I've only read the one article so far and not watched any videos so i'm limited here but wanted to share. Rosen's article "Chinese Youth and State" was really eye-opening. I've been wondering so far about this seeming contrast between Party values and practices. The government seems to me to be serving the population by encouraging economic growth through personal enterprise and entrepreneurship, but this seems very individualistic in nature and opposed to the values of socialism. I found it a bit entertaining that the article focused on Chinese of my age group, the "post-1980s generation" (I'll be 38 this Saturday so I'm of the oldest people of this group), and I saw some parallels between that survey result and my own American generation. What's even more fascinating is the response to surveys about personal beliefs and reasons for joining the Party. It seems that many are searching for something substantial in their lives, which could explain the rise of faith adherence, but also that their self-inclusion in the Party is more out of the pursuit of guanxi than of passionate, ideaological conviction. With this generation in question being so Amer-o-phile? (that's not really a word but anglophile is incorrect here and I can't think of anything better) what's to stop them from leaning more heavily toward democratic, capitalistic solutions to their individual social, and potentially political needs? This article is 9 years old and from what we've learned about the Chinese economy, what has stopped them is rapid economic growth coupled with sharp increases in personal disposable income brought on by bergeoning urban opportunity; essentially there's no reason to be concerned with the state when everything is going great! I'm curious about how long this can be sustained, and the age gap between ranking Party officials and my generational equivalent in China. Basically, how long before the current 30-40 year olds are in power?

#11 Attracting Mosquitoes to Drink his Blood

An 8 year old child from a very poor family, makes sacrifices to protect his parents. The family could not afford mosquito nets for their beds due to their extreme poverty. On hot night the boy would attract the mosqitoes to himself sparing his parents of the mosquito bites. People find out of his sacrifice and the emperor gives him a scholarship and his family receives an allowance.

self sacrifice, the younger providing for their elders, parents must be protected and revered by their children.

As people started to notice the negative effects of pollution in the environment and their health, they pushed their governments into making changes that would create improvements on their environment. This led to stricter controls on vehicle pollution and the improvement or shut down of heavy polluting factories. These heavy polluting factories ended up relocating to poorer developing countries such as China. Several Countries,United States among them, are spending billions of dollars cleaning up the contamination caused by decades of poorly regulated factories and industries. Most of the contamination is limited to relatively smaller concentrated areas.

China is now dealing with the consequences of having opened its doors to heavy polluting factories and industries, unfortunately due to the reuse of contaminated water the effects are more wide spread, making it harder  to clean up. It is estimated that 16% of all the land in China is polluted. Pollution is heavily concentrated on rural areas and about 20% of all arable land is polluted. This is one of the reasons why China relies a lot in imported food and vegetables. Now China is trying to find a way to clean up their environment, but it will be a difficult and expensive task.

China is becoming a leader in renewable energy production. It produces about 29% of the worlds’s hidropower, 25% of the world’s wind power, and 20% of the world’s solar power. Unfortunately it still relies heavely in coal and oil for their energy production.

I remember hearing on the news that China was no longer purchasing materials such as plastic for recycling, this created a problem for my home state of California. California was selling most if not all of its reciclable refuse to China. Now, we will have to come up with new ways to deal with our recyclable materials once they are collected.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/world/asia/china-kindergarten-stabbing.html

Sad news about an attack on a Kindergarden in the city of Chongqing. The article mentions that stabbing attacks are not uncommon in China and that they are usually directed at children. The attacker was a middle aged woman. 14 children were injured, does not mention any dead.

Unfortunately, we hear a lot about terrorist attacks all over the world, many of them over misguided religious beliefs. We just had another one in Pittsburgh at a Synagogue. Do we know what is driving this terrorist attacks in China?

This seems to be the problem of China's speedy development, the degradation of the environment. To make matters worse, China seems to lack the natural resources to adequately counteract the negative effects of their industrialization, namely water. I'm quite surprised by the major problem of it all but I suppose it is due to their singlar focus on economic development. You're right Marcos, China was ready to pick up the slack for manufacturing which was advantageous economically but detrimental in so many ways. As the weeks go by and we view source after source of info the increasing concern is over the fallout from China's advancement. It makes me wonder how much about my own country I'm unaware of in terms of a focus on growth and development without a care for consequences.

I viewed the Professor Hornby’s lecture on the environment and food.  Of particular interest was that she noted what China and the US export to each other.  She noted that China and the US essentially trade pollution.  Professor Hornby went over the various types of pollution and how these are ranked differently when it comes to the immediacy with which the government addresses them because some forms of pollution are more prevalent than others.  For example, the Chinese government is more likely to tackle on air pollution because it’s a lot more visible than something that is less noticeable like soil pollution. Additionally, in hearing her speak about what types of pollution get more attention than others, I noticed a continuing pattern of urban citizens getting more attention that rural citizens.  For example, at the end of the lecture she noted that part of the reason why the government has been so active in mobilizing efforts at mitigating pollution is thanks to pressure from the media and people, specifically urban people.  However, it seems that bureaucrats are more likely to be proactive in dealing with pollution in urban areas while they are more likely to ignore rural are protesters. This really helped me to understand another push factor for the rural population to want to relocate to urban centers.  This lecture also reminded me of how pollution is dealt with here in the US. Most notably, I thought about the Flint Water Crisis and how it has taken a long time to remediate possibly because this area is inhabited by working class people of color.  At the local level in Los Angeles, Exide was a battery company that contaminated the soil in Southeast LA.  To this day, these areas continue to be contaminated and part of the reason why the government has not aggressively invested to decontaminate is because this areas is largely inhabited by working class Latinos.  In this manner, I see a lot of parallels in environmental justice disparities between China and the US.