China's Ticking Time Bomb to Widespread Unrest

China has many serious problems threatening its future prosperity and strength. Among them are a virtual absence of social benefits for migrant workers, and dangerous exposure to toxic materials of all kinds for both workers and ordinary citizens. The article excerpted below discusses two of these many problems:

The root of the problem is China's hukou system of household registration. Migrant workers aren't considered residents of the cities where they live, which means they aren't entitled to health care, pensions, housing subsidies or education for their children. To educate their children, migrant workers either have to find the money to pay for schooling in the cities where they work or send their children back to the rural areas where they officially still live. With migrant workers earning so little -- the average is about $250 a month -- sending children back home is often the only option.

The hukou system is nothing new, so why the increase in protests now? Three reasons, I think. First, the contrast between the country's newly wealthy and this vast migrant underclass has fed anger at the unfairness of the system. Second, because China's growth has produced labor shortages in many parts of eastern, export-oriented China and because Beijing has pushed growth into lagging western provinces, migrant workers have more bargaining power. They can find work closer to home if they don't like the way they're treated in the traditional fast-growth provinces. Third, China's increasing inflation rate has come down particularly hard on the country's poorest residents. The annual overall inflation rate was 5.5% in May, but food inflation is running at well over 10% annually. If you make just $250 a month -- and remember that's the average, so some migrant workers make even less -- and spend 35% of your family budget on food, then 10% food inflation is pinning you to the wall....

...China is the world's largest consumer of lead. National data are sketchy, but a 2006 review of the existing data suggests that one-third of Chinese children suffer from elevated blood-lead levels. Part of the problem is enforcement -- officials are reluctant to clamp down on businesses that provide jobs. But national environmental standards are also woefully inadequate. Based on U.S. regulations, lead levels of 40 micrograms per deciliter of blood are poisonous for adults. Chinese rules call 400 micrograms per deciliter, a common reading for lead workers, "moderately elevated."

Tightening and enforcing national standards would require closing marginal factories, mandating expensive environmental upgrades for every company that works with lead -- including the country's increasingly large battery industry -- and providing compensation and treatment to affected workers. All that would disrupt local economies and be incredibly expensive. It's easier to treat each outbreak of the national problem as a local event and address it with force and limited payments. _money.msn

Chronic lead toxicity among workers, children, and ordinary citizens is destructive enough. But even worse poisons and poisonings afflict various parts of the Chinese population. And authorities appear extremely hesitant to do anything about them, for fear of upsetting the current run of prosperity in high places.

China's leaders are deluding themselves if they think they can keep China within a bubble of their own making and under their complete control. People and ideas cross freely over the Chinese border on a daily basis, and each person and idea represents a potential threat to the autocratic system of the CCP. But stopping the relative free flow of ideas and people would mean going back to the dismal age of Mao and the cultural revolution of death and fanatical ideology out of control.

The situation is intrinsically unstable. Sooner or later, something has to give.

Maybe Instead of Killing Them All, We Should Send Them to China?

US law schools are pumping out new graduates like a torrent of toxic waste. Elie Mystal thinks that Obama should create an "Americorps" for law graduates. But Al Fin legal scholars think the fallout from the US lawyer glut has become so bad for the US economy and US society, that extreme measures are called for.

No, Al Fin law scholars don't favour the Shakespearean solution of "first kill all the lawyers!" Instead, these legal gurus recommend sending all US law school graduates to China to act as bank examiners, construction inspectors, labour union organisers, environmental overseers, and political activists. It is time to restore international equilibrium! The program should run for roughly 30 years, after which we can send US law graduates to China to help sweep up -- clean up the mess their predecessors have made. By then, the US should have recovered from its own lawyer-instigated collapse, and be ready to provide foreign aid to a much-diminished China.

From: The Best Colleges

Excess attorneys are toxic to any society, but particularly to societies which have no means by which to dispose of the excess. Automatic deportation of US law graduates to China upon graduation would solve a whole host of problems, according to the legal sages of Al Fin.

The Ghost Country that Poisons the World

Prevailing winds across the Pacific are pushing thousands of tons of other contaminants—including mercury, sulfates, ozone, black carbon, and desert dust—over the ocean each year. Some of this atmospheric junk settles into the cold waters of the North Pacific, but much of it eventually merges with the global air pollution pool that circumnavigates the planet. _Discover

China's growth is nothing more than a credit bubble on steroids. Cities are vacant, yet China keeps building, and building and building. _Mish_Globaleconomicanalysis

China and Environs
The amount of toxins that China dumps into its water, soil, and air, is astounding. If China were only poisoning herself -- in the frantic attempt to over-build its ghost infrastructure to nowhere -- the rest of the world could only look on in horror. But since the effects of Ghost China's poisonous activity oozes out to affect many other nations, we need to take a closer look.

These contaminants are implicated in a long list of health problems, including neurodegenerative disease, cancer, emphysema, and perhaps even pandemics like avian flu. And when wind and weather conditions are right, they reach North America within days. Dust, ozone, and carbon can accumulate in valleys and basins, and mercury can be pulled to earth through atmospheric sinks that deposit it across large swaths of land.

...China in particular stands out because of its sudden role as the world’s factory, its enormous population, and the mass migration of that population to urban centers; 350 million people, equivalent to the entire U.S. population, will be moving to its cities over the next 10 years. China now emits more mercury than the United States, India, and Europe combined. “What’s different about China is the scale and speed of pollution and environmental degradation,” Turner says. “It’s like nothing the world has ever seen.”

Development there is racing far ahead of environmental regulation. “Standards in the United States have gotten tighter because we’ve learned that ever-lower levels of air pollution affect health, especially in babies and the elderly,” Jaffe says. As pollutants coming from Asia increase, though, it becomes harder to meet the stricter standards that our new laws impose.

...China’s smog-filled cities are ringed with heavy industry, metal smelters, and coal-fired power plants, all crucial to that fast-growing economy even as they spew tons of carbon, metals, gases, and soot into the air. _Much more at Discover

While China is certainly spewing more than its share of CO2, we should be much more concerned about the real pollutants gushing from China's over-revved production machine. Corrupt government officials are routinely bribed to look the other way. China's people suffer, but so do others who live farther from the source.

Why does a nation full of ghost cities, shopping malls, highways, and skyscrapers continue to push all-out for ever greater construction and production? It is likely that China's export markets will continue to shrink over time -- unless the US jettisons the Obama regime and re-institutes the rules of opportunity which made the US economy the driver of world prosperity.

The true state of affairs is China's banks are insolvent. China is building units for which there is little demand and few can afford. China will have to print money to pay for all of this malinvestment. The idea the Yuan is undervalued fails to take into consideration any of this. _Mish

The overbuilding of a toxic infrastructure by Ghost China. Just one of many important problems which the middle kingdom is thrusting upon the rest of the world.

More on China's ghost cities (via Mish)