By Jeff J. Brown
Picture above: Western garbage arriving to Shenzhen’s port, just a few kilometers from where I live. I don’t want the West’s waste coming into my amazing and beautiful city, and neither do China’s 1.4 billion citizens into theirs. Send it back where it belongs!
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[dropcap] T [/dropcap]he big story about China’s new ban on foreign (Western) waste imports has been completely misrepresented by Eurangloland’s (NATO, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Israel) governments and media. There is a reason for this. Baba Beijing’s (China’s leadership) decision is being driven by democratic demands of the citizens to stop it. This news is a prime example of China’s vibrant people’s democracy, the most participatory and responsive in the world (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/12/27/china-has-democracy-and-the-west-has-dictatorship-171227/). In Eurangloland, China’s uber-successful communist-socialist reality must be zealously denied and suppressed.
Everybody in China hates the idea that their country imports Western garbage (http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/0419/c90000-9451550.html). It’s not only humiliating, but also extremely dirty, dangerous and very unhealthy for all those involved, as well as for the national environment. In-country polls showed that the people were fed up with the practice and wanted it stopped (http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2103587/china-bans-imports-garbage-overseas ). Taking their lead, President Xi Jinping has made green tomorrows a huge policy bullseye for the government to realize and the results are already impressive. As a real participatory democracy that sincerely and proactively responds to citizens’ desires, this vile practice of garbage imports is rapidly coming to an end.
It’s not like super-consuming Western wastrels have not been warned. China started its Operation Green Fence back in 2013 (http://www.waste360.com/business/what-operation-green-fence-has-meant-recycling). This has nothing to do with the new and ongoing Sino-American tariff war. In 2016, 1,500 containers of American garbage were being shipped to China every day, with likely at least that many coming from much more populated Europe (https://www.rt.com/business/416180-europe-plastic-garbage-china/). That container number is dropping precipitously and by December 31, 2019, it is expected to be zero.
Ships are already being turned away at Chinese ports (https://www.rt.com/business/423798-us-china-garbage-ban/), while garbage mountains are piling up in Europe and the US. The US is bluntly asking – demanding is a more accurate term – that China rescind these new policies (https://www.rt.com/news/422255-us-china-garbage-recyclables-import/ and https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-environment-usa/u-s-asks-china-not-to-implement-ban-on-foreign-garbage-idUSKBN1GZ2WI). Don’t hold your breath, because the Chinese people have spoken, and their democratic leaders are listening and responding in kind. Baba Beijing’s reputation, legacy and heavenly mandate are on the line.
Uncle Sam even meekly suggested that it is an international trade violation. Really? We don’t want your garbage anymore should be taken up with the WTO? Maybe the West ought to force the Chinese to buy illegal, banned opium again, like it did for 110 years, until communist liberation in 1949. Should that be a WTO case too? The West’s externalization of deleterious and deadly production costs is the logic of capitalism (http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/04/09/chinas-capitalism-is-first-and-foremost-communist-socialist-china-rising-radio-sinoland-180410/). The following quote from an above-linked article says it all:
If the Asian giant closes off its waste management market [sic], recycling centers across the US will be faced with a hard choice. They can either hire a much more expensive workforce which would raise prices for their services, require households to sort their own waste or be forced to use more landfills across all fifty US states.
Oh My God – OMG! Americans have some hard, and I mean really hard choices to make!
What do you mean? We should hire people to do in-country what China has been doing for the West, since the early 1980s? Are you suggesting that we have to pay people and increase our costs? Provide jobs? HELL NO! Next thing you know those upstarts will want to unionize and we can’t allow that commie plot to hatch. And how dare you expect our overfed, indebted-to-the-hilt, brainwashed super-consumer citizens to actually sort their own garbage? You insult Eurangloland’s Great White Race, pal! Toiling in garbage is for dark skinned people, or poor White trash to sort the trash. And make us buy more land needed to dump our own garbage? Get outta here! Send it to those stupid yellow zipper heads in Chee-nah. They’ll figure something out… Now, where’s my TV remote, so I can turn on CNN and BBC, to find out how evil Muslims, North Koreans, Russians and Chinese really are, as a threat to our superior way of life.
And you gotta love Baba Beijing’s response to their former drug-dealing colonial masters:
China’s representative agreed to take the comments into account but said that every country had a responsibility to dispose of its waste, and with its large population China was obliged to restrict imports of waste while cleaning up at home. “China is seeking a path toward harmonization of man and nature,” the trade official quoted China’s delegate as saying.
That’s something you would never hear a Western politician say, except some marginalized Green Party member in a local or regional assembly, and the West’s masters are making sure those two-legged threats to capitalism never get a chance to govern in any significant fashion. But, this is exactly what the Chinese people have been telling their leaders for years. Within this are the concepts of harmony, balance and yin-yang, tapping deep roots into Daoism and Buddhism, chanting in their inner souls. Baba Beijing is responding to its people’s democratic dreams by singing back,
Right on, comrade citizens, we hear you loud and clear. The import ban is ON!
Other sources researched to produce this article and podcast:
https://www.npr.org/2017/12/09/568797388/recycling-chaos-in-u-s-as-china-bans-foreign-waste
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/09/chinas-crackdown-on-trash-could-make-it-harder-for-u-s-cities-to-recycle/ https://www.rt.com/news/422255-us-china-garbage-recyclables-import/
https://www.rt.com/news/422255-us-china-garbage-recyclables-import/
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Why and How China works: With a Mirror to Our Own History
JEFF J. BROWN, Senior Editor & China Correspondent, Dispatch from Beijing
Jeff J. Brown is a geopolitical analyst, journalist, lecturer and the author of The China Trilogy. It consists of 44 Days Backpacking in China – The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass (2013); Punto Press released China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017). As well, he published a textbook, Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). Jeff is a Senior Editor & China Correspondent for The Greanville Post, where he keeps a column, Dispatch from Beijing. He also writes a column for The Saker, called the Moscow-Beijing Express. Jeff interviews and podcasts on his own program, China Rising Radio Sinoland, which is also available on SoundCloud, YouTube, Stitcher Radio and iTunes.
In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm and Capital M Literary Festivals, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences (BASS) and various international schools and universities.
Jeff can be reached at China Rising,
je**@br***********.com
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The West will never concede that its rivals or the Non-Aligned Movement are capable of accomplishing ethical or smart actions. Good propaganda for the empire demands twisting the best into the worst. Michael Parenti details in his brilliant essay “Left Anticommunism” and his speeches on anti-Soviet thinking how self-interested press lackeys of NATO/capitalism reduced 20th-century socialist states often forced to make complex, difficult decisions to strawman cartoon villains.