Re: U.S. versus China

At 8:13 AM +0800 29/5/00, Richard N Hutchinson wrote:

>We must be active in opposing the rise of anti-China sentiments!
>I see them already among my students.

I was listening to the BBC commentary early this morning. And with
the BBC, the use of adjectives is everything -- the world's freest,
most objective, propaganda media. So it struck me that virtually
every time the name China was used, it had the adjective 'communist'
attached to it. The masters of imperial discourse are at it.

>One particular point I think Bello/Mittal make light of, though, is
>the environmental issue.  They shouldn't be so quick to attack Lester
>Brown and the Worldwatch Institute.  If countries like China justify
>environmental devastation on the grounds of national sovereignty and
>fairness -- the U.S. and Europe did it, so will we -- they should be
>challenged.  We can't change the past, but we can affect the future.
>Core environmentalists engaging this issue should not be denounced in
>toto as imperialists.

I don't think that either Bello or Mittal wish to make light of the
environmental issue; the forums in which they participate and the
organisations in which they are active definitely don't. It was a
polemical piece.

They were taking issue with the manner in which the environmental
issue was phrased -- how much the Chinese would consume as an entity
called "Chinese" or "China". Now that's a cruel joke! And to use milk
as one example -- that's an even more cruel joke. Actually, it's
worse than a joke, it's racist, at a core -- deep? -- level; and it
betrays an absence of knowledge of broad Chinese taste, or rather
distaste, for dairy products. Sure, when there are over a billion,
even if they consume 1/4 of what Americans consume, they will, as an
'entity' consume more than Americans and they will, as an 'entity',
contribute more to world pollution. So, Chinese are to be lumped as
an 'entity' in the calculation? With this particular 'fallacy of
composition', we may likely need to ration how much one Chinese can
shit -- remember the old joke about how if one billion chinese were
to line up and fart when wind conditions were right... Sorry about
the bad taste -- scatological humour is also part of the 'tradition'.

The environmental issue is the model of development. And that is a
fight that cannot be put on the shoulders of the Chinese, however
disappointed one may be that they have gone along with the model, and
of other non-EuroAmericans. It is a global fight, and has to be
fought globally. The correction or atonement for the sins of the past
cannot be the speciality of non-EuroAmerica while EuroAmerica carries
on 'enjoying' the wages of sin, indeed flaunts that enjoyment at the
rest of the world, worse tells us how that enjoyment is actually
pulling us along -- you know, all that talk of export market of last
resort, etc., which is all true enough in the order of things. But it
is precisely the order of things that has to be changed.

KJ Khoo