A Quote by Ma Jun
While cheap products are exported to western countries, the waste is dumped mostly in China's back yard, contaminating its air, water, soil and seas.
Related Quotes
Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight.
We can break the mountains apart; we can drain the rivers and flood the valleys. We can turn the most luxuriant forests into throw-away paper products. We can tear apart the great grass cover of the western plains and pour toxic chemicals into the soil and pesticides onto the fields until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with acids, the rivers with sewage, the seas with oil - all this in a kind of intoxication with our power for devastation at an order of magnitude beyond all reckoning.
China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
In Wisconsin, we have got a lot of agricultural products that are exported. We have a lot of manufacturing products that are exported. I don't want to engage in a trade war.
For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
Between 1995 and 2009, Western Europe's entrepreneurs created jobs faster than the U.S. did, and European economies exported more than the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Eastern Europe's productivity increased more rapidly than East Asia's.
If the level and amount of consumption and waste of the western rich countries ever reaches the poor countries, it will mean the end of humanity. The big world corporations are busy doing it...The production, selling, consumption, accumulation, wastes' and advertisement explosions in the western rich countries and the continued population explosion in the poor countries will turn into major catastrophes.
Overall the cost of living in Ho Chi Minh City is cheap and if you can stay away from Western restaurants and use just local products in your everyday life it's really cheap.
If China has cheap labour, Africa has cheaper labour. This is why China started buying out poor countries.
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
China wants Western countries to be timid. Its strategic foreign policy has been to make any criticism of the Communist Party of China seem unreasonable or even Sinophobic.
In America, we're not making anything anymore. China and other countries are making our products. We are rebuilding China.
We still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong... this is the reason.
If we weren't so dirt-conscious, we would obtain adequate vitamin B12 from soil, air, water, and bacteria, but we meticulously wash and peel our vegetables now - and with good reason, as we can't be sure our soil is not contaminated with pesticides and herbicides.
The western model of growth that India and China wish to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources - energy and materials - and generates enormous waste... it remains many steps behind the problems it creates. India and China have no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory
Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.
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