The Weekly Screed (#603)

The real China syndrome
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — My journalist wife, Hotlips, is now covering the technology beat in China. Hence, by association, I’m meeting a whole new world of wild and wonderful characters. Among these is a bubbly guy named Ling Ting “L.T.” Tong, who proudly told me that he runs one of China’s biggest agencies, the People’s Ministry for Using Up Everything (PMUUE).

I asked what PMUUE does and L.T. replied, “Duh! We use stuff up!”

I said, “I guess that’s self-evident. But, what stuff?”

“All of it!” he said. “You name it. If it’s there — anywhere —  we’re gonna consume the dickens out of it. We catch it, we mine it, we kill it, we grind it up, we eat it, we roll it out and stack it high, we walk all over it, we ride it, we smelt it, we burn it, we pulverize it, we paint it, we butcher it, behead it and gut it, we cut it up and sell it for parts, we rip it down, replace it and rip it down again. We slit it right up the middle — ”

“Wait, you’re not making sense. What is all this stuff? Be specific, man!”

L.T. smiled over the videophone that was carrying our dialog. “I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s everything. It’s our national policy to: Use. Up. Every. Last. Thing.”

I still didn’t register much grasp, so L.T. said, “OK, it all started with a few of the world’s most magnificent wild animals — tigers, bears, elephants, rhinoceroses, musk deer. As a trial run, we decided to see what the rest of the world would do if China suddenly just started slaughtering these rare, beautiful creatures so we could turn their parts — bladders and penises, spleens, horns and glands — into fertility powders and asthma remedies, and those little pornographic figurines carved out of tusk ivory.”

I didn’t need to ask how the trial run was going.

“Oh yeah. HUGE success,” L.T. replied, “For a while, we got pushback from a few environmentalists. But then we insisted that sautéeing tiger testicles and chugging bear bile are ancient Chinese traditions with profound religious meaning. We said Confucius ate a musk deer’s liver every day at breakfast. And who can argue with that? Now, the white rhino is virtually extinct and we figure the last tiger skin will be hanging on the woodshed wall by the end of this decade. Jumbo and Dumbo won’t be far behind.”

“But why,” I asked foolishly, “would the Chinese want to ‘use up’ every tiger and rhino on the face of the earth.”

“Well, maybe you didn’t notice but, in China, we don’t have any tigers or rhinos,” said L.T. “And we figure if we don’t have ‘em, why should anybody else?”

L.T. added, however, that — beyond sheer spite — the main reason the Chinese are wiping out endangered species is to condition the world to the idea of the Chinese wiping out everything else.

“We got away with tigers, right?” he said. “And rhinos. So, the next time around, if we decide to wipe out the entire world supply, of — for example — rare earth elements, we face a lot less flak. And once we’ve activated the Law of Diminishing Marginal Outrage, who’s gonna blink twice if suddenly there’s no timber in Brazil because we cut down every tree in the rainforest and turned ‘em into disposable chopsticks. And we can manage that, trust me! We got 1.5 billion Chinese people chucking away a dozen chopsticks every day. Not to mention the export market — Japan, Korea, Manhattan…”

L.T. said the PMUUE is targeting not just tigers, timber and terbium. “We realized one day at lunch,” he said, “that if we turn the entire population of China into consumers as rabid as the wasteful spenders, gas-guzzlers, status-seekers and slobbering gluttons in America, we could eradicate every resource on earth in a couple of generations. If we commit China to total consumption, and if our Western competitors continue to obliviously lay waste to the land and the seas they way they’re doing now, we realized we could hand down to our grandchildren a planet so completely, spectacularly used-up that it won’t even support cockroaches and fungus. By the end of this century, all that’s left could very well be a giant heap of lifeless, toxic ash a mile high and a thousand miles square (preferably located in Kansas). Earth would look like a cross between ‘The Road Warrior’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Only bleaker!” 

Shuddering at the prospect, I begged, “But why? Why doesn’t China choose instead to preserve, nurture and renew the resources that still survive on the planet.”

L.T. laughed. “Why should we? You white guys never did.”

I couldn’t argue that. So I tried this: “But if you use up everything, just to teach the developed nations a lesson about waste and conservation, the Chinese won’t have anything, either. Your people will be miserable.”

This only drew a heartier laugh from my Chinese friend.

“Our people have always been miserable. Even when things get better, we make them miserable all over again, just so riffraff don’t get comfy,” said L.T. “For instance, nowadays, your average Chinese assembly-line worker lives nine people to a room the size of a walk-in closet, whose only furnishings are a three-legged table, two chairs, a hotplate, a naked lightbulb and a chamber pot in the corner. And this represents a major improvement over conditions in the Cultural Revolution. These wretched coolies think they’re upwardly mobile. Hell, to a Chinese peasant, nuclear winter would look more like a weekend at St. Moritz.”

“So, China is determined to use up everything,” I said, dismayed.

“Every little thing,” said L.T. “No stone unscorched.”

“And I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do to stop you?”

“Not without throwing the whole U.S. economy into a tailspin,” said L.T. “We offered a piece of the action to every major private equity firm, hedge fund and investment bank on Wall Street. They all went for the deal like a panda bear after a bamboo shoot. You guys are leveraged to the nipples financing your own annihilation.”

L.T. grinned and added, “You know what the beauty part is?”
I asked.

He replied, “Mao would’ve loved it.”