Tag Archives: environment

there is a continent in the sky

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Yesterday evening, December 29, 2017, I had the pleasure of listening to Agency (Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller) speak on the results of their Shenzhen residency. They walked accessible edges to produce drawings and embroidery patterns of data, the embroidery algorithms derived from the difference between reported and their on-the-ground measurements of air particulates. The talk was inspiring, not least for “Roller Blade Boy” who skated circles around us, pausing only to check out the data. Continue reading →

politicized face masks

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protests

On May 4 this year (more here), Kunming residents wore surgical face masks to protest the construction of a p-xylene factory. In response, the government issued a gentle reminder that clinics, pharmacies, and printers should use the “real name system (实名制)” to complete surgical mask sales and immediately report the transaction to the police.

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Gentle Reminder to all pharmacies, clinics and printing shops in Bianbanjie Village, Jitou Township: From this day forward, if anyone comes to you to purchase large quatitities of surgical masks or to print any of the phrases “human health, petrochemical project, Pengzhou [proposed factory location], or PX”, please take down their telephone number and identity card number, and then report the transaction to either the Jitou Precint or neighborhood police station. Thank you for your cooperation. Jitou Precint telephone number: 85369511 and neighborhood police officer cell phone number: 15828585968. 　

Paraxylene is an isomer of xylene, one of the most produced petrochemicals in the United States. In the toxic daisy chain of polymers, xylene is a raw material used to produce terephthalic acid, which is used to manufacture polymers, which are used to make products ranging from pantyhose to take-out containers to baking tins. Paraxylene (or PX as it is being called in Chinese) is the most commonly used isomer in the production of terephthalic acid. The major producers of p-xylene tend to locate factories in poorer regions. One of the world’s largest producers, Chevron Phillips, for example, produces p-xylene at their Pascagoula, Mississippi plant. BP owns the world’s largest single factory in Texas City.

P-xylene is highly toxic:

In humans, overexposure to xylene can cause headache, fatigue, dizziness, listlessness, confusion, irritability, gastrointestinal disturbances (nausea and loss of appetite), flushing of the face, and a feeling of increased body heat. Exposure to xylene vapors above recommended exposure limits (100 ppm – TWA) can cause irritation of the eyes, nose and throat as well as tightening of the chest and staggering gait. Severe overexposure to xylene has been reported to cause irregular heartbeat or rapid incoordinate contractions of the heart, tremors, central nervous system depression, and unconsciousness. Lethality has resulted upon exposure to 10,000 ppm. The odor threshold for xylene is reported to be 1 ppm…Aspiration of this product into the lungs can cause chemical pneumonia and can be fatal. Aspiration into the lung can occur while vomiting after ingestion of this product.

Six years ago, protests against a PX plant in Xiamen caused local authorities to cancel plans to build a processing factory. Similar protests took place in Dalian (2011) and Ningbo (2012) also resulted in authorities withdrawing plans to build PC processing plants.

The levels of pollution in many Chinese cities have resulted in many residents wearing face masks. There are also reports of face-kinis to protect skin on the beach. To date, however, the Kunming protests and government response have been the most explicit politicization of face masks.

edgy map

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Ryoyu Kido sent me the link to Modeling the influences of land reclamation on groundwater systems: A case study in Shekou peninsula, Shenzhen, China, which includes a map of land reclamation around the Nantou Peninsula, 1983-2005:

shenzhen land reclamation

I colored in the boundaries to give a sense of the progression of land reclamation in in the Qianhai and Houhai areas of the Peninsula:

shenzhen land reclamation-mao

The tags land reclamation and Shekou bring much of this change into cultural perspective.

scale of gentrification, buji

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Gentrification in Shenzhen not only means displacing the working poor, but also rescaling the city. In Buji, the process has just begun and thus the palatable violence of this transformation is more visible than it is in the inner districts, where neoliberal environments have a more polished veneer. The images below highlight the extent to which the construction of massive public infrastructure effectively isolates neighborhoods and privileges car-owners.

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luohu culture park: the antidote to mall-burbia

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DSCI0079 I prefer early Shenzhen urban planning to the rush to mall-burbia that is the current trend. Early planning assumed small scale, low cost urban living that promoted street life. In contrast, mall-burban developments raze central areas of the city to build large scale, high cost gated communities and attached mall, where security guards keep out the riff raff, effectively suburbanizing densely populated urban areas.

Luohu Culture Park (罗湖文化公园) exemplifies the latent urbanity of early Shenzhen planning. The 2,000 sq meter park includes underutilized cultural infrastructure, a lake, and my favorite kind of public art — a sculpture that children can easily appropriate. Continue reading →

spiderwebs

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sustainability is a collective decision

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Netizens have joked that using a blow dryer or tanning may now infringe on national property rights.

Just recently, Heilongjiang Province promulgated laws governing the analysis of atmospheric resources and conservation (黑龙江省气候资源探测与保护条例). The key and controversial point, of course, is the decision that atmospheric resources, including wind energy, solar energy, precipitation, and ambient air are natural resources and as such belong to the country.

What does that mean?

According to Minister of Meteorology, Zheng Guoguang (郑国光) the laws do not mean that air has been privatized — “impossible!” he said — but rather that the research and development of energy resources will be centralized. The legislation seems to me a rather straight forward decision to institute state monopolies on the production and allocation of sustainable energy. It also anticipates state appropriation of sustainable energy technologies that are developed outside the context of national research and development, but within national borders.

Other countries have also begun to dispute the question of “wind rights”. Denmark, for example, compensates neighboring landowners for loss of property value due to the erection of wind turbines. More interestingly, the Danish government has adjudicated on disputes that (depending on placement) new wind turbines “take wind” from extant turbines.

Ron Rebenitschhas considered water laws (first in time, first in right) and oil right laws (compensatory unitization) as models for developing wind laws. In the former, the first user to develop a qualified use of water (i.e., irrigation) from a flowing stream develops certain rights to divert a defined quantity of water from the stream if it is available. Later users of water from that stream can still divert water from that stream, but only in quantities that do not affect the earlier users’ ability to divert the allocated quantity of water.

In contrast, when an oil well is drilled, the oil flows to the well from all directions, without regard for ownership of mineral rights. Thus adjacent mineral rights holders could theoretically have their oil drain to the nearby well, without recompense. Under unitization, the production of an oil field is then allocated proportionally to the surrounding mineral rights owners, in accordance with pre-determined impact.

Like the Danish and US American discussion, China’s nascent foray into wind rights discussion do not take international borders and sustained regional inequalities into account. Consider, for example, the Law of the Colorado River.

This thicket of deals, trade-offs, set-asides, subsidies and politically sanctioned thievery is nearly impenetrable to even the most seasonedand cynical observer. But from the Mexican side of the border,the law is devastatingly simple: The US retains 95 percent ofthe Colorado River’s water and Mexico gets what’s left over. Most years this is about 1.5 million acre feet, roughly the same amountthat Sonoran desert farmers were using to irrigate their beanand onion fields in 1922.

Likewise, in the Middle East, long-term sustainable economic development depends on access to clean and dependable supplies of freshwater. In turn, this access continues to depend upon region wide management agreements (Gleick, Yolles, and Hatami). More recently, US American Intelligence has predicted increasing risks of water conflicts worldwide. As in the Middle East, shared water resources are increasingly used to threaten neighboring states, while the over-pumping of groundwater supplies threatens the agricultural production, which accounts for 70% of freshwater usage.

All this to make a simple point.

In China, the rhetoric of a centralized state frames the discussion of sustainable resources, while in the Middle East and United States, we can speak of “water security” and thereby transform drinking water into weapons of war.  Thus, the development of sustainable energy sources is as potentially fraught as the development of other resources (oil and now water) because we are proposing to use the same, unsustainable models of production, distribution, and allocation.

海湾村: land locked futures

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The Transformation of Shenzhen Villages (沧海桑田深圳村庄30年), Episode 9: Haiwan Village tells the story the Nantou Peninsula and the reclamation of land in Houhai (the southern coast facing Hong Kong) and Qianhai (the northern coast facing Guangzhou). This was the platform from which Hong Kong entered China and Baoan villagers once launched themselves to Hong Kong.

During the Mao era, Wanxia Village was divided into two production brigades, one land based for agricultural cultivation and the other water based for oyster farming. Eventually, the Wanxia Oyster Brigade was renamed Haiwan Brigade, creating two administrative villages through the division of one natural village. This division points to the importance of production — rather than history — in defining Maoist administrative units, especially in rural areas, where villages were integrated or split depending upon production needs. Importantly, however, these administrative categories were not naturalized in the same way during the early years of Reform and Opening, when some administrative villages re-instituted traditional boundaries while others did not. Haiwan retained Maoist status and began building village level factories.

Access to the sea shaped village demographics, with a population gap of people, ages 45-65 who escaped to Hong Kong in the last large flights in 1968 and 78, respectively. Nevertheless, traditional land rights enabled Haiwan to prosper. In addition, we learn from an older, Cantonese-speaking villager that Haiwan Village is an Overseas Chinese village, with many descendants scattered throughout the world with village association buildings in the United States and Hong Kong, representing support, ranging from monetary to knowledge to investment connections. The village has also maintained its identity through traditions and ritual that centered on a small Tianhou Temple.

Watching this episode, I suddenly realized something that was clearly obvious to the filmmaker: Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour coincided with the establishment of guannei villages as stock-holding corporations and urban neighborhoods. In other words, the second tour did result in new policies or breakthroughs as they are known. My a-ha moment was in seeing the connection between politics and the radical restructuring of the south china coast.  The episode ending rhetorically juxtaposes images of Wall Street with Houhai, asking if Shekou can become the next Manhattan. The question is illuminating not for its booster-hype pretensions, but rather because it clearly reiterates the primacy of investment and real estate over traditional livelihoods such as oyster farming. In such a world, insofar as the sea becomes a factor in determining property values and not an independent source of value, reclaiming the sea makes good business sense.

the 5.12 beichuan incident, nuclear war games, and why the party fears religious organizations

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The Party’s refusal to either share power or make political decision making transparent and open to public debate creates mistrust: just what have they got to hide anyway, inquiring minds want to know. In addition, through its control of cultural resources, including the arts and the right to convene, the Party has demonstrated a refusal to acknowledge any viewpoints other than those that shore up the influence of high-ranking officials.

Neitizens and western journalists have responded to Party control over and access to information with reports that (more often than not) conflate conspiracy theories with the “truth”. Not unexpectedly, citizens spend an inordinate of time trying to piece together a big picture out of rumors, veiled allusions and gut feelings. Sadly, the more the Party doesn’t say about Beichuan or Bo Xilai or Chen Guangchen, for example, the more accusatory rumors circulate via the net, weibo, and text messages and with them the festering anxiety that no one can be trusted to speak truthfully. Thus, in today’s China, common sense has it that Party members don’t tell the truth because the truth would harm them politically, while the rest of us are incapable of telling the truth because we don’t know it.

Keywords of the day – trust (信任), good faith (诚意), and loyalty (忠诚) – pivot on the relationship between a healthy society and how good our word might be. The characters for person (人) and word (言), for example constitute 信, the first character in the compound for trust. The character word (言) also appears in sincerity (诚, literally “word” “is realized”), which is an element of the expression good faith (literally “sincere meaning”) and loyalty (faithful sincerity). Moreover, the question of belief (信仰, literally a person who trusted and admired) resonates throughout all levels of society and the most trusted forms of organized alternative to Party disinformation and rumor mongering tend to be religious – Tibetan Buddhism, Xinjiang Islam, and popular Buddhism, Falungong, Christianity in Han communities.

“A Report on and Lessons from the 5.12 Underground Nuclear Explosion at Longmen Mountain, Beichuan,” a recent Epoch Times (大纪元) article illustrates the co-dependent relationship between belief, opposition, and efforts to figure out the truth. The Epoch Times, of course, is the official Falungong news outlet and the article author Lu Deng is the spokesperson for the Chinese Christian Democratic Party. The gist of the article is that the Party used the 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake to cover-up the fact that on the same day, it detonated a nuclear devise at Beichuan, destroying an entire region. Based on a few facts, knowledge of how the Party operates, and deductive reasoning, the argument is compelling and compellingly legal:

The article reconstructs the events of May 12, 2008 by giving a quote from Feng Xiang’s decidedly poetic and vague blog and then re-interpreting it in terms of a nuclear blast. For example, in February 6, 2009 post, Feng Xiang wrote, “In 80 seconds, the mountain collapsed, the ground split open, the mountains shook and the earth moved, the river changed its course. The green mountain lost its color, and all I see is disaster. This was Beichuan’s most devastating moment. A level 8 earthquake, with level 11 destruction”. According to Lu Dong, the phrase “the green mountain lost its color” refers to the fact that all the mountain foliage was burned. Lu Deng also analyzes sections where he asserts that Feng Xiang’s original text, including references to a Chief Pan of the Anti-Chemical Corps of the Second Artillery (二炮防防化部隊隊長番号) have been changed.

As an opening witness, Feng Xiang  (冯翔) is a compelling figure because his position within the Party hierarchy placed in a position to learn the truth, while his loss as a father and a teacher gave him moral authority. Feng Xiang was a teacher and then a vice minister in the Qiang Minority Autonomous County, Beichuan Ministry of Information (北川羌族自治县宣传部). His eight-year old daughter died in the Wenchuan earthquake. Subsequently, his efforts to uncover the truth about her death led to charges that an underground nuclear explosion rather than the Wenchuan earthquake caused the Beichuan disaster. The truth of his position was confirmed through allegations that Feng Xiang was harassed into committing suicide when he attempted to bring this story to the public.

Lu Dong then moves on to analyze corroborating evidence from other sources; it is an “open secret (公开秘密)” that the damage at Wenchuan was minimal and the strength of the quake insufficient to have destroyed Beichuan. In his book “The Epicenter was in Human Hearts (震中在人心)” Mainland author, Li Ming claimed that the Wenchuan quake gave Party officials an excuse to cover-up the real disaster at Beichuan. Web reports suggest the same pattern of information: Wenchuan was serious, but not a disaster and certainly not enough to have decimated Beichuan. Moreover, web posts included reports that indeed anti-chemical corps had gone into the Longmen Mountain Nuclear facility. In addition, local eyewitnesses said that the heat from the blast burned off the skin of water buffalo. Blogger Xiong Furong said, “The geologists may have different explanations for what happened here, but for us ordinary people, we know it was a detonation (熊芙蓉說，“地質專家對此可能有各種不同說法，但對我們普遍人來講，這就是爆炸。)”

Examples from media reports are brought in: a video on youtube; reports from 21st Century Economic Report (21世紀經濟報導) that the mountain continued to reverberate through the night; Southern Weekend (南方週末) reported that the tremors were so strong that villagers clung to each other to keep themselves from falling into the sinkholes; Western China News (華西都市報) reported that in the Green tablets river basin, there were nearly 10 kilometers of cracks in the mountain, some of which were 42 centimeters deep; and even Party media acknowledged the extent and scale of Beichuan exceeded that of Wenchuan. Beichuan TV broadcast, “The entire 2869 km2 County Area was destroyed, 10s of thousands of buildings were destroyed in mudslides. Over one million square meters collapsed and over 100 areas effected by mud. (北川電 「全縣境內2869平方公里受災，出現了數萬處塌方，泥不流和大滑坡。垮塌百萬立方的特大滑坡達100多處.)” A quote from an elderly gentlemen summarizes and ends this section, “The earthquake had the force of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima (能量相當干400顆廣島原子彈.)”

Lu Dong is relentless in his case. He notes differences between the pattern of damage at Wenchuan, which fell away from an epicenter and Beichuan, which fell in a different pattern, away from Longmen Mountain. Evidence from the Tangshan earthquake is brought in. Even at Tangshan, after the quake subsided there were some buildings and trees standing. In contrast, at Beichuan everything collapsed: 498 kilometers of highway, 6066 kilometers of ordinary roads, 1503 bridges, 131 power stations, 8,944 kilometers of electrical transmission lines, 26,000 kilometers of fiber optic cables, 597 water reservoirs, 9,416 kilometers of channels, 282 broadcast stations, and 2,432 different sites of geological disaster.

Even more disturbingly, after the 5.12 Beichuan disaster, doctors from Sichuan Medical University, the University of Illinois, and Imperial College released studies documenting that many people and animals in the disaster area suffered from radiation poisoning. In addition, specialists suggested that iodine 131 is a radioactive isotope that could have caused spontaneous abortions similar to those seen at Beichuan. However, the Sichuan Party Secretary ordered a blackout on all reports on over 100 fetuses that had died in utero.

If all this wasn’t enough, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency reported that an earthquake did not adequately explain the yellow color and condition of vegetation in Beichuan. Lu Dong ominously concludes, however, that these conditions were consistent with the effects of a nuclear blast. And yes, ongoing Party inspection tours and scientific reports from Beichuan seem consistent with the after effects of a nuclear blast and not an area healing from a natural earthquake.

Clearly, Lu Dong believes that there were underground nuclear experiments at the Longmen Mountain Facility and that an accident occurred. He is a compelling rhetorician, concluding his argument with the reminder that Hawkish General Zhu Chenghu (朱成虎) has threatened to use nuclear weapons to destroy the United States if the country should ever help Taiwan and calling for the Party to meet face these accusations in court.

And there it is. The reason that the Party fears religious organizations.  The unstable situation of chronic Party secrecy and corrosive public suspicions has created an environment in which many people “don’t feel safe (没有安全感)”. However, religious groups continue to investigate and make public charges (if even from abroad), rather than hiding behind anonymous weibos and innuendo. The Chinese Christian Democratic Party has thrown down a political gauntlet in a Falungong newspaper, which also publishes pieces that support the Dalai Lama, forcing those of us living in murky half-truths and deliberate cover-ups: when all is said and done, who do you believe?