The Tinderbox in China

First off: I know I haven't been posting as frequently lately. This is partly a result of being busy and partly from my desire to create longer, more meaningful posts. I will most likely be posting one or two blogs per week, but they will be a bit longer than my typical blogs.

The issue that has gained my attention has been the social situation in China. If you want to see oppression of the poor, low life expectancy, and lack of environmental sustainability, look at China. It's frightening that, as the world's largest industrial nation, China has virtually destroyed its landscape. A huge supply of water for China, the Yellow River, is at a tipping point. Much of the river is polluted (and in many parts, undrinkable), and the only clean areas are near its source in the Himalayan Mountains. Acid rain seems like an issue in America's most populous cities, but it damages buildings and crops in roughly thirty percent of China. And, given the fact that much of the population is concentrated in a fraction of China's landmass, that's a terrible number! Overpopulation is also becoming an alarming burden that continues to crowd major urban centers. Is it fair that their government regulates how many children a family can have? That's a tough call. If the United States had the same problem, what fair measures could we take to solve that problem?

The problem is that we're looking at a period of social unrest in China. And why not? Chinese citizens have every reason to be dissatisfied with the lifestyle they have to put up with. All of the environmental and social issues that China is facing today affect the lower classes the most. And every year, we see the conditions worsening. Could China face a revolution in upcoming years? The government is relatively strong at this point (for now) and seems able to supress any uprisings that could occur. But revolution is a possibility and we've seen it through history. Governments change in China like the sparks fly up. And China has experimented with more governments than any other country has. Perhaps the communist system has been abused and is failing China at this point. Whether a revolution occurs or not, status quo can only be maintained for so long.

If a revolution were to take place in China, what could that mean for the rest of the world? What could that mean for consumeristic Western nations? Through history, we've seen that periods of disorganization or even anarchy follow revolution. That could mean a major slowdown in China's production. A friend and I discussed that it could possibly cause an economic crisis for the rest of the world, which relies heavily on imports from China. The globalized economy which we've built on so much would virtually come crashing down. Someone has to make the products we live on--that "someone" would have to change in order to meet our needs. Perhaps India. But that chance relies on the political situation of China in the future. I'm not at a point where I would panic about the future, but the thought of political in change in China is interesting. It would definitely mean a shift in industrial power. Nowadays, it seems like power comes from industrial strengh instead of military might. That's both good and bad, I suppose. We're seeing that the industrial nature of China is creating a poor quality of life for the working class and something should be done about it before the situation worsens. Since the Chinese government won't likely change things, it may be up to us to do so. Our reliance on Chinese exports is at an all-time high and is creating a house of cards. I'll bring back the theme from my "Consumerism Kind of Sucks" post and say we should stop buying things we don't need. We're creating a reliance on a single country, which is risky to say the least. Of course, American businesses should do something about this as well, like having less Chinese children assemble their products. Our dependence on China will only increase if people remain ignorant of the problems the country is facing. While everything may seem peachy keen right now, think of the hole being dug for the decades to come.