Today's Links: The problem with e-waste reporting, China's first female railroad engineer, and GM loves Shanghai

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  • Ghosts of the Machines - OR - Just where do all of those Chinese PCs go to die, anyway? [Shanghai Scrap] On August 28, Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, ran a news item regarding ongoing studies of the health effects caused by environmentally unsound processing of e-waste (PCs, monitors, printers, etc) in south China… But there’s a problem with the Science story, and those like it: they insist on blaming China’s e-waste problems on foreigners, and thus deflect attention away from the fact that Chinese e-waste is the fastest growing and largest component of the waste stream arriving in South China (and, especially, into Guiyu, the notorious e-waste processing hub). And, in doing so, publications like Science provide cover to the Chinese government officials, and the Western and Chinese consumer electronics companies who have - collectively - failed to do much of anything about the problem."
  • China's First Female Railroad Engineer [All-China Women's Federation] "Sitting in her airy and clean apartment, 80-year-old Tian Guiying, appears no different from any other retired senior citizen. But Tian has the distinction of being New China's first-ever woman locomotive engineer. Tian was the youngest of six daughters in a fisherman's family, resident in a poverty-stricken village near the coastal city of Dalian in northeastern Liaoning Province. To her parents, Tian's birth meant little more than a heavier burden."
  • Party’s Agenda in China Seems to Fall Flat [New York Times] "China’s Communist Party elite had billed its four-day strategy session as an attack on “acute problems” that threatened the party’s political standing, like official corruption, China’s yawning gap between the rich and poor, and the lack of democracy within the party’s own ranks. But besides an anticorruption directive that would force officials and their families to disclose their property holdings and investments, initial reports from the meeting last week suggested that the Central Committee’s members either were reluctant to make major changes, or disagreed over how those changes might be made."
  • GM to back World Expo in Shanghai [Detroit Free Press] "General Motors surprised many when it ended its 9-year endorsement deal with superstar golfer Tiger Woods. It also has shocked communities like Flint when it yanked its sponsorship of the Buick Open golf tournament because of its bankruptcy. Yet GM is forging ahead with its multimillion-dollar sponsorship of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China, taking place next spring. Why? As GM CEO Rick Wagoner told me when I worked on a WWJ-TV project on China, the country is "the one place we have to get it right.""
  • Young foreigners hunt jobs in China amid crisis [SF Gate] "When the best job Mikala Reasbeck could find after college in Boston was counting pills part-time in a drugstore for $7 an hour, she took the drastic step of jumping on a plane to Beijing in February to look for work. A week after she started looking, the 23-year-old from Wheeling, West Virginia, had a full-time job teaching English."
  • President Hu rolls into US [China Daily] "President Hu Jintao is making an unprecedented string of visits to United Nations summits as he leads a high-ranking Chinese delegation to the United States this week. The president will be in New York for the UN Summit on Climate Change, the 64th annual UN General Assembly debate and a nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament summit of the UN Security Council from Monday through Thursday."
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By Elaine Chow in on September 21, 2009 7:30 PM Comments 1 Likes Like

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