Teatime

It seems that I live near a renowned tea growing area. Within the political boundaries of Hangzhou city lies Longjingcun, or Dragon well village. On its terraced slopes grows the Longjing tea variety. And as with anything in China, most of what is sold as Longjing tea is phony. It would be redundant to describe and categorize all the sundry and arcane terms and grades of tea produced under the Longjing tea label. Other sources are already more competent on the subject than I am and most of what is written is irrelevant since one can seldom be certain what one is buying when one purchases a box of tea leaves labeled, Longjingcha (龙井茶). Apparently some merchants distinguish themselves by proclaiming that they are selling real counterfeit Longjing tea. This amounts to truth in advertising.

I know a little bit about the area only because I was kindly invited by two students to visit a teahouse in Longjingcun. One student owns an automobile which made the jaunt from Xiaoshan up into the mountains rather easy. Chinese mountains hold a quasimystical aura about them. I live near a slight geological mound call Beiganshan, or Beigan mountain as my students like to announce. It’s certainly higher than the surroundings, but it could also be a kind of fake mountain. It gives the area some clout, it seems. Tea plantations grown on a mountain might in fact benefit from the microclimates, but in the marketing of it, the mountain source is the key. Mountains are where wisemen live and powerful herbs grow for use in TCM. Mountains are where people go to escape the heat and the chaos of the cities.

The walk through the village was pleasant and relaxing. It reminded me of some propserous Italian villages where the prosperity is due to a collective effort of all members to focus on a particular resource, be it specialized foodways, shoemaking skills, or ancient architecture for the tourist market. All the houses in Longjingcun are well maintained and show a unified style. I saw tidy, little gardens, fruit trees and closely cropped tea bushes next to small tea finishing rooms and welcoming restaurants. My two hostesses settled upon a restaurant at the end of the village’s mainstreet after inquiring about the menu with the doorgirl. We all sat down in an arbor covered courtyard in the back of the restaurant on a lower terrace. The place had a rustic charm and felt timeless with its cut stone masonry and lanscaping.

It seemed obvious that we would drink tea here, yet they asked me anyway whether I wanted to drink some with them. With the first sip, I thought I was doing something wrong. Had I not let it brew long enough? The tea seemed especially insipid and weak. I looked at the pot, which was crafted of attractively shaped and decorated porcelain, only to see a single teabag string hanging over its rim. Perhaps by clearly showing that they used teabags, this restaurant was trying to set itself apart from those that intentionally deceive their customers as to thereal contents. I asked my accompanying tea drinkers why a restaurant located in the middle one of the most famous tea growing regions in the world would serve such low quality tea when I could see all around us tea plants and tea leaves drying in the midday sun. They answered in the same way that they have answered their own similarly posed questions and probably those of others: “Because it is cheaper.” And that was the end of the comparison between Longjingcun and an Italian mountain village.

I could have and should have known the answer to my own question. I have asked and answered it myself often enough about matters in China. It is a theme in this developed and developing country. It explains why so much of manufacturing in China is contracted or counterfeit. It’s cheaper to copy than to foster talent and innovation. Why did the Xinjiang restaurant’s baba ghanoush taste so bland? It is because it saves the owners money to substitute neutral soybean oil instead of olive oil and to leave out the tahini. It is cheaper to build upon somebody else’s ideas than to create one’s own, at least, in the short run. Why does melamine end up in so many foodstuffs? It’s because it’s a cheap way to make foods appear to have more digestible protein in them than they do.

The driving economic impetus to ending the misery and chaos under the Maoist management of the PRC has been to make things cheaply and to repeatedly make lots and lots of them. There is even a grading system for rating knockoffs whether pirated DVDs or Louis Vuitton handbags. Not surprisingly, not much stock is put into this system since every seller claims to sell the most highly rated fakes. When I ask about the enormous percentage of counterfeit goods made and sold in China, most Chinese see it as a problem but they limit the negative consequences in their answers. They reason that it’s ok to buy fake bags and clothes since they know that they are not the real ones. And they know that they are not real because they can, and willingly, buy them so cheaply. It’s harder for them to explain about the prevalence of melamine in so many foodstuffs. They, therefore, have much less to say about it.

The most recent scandal involving the adulteration with melamine makes my disappointment with the tea served in Longjingcun somewhat selfish and petty. Just as with the counterfeit grading scale, is there a continuum with legitimate copying and cheaper substitutions on one end and universally recognizably illegitimate counterfeits on the other? Adulteration with melamine that causes the deaths and hospitalization of nursing infants would seem like a clear cut case of bad counterfeiting. I fear, however, that in the mind of some industry players, chemical or dairy, the bad counterfeiting was simply that a bit too much melamine was added to the watered down milk.

What if the bad element is that people aren’t allowed to know that they are buying fakes? Is it acceptable to sell tainted milk products as long as it is labeled properly? Possibly, but there is a reason why we weren’t given that information freely. It severely reduces the profit margin when consumers are told upfront that they are buying poisoned food. Some Chinese seem to feel that they, in fact, benefit from the counterfeiting. How else, they reckon, would they be able to carry a LV handbag if they had to pay for a real one? Even if there is no apparent acknowledgment of a product being a copy, the cheap price is regarded by the Chinese as proof that they are getting what they pay for. It’s a kind of unspoken caveat that saves face for both parties.

A few months ago, there was raid on an upscale Hangzhou retailer of LV handbags. Authorities discovered and confiscated counterfeit, admittedly high grade, samples in the storeroom of a boutique on Wulin square. The storeowner featured originals to put on display but sold unlicensed copies to unwitting customers as originals and with original grade prices. The purpose driven officials had to walk past a lot of other retailers of counterfeit goods along the streets of Hangzhou to get to the one store that was worthy of being shut down, but they persevered. I wanted to think that this signaled a kind of shifting tide, and that WTO standards regarding IPR were beginning to wend their way through the Chinese bureaucracies. That thinking is premature as yet. It’s much more likely that the merchant sold a counterfeit LV item to the wife or mistress of a high ranking party member or, to a party member herself. Either that, or he failed to come down in price for somebody important and the subsequent backlash led to an investigation. Ladies of high station cheated of their lucre into carrying bogus handbags might be the mechanism that starts a trend. Up until now, it has mostly been the parents who cannot afford imported infant formula and particular foreigners who assumed that they are getting local tea who have really seemed to be bothered enough to complain.

Carp Fishing in China

I was invited by some friends to go fishing. A German autoparts factory manager was returning home with his Chinese wife and new baby shortly and this activity would be something of a goingaway outing. The photo above helps to convey better than mere words what sort of experience this was. Nature in China is a relative term, which does not cover the same geographic and abstractions as I am accustomed to. I have been to private fishing ponds in the USA where children, mostly, are escorted for the pleasure of pulling a fish, usually a trout or bluegill, out of a manmade, earthen embanked pond. They are located in the countryside, near or excavated out of former farmland with grassy hillocks, shade trees, and other natural amenities. This fishing facility, set in a dense urban environment and screened by a line of willows and alders, was a tightly packed series of shallow lagoons edged with concrete platforms and rusticated cabins for the more refined Chinese sportsmen and accompanying mahjong players. All the tools of the sport were provided by the facility’s management. I found it odd that in a land where bamboo is used for nearly everything applicable, here the reelless fishing poles were made of plastic tubes. The advantage was the lengths stacked inside one another, collapsing down to a shorter pole; however, the corresponding disadvantage was that during use the pole sections would slide down over one another. Yet due to the purchase decisions of the management, after renting the fishing poles, we would therefore not be unduly encumbered as we walked the 15 meters to where we would drop our lines and begin testing our patience.

This water was noticeably unclear. Only fish the most tolerant of low oxygen levels can survive in such muddy, stagnant conditions. This was indeed a carp pond. The carp is a fish revered by the Chinese as much as the pig because of its fecundity and ability to convert inedible waste into edible protein for humans. It was regarded similarly in the US until about the middle of the 19th century when public perception of this fish turned against it. The most rational story is that entrepreneurial farmers invested in creating productive carp ponds out of otherwise unusable waters: ditches, millponds and the like. The fish bred as is their wont and they and the early North American experimenters in aquaculture overwhelmed the local markets and the prices plummeted. At the same time, they also had to compete against species like cod and other fishes which were not only cheaper but easier to debone. Perceived valuation became ingrained in the American psyche: if the fish is so cheap, it cannot be good.

But there must be more to the story than the price drop in the 19^th century to explain the disdain for a fish that much of the world reveres in the arts for its fecundity, beauty, and adaptability. The carp seems to have been a big part of the diet of Eastern European immigrants. This might have led to an association with the fish as simply another immigrant, a nonnative that in later years would take on similar language as it competed with superior native fishes in dwindling habitats. While it’s true that the introduction of nonnative species can wreak havoc on native environmental systems, few complaints are ever raised about wheat displacing native grasses with in same domineering spirit. I don’t know anybody who would turn down a loaf of wheaten bread and prefer crackers made from North American Gamagrass because it is native to the biome. Naturalized and domesticated plants and animals can earn the label of native over time. In this process tomatoes have become Italian; pineapples and plumeria, Hawaiian; and beef cattle and mustangs, American.

Growing up along the coastline of Lake Michigan, I was told that the carp was an undesirable fish to eat because it was a bottom feeder and as such it was perceived as a trasheater. This explanation is reverse engineered to explain a deeply seated prejudice. Flounder and lobsters are bottomfeeders and they carry none of the negative associations. We only need to look at the recent resurgence of catfish as an acceptable food for the masses, often deepfried and batterdipped, and heavily marketed as homegrown in flooded Louisianan fields and raised on a diet of corn and soybeans. Topfeeders, in fact, carry the highest levels of concentrated toxins. Whales, clearly the largest of the topfeeders, have been found to have toxic flesh containing halogenated-organic contaminants such as PCBs, DDT among other synthetic poisons. On the other hand, many carp varieties subsist on plant materials, notably the grass carp, which makes their flesh the healthiest and cleanest. Louisianan catfish are raised on soybeans and cornmeal. This distinction takes to an extreme the adage: we are what we eat; instead, we have: we are what is eaten by what we eat. Once reviled by aquaculture producers and ecologists, in a strange twist of fate it seems that the carp might be a savior for the catfish industry. The black carp (Mylopharyngodon piceus) is especially adapted to consuming snails which host a parasite that can kill catfish in aquacultural conditions. They also consume other parasites affecting other marketable fishes.

When I was 18 years old, I attended my first seder although I didn’t understand what it was at the time. The French family who hosted me sat around a carp that had been poached and then carefully restuffed again in its skin with bones painstakingly removed. I was mildly shocked when the head of household greedily selected the head for himself. Having grown up to look down on this delicacy, I was intrigued. This memory got tucked away and was later recalled when I started a career as a chef in a catering company in the USA. I learned to make gefilte fish for American Jewish clients, who would never think of allowing the lowly carp in their food. They preferred topeaters like Great Lakes whitefish, pike, trout, anything but the carp. I doubt even that I could have bought carp then without resorting to an Asian market focused on Chinese customers. I made essentially unfilled gefilte fish, quenelles poached in chicken stock set to a simmer for as long as they took to float to the surface, and not for the two hours prescribed by one recipe from a Jewish mother.

There has been a trend in the American diet to disassociate food from its origins. This is especially true with meat. Meat is most often served in a form that least resembles its fleshy animal source. Hamburgers are round and shaped into identical patties. Atlantic cod is molded into squares and rectangles. The most expensive cut of chicken is the boneless, skinless breast, devoid of the vestiges of a living creature and the least flavorful part, plumped up and selectively bred for size. By contrast, restaurants in many parts of Asia specialize in fishhead soup adjusted to local styles and tastes. The memory of a fish served at a seder at the center of a French family dinnertable is evoked nearly daily in the PRC where live fish and seafood are sold in the most modern of supermarkets. Turtles, eels, and bullfrogs make up a significant part of the selection next to tanks wherein one finds the more western leaning choices of shrimp, bivalves, and salmon. The carp are always there, sorted by size and species.

We were given a papercup of bait, which was a sweetened paste of cornmeal that I packed around the hook. The tackle was basic: hook, sinker, and bobber. The key to catching carp in this pond as it was pointed out to me by the hired driver was to adjust the bobber so that the bait lie on the muddy bottom by sliding a plastic cone along the line and wedging the bobber tightly into it. Being bottomfeeders and accustomed to murky waters, carp find their food by smell and by touch, using their soft mouths along the bottom, stirring the mud and causing the damage to native limnological systems that riles so many anticarpists. Carp can attain rather large sizes. They can live for well more than fifty years and especially in cultivated conditions when they are allowed to do so, they can grow to a weight of 35 kilograms and 1.5 meters in length. In a single spawning, which can occur more than once a year in warm climates, they can produce 300,000 eggs, which in a polyculture system sometimes become food for predatory, topfeeder fish like pike and bass. I had no idea what sizes of carp might be found in this fishing pond. The tackle proved woefully undersized.

While we all stood there with our hands on our shafts, we would occasionally catch sight of a passing bobber arise to break the surface, move slowly, and then slip back under the level calm of the water. At one time, we spotted three such movements. These were the signs that some fish had broken free and still had fishhooks with lines dragging bobbers behind them. Those were the large fighters that we all wanted to pull in. I was no different. Whenever such a mystery bobber got close enough, I attempted to lash my line, wrapping it around deftly, in order to draw it within range so as to be scooped up with a net readied by an accomplice. Twice I succeeded at this level of my improvised carp fishing method. With one bobber locked onto the other and feeling the lines enmeshed, I began to work the fish closer to the jetty, allowing just enough tension to keep the fish from diving underneath so it might not scrape the line against the abrasive masonry piling. That was my plan when I called out to a colleague to make ready the long poled net. The hired driver however was convinced that he should pull in the fish in a manly way and grabbed the line directly before the net could get close enough. The polystyrene snapped as I expected. In a similar bit of piscatory struggle a fellow angler across the pond had his bent pole bust in two to the amazement of all the onlookers. There was less amazement after I hooked another fish and the hired driver decided again to intervene a second time by grabbing hold that time of the fishing pole. I heard the crack and refused to look him in the eye.

In spite of our struggles to wrest these fish from the turbid waters, we still had to pay for our catch. It was weighed up and the more knowledgeable among us agreed that it was a fair price. We then proceeded to head back home where awaiting spouses would turn our hard won game into a feast. A housekeeper helped out as well. Three of the fish went into a kind of stew, a very common way of preparing carp. The flesh was tender and mild while the broth was weak and watery. The additional vegetables added little to the overall flavor. To be certain, carp is full of little bones which can be picked apart between the flakes of the cooked fishflesh. As a testament to their endurance, the remaining carp were left in a bucket to be kept fresh and alive for meals later that week.

Finals and fines

At about the end of May I noticed a sharp uptick in the number of students who had enrolled with the expectation that they would be studying in universities and colleges in English speaking countries. These students joined an already small number whose skills had remained unremarkable over the course of the time that they were enrolled. Some of the students from this first wave in May were still waiting to hear final news about visas, scores from their English competency tests, and other minor details. They represented a mixed lot with a minority of them who were levelheaded about their abilities and seemed to have the intellectual wherewithal to be able to benefit from a western education. More than a few, on the other hand, appeared entirely clueless as to what would be expected of them when they showed up on campuses in Houghton, Michigan, or Dublin, Ireland for example. Some of these students could barely put together a complete sentence without the assistance of their classmates’ prodding, but they seemed to comfort themselves that they had enough time (nearly 2 and a half months) in order to become prepared to hit the ground running as international students, or “abroad students” as some preferred to be called.

I was forewarned that as an employee in this private school, I would have some paid vacationtime but that I would not be able to take any in August. It was my impression that this was a function of the public school calendar, but I didn’t realize then that it was moreso a function of procrastination. At the beginning of August, there was a second wave (or possibly a third wave. I don’t want the metaphor to become too much about standard Chinese military strategy) of students with ambitions to study in English speaking universities around the world. These were the students who seemed to feel that they didn’t want their English speaking abilities to peak too soon. The last enrolled students are equally as confident that despite having trouble speaking English unhesitatingly, they feel that they only need a few weeks in order to be at a level of oral communication to make the most of life in a western, English speaking university.

I smile and try to treat them all as equally promising scholars but then again, I am not paying their tuition fees. The days when Chinese students studied their fingers to the bone on order to qualify for state sponsored opportunities to study abroad, first in the former Soviet Union and then anywhere the CCP deemed essential for the good of the nation are mostly in the past. There are still some state sponsored scholarships and the CCP has simultaneously increased the number of opportunities to earn college diplomas within China and without. Today, however, mommy and daddy principally foot the bill; they also make all the decisions about the children’s education. The motives are somewhat in dispute. I suspect that there is a desire to lengthen the amount of time that young women spend in schooling as a kind of socially engineered scheme to delay their marrying and subsequent childbearing. One reason that students in Heze told me that young women attend higher education is so that as future wives they will be able to speak with their husbands. (At least, they are honest about the level of their career ambitions and perhaps, as much, of their job prospects.) That rational came from students who had no interest in studying outside, or more relevantly, whose parents could barely afford to send them to a Chinese provincial institution.

A followup question that I posed whenever a student told me that she was going to study abroad was: “What does your father’s factory make?” And usually I got an answer and if not, the student fully understood why I had asked. These students are just as much automata as their homebound peers. They have only focused on an education from an overseas university in the same way that they do in China. They choose a major that their parents find acceptable and they want to attend a university based on its name recognition. The purpose strictly is the diploma, not the education.

The students heading abroad have been raised in a home and school environment wherein most life choices have been removed and important decisions, made for them. In one sense, the second language challenge is the least of their problems. The average Chinese has been taught to function merely as passive vessels of facts. They have been coddled and programmed while they toil to pass the next test set out before them.

And now it’s the first week of September and the public school calendar has restarted and the adult students who had wisely chosen to avoid the younger crowds have returned to replace some those who have packed up and headed to domestic universities and those abroad or else back to the local public schools. A small cadre of younger students seems to want to continue with the courses on the weekends and fortunately, they are the more willing to learn scholars. I’ve been noticing a few familiar adult faces pop up again. Teachers’ day was this week, too. The school hosted an evening in a Hangzhou nightclub with singing and free drinks. The next day we then learned that we would be fined 50 RMB if we are ever late submitting our discussion topics. Like so many things in China, some things are as predictable as the changing of the seasons.

Medieval practices

One sight that is hard to adjust to in China is all the visibly bruised Chinese people on display. Bruising is the correct term but it in fact look like a series of enormous hickeys, some about the size of table coasters all over a person's back, legs and wherever the skins allows. The normally prudish Chinese would quickly cover the marks if they had been planted there by an eager kisser doing a Hoover imitation, but one learns the wearer of such splotches actually paid a professional to apply them.

There is a lot of interest now in western countries to better understand what is loosely referred to as Chinese medicine. Schools of traditional medicine are expanding to allow westerners to study firsthand and to earn valuable certficates. In this endeavor I do hope that calmer heads prevail. There can be some benefit in studying placebos and faith healing practices, which frankly is mostly what Chinese medicine amounts to. If feeling good is the main purpose of medicine, then indeed, there is much that can be gained from the practice of traditional Chinese medicine.
An Australian colleague told me about his Chinese wife's encounter with a Shandong doctor practicing 'traditional' medicine. The doctor held her wrist as taking her pulse. After counting and sensing the heartbeat and looking studious for a few minutes, he declared that she was in fact pregnant and she was going to have a boy. Effective? The patient happily agreed with the doctor so, yes, Chinese medicine does work effectively on at least one level.
There are lessons to be learned from even a very flawed philosophy that in most ways resembles medieval medicine. As soon as the elusive black humor is found, ours can be balanced and we just might all be better off for it. There are some herbs and plants that make up the bulk of Chinese medicine and the active ingredients do undoubtedly have therapeutic value. Some are in wide use today and others are being studied more still. The problem with common plants and herbs is, however, that most anybody in China will tell you that the strongest medicine is the most expensive and the most difficult to obtain. Ginseng from Wisconsin is marketed as some of the best here. And all the stories about endangered animals being essential to traditional medicine are true. And the stories about aborted fetal tissues used in medical concoctions are probably true. At least, the people who tell me about them believe that the stories are so.

Bloodletting has gotten a bad reputation in the west as many unemployed phlebotomists continue to assert. There are in fact diseases for which reducing the amount of blood can alleviate symptoms. And as the professional phlebomists of old used to say: "If it works for acute hypertension, why not bleed a patient with pneumonia or kidney stones?" This is probably one of the reasons why I dislike dealing with professionally minded types. The Chinese who defend even what some of them cannot explain will quickly use the argument that if it cannot be proven to not work then it does. And that same argument, that of forcing a detractor to prove a negative held sway in the west until, to be fair, alternatives were developed and put into practice. Doctors did what they did until a new method became more acceptable to engage in and to earn a living from. The idea that sometimes doing nothing is the most effective medicine was hardly cost effective even when doctors all knew what 'primum non nocere' meant and swore to uphold it.

Which now brings us to fire cupping,(many Chinese doctors, nonetheless, now use hand operated vacuums today) that other medieval practice that was due for a comeback like witchcraft and exorcism did in the 1970s. I tried to find a helpful image of cupping but all I could find locally was the above that I snapped during an anthropological promenade one afternoon. It's not gruesome or descriptive of this essay's main point but I think that the image reveals something just as helpful for treating medical conditions as fire cupping. Luckily for my expository proclivities, Gwenyth Paltrow (bless her heart and penchant for everything alternative) decided to revisit the middle ages back in 2004, subjecting her tired, qi imbalanced muscles to the ordeal and the results to aghast paparazzi and bewildered entertainment journalists. I do hope the evil spirits were removed by a certified expert though. The BBC did seek out and find such an expert, a professor, in fact, to comment on the distressing sight of a highly photogenic actress with some blemishes.
He states:
"There is no evidence for its efficacy. It has not been submitted to clinical trials, but there have certainly been satisfied customers for 3,000 years."
I am certain that Ms. Paltrow's publicist could not have agreed more. And after all who needs qualified efficacy, double blind trials, and cause and effect mumbo jumbo, when there is tradition that dates back to the time of Hippocrates and more than 1.4 billion people who have not yet been proven that it doesn't work?

Indicator Species

The classic indicator species is the clichéd canary in a coalmine, schlepped into the poorly ventilated mines of days past. If the miners noticed that the canary had stopped singing in its cage, they might have a chance to escape before being overcome by the same fate of the more environmentally sensitive creature, probably due to asphyxiation from carbon monoxide, methane, or simply low oxygen levels. So then what shall China’s indicator species be?

There’s not much good news coming out of China with regard to the environment. The two most important rivers in China, the ones that rank with the Nile and the Mississippi in terms of historical and cultural legacies, the Yellow River (黄河, Huáng Hé) and the Yangtze (长河, Cháng Jiāng) are better thought of today as movers of industrial and urban effluence. Fully one third of all fish species of the river considered the cradle of Chinese civilization has been declared extinct. http://en.chinagate.com.cn/english/environment/49803.htm

Meanwhile in Yunnan province the White-handed Gibbon aka the Lar Gibbon (subspecies Hylobates lar yunnanensis) has been declared extinct officially in the wild. http://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/586/goodbye_yunnan_whitehanded_gibbon

This loss of a primate species, however, has at best been treated as a footnote in most of the Chinese press, qualified as ‘presumed’ or ‘possibly’. This perhaps parallels the recently drawn out scandal about the South China Tiger photos. Was there too much ready willingness even amongst the skeptical members of the media to publish anything positive about the state of China’s endangered species and diminishing wildlife habitat? I would prefer to think that the gibbons have just gotten smarter and stopped serenading park visitors with their distinct calls. There was another bit of a glimmer of hope a few months back when a Baiji dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) was spotted in August 2007 after it had been officially declared extinct in the Yangtze river. Now it is qualified as functionally extinct. It’s still extinct for all intents and purposes; there is simply one last straggler that didn’t get the memo. What the chance discovery shows rather is not that the species is anymore viable, but that the Yangtze is so muddied and opaque that a bright, white sea mammal can be missed when being looked for by a trained team of naturalists. As recently as the 1950s there were an estimated 6,000 of them in the wild when during the Great Leap Forward, veneration of the animal (长江女神; Cháng Jiāng nǚshén, or Yangzte goddess) was deemed incompatible with socialist dogma. It was hunted down freely and electric fishing became an acceptable method, stunning the river fishes with high current.

If the Yunnan Gibbon species had been cuddlier and more marketable, would it have gotten more attention in time to have saved its existence within Yunnan’s Nangunhe Nature Reserve? The Fuwa, Beibei, is a sturgeon of sorts yet I doubt that graphic allusion will convince buyers of the Olympic tchotchke to consider more about the greater need for aquatic habitat restoration. It seems easier to talk all about the recent birth of four more giant pandas recently in the state breeding program. The panda, too, is an indicator species. It indicates that the Chinese government thinks that it’s more effective for its political agenda to insure the panda’s survival and to occasionally bestow a few to some countries’ national zoos as diplomatic gestures while it squanders and befouls the environmental legacy of the entire nation and the world.

And so I wonder about the economic development of a country and the middle class phenomenon and its accompanying socalled middle class values. There had been efforts made to protect the variously declared extinct species of China, but they were all part of the central government's agenda. NGOs and the like are not encouraged in the PRC, certainly not ones that might besmirch the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to protect the environment. Their efforts are mixed, to say the least.

Taihu, one of the largest freshwater lakes in China, forming a common border between Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces is essentially dead, so polluted that the bluegreen algae blooms now cover it as soon as the temperatures allow, rendering it unfit for human usage. In the meantime one of the most vocal defenders of the lake, Wu Lihong, now sits in prison after what most agree was an effort by the Jiangsu provincial government and polluting industries to punish his success in drawing attention to the worsening conditions. And in the meantime, the central government has allocated $14 billion US for the cleanup of Taihu to be administered by the Jiangsu provincial government. With that much money, they can build of a lot of new prison cells to make even more of the problems go away.

http://www.pacificenvironment.org/article.php?id=2418

There was a recent propaganda coup regarding the nests of a few swans at the sight of the 2008 Olympic rowing events. In order to restore this formerly dry site, water was diverted from other sources. How much and from where exactly is a state secret. The green Olympics have been redacted with black. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/01/olympicgames2008.china1

The operating truth is that appearance is always more important than substance in Chinese society. It follows to a degree from the concept of what motivates a shame society. The government uses this pretext to utmost effect with the general populace falling in line with its declarations, happily believing that the pollution in Taihu is due to natural cycles and a shortage of rain. Does it naturally follow that all middle classes demand more attention be paid to the environment? There is nothing equivalent to a naturalist movement that I can detect in Chinese history. Is there enough time, given the breakneck speed of China’s changes, for the nation to pause and reflect about what irrecoverable, shared biological assets are being sacrificed for private, material gain?

There are, however, the toads, a carpeting of them in the allotment gardens next to the city river/drainage ditch. I would like to believe that their numbers reveal the positive condition of the local waterways. Amphibians are, in fact, another good indicator of toxins and carcinogens in an environment since they readily absorb them through their skin. I don't know just how organic these horticulturalists are but they are big proponents of nightsoil dressing. I see an occasional butterfly in the city as well, which gives me hopeful pause in this urban jungle. More likely, though, the enormous knot of toads is better explained because the predator species, which might have consumed the tadpoles and egg clusters, have been eliminated to such an extent that the toads’ number have allowed them to become so dominant in the gardenscape. There are always winners and losers when habitats are modified by humans. Normally it's the rats and pigeons that come out as winners; this time the toads have the advantage.