The Weekly Screed (#542)

“I like Chinese/ They barely come up to your knees…”
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Western media tend to avoid embarrassing America’s
“most-favored” trading partners. So you might not have come across
China’s Travesty of the Week, which is — exploding watermelons.

According to a really tiny story in the Times, Chinese farmers — whose
hands are not tied by government regulators like, say, a Food and Drug
Administration or anything like a Dept. of Agriculture — have been
pumping baby melons full of a chemical growth agent called
forchlorfenuron, turning mere fruit into what the heavily-censored
Chinese state news agency calls “land mines.” Right now, there are 115
acres littered and scarred with watermelon shrapnel. The death toll
has not been released.

But this isn’t what bothers me. I’m upset because I know what China’s
going to do with the unexploded melons. They’re coming here, to
America, to sit inside innocent suburban refrigerators like ticking
time bombs, ‘til some tyke in Sheboygan opens up the fridge, sees this
melon the size of a medicine ball and says, “Oh, golly, what a treat!”
— just as the forchlorfenuron reaches critical mass and… BLAM!

Blows the kid’s head right through the bay window and topples the lawn jockey.

I blame Richard Nixon.

When Nixon went to China in 1972 to snuggle up with Chou En-Lai, he
inoculated the Chinese Commies against their own communism. Instantly,
China was the darling of Big Business in the U.S.A. Republicans, and
all their corporate sugar daddies, could finally proclaim the
Forbidden Market no longer forbidden. The Chinese people, known the
day before as the Yellow Peril, were now just “one billion consumers”
ready and eager to buy every product generated by the world’s biggest,
greediest, freest economy.

Mao Tse Tung was suddenly Dow Jones’ long-lost lovechild. Say what?
Millions starved, tortured and murdered in work camps? All is
forgiven. Dim sum, anyone?

The thing is, when Dick came back from Beijing, he didn’t suggest that
there might be more to these one billion consumers than just their
unrequited thirst for Coca-Cola.

Because these guys, faster than most Americans could grasp, also
became one billion workers willing to do jobs Americans had been doing
just fine up ‘til then, but for only a dollar an hour, or fifty cents,
or not a goddamn cent; or

One billion pirates and counterfeiters with no respect for copyright,
trademark or patent laws, and not one cop in all of China with the
least interest in protecting any other country’s artists, musicians,
authors, filmmakers and intellectual property; or

One billion cut-rate salesmen sucking the life out of the U.S. economy
by freezing the Chinese currency and dumping unsold products in vast
numbers at inconceivably cheap prices, wiping out worldwide — and even
U.S. — demand for anything but the Chinese knock-off (even if the
knock-off turned out to be shoddy, toxic, soaked in anti-freeze or
fatal for small children); or

One billion people acting as the only consumers on earth with any use
for the gall bladders of endangered bears, the penises of endangered
tigers, the horns of endangered rhinoceroses and the fins of
endangered sharks, and whose appetite for this wasteful slaughter of
wildlife won’t let up ‘til they’ve butchered, pickled, sun-dried or
rubbed their genitals with every last one of these rare and beautiful
creatures; or

One billion capitalists in a so-called democracy in which people are
afraid of their own shadows, and only willing to speak up if they’re
resigned to being tossed into a dungeon and tortured for a decade or
two before being hanged in a prison courtyard and denounced on Google
by the “state news media” as an Enemy of the People; or

One billion careless, callous and unregulated exporters of poisonous
pork, contaminated chickens, toxic toys, adulterated vegetables,
communicable diseases, Lorex watches and IED melons. Thank you, Dick.

Right now, U.S. companies — who go groveling for business
“concessions” in China, both from Beijing and the local tinpots who
run each province — are paying an emperor’s ransom for the privilege
of transferring their every proprietary technology to “partners” in
China (who are allowed to transfer none of their own discoveries or
inventions — if they have any) to America.

Right now, thousands of China’s best and brightest are attending
America’s technology universities (often tuition-free) and interning
at the best companies in America, after which — with a nest egg of
U.S. dollars in their easily transferable Wells Fargo accounts — they
return to China, where, first thing they do, they upchuck American
knowhow like penguins waddling home from the sea to feed their chicks.

American companies are not afraid of the U.S. government. After all,
they bought it. They aren’t afraid of the Internal Revenue Service,
which can’t afford a good lawyer. They’re not afraid of organized
labor, because — with help from Congress and the Supreme Court —
they’ve re-defined unions as Enemies of the People.
The only thing that scares Wall Street fatcats and Big Business is
China. And the only thing they fear from China is the word, “No.” A
China that says, “OK, white boy, you gotta deal” regardless of the
terms, allows American business interests to reap the rewards of
China’s closed, mercantilist, protectionist economy — the very system
that Adam Smith denounced in the Republican bible, The Wealth of
Nations — while praising themselves as pioneers of free enterprise.

Here’s an idea. Pass one little law, requiring U.S. businesses eager
to operate in China — in any way — to pay American taxpayers the exact
same amount they’re paying to Chinese extortionists in bribes,
blackmail, kickbacks and baksheesh.

Impossible? Of course.

Because if they had to pay that much tribute, twice over, American
bosses could afford to hire American workers instead of Tibetan
political prisoners. They could probably even afford to protect the
environment, value the safety and security of their employees, save a
fortune in contributions to the pro-China wing of the GOP, and sleep
all night with a clear conscience.