The adventures of Red Ahern in Red China
About a year and a half ago I came across this book called Who will Feed China? in a second-hand bookstore in Kathmandhu. Though I'd heard of it before, I looked up some reviews on Amazon, which kind of gave away the ending. This is often the case with non-fiction books, when I was a second-year history student I came across this fresher reading The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor and I snuck up behind him and said "Guess what happens at the End? Germany invades Poland!" but he didn't seem remotely fazed.
The author of this book, who'd obviously done a lot of research into the subject, didn't know any better than I where China's growing, urbanising, westernising population were going to get the meat or the grain to feed their animals. The book was a wake-up call to the dangers of exporting the Western way of life to Asia, though the people who run the IMF and the World bank still seem asleep to me.
Since this book was written in the mid-nineties China has grown exponentially, in almost every sense of the term. Their appetite for grain and oil has grown, their skylines have grown, their waistlines have grown. Most of all, their economy has grown, so much so that at least in part, the answer to the question posed by that book is, um, us.
Bertie Ahern has been in China trying to drum up some business for the Irish economy. China is doing so well that soon there might be an Irishtown in Shanghai with an arch with Celtic Crosses and Sheela-na-gigs.
It's apposite in some ways that Bertie is doing business with the Chinese. Both Ireland and China are ancient civilisations that more recently have been victims of imperialism and then some disasterous, self-imposed socio-economic systems. Now we're both "Tiger" economies, though of course in China they actually do have some real, honest-to-god tigers.
Bertie is doing a little better than George Bush Senior in his efforts to drum up business in East Asia, which is to say he hasn't thrown up on anyone yet. That's a little surprising, because it appears that they have much stronger to stomachs than us. Apparantly we don't eat offal in this country, which leads me to wonder if Bertie has been in the English Market in Cork any time lately. Those Chinese can't get enough of it, though, so we're going to be sending bucket loads of the stuff over there.
Ah, yes, the noble Irish tradition of feeding tyranous regimes. We fed Sadamm Hussein's soldiers at the same time they were gassing the Kurds, now we're going to be feeding the Chinese army who've been occupying Tibet for the last 50 years. It's a pretty safe bet that Bertie hasn't used the T-word in his time as a guest of the Chinese government. Tibet is a sort of cause celebre for hippy types like myself, who walked way up into the mountains outside Darjeeling to visit a refugee sanctuary for those lucky enough to have escaped the Chinese jackboot. I bought a big, colourful, wooly jacket, which I still have and, oddly enough, has turned out to be a total babe magnet. I think of it as positive karma. I saw an old woman knitting something similar on an old hand loom, she tols me that she fled Tibet in 1959 and will neve be able to go back.
But she's one of the lucky ones. Those ethnic Tibetans that remain face gradual ethnic cleansing as Chinese move into their land and do what they do best - breeding. Many try to flee to India where they can practice their religion in peace, though an awful lot of them get stuck in a Nepalese limbo.
None of this is going to bother the likes of Michael McDowell. His heart was bleeding on Monday for the victims of IRA crimes, but he's able to overlook the destruction of monasteries, slaughter of innoncent men, women and animals as long as we can send the Chinese some pigs bellies and make ourselves some more money and buy bigger houses and SUVs.
He's not going to worry about the environmental impact of importing grain and soya from Latin America, force-feeding it to pigs and then sending their innards all the way to China. The minds of those of us who worry about the future of the planet boggle at this profligacy, though I'm unsure whether all the oil consumed in this process count towards the nations CO2 emissions.
Complying with Kyoto has never been a priority for our government, though, when it was revealed that we were 3rd worst nation in the EU for doing so, Fatty Harney told the EU that they could ram that fucking Kyoto accord up their asses (I'm paraphasing slightly)
The best thing to do for the people of Tibet is to boycott Chinese products, which is incredibly hard as almost every manufacturing concern has outsourced there. I'd like best if our athletes organised their own boycott of the next olympics. After all, we never win anything, and China has a bitter history of Westerners bringing drugs over there.
The author of this book, who'd obviously done a lot of research into the subject, didn't know any better than I where China's growing, urbanising, westernising population were going to get the meat or the grain to feed their animals. The book was a wake-up call to the dangers of exporting the Western way of life to Asia, though the people who run the IMF and the World bank still seem asleep to me.
Since this book was written in the mid-nineties China has grown exponentially, in almost every sense of the term. Their appetite for grain and oil has grown, their skylines have grown, their waistlines have grown. Most of all, their economy has grown, so much so that at least in part, the answer to the question posed by that book is, um, us.
Bertie Ahern has been in China trying to drum up some business for the Irish economy. China is doing so well that soon there might be an Irishtown in Shanghai with an arch with Celtic Crosses and Sheela-na-gigs.
It's apposite in some ways that Bertie is doing business with the Chinese. Both Ireland and China are ancient civilisations that more recently have been victims of imperialism and then some disasterous, self-imposed socio-economic systems. Now we're both "Tiger" economies, though of course in China they actually do have some real, honest-to-god tigers.
Bertie is doing a little better than George Bush Senior in his efforts to drum up business in East Asia, which is to say he hasn't thrown up on anyone yet. That's a little surprising, because it appears that they have much stronger to stomachs than us. Apparantly we don't eat offal in this country, which leads me to wonder if Bertie has been in the English Market in Cork any time lately. Those Chinese can't get enough of it, though, so we're going to be sending bucket loads of the stuff over there.
Ah, yes, the noble Irish tradition of feeding tyranous regimes. We fed Sadamm Hussein's soldiers at the same time they were gassing the Kurds, now we're going to be feeding the Chinese army who've been occupying Tibet for the last 50 years. It's a pretty safe bet that Bertie hasn't used the T-word in his time as a guest of the Chinese government. Tibet is a sort of cause celebre for hippy types like myself, who walked way up into the mountains outside Darjeeling to visit a refugee sanctuary for those lucky enough to have escaped the Chinese jackboot. I bought a big, colourful, wooly jacket, which I still have and, oddly enough, has turned out to be a total babe magnet. I think of it as positive karma. I saw an old woman knitting something similar on an old hand loom, she tols me that she fled Tibet in 1959 and will neve be able to go back.
But she's one of the lucky ones. Those ethnic Tibetans that remain face gradual ethnic cleansing as Chinese move into their land and do what they do best - breeding. Many try to flee to India where they can practice their religion in peace, though an awful lot of them get stuck in a Nepalese limbo.
None of this is going to bother the likes of Michael McDowell. His heart was bleeding on Monday for the victims of IRA crimes, but he's able to overlook the destruction of monasteries, slaughter of innoncent men, women and animals as long as we can send the Chinese some pigs bellies and make ourselves some more money and buy bigger houses and SUVs.
He's not going to worry about the environmental impact of importing grain and soya from Latin America, force-feeding it to pigs and then sending their innards all the way to China. The minds of those of us who worry about the future of the planet boggle at this profligacy, though I'm unsure whether all the oil consumed in this process count towards the nations CO2 emissions.
Complying with Kyoto has never been a priority for our government, though, when it was revealed that we were 3rd worst nation in the EU for doing so, Fatty Harney told the EU that they could ram that fucking Kyoto accord up their asses (I'm paraphasing slightly)
The best thing to do for the people of Tibet is to boycott Chinese products, which is incredibly hard as almost every manufacturing concern has outsourced there. I'd like best if our athletes organised their own boycott of the next olympics. After all, we never win anything, and China has a bitter history of Westerners bringing drugs over there.
posted by seamus @ 4:03 pm
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