(HOST) Commentator Jay Craven recently returned from a two-week trip to China – organized by the American Film Institute – where he encountered many provocative images.
(CRAVEN) I had a hundred memorable experiences in China, including an encounter in my Beijing hotel lobby with French President Nicolas Sarkozy who saw me eyeballing a sporty new Peugeot on display. "Bonjour," said Sarkozy," extending his hand. "Good car."
"It is," I said. "But I recently bought a Mini Cooper." Sarkozy moved on.
Everyone, it seems, wants to be in business with China. But the effects of this are immediately apparent to any visitor.
The air in Bejing is the most polluted on earth. The blue-gray haze is so thick that I could taste its bitter sulfur/metallic tang, even while sleeping. On most days, I couldn’t see the distance of two city blocks, through this heavy curtain of smog. At night, it diffused headlights and street lamps, suggesting Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic thriller, "Blade Runner."
According to our U.S. Embassy liaison, the life expectancy of a policeman working Beijing’s air-fouled streets is just 46 years. And 25% of Los Angeles smog now comes from China. I traveled south to Guangzhou and the air there is just as bad, due to smoke-belching factories, where migrant workers earn $4 a day, living in barracks where they’re charged rent and metered each time they use light or water. Guangzhou’s Quangdong Province produces 50% of the world’s shoes and 60% of it’s toys.
Americans are justly concerned this holiday season, with reports of lead-painted toys and other tainted goods coming from China. But also think of the workers, who are routinely exposed to these toxic chemicals.
In 2005, China had 387,000 deaths from work-related illnesses. Reporter Loretta Tofani of the Salt Lake City Tribune reported on just a few of these including Wei Chaihua, 44 – whom she visited – tethered to an oxygen tank and dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making popular gas grills sold throughout the U.S.
I met terrific students and filmmakers in China, but I also came away with a potent sense that I had seen the future – and it doesn’t work. Maybe that’s the upside of all this-that we can now see the environmental and human cost of unlimited growth. The problem is not China’s alone. Overproduction wrecks havoc in India and elsewhere. And, it’s American and European companies that spawned all this by shifting our own manufacturing jobs overseas. We’ve also set an example for consumption. Indeed, last year the U.S. imported $288 billion dollars worth of goods from China, up from $51 billion a decade ago.
Change is needed worldwide, but not to see how fast we can produce more goods. Our most hopeful future lies, instead, in sustainability and renewal – and in the more careful stewardship and appropriate distribution of the world’s finite resources.
Filmmaker Jay Craven teaches at Marlboro College and directs Kingdom County Productions.