http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd60/edheres/mz_100909_10028686967.gif
Smog and Defectors
When I was in China five years ago, air pollution was apparent in some places but nowhere near the level it is now. Xiamen (shaman) was one of the better cities in China for air quality. No more.
When I arrived in August, the heat and humidity were oppressive and the air was heavy and hazy which I attributed to the humidity. It’s cooler now, in the 70s and sixties at night, but the air never cleared. Crisp and clear it ain’t. Pollution in the air here is palpable. Visibility toward the horizon is often limited to a mile or two at most due to heavy smog. On the clearest days, visibility is seldom greater than five miles – and “clear” days are few. I have seen no day with clear visibility at the horizon that permitted a view. A “raspy” throat is commonplace and the smell and feel of incinerated particles in the air is constant.
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd60/edheres/IMG_0412.jpg
It comes from coal-fired power plants, widespread use of charcoal bricks for cooking and fume-emitting vehicles of all types from conventional tractor trailers, to hundreds of busses, to thousands of motorbikes, the principal means of transportation for most people.
Public transportation is mostly a variety of busses and a larger variety of taxis. The taxi’s range from conventional cabs with dome lights, to marginally legal blue busses which are small, over packed vans that operate as gypsy cabs or the vans in New York, to motor bike contraptions and regular motorbikes where anybody and everybody hops on for a cheap – and risky – ride. I’ve seen families piled onto the back of a motorbike, with plastic bags of groceries hanging on them while they hung on to each other.
http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd60/edheres/EarlyModelTaxi.jpghttp://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd60/edheres/IMG_0216.jpg
Defectors
At the Sofitel Here, a French hotel brand operated here by a Singapore company, they inaugurated a new ballroom by showing the BBC documentary “Crossing the Line” about four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the 1960s. One of them was the guy who was able to rejoin his Japanese wife, a kidnapping victim of North Korea, in Japan after settling up with the US Army and another is still in North Korea, an aged celebrity now in failing health.
The fellow who got the tickets for some of us is a Malaysian-born Chinese who after spending twenty years being an Australian, came to China. He’s got an unusual accent in both English and Mandarin.
The event featured the film, a well done and balanced study of North Korea and the US deserters, accompanied by comments by one of the co-producers, Nick Bonner. Bonner who lives in Beijing runs a travel agency that arranges tours of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It’s not particularly busy.
The irony of sitting in the ballroom or a luxurious French Hotel, in what some call Communist China (with special emphasis implying a closed restrictive society), watching a BBC produced documentary depicting North Korea in a candid and unflattering way, with a mixed audience of expats from all over the world and Chinese nationals was illuminating. Well within my lifetime, North Korea was a client-state of both the Soviet Union and Communist China. Some of the first television I remember ever seeing was newsreel coverage of the Korean War when hundreds of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” streamed into North Korea to fight GI’s. North Korea didn’t learn how to be a closed society by reading books; they were taught by folks whose kids and grandkids now think it’s a pretty bad idea.
0 Responses to “Smog and Defectors”