The Chicago Tribune ran a three part series titled "China's Great Grab."
The first part is titled "Your cheap sweater's real cost: that inexpensive sweater exacts a hidden toll: dust borne pollution that reaches America."
The country's enormous herds of cashmere-producing goats have slashed the price of sweaters. But they also have helped graze Chinese grasslands down to a moonscape, unleashing some of the worst dust storms on record. This in turn fuels a plume of pollution heavy enough to reach the skies over North America.
The second part is titled "The hidden cost of your hardwood floor: the demand for Chinese goods is driving destructive logging around the globe."
It will be your hardwood floor and your coffee table, your bedroom dresser and your plywood -- all stamped with the most successful label of our time: Made in China.
In less than a decade, China has transformed the global timber trade, importing more wood each year than any country in history and quadrupling the amount of wood products it ships around the globe.
And no one is consuming more of it than Americans. U.S. shoppers have become the world's best customers of low-cost Chinese flooring, furniture and plywood, buying 10 times as much as a decade ago.
But that profitable embrace comes at a steep, hidden cost: The demand for cheap Chinese goods is driving destructive logging around the world, threatening livelihoods and dividing fragile nations.
The third part in the series is titled "The coming fight for oil: the roaring Chinese economy needs more oil: It's turning to America's friends to get it."
Each new factory churning out goods made in China and each new car on Chinese highways adds to a ravenous appetite for raw materials, not only oil but timber, copper and soybeans. Satisfying that appetite has sent Chinese oil explorers around the world--first into the arms of America's enemies but increasingly to friends as well.
The 19th Century saw the British Empire and czarist Russia jockey for control of Central Asia in a Great Game of global strategy. Today the game is gathering again, this time between China and the U.S., as China makes its biggest push for influence in this oil-soaked region since the days of the Silk Road.
No nation is more in play than Kazakhstan, where China's new oil pipeline snakes for 620 miles and may one day reach the shores of the Caspian Sea.
This Is China! Weblog recommends the series:
The three-part series is a real eye-opener, in part because it's wholistic in its view of global relationships driving the mining/consumption/degradation cycle; in part because it doesn't let American consumers or government policy get off the hook in sucking in Chinese imports; and in part because it's not a typical American media piece shrilly bashing China (which gets very old very quickly).
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