“The trip was awesome and frightening all at the same time. It isn’t the China of bicycles and tin and wood shacks I saw just seven years ago. There are all new cars on the roads and new, modern high rise apartment and office buildings going up everywhere. I counted 87 cranes just from the airport to our hotel when we arrived in Beijing.”
– Vancouver State Senator and Marketing Consultant Don Benton, in a statement regarding his recent trip to China
A delegation of Washington politicians and educators just returned from an excursion to China, sponsored largely by Hanban, also known as the National Office For Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language.
State Senator Don Benton, who sponsored a bill this year that would have created a two-year Spanish and Chinese language instruction pilot program in two Washington school districts at the elementary school level, returned with the above sentiments. He says that the United States needs to put more emphasis on math and science and spend more money to hire and keep good teachers – to be competitive with China.
“This needs to be done,” he says, “before there is a crisis and China becomes the world economic power.”
According to numerous recent international newspaper and other reports, there already is a crisis. Actually – several crises – tainted seafood, bottled water, toothpaste and pet food. Fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit products of all types. My favorite headline last week was “Chinese food made from cardboard.” The CNN story described the main ingredient in dumplings being sold in one Beijing district this way: chopped cardboard, softened with an industrial chemical and flavored with fatty pork and powdered seasoning. The cardboard, as if it matters, is stored on the floor.
In a crackdown believed to be tied to food safety and good public relations for the 2008 Olympics to be held in Beijing on July 10, China’s government executed its former food and drug agency director for approving untested drugs and taking bribes that resulted in the deaths of at least 10 people. Executed him. And the Chinese government said in June it closed 180 food manufacturers found to have used industrial chemicals and additives in food products, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Last year, according to the same story in the WSJ, 48 percent of the 924 shipments rejected as unsafe by European Union countries came from China, while only 15 percent of all EU imports, by dollar value, were from there.
Wouldn’t you say there already is a crisis?
Sure there is a huge emphasis on math and science in Chinese schools and the graduation rates are stellar and kids can afford to attend university – but what on earth are they teaching in those math and science classes? Certainly, tenth grade chemistry students are not specifically learning how to contaminate food with industrial products to further bolster China’s robust export economy. Or – are they?
I’m joking. But the workers learn it somewhere – and it’s reminiscent of the early days of the American meat packing industry Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle – except now it’s a technology revolution hand-in-hand with industrial. And thousands died last year in China coal mines due to increasing energy demands. This country has been there, too – but not for several decades.
A dear American friend of mine who lived in China for three years and now works in international trade is the proud owner of an awe-inspiring stack of boot-legged DVDs he purchased for a dollar in the streets of his host city. Weird I know – and certainly illegal – but not life threatening.
So the economy is different in China and perilously dependent on its ability to export huge amounts of product fast. But can we beat them at this game by bolstering math and science and learning Chinese? No way. They’re playing dirty ball.
Cardinals coach Tony LaRussa didn’t bat an eye during Game 2 of the 2006 World Series when Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenny Rogers was thought to have a foreign substance resembling pine tar on the heel of his pitching hand. (Yes, I’m still bitter.) Why was it brushed off by LaRussa and the rest of baseball? Because – to some degree – dirty ball is normal. And this is the part that I find “awesome and frightening.”
Which set of rules, then, do we learn in order to compete? By all means do I think teachers should be well paid – heck, overpaid – and kids should be bilingual. Math and science are hugely important to a well-rounded education and will lead to high paying jobs and bolstered industry sectors. Clark County’s business, tech and education communities have made strides to support kids in these areas through funding and mentoring.
But we in Washington, with our heavy trading power in the Pacific Rim and great relationships with China and Japan, can also inject a serious dose of ethics into our policies, setting a standard in the United States that the Feds and indeed the global trading community can stand behind. Let us not blindly move forward to “compete globally” – the game is rigged. We can recognize how many decades and centuries it took us to raise our standards of safety and quality and not let these things slip in the face of competition.
This may seem like a tall order, but remember that just a few years ago, “sustainability” was an edgy concept – now it’s a multi-billion dollar industry. Ethical trading and importing is on the fringe, but several local organizations like Organic Products Trading Company, Café Feminino, Mint Tea and others are part of the new trading market.
Another friend, who is a local business developer for popular Boston-based Equal Exchange and hails from a successful tech start-up, is working toward making the worker owned cooperative a new-era flagship – and potentially a publicly traded company – where the shareholders’ “dividends” are just what the company promised: a small slice of the global economy based on safety for workers and consumers, fair prices and tasty snacks. But no profit is to be made. Crazy. And yet, big money investors are interested.
Perhaps I’m just a July patriot, but I think math and science – actually, training and keeping the innovators stateside – can help us do it better than everybody else. And by better, I mean ethically, safely, creatively and economically sound. Not just cheaper and faster.
