If there’s going to be a deadly intestinal virus outbreak in central China, you can pretty much bet it’s going to happen in Fuyang. The Anhui city, near the border with Henan province, has something of a history of unwholesome happenings.

So, there were no surprises when a CER colleague sent me a link about the recent Enterovirus 71 (EV71) outbreak. EV71 is a variant of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), but with more severe symptoms:

Typically, it starts with a generalized illness, poor appetite, and sore throat, followed by a fever, rashes on the hands, feet, and buttocks along with mouth ulcers.

State media reports that there are now over 15,000 cases of HFMD in China, resulting in 26 deaths. In Yunnan province there are 113 cases, Jiangxi has 114 and Shanghai municipality has reported 1,988.

In Fuyang, EV71 has infected 3,300 people and caused 22 deaths.

Remember 2004’s fake milk powder scandal that killed 15 babies? That was Fuyang.

And last month, the city government’s “white house” (do we mean Capitol building?) made news. At a glance, we’d guess some dubious sources of income may have been involved. A whistle-blower on the project mysteriously died in prison. The central government is investigating.

“Fuyang is the most luan place I know,” our Chinese teacher from Anhui told us. “The government, the people, the mafia … just go to the train station and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

We may take a rain check on that one.

Related

Danwei: Darkness in the “White House”

Wikipedia: Fuyang disambiguator (there are two Fuyangs, one in Anhui and one in Zhejiang)

Black swans are a part of life. They are the term given by trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb to the unexpected, random, unpredictable events that disrupt models and forecasts, and make fools about economists and analysts. SARS was a black swan, and so was 9/11. So are SocGen’s troubles and Obama’s surge. Who could have predicted them? Who could have predicted the snow and traffic madness that hit China around the lunar new year?

Taleb’s book on the subject, Fooled by Randomness, is a must-read. He often gives the impression of being smug ands arrogant, but he’s right that a wise investment strategy has to take into account the unknowable – the random event that shifts a situation in a fundamental way, upsetting predictions happily or more usually tragically.

The government dodged a bullet for sure in the middle of the snow. It was the first serious black swan to hit China since SARS in 2003, and the fact that there was no disaster – no headlines reporting 50 dead in a stampede at Guangzhou railway station – was a pleasant relief and even a surprise.

It is worth remembering as the GDP train speeds towards another solid year of 10% growth that China is still susceptible to more black swans. Overall, it is probably true that the more mature, regulated and transparent a society, the less chance there is of seriously negative black swans. In those terms, China is in better shape today to ward off the birds than it has been for a long time.

But just as SARS got its start, it would seem, in a civet cat cage in a market in Guangzhou, what else is brewing out there? Who knows? Another religious cult? An environmental disaster somewhere no one thought of? A stand-off between the authorities and middle class property owners that turns nasty? A sudden stock market plunge? A couple of back-to-back airline crashes?

This is not a doomsday prediction, just a reminder that the unexpected is to be expected. China got over the snow pretty easily, but still has an endless capacity to surprise. It is worth keeping in mind.

After a brief reprieve, it’s now snowing in earnest again. China’s disastrous winter weather has already killed at least 60 people nationwide.

The central government has tapped into its emergency pork reserves, and will release 18,000 tons before the lunar new year on February 6.

The hardest-hit province appears to be Hunan, with Chenzhou city going into its eighth day without electricity. Food and petrol in that city of 4 million are running low. The Central Meteorological Authority’s website forecasts indicate more snow and sub-zero temperatures there for the next two days.

The SCMP reports that massive traffic jams around Nanjing are preventing supplies like fuel from entering the city. As a result, some stations are rationing fuel to 30 liters per car. Some taxis are charging up to three times the usual fare because of the fuel shortage.

Shanghai has shut down its port, leaving 1,000 ships stranded. According to Bloomberg, the storms could continue until the end of next week.

However, the Central Meteorological Authority’s forecasts on its website indicate that Shanghai should be clear of snow, although still cloudy, tomorrow and on Monday.

Most people know about Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, what with him being a Nobel Peace Prize winner and all. But there’s also an organization called Grameen Foundation, which, although it has no legal ties to Yunus’ bank, nevertheless follows his principles. It’s not a source of capital; it’s more of a lubricator for capital and expertise to flow from people who have it to people who don’t have it but need it.

The EU Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai arranged for a presentation by Grameen Foundation’s East and Southeast Asia Regional Coordinator, Kate Druschel, about its activities in China. I wrote about China’s nascent venture philanthropy scene for this month’s magazine, so I was particularly interested to hear that Grameen Foundation would be ramping up its activities here.

As usual, we give you the highlights:

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Food safety in China has always been a concern but that concern has been whipped up into an international frenzy recently by the media. Abroad, the concern is about the safety of Chinese imports. Here in China, there was a kafuffle about an investigative report that purportedly showed dumplings made of cardboard being sold in Beijing.

Now a new food class must be approached with caution. In Beijing again, a “high-ranking” South Korean diplomat died after eating a sandwich from a shop near his office. He suffered a stomach-ache and diarrhea after ingesting the food item.

The Beijing hospital conducting the postmortem said only that results would be out in a month.

This makes me rethink the wisdom of having eaten a sandwich I just bought from a shop near my office.

I originally came across this article on the website of the Straits Times, Singapore’s main paper, which is pay-only, and there were some comments left by readers. Since Beijing will be host to plenty of tourists and foreigners next year, their comments might be worth reading: (more…)

The newly revitalized Shanghai Foreign Correspondents’ Club (facebook link) has been organizing some interesting and useful events lately, thanks to a new board.

It invited Kerry Brown, a scholar (now a fellow at the think tank Chatham House in the UK, though he has even lectured at Inner Mongolia University), former diplomat and now author of a new book on our favorite subject, for a talk at Arch on Changshu Lu. It’s called Struggling Giant: China in the 21st Century, and it’s published by Anthem Press.

The venue was rather cramped, but the talk went well - Brown made a few very good points about China from an outside observer’s point of view. We’ll be running an interview with him soon about his ideas on China. Here are some key points from his Shanghai FCC talk:

-China’s strategy of inviting foreign investment was primarily to facilitate technology and knowledge transfer; this has failed, so FDI is now no longer the yardstick the central government uses for provinces

-Foreigners tend to look at China in an ahistorical way, despite the country’s long history and attendant baggage

-NGOs are increasingly tolerated by the government as a way to help plug holes in a tattered social safety net

-Beijing’s control over the provinces is brittle – it can snap quickly and “the whole thing could fall apart tomorrow,” he said

-There’s no clear candidate for the top job when the Party Congress convenes this autumn, unlike previous leadership transitions

-What keeps Hu Jintao up at night? Not economic stability; not human rights and foreign government criticism. He’s worried about income disparities, including the great underclass of 200 million migrant workers, who are disenfranchised in almost every way. And since there’s no democracy, no one really knows what in the world they are thinking.

I didn’t read the South China Morning Post on Saturday. Fortunately, Imagethief did… and turned up this:

It is a work by artist Liu Yuyi and his daughter, Liu Haomei, painted to mark the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Measuring 7.1 meters by 2.8 meters, Halcyon Days Pearl is Hong Kong’s largest painting.

It depicts President Hu Jintao surrounded by a selection of Hong Kong’s great and good with Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang quite literally standing there as Hu’s right hand man. If SAR critics are looking for more “Beijing’s poodle” material to lob at Tsang, this could be it.

Liu said he wanted to include people of different political views, which explains the appearance of Cardinal Joseph Zen, Bishop of Hong Kong, Anson Chan, former chief secretary to the SAR, and Alan Leong, the Civic Party candidate who lost out to Tsang in March’s controlled election. Tycoons such as Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho earn spots much closer to Hu.

According to the SCMP article, the background of the painting includes Mount Everest (presumably without a road running up the side) as a symbol of mainland China’s support for Hong Kong.

Imagethief makes two interesting comparisons: one to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the other to Mao-era propaganda art.

Parallels are drawn between the positioning of Hu amongst the Hong Kong’s elite and Mao in his classic poses surrounded by the proletariat. Similarities can also been seen in the use of positive imagery.

My first thought was that this kind of iconography might be intended as ironic. Apparently not, it seems.

Imagethief’s closing remark is to ask what Hong Kong people might think of it (or where to hang it). I’d also be interested to find out what Beijing’s take on it is. When the official message for the handover anniversary is likely to be along the lines of social and cultural inclusiveness combined with mutual economic gain, it can’t be good PR to have someone drag up images that remind many Hong Kong people of what made them leave the mainland in the first place.

A short but interesting debate unfolds in the letters page of the current Foreign Policy magazine. One of its overarching messages is the critical role family plays in the stability of China.

Families, even extended families, provide a safety net that enables people to weather problems - periods of unemployment are easier to handle, forced relocations can become less of a burden. Family members can also band together to fight legal or regulatory injustice, pitch in for unexpected health care bills or buy land as a group or provide loans to start a business.

In short, families can provide the social safety network that the government does not provide.

In many ways, families balance out the damage that local government causes through corruption and a disproportionate emphasis on economic growth over welfare.

One way to help this is to allow for the faster development of civil society. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), both domestic and foreign, are not yet allowed in China but there are signs of change.

On May 25, China Daily reported that the government is to create registration policies for NGOs (foreign NGOs have to operate as businesses in China) and streamline registrations for their domestic equivalents.

All this is part of an effort to deal with a very basic problem that Beijing: how to maintain its authority and legitimacy if economic growth begins to waver. As long as more people make more money than they did last year, all is good. If that changes, there are fears of social unrest. Nobody wants that.

Families can provide some stability in bad times but their ability to act as the country’s surrogate social safety provider only goes so far. A strong civil society can give people more recourse in times of trouble but Beijing needs to let go of some of the reins.

Here’s a story that is really, well, dumb. The problem is not so much that it happened. That part is easy to understand. What is difficult to fathom without breaking into fits of laughter is the reaction.

The story goes like this. A couch manufacturer in China used Kingsoft software to translate a product label. The software is an omnipresent tool in computers across China. One particular version of said software, an old version, translated the color “dark brown” into the racially charged “n—– brown”. This is definitely not a good thing but I doubt the couch meant it in a derogatory manner or that the software is racist.

So the couch is sent to Canada where it is purchased by Doris Moore, who is black, and takes great offense. A certain (mild) level of offense is understandable. There should be a proofreader of these labels, no doubt. And it probably leaves one wondering about the quality of the couch in question.

But no, Moore says somebody should take responsibility, which according to the version of the story from AP translates into cash.

Some of her friends, Moore said, actually refused to sit on the racist couch and the issue has “taken a toll on her family.”

Apparently, Moore’s daughter found the label and questioned her on the word which she didn’t know. She probably hasn’t been watching television or listening to music or going to the movies or reading Huckleberry Finn or going to school. Moore said she didn’t want her daughter learning the word in this random fashion. I guess one alternative would be that she learn the word spoken by a character in a movie who is holding a gun and shooting people, or that she learn it from some white guy in a period piece who has absolutely no tolerance and represents everything that is base about humanity.

Some translations that come out of China are wrong, more often funny wrong than insulting wrong. Yes, it can be a (mild) issue. But how much of a toll can a wrong label have on the family? More than that, where do these friends come from that are holding the couch responsible for the label and preventing it from fulfilling its destiny by not sitting on it?

An official at the Ontario Human Rights Commission (yes, this is now a human rights issue) said it could take two years to resolve this. Two years! How many hearings is that? How much money will it cost? How many inflammatory comments over a simple mistake made by a piece of software that has already been fixed? (By the way, Kingsoft has already apologized and said the whole thing really was a problem with the software.) Will somebody actually pay Moore for this? And, if that is the goal of the entire exercise, how does that affect efforts to deal with issues that are truly important and based on actual racism and discrimination by people, not furniture?

For a little while, I guess, we can put genocide, racial killings, that fact that a racist has a shot at becoming president of France, conflicts in the Middle East, discrimination against minorities in Canada itself and myriad other problems firmly in the back burner. We got a couch to deal with.

This is the seventh in a series of posts Alfred Romann will file on India.

The list of assets of Mularam Kharida, a driver in Delhi, includes but is not limited to:
- A 24-hour-a-day job as a driver (earning 3,500 rupees, or US$90, per month),
- Access to tourists that tip well,
- The ability to take said tourist to shops that tip him badly,
- A small parcel of land three hours from Delhi where the one-room home for his family of five is,
- Another piece of land in the same village where he is slowly building a new and bigger home,
- Four buffalo,
- One cow,
- His wife’s job as a kindergarten teacher in his home village (earning 1,200 rupees per month or US$30).

Mularam’s list of liabilities includes:
- About 9,000 rupees per month (US$220) in household expenses,
- School fees and expenses (uniforms and supplies) for his two dauthers, aged 18 and 16, and one son, aged 14.
- Lack of sleep (three full hours on a good night),
- Two daughters, aged 16 and 18, that will likely be married soon and require a “very expensive” dowry,
- Ongoing construction costs for his new home,
- Occasional and unexpected medical costs.

The list of things Mularam would like includes:
- Enough money to pay for his two daughters’ marriages/dowries (a few hundred thousand rupees),
- To finish his new home (another year or two),
- Constant electricity,
- A refrigerator (see above),
- Less work,
- For his entire body to hurt less,
- A few nights of uninterrupted sleep.
- Go overseas to work (”I work hard. In a few months pay for my daughter’s marriage. Pay for new house.”)

The list of things Mularam dislikes includes but is not limited to:
- People from Pakistan (”no good people”),
- The cheap three-wheeled taxis that populate the streets of India’s capital,
- People from Bangladesh,
- Coffee (tea with milk and sugar is better),
- People from Sri Lanka (”no good people),
- Chinese trinkets,
- People from the mountainous regions of the country (”no good people”),
- Beer (although rum in moderate doses is OK),
- Local tourists (they don’t tip well),
- Beggars (”Always drugs”),
- His brother in law,
- Mutton (other non-veg meals are fine).

This is not, of course, a comprehensive profile but it is not atypical of the millions of Indians that have, at best, seen marginal benefits from the country’s growth. This is the core of the customer base in the country. Of the 1.1 billion people in India, about 650 million live, more or less, like Mularam.