Mutant Palm

Inhabitat tells me:

About a year ago, Sydney started a trend of turning off your lights for one hour in a show of support for protecting our environment. Soon after, London, San Francisco quickly followed suit. One year later, the organizers of Sydney’s Earth Hour feel that one city at a time doesn’t really cut it anymore. Which is why this year’s event is going global, with cities from every continent, including the US, participating in what promises to be the largest ever show of solidarity in the world on March 29th for Earth Hour.

Yknow what, this is utterly presumptuous of me, but I’m gonna speak for all of China and say we’re gonna sit this one out with the lights on. And the electric heater. Cuz people are still gonna wonder how long their power will last come March 29th. Rest of y’all can pretend to be North Korea for an hour. Some of the world is gonna wanna smoke ‘em if they got ‘em.

Or as Daniel Drezner quipped “like Benjamin Barber after a three-day coke bender in Macao.”

There are alot of things that I find disagreeable about Parag Khanna’s NYT Magazine cover story “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”, I’m gonna just pick on one line:

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged.

OK.

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was something Imperial Japan talked about while engaging in fun things like invading other countries and installing puppet governments. It was ostensibly about getting Asians out from under the thumb of the White Man, but funnily enough all the big partner “nations” in it were under the thumb of the Japanese. It may come as a surprise to Mr. Khanna, but this handy little turn of phrase he’s used is both wildly inaccurate as well as probably one of the most appalling things you could say to Chinese people.

I’m trying to think of something that shoves your foot down your throat as much as comparing the Chinese diaspora to a system that included slave labor and drug trafficking built on the ruins of invasion and atrocities, but I’m blanking at the moment. Perhaps some sort of “yo momma” joke?

Big story #1: The massive snowstorm that crippled China’s rail lines, leading to power and food shortages, loss of mobile phone communications (in poor ol’ Guizhou), at least dozens dead, and the loss of at least 32 billion RMB.

Big story #2: Tainted leukemia medication leaves Chinese patients paralyzed due to contamination.

Guess what these tragedies share in common?

The heavy hand of government fiat! Yes, the power shortages are in no small way due to the fact the government capped the price of power in a short-sighted maneuver so consumers wouldn’t feel the pinch of rising coal prices, and so coal plants had little incentive to stock up for any sudden freezes. Meanwhile the leukemia medication was tainted because the company got sloppy, again in no small way due to the fact that the government ordered that they charge only 1.9 yuan for it, according to the China’s FDA via Southern Weekend via Time.

Aren’t these guys suppose to be Milton Friedman addicts? What happened to the Chinese government being run by a bunch of technocrats with engineering degrees?

How about subsidizing some of that coal for those power producers or medicine from pharmas that you’re asking to be good samaritans?

How about considering the limits of nationalism as a guarantee that you can just up and tell a company to screw making money when you kinda told them that’s all they really ought to spend their time on?

How about thinking ahead to having some sort of plan for how to disseminate information and manage crowds when the only rail link for Sichuan migrants in Guangzhou goes splat?

Fuck that, what happened to paying attention to the weather report?

Or how about thinking about instituting a social safety net before, not during or after, you start gettin’ rocked by inflation?

How about some solution that involves thinking long term, building long term trust between government, business and the public, not subobtimizing everything, and getting everybody in China to stop hunting rabbits all the time and go catch a stag for once. So far the only people who seem to have had even a smidgeon of that kinda thinking the PX actors of Xiamen.

These guys aren’t technocrats. They’re short-sighted, reactive populists. And they’re terrible at it.