Fateful decisions made by China’s leaders, limiting births to mostly males and forbidding farmers to tap shrinking reservoirs diverted to smog-choked cities could lead to internal strife and foreign conquest as this economic powerhouse reaches the limits of explosive growth. But US consumers continue to fund China’s military modernization, even as they erode their own economy and employment at home. Even worse, Wal-Mart shoppers are supporting forced labor camps where the healthiest inmates are executed for “organ harvesting”. Wal-Mart also buys heavily from slave labor manufacturing zones, where women workers are typically paid 3 cents an hour or less for 70 to 90-hour work weeks. See smuggled photos here. And please don’t buy any products “Made In China”.
Lao Tzu got it right a long time ago when he penned the first “self-help” bestseller. Available at most checkouts, The Way of the Tao sagely suggests that anyone presuming to push against the river will end up swallowing a lot of water.
It’s better to go with the flow.
Tzu didn’t mention what happens when the “flow” is a rapids heading over a 10,000-foot falls. But it looks from here that the toiling masses that propelled China’s overnight ascendancy from destitute “Third World” status to impoverished economic Superpower are swamping sustainability.
TIGER RIDING FOR DUMMIES
It started about 20 years ago, when China went capitalist. With his hands directly on the controls over China’s restive masses—and upwards of 40 million human corpses testifying to Mao’s mismanagement—every creature in the land held its breath as Deng Xiaoping considered the country’s next Great Leap.
To everyone’s amazement, China’s new leader suddenly shouted, “To get rich is glorious!”—and hundreds of millions of people rushed onto sidewalks and streets to resume their passion for commerce.
ButWith an additional hundred million or so hungry citizens due to drop in by 2010, Deng took another drastic step, limiting births to one child per couple. That put the brakes on. It also brutalized many people, while lighting the fuse on a powder keg that could blow the country apart as Beijing’s “One-Child Policy” favoring male offspring tamps the testosterone from tens of millions of frustrated and unemployed males into increasingly critical masses.
BIRTH POLICE
In Fujian province, a 34-year-old mother of two young boys refused to be sterilized after a local hospital warned her against aggravating her medical condition. Sun Zhonghua was taken from her farm at daybreak by birth-control officials and beaten to death.
Another village woman whose IUD was incorrectly inserted tried to hide an unauthorized second birth. A shaken former birth control officer who defected with smuggled identity cards, documents and videotape confessed that when she learned of this transgression, Gao Xiao Duan “sent a bulldozer to demolish her house and her brother's house. She was then sterilized.”
“In the race to the bottom, China is the bottom,” says Bama Athreya, Deputy Director of the International Labor Rights Fund. “The most extreme cases of misery and repression can all be found in China, thanks to the fact that its enormous and desperate population of unemployed have no choice but to accept starvation wages and suffer abuse.”
WAL-MART’S DIRTY SECRET
The country that invented gunpowder has never seen an explosion as big as the one that’s coming as some 30 million currently unemployed workers compete for sex and survival with another 40 million slated to lose their jobs over the next five years.
Millions of young Chinese men can find neither money nor love because many of the relatively few available single women are being beaten and raped while producing products for the USA, Canada and other world markets in death camps called laogai.
Or they “voluntarily” work backbreaking hours in what amount to slave labor camps, where the National Labor Committee for Human Rights has documented 98-hour workweeks in factories over 100°F, a ban on talking during work hours, 24-hour surveillance, and compulsory unpaid overtime.
Top wages are 10 cents an hour.
Average pay in China’s “Special Economic Zones” is three cents an hour.
Other workers are paid just 36 cents for more than a month’s work—making just 8/100th of a cent an hour.
At the Qin Shi factory, thousands of women work 98 hours a week making Kathie Lee handbags that retail for $8.76 at Wal-Mart. They are paid less than $22 a week. In air thick with dust and chemical solvents, workers handle toxic glues without gloves alongside machines that roar like express trains. The whole production line must often remain at work unpaid for an extra three to four hours, until the inhuman daily quotas are met.
At the end of typical 18-hour workdays, the Wal-Mart slaves are marched single-file to dorm rooms crammed with 16 metal bunks—and locked in. Armed company security guards are allowed to keep 30% of any fines they levy against the workers.
Already the tug of several strong gravities is starting to bend the meteoric trajectory of this awakening giant toward what economists term “a hard landing” and ecologists call, “overshoot.”
How long China can continue juggling so many demands and contradictions could soon be seen. Which will be unfortunate for about a billion broke peasants and workers who remain hostage to the new bourgeois elites battening on their labor—not to mention their organs and skin, which are sold on the open market.
Chinese officials, doctors and relatives of prisoners confirm “organ harvesting is widespread in China’s jails.” According to David Chu of the China Support Network, “prime” death-row prisoners who are young and healthy are subjected to health checks to match them with donors. Then they are shot in the back of the head, leaving the valuable vital organs intact. Like some barbaric rite, beating hearts are transferred into waiting patients—sometimes, it has been documented, while the gunshot victim is still alive.
Kidneys cut from “Made In China” corpses fetch as much as $15,000 apiece. And the skin carved from an estimated 15,000 state murder victims every year is stored in saline for later use on burn victims, who may have very troubled dreams indeed.
No wonder David Chu calls this place, “Nazi China”. Would you buy anything made by Nazis running concentration-labor camps like these?
CHINA’S NEW RICH, AMERICA’S NEW POOR
With 160 million low-paid Chinese engaged in manufacturing and mining, the repercussions in the USA are severe and growing worse. China’s sweatshops and force labor concentration camps have already taken over about 70% of the American textile and apparel market. In January 2005, a congressional commission reported that China’s slave labor policies had cost 1.5 million US jobs since 1989.
But China’s murderous miracle cannot be sustained. No matter how they’re shuffled, the numbers simply don’t work.
Over the past four years, China has consumed 40% of global oil demand. When its consumption more than doubles in the next 20 years, China will become the world’s biggest importer, requiring the same 12.8 million barrels of crude oil that many fewer Americans import and burn every day.
China is currently the world’s seventh largest economy. It may well be the world’s largest in the next 25 years. But it cannot feed half its population. And water tables are drying up beneath the great North China Plain, which produces much of China's grain harvest.
Racing for the last big oil, gas and mineral acquisitions throughout Central Asia, Canada, the Middle East and Africa, the world's second-largest consumer of oil is already America’s biggest competitor. But as aquifers run dry and more water is diverted to China’s teeming cities, farmers are being banned from using reservoirs—and harvest yields are dropping. Beijing’s narrowing options are to secure the people’s needs through overseas investment. Or the conquest of its neighbors.
US SHOPPERS ARM CHINA
War with the USA is “inevitable,” Red China’s Defense Minister, Chi Haotian told Hong Kong's Cheng Ming newspaper. "We cannot avoid it," he said. "Chinese armed forces must control the initiative in this war."
According to right-wing Rand researchers, China's military is narrowing its technology gap with the US armed forces, using US technology transfers to prepare for a future war with the US. “And the really sad and ironic part is that the American people are paying for their own demise with each and every purchase of merchandise “Made in China,” says Internet commentator Jim Welch.
China denies any hostile intentions. For the moment, it can buy all the raw materials and oil it needs thanks to American consumers, who every month continue borrowing to purchase about $59 billion more overseas products than foreigners are buying from them.
Stay tuned. The mandarins in Beijing are riding a “Made In China tiger” that could bite us all.
Lao Tzu got it right a long time ago when he penned the first “self-help” bestseller. Available at most checkouts, The Way of the Tao sagely suggests that anyone presuming to push against the river will end up swallowing a lot of water.
It’s better to go with the flow.
Tzu didn’t mention what happens when the “flow” is a rapids heading over a 10,000-foot falls. But it looks from here that the toiling masses that propelled China’s overnight ascendancy from destitute “Third World” status to impoverished economic Superpower are swamping sustainability.
TIGER RIDING FOR DUMMIES
It started about 20 years ago, when China went capitalist. With his hands directly on the controls over China’s restive masses—and upwards of 40 million human corpses testifying to Mao’s mismanagement—every creature in the land held its breath as Deng Xiaoping considered the country’s next Great Leap.
To everyone’s amazement, China’s new leader suddenly shouted, “To get rich is glorious!”—and hundreds of millions of people rushed onto sidewalks and streets to resume their passion for commerce.
ButWith an additional hundred million or so hungry citizens due to drop in by 2010, Deng took another drastic step, limiting births to one child per couple. That put the brakes on. It also brutalized many people, while lighting the fuse on a powder keg that could blow the country apart as Beijing’s “One-Child Policy” favoring male offspring tamps the testosterone from tens of millions of frustrated and unemployed males into increasingly critical masses.
BIRTH POLICE
In Fujian province, a 34-year-old mother of two young boys refused to be sterilized after a local hospital warned her against aggravating her medical condition. Sun Zhonghua was taken from her farm at daybreak by birth-control officials and beaten to death.
Another village woman whose IUD was incorrectly inserted tried to hide an unauthorized second birth. A shaken former birth control officer who defected with smuggled identity cards, documents and videotape confessed that when she learned of this transgression, Gao Xiao Duan “sent a bulldozer to demolish her house and her brother's house. She was then sterilized.”
“In the race to the bottom, China is the bottom,” says Bama Athreya, Deputy Director of the International Labor Rights Fund. “The most extreme cases of misery and repression can all be found in China, thanks to the fact that its enormous and desperate population of unemployed have no choice but to accept starvation wages and suffer abuse.”
WAL-MART’S DIRTY SECRET
The country that invented gunpowder has never seen an explosion as big as the one that’s coming as some 30 million currently unemployed workers compete for sex and survival with another 40 million slated to lose their jobs over the next five years.
Millions of young Chinese men can find neither money nor love because many of the relatively few available single women are being beaten and raped while producing products for the USA, Canada and other world markets in death camps called laogai.
Or they “voluntarily” work backbreaking hours in what amount to slave labor camps, where the National Labor Committee for Human Rights has documented 98-hour workweeks in factories over 100°F, a ban on talking during work hours, 24-hour surveillance, and compulsory unpaid overtime.
Top wages are 10 cents an hour.
Average pay in China’s “Special Economic Zones” is three cents an hour.
Other workers are paid just 36 cents for more than a month’s work—making just 8/100th of a cent an hour.
At the Qin Shi factory, thousands of women work 98 hours a week making Kathie Lee handbags that retail for $8.76 at Wal-Mart. They are paid less than $22 a week. In air thick with dust and chemical solvents, workers handle toxic glues without gloves alongside machines that roar like express trains. The whole production line must often remain at work unpaid for an extra three to four hours, until the inhuman daily quotas are met.
At the end of typical 18-hour workdays, the Wal-Mart slaves are marched single-file to dorm rooms crammed with 16 metal bunks—and locked in. Armed company security guards are allowed to keep 30% of any fines they levy against the workers.
Already the tug of several strong gravities is starting to bend the meteoric trajectory of this awakening giant toward what economists term “a hard landing” and ecologists call, “overshoot.”
How long China can continue juggling so many demands and contradictions could soon be seen. Which will be unfortunate for about a billion broke peasants and workers who remain hostage to the new bourgeois elites battening on their labor—not to mention their organs and skin, which are sold on the open market.
Chinese officials, doctors and relatives of prisoners confirm “organ harvesting is widespread in China’s jails.” According to David Chu of the China Support Network, “prime” death-row prisoners who are young and healthy are subjected to health checks to match them with donors. Then they are shot in the back of the head, leaving the valuable vital organs intact. Like some barbaric rite, beating hearts are transferred into waiting patients—sometimes, it has been documented, while the gunshot victim is still alive.
Kidneys cut from “Made In China” corpses fetch as much as $15,000 apiece. And the skin carved from an estimated 15,000 state murder victims every year is stored in saline for later use on burn victims, who may have very troubled dreams indeed.
No wonder David Chu calls this place, “Nazi China”. Would you buy anything made by Nazis running concentration-labor camps like these?
CHINA’S NEW RICH, AMERICA’S NEW POOR
With 160 million low-paid Chinese engaged in manufacturing and mining, the repercussions in the USA are severe and growing worse. China’s sweatshops and force labor concentration camps have already taken over about 70% of the American textile and apparel market. In January 2005, a congressional commission reported that China’s slave labor policies had cost 1.5 million US jobs since 1989.
But China’s murderous miracle cannot be sustained. No matter how they’re shuffled, the numbers simply don’t work.
Over the past four years, China has consumed 40% of global oil demand. When its consumption more than doubles in the next 20 years, China will become the world’s biggest importer, requiring the same 12.8 million barrels of crude oil that many fewer Americans import and burn every day.
China is currently the world’s seventh largest economy. It may well be the world’s largest in the next 25 years. But it cannot feed half its population. And water tables are drying up beneath the great North China Plain, which produces much of China's grain harvest.
Racing for the last big oil, gas and mineral acquisitions throughout Central Asia, Canada, the Middle East and Africa, the world's second-largest consumer of oil is already America’s biggest competitor. But as aquifers run dry and more water is diverted to China’s teeming cities, farmers are being banned from using reservoirs—and harvest yields are dropping. Beijing’s narrowing options are to secure the people’s needs through overseas investment. Or the conquest of its neighbors.
US SHOPPERS ARM CHINA
War with the USA is “inevitable,” Red China’s Defense Minister, Chi Haotian told Hong Kong's Cheng Ming newspaper. "We cannot avoid it," he said. "Chinese armed forces must control the initiative in this war."
According to right-wing Rand researchers, China's military is narrowing its technology gap with the US armed forces, using US technology transfers to prepare for a future war with the US. “And the really sad and ironic part is that the American people are paying for their own demise with each and every purchase of merchandise “Made in China,” says Internet commentator Jim Welch.
China denies any hostile intentions. For the moment, it can buy all the raw materials and oil it needs thanks to American consumers, who every month continue borrowing to purchase about $59 billion more overseas products than foreigners are buying from them.
Stay tuned. The mandarins in Beijing are riding a “Made In China tiger” that could bite us all.
