China’s Policies are Human Rights Violations

With the outbreak of the coronavirus, there are many actions to contain control, and develop a vaccine. You don’t hear of anyone really trying to get to the root cause, and I don’t mean the conversation about whether it came from an exotic bird or a snake. The question that should be asked is what is going on in China, and why do health scares spiral out of there on a regular basis? Whether its air quality, food quality, or thousands of dead infection pigs floating down the river, what drives this?

I have written about China in pieces and parts, but given the coronavirus outbreak, it is time to put it in one place. It is impossible for someone in the US to picture what goes on in China regarding health. We take for granted things that Chinese nationals have to watch out for and live with. The actions and direction of the government is known to enable human rights violations in detention, execution, and other other freedoms, but their health policies are far more fatal than those things.

The fundamental difference between the US government and China is the belief that the first priority of the government is the protection of its citizens. Sure, in the US, the government occasionally gets confused and tries to dip into things like income redistribution, fairness, and happiness, but that is always a short lived event. In China, the governments priority is NOT the protection of its citizens. Its priority is economic development using any means necessary. You see this in day to day life in China, but also how it acts in international markets. The Chinese government reacts when there is money at risk, usually not pro-actively. As China slowly recedes from being a world economic leader, this is the cause.

The most obvious problem is lack of a free press. Even though our major press outlets are very politically biased, there is always a young and hungry journalist looking to out someone, and the internet is always available. If there is a lettuce contamination issue or a city with consecutive days with unhealthy air, we are going to know about it. Sure, the FDA may be swayed by political lobbyists in Congress, but you just can’t poison the public in the short term and get away with it. You can feed them chips and burgers and give them type 2 diabetes, but that still gets challenged through a free flow of information. How many people die each year of air pollution in China? No one knows, but if you see it for yourself you would be mortified. Visibility is measured in yards, not miles, every day, in major cities.

I had a work colleague come back from a business trip in China, and he was floored. His background is not that of an environmentalist by any stretch. He has a lifted 4WD diesel pickup, a Harley, and a top of the line water ski boat. This is a pretty close quote from him: ‘I don’t consider myself an environmentalist at all, but when you see that, you know there are global implications’.

The beautiful buildings built for the Olympics in 2008 now look like they are 100 years old covered in dirt and filth. The government continues to pursue a path of massive coal fired electricity, with modern handling of waste generated not being priority. Four days on the street not moving will result in an eighth inch of film covering your car.

I was going through customs in Taiwan a few years back, and got overwhelmed with a stale diesel/construction smell. I looked around to find that a group of Chinese nationals in a large tour had just arrived, and were following the guide with the flag to customs. These were not unclean people. Chinese are generally very clean and fastidious, and take their public appearance seriously and this group was no exception. Their clothes, given whatever city and province they were all from, were saturated with the local environment they where they lived. d

While visiting a friend in Shanghai a few years ago, I learned her and her husband, who were approaching retirement age, had recently come to the conclusion that a small amount of red wine could be beneficial to their health. They had begun brewing some in their apartment. I asked her why they just didn’t go to the store and buy a some, and she explained counterfeiting and rebottling was a regular practice and you took your life in your own hands buying wine in the store. That can be said for most packaged foods. Frozen horse meat lasagna, fake rice, and contaminated baby formula all point to a market that is a free for all with few real controls. Wet food markets sell anything (bats, snakes, live birds, lizard, anteaters, dog to name a few), and unhealthy farm practices generate mass illness. This problem, and their actions, are not just localized issues, as we now see with COVD-19.

When negotiating a factory expansion with a high ranking local government official, I mentioned that we had the best employee retention and treated our people extremely well and would continue to do so. After translation, his reaction was quite simply, ‘So What??’. Later my local team explained that this was not in any of his metrics for yearly bonus payments, nor would it impact his ability to move up within the party. Protecting citizens is not rewarded in the communist party. Meeting objectives that feed the parties 100 year plan is.

One way this impacts us today in the US is that we have to pull back and move supply chain and manufacturing due to COVD-19. China has become an unstable partner in these areas, with poor employee practices. Hundred hour work weeks and high suicide rates have been clearly documented on factory campuses such as Foxconn who manufactures I-phones. In addition, using local contractors for construction is a tangled web of graft and bribery, poor quality and cheap materials, and nepotism that make it extremely difficult for a US based company to navigate. If you ask any of their companies to build something for you, it is a given that they will reverse engineer your product, and if they find it valuable, they will produce and sell it themselves. Making consumer products during the day for foreign companies, then using the exact tooling and process at night for their own sales, is not a myth. In the final analysis, its revenue, and the measure of prosperity as defined by the bureaucracy, that matters.

As we work to achieve a healthy environment, preserve nature, and improve our food supply with quality options, at some point we get diminishing returns. There should always be progress here and we need to leverage the use of the internet to enlighten our population but at some point we need to expend some energy pressuring China through economic and manufacturing sanctions to straighten up their act. The world wide impact of China’s policies will continue to grow. Although the US took actions recently executing the first real trade deal with China, it barely scratches the surface.

The best way to combat this is develop a Plan B. De risk supply chains and manufacturing by dispersing them to Vietnam, Thailand, and the like. Be aware that LCG (big business acronym for low cost geography), comes with risk you have to mitigate. Create alternative markets and trade partners like India. Wake up US companies to the fact that free is not usually free, and that no matter what you think or are told, the Party is involved in every aspect of business. Both Intel Samsung have major semiconductor plants in China, and must be now regretting those decisions. Let us focus on environmental concerns and stop encouraging China and other LCG countries to destroy the planet. Mostly, we need to educate the average US citizen about what is going on in China.