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Over the months, there has been quite a lot written in these
pages on the threats posed by China
and some other would-be US
trading partners in the developing world. While some would call it “China bashing”, the fact is that China, with its
super low labor costs and authoritarian government offers an opportunity to
circumvent many of the safe guards and protections built into the domestic
markets of western countries. Those legal protections have been hard won over
the last 100 years. They represent individual human rights that do not exist in
current day China
as well as many other Asian nations. (Read more).
Even as China
seeks to solidify its presence in our food markets with announced new, higher
standards in seafood and crops, US corporations work willingly with the Chinese
to improve surveillance of the general population during the Olympics. But US
corporations know as well as we do that equipment used to spy on people during
the Olympics will still be in use once the games are completed. Not only that,
but the technology that those systems are based on will be in the hands of a
nation where intellectual rights are held in the same low esteem as that of human
rights.
A recent shopping trip, where the wife of the Chinese premier
spent hundreds of thousands of illegally-pegged-to-the-Yuan-dollars on jewelry,
raised the curtain of secrecy for a brief instant. It illustrates the extent of
the wealth divide between Chinese people and their leaders.
While personal wealth to one degree or another is a goal for
most average people, in a country where peasants live on $250 per year or less,
such huge wealth controlled by their leaders seems grotesque. But it is no more
out of place than here in America,
where executives, like those at Tyson earn millions of dollars in bonuses while
eliminating low wage jobs provided to American laborers, employed by the
corporations they oversee.
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