Dave’s Wagon

I recently learned about the Chicago International Documentary Festival that’s going on right now in nearby Chicago. I found out too late to catch the film that interested me most, The Blood of Yingzhou District, but I still might go to see They Chose China.

BEIJING - The Chinese Ministry of Commerce elected today to levy increased tariffs on U.S.-made goods, hailing the move as necessary to protect Chinese industry from unfair American economic tactics.

The news comes amid increased Chinese criticism over the rampant piracy of Chinese goods in the US. By some estimates, 80% of all Chinese products in America are sold illegally.

Most Chinese shipping freighters never reach their destinations in the U.S., intercepted instead by the sea-faring bandits that plague the West Coast. Chinese crews are always left unharmed, but their cargo is invariably seized, forcing them to turn back for home ports with nothing to show for their efforts.

While the U.S. government has assured China that it is taking stronger measures against pirates, such promises have only yielded token arrests and isolated crackdowns.

A walk off the main avenue of any American city shows just how sincere the country has been about combating the problem.

In downtown Detroit, stolen flat-screen TVs are hawked in broad daylight, their Chinese bills of lading still attached to the packaging. On the outskirts of Los Angeles, Chinese-made auto parts are sold straight out of the shipping containers they were seized in. In an electronics store in Minneapolis, mountains of computer parts with their Chinese origin markings scratched off are stocked to the ceiling.

“America’s economy is still developing!” said one buyer of pirated goods who asked not to be identified. “We don’t have the advanced labor exploitation and union-busting that China has. Sure, there’s hope in companies like Wal-Mart, but in the meantime, we just can’t compete.”

In China, by contrast, 5000 years of unbroken history have culminated in absolute rule of a law and a profound respect for the fruits of intellectual labor. While some piracy within the American-dominated intellectual property market does exists, it falls far short of that found in the US.

For Americans, the possibility that they might apply the same honesty to their acquisition of Chinese products, seems, for the time being, to be a thought not yet considered.

What happens when you take a Chinese friend to an anti-war protest to show her the strengths of your country’s democracy?

If you’re me, one of the keynote speakers turns out to be a mohawked high school ruffian wearing an Imperial Military flag of Japan shirt who punctuates his speech with a half-dozen f-words blasted over a public address system.

Then you write an overly-brief blog entry because you’re too ashamed to even know where to begin.

Think Chinese tea and human piss couldn’t possibly be confused? Urine for a surprise!

Via Yahoo! News:

Scandal brews over China tea-for-urine samples

Jokes aside, those reporters deserve to be commended for this kind of creative muckraking.

I was less-than-delighted to see Minnesota State Representative Tom Rukavina embarrass my home state on national news (video) tonight with his bill to criminalize the sale of foreign-made American flags in Minnesota.

Horror of all horrors, it turns out that most American flags are actually manufactured in dirty, filthy, Red China. This, apparently, is a grave injustice to current DLFer and former DUIer Rukavina who cloaks himself solely in garb tailored in the United States and dyed with the blood of fallen patriots (or something to that measure).

Opponents of the bill in the Minnesota House tried to argue against it prior to its passing. Representative Dan Severson claimed, “When people make a flag in China or they make a flag in Japan or they make a flag in another country, they understand that that flag is symbol of justice, that that flag is a symbol of freedom, and more than that, for third world countries, that flag is a symbol of hope.”

That, of course, is laughable untrue of China and even some segments of America. Nonetheless, I am reminded of the essay “On Becoming an American Citizen in Spirit” (Chinese) that landed a Chinese journalist in jail for two years on subversion charges. Part of the essay read:

This was right before the American Congress attempt to overturn that very part of the U.S. Constitution with a bill to ban flag burning that failed by one vote. What a miserable slap in the face that would have been to this poor man.

Rukavina’s bill falls far short of that, but how stupidly ironic nonetheless that he would try to encumber a symbol of freedom and capitalism with such un-free and un-capitalistic regulations.