the USA of the partnership between corporate and government aristocrats and Chinese communist aristocrats is going to be VERY BAD.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 16:04:51 +0000

During discussions of trade agreements, it was predicted that free trade would allow polluters to move away from environmental protection laws. That possibility is now being used as a threat by industry when talking to state legislatures. There are also provisions in free trade agreements penalizing state and local attempts to exclude profucts produced by environmentally-destructive methods. The right-wing free-trader argument is that pollution is a a tradeoff which the third world should be free to accept. And that “the third world t=cannot afford the luxury of environmentalism”, as if environmentalism was all about pretty photographs and such. The right-wing free-traders also normally are hard-line on government “takings”, but here the government decision involved the “taking” of a villages’ health and part of its livelihood. The Chinese profitting here are different individuals than the ones suffering from the pollution. We’re not dealing with the unanimous collective solidarity of the People of the Third World or People of China. It’s the liberal free-traders who have the hardest questions to answer. During the freetrade debate questions of this kind were simply brushed aside and ignored (well, some laughable nugatory provisions were written into the law). In short, knowing what we know about the government of China and the workings of free trade, we should not be surprised by this and should not object either if we’re free traders. After all, the goat-herders chose to live downstream from the factory; to them it was a good choice, and the reason it seems that way to them is that they are not competitive on the market. They need to improve their skills and invest in some other enterprise.