Report from Tian’anmen Square

The best anecdotes always involve national characteristics going on display. These normally bloom most in moments of crisis, judging from my European experience, but here are a few from a relatively calm series of events during Chinese National Day Celebrations in Tian'anmen Square.

We were gathered into the Foreign Experts' Hotel and each given an apartment - two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen plus bathroom and balcony, within view of the Olympics Birdsnest stadium. My daughter duly arrived from Africa and moved in, but as she was not a spouse, I could not get her into any official functions! I did manage to get a Chinese colleague into the fireworks in the Square, however, as the famous Chinese discipline began to slip for this final event.

My first conversation with one of the Americans was about the ' terrible smog' as he called the mixture of water vapour and pollution; but then miraculously the smog totally disappeared on National Day for the parade and we all got sun burned from the blazing orb in the sky. I don't think he worked out how the skies had cleared so easily, but old Beijing hands know very well that there are ways (making it rain in the early morning); also that there can be blue sky days if there is a nice breeze to blow the pollution away. His prejudices about the Chinese dated from the 1950's and would have been irritating if he had not been so completely predictable.

For the presentation, typically it was an Australian from the lucky country who was called up first.......while New Zealanders were put after the Netherlands and I was turned into a Brit and put just in front of the US (last in the English alphabet), with the UK delegation. There was no English rep, but a Scottish woman, a Welshman and an Irishman so the Celts were well represented. The Germans had a strong group and the only non tie wearer in the whole group was a prof from Berlin. He wore a white t shirt under his shirt, just as I wished to be dressed! He also made a good speech about his work from 1985 on production technologies. The Japanese made up the largest group, with many of them in their 70s and 80s even.

Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang made an excellent job of shaking 100 hands, including that of a blind Austrian and a wheel-chair bound German. He also went out of his way to shake the hands of all the wives and the few husbands who were there. Next Premier, I would say and a real 'ladies man' as the Welshman said.

Premier Wen made a very warm speech to us, without notes, but with translation, and indeed I can see why they appreciate all the talents which have been deployed in China - from South Africans helping with animal farming in dry parts of the country, to nuclear engineers and mine safety guys, to aerospace engineers and computer whizkids, early childhood education and human genome profs.....the list is quite long - chosen from 10,000 names submitted by ministries, provincial governments and the like. Apparently, there were 480,000 foreign experts in China last year, compared with only 10,000 in 1978. What is certainly the case is that our work on mine safety is greatly appreciated. I was interviewed by People's Daily online tv but don't know when, after the events, it is to be broadcast. I do have a dvd of the 40 min interview but it is read only. Will try to copy it.

The parade itself was also rather memorable, not because of the military display, which was more of the 'don't mess with us' variety and defensive in my view, and commercial advertising to potential buyers in the developing world. China's army is on UN Peace Keeping missions, after all, not fighting vicious wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or deployed to military bases around the globe, like the US and UK, and half of the EU countries. even NZ has sent SAS troops to Afghanistan, although we kept out of Iraq.

What struck me about the parades was that they were predominantly young people, with many more in costumes than in uniforms or in tanks. These were amazingly colourful, not just the ethnic dress but also the uniforms of the women soldiers, airforce and navy marchers, with rather short skirts, with white or black knee length leather boots. Never seen anything like that anywhere in a puritan, Lutheran or Catholic country even, before! even American cheerleaders look rather shabby by comparison and not as sexy, I have to say, and this was Red China!

But the piece de resistance of it all, of course, was the banquet in the Great Hall of the People. More than 5000 were filling the hall and the balconies in tables of 10 and, once again the premier spoke, very warmly about us as well as dealing with the future and the present. There were many older people there and quite a few foreigners. It was all over quite quickly, with the task of feeding us very well, completed with great efficiency by hundreds of young people from the country side.

My last day in Beijing was spent with my daughter and a Chinese friend at the Water Cube and the Birdsnest. Very funny, as I am sure has or will happen to you if you are in China for a while - I was asked by young people to be photographed with their mothers, brothers and sisters or kids - people from the countryside in the big smoke, rubbing shoulders with foreigners for the first time. I duly obliged and grabbed the mums and held them close! There is an income stream there somewhere!

Blair in Beijing

Tony Blair has been in Beijing in recent days, apparently on an environment mission, according to the journalist from China Daily who met him. No specifics. But the very presence of the man irritates me deeply these days - I am working in Beijing. Looking back on my years in the UK, I have to say that everything Margaret Thatcher did was predictable, although more extreme and ruinous than expected. She managed to shut down half of UK industry, skew the economy to the City and services and leave very little of long term substance in the wake of the global financial/economic crisis. Britain is a much poorer country as a result. Some recovery could have been made during the Blair-Brown years, but they continued down the same path. The UK, unbelievably to many other countries, has squandered its energy wealth in a mad fit of extreme liberalisation, which saw the coal industry virtually wiped out on the cross of competiton with low dollar imported coal prices (when the petro-pound moved skywards) and subsidised (initially) gas plant in the new privatised electricity system. The country will be broke in energy terms by 2020, from being the wealthiest EU country in the 1980s. Very few accessible fossil fuel reserves will remain. So sad.

It is difficult to find anything which Blair contributed to the country of a positive kind. True, he started a kind of constitutional change process, but that was inevitable under any government - the Scots and Welsh would not have had anything less than they got. Peace came to Northern Ireland, but Mo Mowlam made the most important political contribution, along with many, many other politicans from the UK and abroad, from the US to South Africa. And the local politicians delivered in the end as well. What Blair will be remembered for is not his hot air on climate change - the UK's rapid reduction in CO2 levels came with the rapid closure of the coal industry, when the introduction of cleaner coal technology could have enabled a transition to a lower carbon economy and maintain coal reserves. But the brutal sacrifice was made by Britain's miners and very little else has been done - where is the renewable energy or the energy conservation and efficiency programmes we knew would be needed from the first oil shock?

True, there is the minimum wage, but in the end employers grumped but did not block, as they did so easily the sensible introduction of a European style industrial relations system the country needs so desperately to modernise. Blair hates European social dialogue, because he dislikes trade unions.

However, his overwhelming legacy is his role as a warmonger and China Daily noted this in its first paragraph. The last position he should be put into by his fellow politicans in Europe is as the first President of Europe. He has simply created too much damage in the world. I cannot see him being taken very seriously in Beijing.

Security of energy supply - a critical issue

The G7 recently declared in favour of a target on global warming - of limiting warming to a 2 degrees centigrade average increase from the pre-industrial period, by 2050. This has already been adopted as a target by the EU and is the best scenario for the UN scientific panel on climate change. Energy is critical in all this and it is worth looking at the energy security situation of the G7, in assessing this in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.

There are some key facts in an era of Peak Oil. The world’s oil and gas reserve base is moving eastwards, as US and UK North Sea reserves deplete and Mexican oil fields mature. The majority of these reserves are now located in the centre of the Eurasian triangle, in Russia and the central Asian Republics, and due south in the Gulf.
Among the G7 countries, only Canada has access to secure, long-term indigenous fossil fuel reserves - oil, gas and coal. The US is a major energy importer although it has access to long-term coal reserves and by 2020 the UK, from its recent self-sufficiency, it will have very few long-term fossil fuel reserves now it has closed all but a handful of its coal mines. Japan, Germany and Italy are highly dependent on imported energy, while France which has nuclear and hydro generated electricity is nevertheless highly dependent on imported energy for transport and other sectors.

Looking globally, the energy economy has entered a period of growing instability. This instability has led recently to higher oil and gas prices and then to a sharp drop as the financial and economic crisis hit home and demand fell. At the same time the large, rapidly developing countries (China, India, Brazil) have increased their energy consumption and especially their fossil energy use. For China and India, a rapid move away from fossils is not possible in the medium term, although plans for improved energy efficiency could contribute to less rapidly increasing demand in China.

China is now the second largest energy consumer, after the US, using 17.7% of the world’s primary energy, compared with 20.4% in the US in 2008 (BP, 2009). In million tonnes of oil equivalent this corresponds to 2002.5 and 2299 respectively. While there is still some debate about the calculations, China has now overtaken the US in the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from energy consumption and flaring of fossil fuels - 6017.69 versus 5902 million tonnes ((EIA, 2008).

As the world economy comes out of recession, however slowly, rising demand will once again drive up prices at the pump. President Obama has ordered the US car industry to build more fuel efficient cars. He is quite right. Now is the time to dump the gas guzzler.

Good on you, Judge Chin

Many small investors and no doubt some large ones will welcome the 150 year prison sentence handed down to Bernard Madoff by Judge Denny Chin. Madoff ran the largest of the recently exposed 'Ponzi' scams. In a Ponzi scam, money from new investors, rather than actual profits, is used to pay returns to older investors. Regulators are now catching up with these scams after what 'profits' they were apparently making completely crashed with the global economy last year.

What is amazing is that the regulatory authorities have been so slow about catching out these bank-rolling criminals. Madoff was at it for decades. But he was an esteemed former Chairman of the NASDAQ, the special stock exchange for hitech companies - the core of the future global economy. As a privileged member of the financial elite, he was simply left alone to carry out his crimes. Millions of ordinary people have suffered from financial mis-selling and even theft. Many are, rightly, calling for tough new regulations of financial markets. We have not yet seen much of this - yet billions of dollars of taxpayers' money are being pumped into banks and other ailing financial institutions to bail them out - in case of the very real danger that they will collapse the 'real' economy in which we all live and work.

Madoff and other self-proclaimed 'masters of the financial universe' have a lot to answer for but we, ourselves, are responsible for ensuring that our political leaders take the necessary actions. This means that we need to act at every level. Our own city is caught in the grip of these economic forces. The Wanganui District Council should be spending time sorting out its own mountain of debt to make us less vulnerable. It should act together with other district and regional councils to build financially sustainable local government. They, like we, as individuals, are vulnerable if we remain alone and isolated, but together we can exert real pressure.

Good on you Judge Chin, the son of poor Chinese immigrants to the US. You have struck a blow for us all.

A Letter to Max

The problem is that the Fascists are relentless once they gain a foothold and they build on the developing euroscepticism which is running throughout established parties and in the UK has been running deep in the equivocal support the mainstream British parties have given to the European (Peace) project. One would have thought they would have learned their lesson by now. I can tell you that there is no appetite among the rising generation of NZers or Aussies to come come back to fight in Europe yet again if it all falls apart and that we, their parents and grandparents will not send them. NZers refused to send young men and women to Iraq to fight in that Imperialist war and will not do it again, lightly.

The political classes in Europe have made two critical errors - they have stopped explaining to the rising generations why they created the European Union (for peace in Europe) and have left the impression it was all just about free markets, which are now failing badly. Instead they created a complex system to keep the economic and social peace; so complex it is difficult to explain in translation from the official languages. Second, those national politicians, seeking to gain advantage over their national fellows, have attacked and denigrated European institutions as both too feeble and too powerful. When Europe has produced some stunning achievements they have often claimed credit for them, themselves. For example, Eurpean trade unions and employers organisations negotiated equal treatment in pay etc for both part-time workers and workers on fixed term contracts. these agreements have become the law of Europe and every member state, bringing equality and millions of euros in wage increases and benefits to millions of European citizens. Blair and Brown and many other national leaders claimed they had achieved this, when in the case of Blair and Brown, they did everything in their power to wreck our negotiations, as UK business did not want to pay equal wages.

So it does not surprise me that, with leaders who will not defend the peace treaties, that millions do not vote.

You should indeed Max, write a letter to the Independent and carry on doing all those things you have been doing before to campaign against this party, the BNP; for it is a party which supports what Hitler did in Germany and what the Japanese Imperial Army did in China and throughout Asia Pacific during the second world war. This is why it is so sad that it was able to secure two seats in the European Parliament created by a Peace Treaty after the end of that war in Europe, a treaty whose main purpose was to create an economic and social basis for a lasting peace in Europe.

As you know there are now quite a few parties like the BNP in other European countries and in the European Parliament, all seeking to pull the European Union apart and to establish militant, nationalist regimes in their own countries. If these, and other less militant parties with similar nationalist politics succeed in their efforts to wreck the European Treaties then we will not be just back to 1945 but probably to 1914 in Europe. The EU has many problems to solve, but not one of these parties has any intention of helping to do so.

My father 'did his duty' like millions of others (including many other colonials of German descent in Australian, Canadian and American armies), when he was asked to do it but he never once talked to us about this, so great was the effect of that episode of his life on him. But I thank God he did so, despite the tragedy that befell the German part of my family, some of whom went to their graves years before they should have done, during the wars of the 20th century. My father, an engineer on aship blown up off the D-Day beaches, grabbed the engine room clock as he finally left the bow section of the ship, which had remained afloat after being blown apart and he used to wind it up every week. It was a seven day clock and it ticked throughout our childhoods. We all knew that something terrible had happened, and this was the way he remembered his fallen comrades.

There are two films now showing in China about the 'rape of Nanjing'. One is the 'City of Life and Death' and it documents how the Japanese Army killed 300,000 citizens of the former Chinese capital city and raped thousands of women and girls in public and private. That Imperial Army, one million strong, went on to kill 4 million Chinese citizens citizens during the occupation of China, but was tied down by the Chinese people's resistance, instead of coming south to Australia and New Zealand, or east to the US, where they were trying to go. Japanese bombers and submarines did get as far as Sydney and Darwin in Australia in any event.

So, yes, Max, I do support everything you are doing to fight the ideas and influence of Mr Brons and his party. It is a very sad day for Britain indeed that you now have to do this.

in solidarity,

Dave

Where there's muck there's brass

This old Yorkshire adage should be followed by the New Zealand and other country dairy industries to save on costs, provide energy and clean up the environment. As the global recession bites, New Zealand and other country dairy farmers will come under tougher cost pressures from increased electricity charges and environmental compliance. One solution is to use dairy waste to raise heat and power. Instead of taking fright at New Zealand greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rules, farmers can turn the situation to their advantage. New Zealand has a particular problem with methane, as 49 % of its GHG comes from grazing animals – mostly from their gut and out of their mouths and a the rest from the back end.

The technology involved comes off the shelf. It is in widespread use in the United States, being taken up in Europe and is now taking off in Asia. Any company which ‘cracks’ the packaging of a flexible system for dairy farms, will make a good living. Whanganui, where I live, and situated between large dairy regions, Taranaki and Manawatu, and having dairy farms of its own, could become a regional centre.

The technology works like this: dairy shed waste is flushed into a set of sumps; the grit is left to settle and then the waste is pumped into a digester. This produces methane gas from the waste, which is then burned to raise heat. It can also be burned in a small methane engine to generate electricity. Remote farms, using expensive diesel generators, can replace them. If a feed pad system is used, then more waste is collected while the cows are eating.

Here are the three wins:
• First, it allows farmers to manage their effluent better, including nitrous oxides. The process does not eliminate nitrogen, but manages it better.
• Second - it converts methane –20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – into useful energy.
• Third, in future, farmers will earn carbon credits for doing this. All political parties should be thinking about how to bring farmers into such a system early, to encourage the take up of biogas generation, now.

The Christchurch, NZ company, BioGenCool and Landcorp have a working prototype. Other trials have been conducted on middle sized dairy farms and several New Zealand companies are in talks with farmers to set up projects. Warwick Cutfield, technical director of Maunsell Engineering laid out the issues in a presentation to our Whanganui River Institute annual seminar back in February. Environutra, a start-up company is in discussions with dairy farmers in the region. The brass is in sight.

May 1st reminds us - working hours are too long

May 1st is a Workers’ Holiday in many countries. It began as a harvest holiday. It became formal after tough strikes in 1886 in Chicago, for the 8 hour day. May Day should give us pause for thought about how long our working hours are. Between them, Kiwi men and women spend an average 62 hours a week at work. There is no legal limit on weekly working hours in New Zealand. Only four other developed countries have no limits.
The deep recession should also give us pause. There is much less work around. To preserve existing jobs, the National Government has extended the nine day fortnight scheme to firms with 50 or more employees, taking it down from the 100 minimum before. Well done. Shorter working hours would also share work around.
Long hours have a huge impact on family life, separating men, especially, from their children. Kiwi men work the second longest average weekly hours in the developed world, after the UK. Many women are working to boost family income because they have no choice, when their kids are young. These days we have many kids who are often ‘home alone’. Throw temporary, agency and migrant work into the mix and we can see social problems being created daily. Families are under pressure and the loss of income in the recession hits hard as well. Decent pay is essential, too.
Long working hours are damaging to health as well as to family life. May 1st makes us reflect and so, too, does our own Labour Day. It also commemorates the struggle for an eight-hour working day. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim this right when, in 1840, the carpenter Samuel Parnell led the fight for the eight-hour day in Wellington. Labour Day was first celebrated in New Zealand on 28 October 1890.
Another milestone in the fight for shorter hours came with the Blackball miners’ strike in 1908. Blackball was the birthplace of the New Zealand Labour Party. Its foundation followed the 1908 miners’ strike to reduce hours of work. If we are to have a healthy society and families which spend time together, then working hours must be reduced. There needs to be much better social support provided for working families with young children. Otherwise we will reap an even worse whirlwind of social problems.