This is China! BLOG

China’s Land Grab: An Outstanding Series

One of the more pleasant aspects of being back in the States during the Holiday Season has been comig across a very well-written series of China articles in the Chicago Tribune this week. The series focuses on the impact of China’s increased use of natural resources on the global environment and America’s own complicity in the cycle of “mining” natural resources, consumption and subsequent environmental degradation. The name of the series is “China’s Great Grab”.

The three-part series is a real eye-opener, in part because it’s wholistic in its view of global relationships driving the mining/consumption/degradation cycle; in part because it doesn’t let American consumers or government policy get off the hook in sucking in Chinese imports; and in part because it’s not a typical American media piece shrilly bashing China (which gets very old very quickly).

Each article in the series focuses on the mining/consumption/degradation cycle of a single natural resource: wool, wood and then oil.

Essentially, the rock-bottom prices at which Chinese in North China have been able to manufacture merino wool textile products has led to vast overgrazing that is extending the reach of the Gobi desert. Americans are snapping up cheap merino wool products like there is no tomorrow. Now, sand storms not only dog Beijing, but are also affecting weather patterns in the Northwest of the United States.

America is the largest consumer in the world of wood furniture products made in China. But China is contributing to the dramatic deforestation of the precious rain forests of Borneo and Papua New Guniea, like a plague of locusts out of the Bible. Loose controls in the forested countries in league with corrupt Southeast Asian officials and businessmen has made illegal logging the new “Blood Diamonds” of Asia: locals are not benefiting one wit from the rape of their lands. And of course, the world loses a huge carbon dioxide sink as it loses these forests, so increasing the effects of global warming.

And we all know why the US is sacrificing lives, dollars and credibility in the Mid-east: Oil. Meanwhile, China for the past five years has been quietly going round the globe developing strategic reserves of oil with governments as unsavory as those with which the US has been dealing for the past fifty years. One day, the elephant and the dragon may step on each other’s toes when it comes to vying for oil in the unstable Central Asian country of Kahzakstan.

I do hope you get a chance to check out the series. It is well worth the free sign-up procedure you have to endure to get at the articles.

William Dodson
Chicago, USA