Live from Hong Kong

After a 22 hour train ride from Beijing to Shenzhen, and an interesting by-foot crossing of the China PRC - Hong Kong SAR border, I arrived in beautiful Hong Kong last Monday.

My official purpose was to attend a conference entitled "Environment, Health and Harmony" hosted by the Hong Kong America center at Chinese University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. it was a terrific conference, attended by over 95 students from throughout the Pearl river Delta (Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Macau, Xiamen, Guangzhou....). Pictures will follow in later postings.

Now I am staying in downtown Hong Kong and am overwhelmed by this breathtaking and bustling city. A true crossroads of east-meets-west. It is a truly cosmopolitan city and full of malls, malls, and more malls. As I have been luxuriating at my techotel, it has been awesome to taste the air of enencumbered speech, enjoy potable tap water, and take in all of the sino-european flavor of the city.

My impressions are many and I hope to update again soon with more photos and words. I did not bring my lap top in order to break the leash that computer had to me! It has been nice to not be staring and typing every day! ok, must be off to enjoy more of the sights on this lovely friday evening. cheers~

China's Water Crisis - A Report from Singapore

My friend & fellow Fulbrighter Julian updates his blog from his home, and tropical paradise, Singapore, to celebrate Singapore Water Week. Look for my quotes in the management section.


Green Leap Forward

Through the Looking Glass - lightly

A month has gone by with no postings, apologies for being incommunicado. I use the title of "Through the Looking Glass" referring to Lewis Carrol's story after Alice in Wonderland, and to connote the kind of futuristic tone that so much of my work these days revolves around. This I say "lightly" in response my contention with the over-archingly apocalyptic tone of recent media reports, particularly from the West, predicting humanity's immanent self destruction. The problems facing the world are dire, however viable solutions are being crafted by intelligent and well-meaning people around the world. It is my grand hope that people working "on the ground" to enact changes related to the environment, human equality, peace, and freedom, may some day soon be sitting in positions of government power, instead of shunned to the margins of civic life - what a novel concept!!!!

“有朋自远方来，不亦乐户" 孔子说。Confucius said: "Nothing brings more pleasure than a friend visting from far away"
Other things keeping my away the internet, other than working for global peace, include my friend Chris' visit from Washington DC where we toured Beijing and Shanghai and had a fantastic and memory-filled time experiencing the sights of China. A few highlights include a beautiful Great Wall Hike, a strangely homo-erotic and perilous Chinese Acrobatics show, several long walks down dark hutongs in search of bars, me forgetting a brush in Shanghai and taking "bad hair day" to a new level, an awesome boat tour to the mouth of the Yangtze River, drinks at Yifeng Elite and Cloud 9 in Shanghai, Chris' poor belly taking the hits of Chinese cuisine, to name a few.

eraA New era of environmental progress in China

I have been insanely busy as I have become involved in several aspects of China's burgeoning environmental policy movement. Chinese society and Chinese government are actively working to address many of the environmental side-effects of their recent rapid economic development.

In addition to the plastic bag ban, which is a very progressive law enacted on June 1 2008, there is also 2003’s Environmental Impact Assessment Law that requires public participation in construction and land-development decision making, with the aim of making economic development more environmentally sustainable through the involvement of local stakeholders. Next, the 2008 Measures on Open Environmental Information is a sweeping new policy that requires enterprises to disclose environmental pollutant information and records of discharge quantity violations. By mandating disclosure of discharge amounts, citizens gain access to previously withheld data on local companies’ environmental performance, and are thus able to more fully participate in environmental management.

My Recent Activities

First, my dissertation which I am writing based on on-going partnership with the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at the Chinese Academy of Science. My dissertation looks at the intersection of investment policy, infrastructure development and water resources by examining rural investment patterns into irrigation infrastructure in northern China over the last 20 years. We followed the investment records of 70 villages in three different provinces (Henan, Hebei, and Ningxia) and took account of modes of water resource governance, fiscal management, water allocation and water use behavior, agricultural crop water use, and agricultural productivity. Look forward to reading a riveting dissertation on our analysis in months (years!) to come.

Next, I began working for a local Chinese NGO here in Beijing called Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). IPE is known for hold companies accountable for their pollution activities by publicly disclosing polluting company's names. Read more here:

China Water Pollution Map and China Air Pollution Map are two public interest databases developed by IPE. Through two websites (www.ipe.org.cn and air.ipe.org.cn), the databases make information about local water and air quality easily accessible to the public.

IPE has expanded its existing list of water and air pollution violators into a comprehensive account of violators’ discharge activities including violating companies’ names, locations, and discharge amounts, all based on government-sourced records. Due to expanded disclosure of polluters by the government, the number of records of violators has topped 22,000. The search engine function of the websites allows users to check whether a company operating in China is openly listed by government agencies as polluters from 2004 to 2008.

IPE is led my a very famous environmentalist here in China named Ma Jun. It has been my privilege and honor to work with Ma Jun and other brilliant IPE colleagues on a new project that adds another element to the pollution accountability strategy, that is linking polluting Chinese suppliers to their multinational partners. We are developing a new tool that holds multinationals accountable for all the pollution violators in their supply chains, and we use our access to the media to make sure multinationals are aware of their "dirty supply chain" partners. We are doing this in partnership with several large multinationals who indeed want to address these sorts of issues. We hope to launch this project in August or September.

As if that all wasn't enough, a few friends and I are also making a short documentary on what China will look like in the future for ABC News. http://earth2100.tv Look for our video in coming weeks, which may make it on to Prime Time in Fall 2008.

14:28

Today began 3 days of national mourning throughout China in memory of the deaths and suffering due to the Wenchuan Sichuan Earthquake of May 12, 2008.

Employees and students here Chinese Academy of Science joined the 3 minutes of silence as the entire institution gathered in the central plaza to join together for the homage. Faculty, staff and students stood in straight lines in an organized fashion to await the moment to begin. The army guards did a salute to mark the moment, and everyone fell silent. As the 3 minutes began, you could hear the wailing of car horns blowing steadily for the entire time as drivers and taxi drivers also gave their salute, in a very noisy fashion.

The effect of the 3 minutes was chilling as the images of the earthquake are so vivid in people's minds thanks to the constant media coverage of harrowing sights, rescues, and devastation.

To provide a first hand account of some of the activities happening in Sichuan, let me include this account by a friend of a friend who runs a public health NGO in Sichuan (Mr. James Heinritz):

"From my vantage point at one of the centers of the relief effort, I
have to say that the government's response has been very impressive.
Within hours, thousands of army troops had streamed into the area and
were digging people out. Medical stations were set up in many of the
worst hit areas and were taking care of everyone who was hurt. Premier
Wen Jiabao was at the epicenter within 8 hours after the quake hit and
was still there on Wednesday when I left to go back to Beijing.
Watching the news, the teams on the ground were working non-stop to
extricate everyone they could from fallen buildings. Ambulances ran
back and forth throughout the night, ferrying the worst injured to
hospitals in Chengdu.

...


It's easy for the western media to bash China, but I see a real
effort here to improve. The current national leadership is fully aware
of the problems China faces and has been making great strides to
address them. International pressure does help, and so does internal
pressure from its own citizens. The hardest part of change here is to
make it happen at the local level where vested interests are so
entrenched. Many say that the rate of change is too slow, but in the 7
years that I've been here, it's been nothing short of remarkable.

About the Red Cross, in China its mission is the same as everywhere
else and is taken very seriously by the government. There is a Red
Cross representative in every health department office in China,
ensuring that the organization's efforts are fully integrated with the
health department's.

On Monday, prior to the earthquake when we were talking casually, the
director and her managers were talking about the situation in Myanmar.
Perhaps bowing to international pressure, the government there had
just allowed the China, Macao and Hong Kong Red Cross into the country
to aid their relief efforts. I haven't seen this mentioned in the news
yet. In China, the government was telling foreign aid agencies to make
donations but not come in. Unlike Myanmar, I believe that China's
reasons are because it already has the infrastructure in place and can
really do this on its own. That's not to say that foreign aid agencies
are not on the ground helping with the earthquake response. I met the
China director of Heart to Heart at the Red Cross office on Tuesday.
They have been working alongside the government in China for more than
10 years.

Dorje Association (www.dorjenet.org) is a non-profit,
non-governmental, non-religious philanthropic organization that I
co-founded in 2006 to help improve the quality of rural healthcare in
China. We have more than 10 projects in western Sichuan, an area
affected by the recent Tibetan unrest, 5 new projects in eastern
Sichuan and another project in Jiangsu Province, near Shanghai. We
help build clinics and hospitals, support the doctors who run them,
and provide advanced TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) training."

Not All Shook Up here in Beijing

Yesterday (May 12, 2008) Central China Province of Sichuan expereienced a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. News coming in from the provincial capital Chengdu tells of deaths in the order of 10,000 or more throughout the region.

Reuters Article

In Beijing, reports of people feeling dizzy while looking at their computers and general hoopla building around an event that didn't in fact really happen here at all. I remained vigilant in my research, only looking up for a moment as text messages beeped all around me as the news agencies spread word of the quake. Such focus could be dangerous for my health!

The Fulbright office reacted with deft speed in circulating notices and locating all of the Fulbrighters in the program, especially the ones working in Chengdu. Within minutes following the quake, the students had emailed the lister serve and assured us of their safety. Will continue to follow the story in Sichuan, looks grim as Asia copes with its second major natural disaster of the season. Sending best wishes to the families and loved ones of the families in Sichuan and Myanmar, as well as the aid workers working on the recovery.

And Introducing...

here in Beijing I am surrounded by millions of Chinese people, and also by quite a brilliant cohort of young foreigners here to join in the fray of modern Chinese culture, society, and politics.

Let me introduce a few of my Fulbright colleagues' blogs:

1) http://www.greenleapforward.com
http://solarcoaster.blogspot.com

2) From Beijing - The Olympian - Olympia, Washington

Also, an interesting discussion to listen to:

Let's Make a Deal!

Every single move you make here in Beijing is a process of negotiation. From buying strawberries from the vendor on the corner, to dealing with the landlord, to the old auntie next door with whom we have “an arrangement” to put our wireless router in her apartment, to tweaking out the details with my mandarin tutor, not even to begin with the negotiations at my research institute.

To note about negotiating in Chinese, its all about the “包括…”, that is “including ….”. In negotiating western style you settle the terms of the deal, then quibble over the price. In Chinese style, the majority of the negotiation comes after the price is set, to see how much you can have included with the set price. Is lunch included? Will I have to pay for entry (for a tourist outing)? Will my tuition include a desk & computer? Will rent include a new air conditioner and furniture? Will tutoring include your transportation fees, etc etc etc … The difference is subtle but important.

The carry over into other parts of one’s economic life is also interesting. In the states we can negotiate over the fee / price because people often have a wide range of liquid cash or options for money to spend. In seeing how I spend money in the states in fact, its not so often about the price, but about the thing, the object and how I will get it, often via credit. From education, to clothes, homes, shiny cars etc, the price does not dictate whether or not you will attain the thing. If you want it, one can usually find a way to get it, or a way to earn (procure) the extra income to get the item. Not so in a relatively credit-less society, and one where in days past, income opportunities were few.

With a fixed budget, the strategy for many here is to try to get as much as one possibly can for that fixed amount of income. For example, I know my budget while I am here for a 10 month Fulbright, so I will try to stretch my money as far as I possibly can, so I can have more. I will live in a cheap apartment, so that I can take Chinese lessons. I will bargain when I shop, so that instead of having JUST 3 apples, I can get 3 apples, and a bundle of bananas. When we see Chinese manufacturers or vendors taking shortcuts in quality, we must remember this frame of mind for budgeting, if I use a cheaper fabric, then I can get more profit for buying other things, etc. It’s a subtle difference in negotiating and economic lifestyles, and one that I think many notice but do not understand.

Now I need to go and bargain for my new wallet, see if they will throw in a belt for the same price! =]