laodan's favorite china-globalization pages, page 1

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Chinas E-Waste Nightmare Worsening: Nov 19, 2007 9:23am 1 review environment, modernity, china-globalization
http://www.physorg.com/news114623477.html; China's E-Waste Nightmare Worsening via Innovation Watch, in Physics.org by CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
"Most e-waste in China comes from overseas, but the amount of domestic e-waste is on the rise," he said. This ugly business is driven by pure economics. For the West, where safety rules drive up the cost of disposal, it's as much as 10 times cheaper to export the waste to developing countries. In China, poor migrants from the countryside willingly endure the health risks to earn a few yuan, exploited by profit-hungry entrepreneurs. International agreements and European regulations have made a dent in the export of old electronics to China, but loopholes - and sometimes bribes - allow many to skirt the requirements. And only a sliver of the electronics sold get returned to manufacturers such as Dell and Hewlett Packard for safe recycling. China's E-Waste Nightmare Worsening America Ships Electronic Waste Overseas Chinese made toys poison Western kids. We have been swept under a barrage of news coverage with similar titles. But do we ever think about how our reaction here is perceived there? Think about it. They are observing their parents, brothers, sisters and neighbors dieing from what they know to be poisoning by pollution but they have nowhere to flee and so they endure their misery mostly in silence. Westerners generally judge China from their high stools of superiority. Ha this crap produced in China, ha China's environmental catastrophe, ha China's human rights record. But what about China's reasons to enter modernity so fast? For the countries of the South a fast industrialization appears as the only possible answer to their survival at the hands of a, so perceived, totalitarian Western centric economic model. In other words the Chinese think that the survival of their nation is depending upon their rapid and successful implementation of such an economic model. In the South industrialization is perceived as a question of survival and speed is considered to be paramount. In such conditions the law is often late to answer problems and if the law has been enacted its implementation does not necessarily follow... And the West is too eager to profit from those loopholes in the South's legal systems to reject upon it its own mountains of most poisonous garbage.