Author: Karen Zhang

For weeks, I’ve been carrying the burden of this question: Are we really living in an age of dematerialization or in the opposite?

Based on the idea championed by MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, a smartphone combines all the functions of a recorder, a radio, a CD player, a camera, a dumb phone, a compass, maps, a phone book, a television and many other products that we may only can see in the museums today. Zillions of applications for electronic devices will make our life easier and simpler. We can do more efficiently with fewer tools and steps. This is dematerialization coined by Mr. McAfee. If you read his book More From Less or watch his YouTube Ted Talk about dematerialization, you’ll be acquainted with McAfee’s positivity in the future of the Anthropocene.

I question whether McAfee overlooks the laborious process of manufacturing smartphones—or, as a matter of fact, the making of many other “smart” devices—and the multitude of abandoned electronics exported from the wealthy countries to the developing countries. Yes, I am talking about the e-waste industry.

When Verizon Wireless and other competitive carriers regularly remind the customers that it’s time to renew their smartphones by the end of contracts or during a promotional period, American mobile phone users are given incentives to renew their phones to the latest model. Apple Inc. and Samsung also dole out all sorts of promotions to encourage loyal customers to switch and replace their cannot-let-you-get-out-of-my-hand devices.

So it is in China. In addition to Apple and Samsung, Chinese customers face a dazzling market of Made-in-China smartphone brands. From Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi to the lesser-known Tecno, Zte, Meizu, and Coolpad, they fit different household income earners. Lenovo is like Microsoft, jumping from the PC world to the smartphone world. Microsoft has acquired the Finnish firm Nokia to develop its mobile phone Lumia products. You can see Lumia phones in China, too.

Our obsession with buying the latest screen devices of all sizes is contributing to mounting piles of electronic waste. When my journalist colleagues covered the labor rights issues at sweatshops-like the Foxconn factories in China (Foxconn is Apple’s biggest original design manufacturer), I had the opportunity to learn what makes a phone smart.

From AMOLED displays to lithium-ion batteries and to the most complicated SoC—short for “System-on-a-chip”—which I called “the brain of a smartphone,” not to mention the cameras, the sensors etc., every component of a smartphone involves chemical and physical reactions of natural resources. Metals such as aluminum, copper, lead, zinc and others are vital resources for components used in smartphones and gadgets. Heavy metals could contaminate the work site and the entire community. Many Southeastern Asian countries as well as China are extracting, or even exploiting, local resources—both from nature and from workers in sweatshops—in order to assemble a “dematerialized,” multi-function device. While Apple Inc. reaches its goal of making big profits for selling more products at a low cost of labor and materials, the company is doing all it can on damage control of its poisoning supply chain abroad. You won’t find much on Google about this, sadly.          

Electronic waste is extremely toxic. The components of every piece of electronic devices contain toxic chemicals in order to enable the chemistry and physics in the device to kick efficiently as well as to draw your eyeballs to that attractive appearance and packaging.

For a long time, the rich world has dumped abroad what its people don’t want. Indeed, the attitude of NIMBYs—Not In My Back Yard—has been an unwritten consensus among the developed countries. China is one of the favorite destinations for global waste—yes, the Chinese call it “yáng lā jī,” the foreign trash. China wanted it. China needed it. As laborious it was to assemble a smartphone, so it was laborious to dismantle the scraps to make them useful again. For their livelihood, tens of millions of low-rung Chinese laborers, as well as those in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria and many other countries, would sit together in their poverty-stricken villages to sort out bundles of plastics, wires, cables and other garbage. They would work at the scrap yards exposed to hazardous chemicals on a regular basis just to make both ends meet.

A record shows forty percent of the US e-waste has been dumped illegally in Hong Kong. In the name of “green laundering,” which is synonymous with money laundering, electronic waste traveled illegally from US recycling companies to Taiwan, Hong Kong and other developing regions and states.

How can we dematerialize if we create excessive waste from a small-sized product? Does a merchandiser really have little obligation to control the impact of an externality—pollution? (Read on. I will explain what an externality is.) Can a government really keep eyes shut to the e-waste pollution domestically and globally?

An externality is an economic term, meaning the cost or benefit that affects a third party who did not choose to incur that cost or benefit. By introducing this term, I hope I can bridge my argument with an economist’s mindset to help us understand why the merchandiser and the consumer—the polluters on the production side and on the consumption side of electronic devices—can, and should, take action to turn negative externality into a positive one. If we still believe the power of “We the People,” consumers, conscientious merchandisers and responsive governments can turn a “double negative” externality into a positive one. Solving the issue of e-waste is a sustainable, positive externality.

It is estimated that after the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, more than seven billion smartphones have been produced in the following decade. And many of them have already ended up in the dump. The world population is more than seven billion people. But not all these seven billion people are smartphone users. The number of smartphone users worldwide in 2019 surpassed three billion. China, India, and the United States are the countries with the highest number of smartphone users, and also the biggest e-waste producers.               

We use less, but we poop a lot.

China has started to understand the waste problem. Beijing announced in 2017 that China would be reduced its import of global plastic and paper waste. Until then, China had been taking in up to 56 percent of the world’s plastic garbage to recycle, 60 percent of paper waste from the U.S. and more than 70 percent of paper waste from Europe, according to the German state media Deutsche Welle. As a result, the non-profit US-based group, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, sees from the first quarter of 2017 to October 2019, US exports of plastic waste to China have plummeted by 89%.

I always say it’s a fate that my so-to-speak “formative years” of understanding modern China and modern United States took place in Guangzhou and Pittsburgh. China’s strategic plan of “Made in China 2025” is happening now. Just like Pittsburgh’s yesterday which produced one third of the US steel in early 1900s and became the center of the “Arsenal of Democracy” in WWII, China is moving at its own pace away from the “world’s factory” which produces shoddy goods at lower labor costs toward a more technology-intensive powerhouse. Today, Pittsburgh has transformed itself into a university town of computer technology, research and medicine. China tightens imports of foreign trash just like Pittsburgh treated its air, rivers and streams polluted by the steel and coal industry. Guangdong is pioneering in treating its water and air pollution caused by industrialization.

So you see why I am skeptical about dematerialization if we don’t follow Steve Jobs to do some damage control. We don’t hold back the scientific truth; we hold back our e-poop.

As I’ve relieved my burden of the question of dematerialization. I am leaving more questions. Watch the space.

Will China’s e-commerce boom turn China’s e-waste into treasure?

Will China’s manufacturing powerhouse of Guangdong become the next global factory for higher-value products and services, such as AI technology?

Can the Big Four tech companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft—find solutions way ahead of their competitors in the e-waste industry?

And I have a proposal for you as a consumer:

If you can keep your smart devices a little bit longer, you are doing tremendous good to the planet and to future generations.

For those who believe in God and often pray for Him to “lead us from temptation,” control your temptation by holding onto your devices a bit longer.

When you renew your phones, laptops, TVs and many others, ask NOT what they can do for you, ask what you CAN do to your wallets and the landfills.

Saving the planet starts from your wallet.

Does this sound like a feasible proposal for you?

By the way, I’m not an Apple hater. In fact, I’m an Apple fan. Thanks to my graduate study about sustainability at Virginia Tech, I have a second iPad. I did my personal inventory. Under my ownership, I have three iPhones and two iPads. That is five Apple products per capita. For this good sales record, Steve Jobs is toasting in heaven now. Let’s make the Planet great again.

You can read my iPad Rhapsody here.

Strictly speaking, Weathering With You (天気の子), “tenki no ko” in Japanese, is an animated feature film written and directed by Makoto Shinkai (新海誠). The story was set in Tokyo during a fantastical period of exceptionally rainy weather. The teenage “Sunshine Girl” named Hina was the “child of weather,” as the Japanese film title suggests. Hina had that magic to stop rainy days and bring temporary sunshine back to the Tokyo sky.

Hina was a poor orphan with a younger brother named Nagi. To support the family, Hina worked at a McDonald’s store in Tokyo, where she met her destiny love, Hodaka, a high school boy who left from a rural village for better opportunities in Tokyo. Their connection started from a complimentary Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s. Employee Hina secretly gave homeless Hodaka, who sheltered in the store from the rain, something to eat. What a praise to the American franchise for making this Japanese romance possible!

Right there, the scene reminded me of the homeless people in Hong Kong. Few people are aware of the charitable role these 24-hour diners and restaurants play after midnight. Especially in affluent cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, as long as the homeless people are well-behaved, they relocate from one fast-food restaurant to another to find temporary hideout for the night. Looking at Hodaka on the screen, I associate with poverty. And that’s exactly what director Shinkai wants to express in his work—youth poverty in Japan.

Last year’s top-rated movie Parasite has also touched upon the theme of wealth inequality and poverty in South Korea. As Director Shinkai of Weathering With You said in an interview that social stratification is obvious in Japan. I second that for the situation in China, and in the United States, too.

In the movie, two poor kids, Hodaka and Hina, fell in love with one another and they lived on Hina’s magic power to make both ends meet. And yet, the day did not last long. The more Hina prayed for a good weather, the less of her was seen in a human body. She would evaporate like water and eventually disappear! Tokyo returned to the days of torrential rain. Th deluge put a third of the city underwater. Where is the “Sunshine Girl”? Where is the normalcy of weather?

Many Japanese anime fans like me understand that Shinkai has hinted the climate crisis—“気候危機” in Japanese—throughout his movie. I remember there is a scene in the movie: some years later, the old lady who used to be Hina’s weather client for a good weather to worship the spirit of her late husband told Hodaka that, many many many years ago, Tokyo used to be submerged in water resulting from typhoons and natural disasters. When people inhabited this place and adapted to the changes, they made it into a prosperous city. And now the continuous raining days were back, and the city was once again returning to what it used to be.

Let’s not question whether the old lady’s fictional storytelling is true in reality. Let’s just think about how Japanese people react to climate change. According to WIRED, the orderly society like Japan where people are respectful toward one another, ordinary people tend to be submissive rather than vocal about big social issues like climate change. Instead, similar to harmonious Confucianism in China, Japanese Zen spirit calls for bringing peace to your soul and making peace within as well as with your surroundings.

As Meera Subramanian, president of Society of Environmental Journalists, said beautifully, “Environmental stories are front-page stories. They’re every-page stories. They’re everywhere stories and they’re everybody stories.”

Climate change is everywhere and about everyone.

Viewers see a movie to look for entertaining pleasure. And Weathering With You does not disappoint me in that aspect. Moreover, the film somewhat surprises me that this is more than just an animated feature. It reflects Japan today. There is an underlying shock from social stratification and climate change in Japan. This is how Shinkai said it in his own language during an interview with the United Nations:

“（『天気の子』の）根底には気候危機から受けた衝撃もあることを観客に知ってもらえたら、とても嬉しいです」”

This is Google Translate version edited by me:

“I’m very happy if (the movie) lets the audience know that there is an underlying shock from the climate crisis.”

Perhaps we should be hopeful that there is a subtle calling among Japanese youths for change—Japan’s wealth inequality needs to change, so is the country’s climate crisis apathy. 

Environmental stories are front-page stories. They’re every-page stories. They’re everywhere stories and they’re everybody stories.
—– Meera Subramanian, SEJ president

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There is a known Chinese proverb: “When you drink water, think of its source.” If you understand Cantonese, you may hear Hong Kong officials saying jam seoi si jyun these days to stress that the city’s freshwater supply is mainly from mainland China. To be specific, Hong Kong has imported water from the Dongjiang River in Guangdong since 1965. Today, imported Dongjiang water meets up to eighty percent of the city’s total freshwater needs. Local rainwater makes up the remaining twenty percent.

When pro-independence radicals in Hong Kong burnt shops whose owners were alleged to be communist sympathizers, sprayed red paint on iconic HSBC lions, and vandalized public infrastructures, they called for boycott from everything deemed Chinese, but they may have forgotten the banking industry, the real estate industry, and even that the power and water in the city have long been tinted red. To boycott Chinese involvement in Hong Kong is class suicide.

It is shameful to politicalize natural resources on which human survival depend. But when it comes to water, governments, regardless of size, are looking for ways to claim sovereignty and make profits. China has the economic power to build dams, open canals, relocate factories to treat water pollution, and launch huge projects to transfer water from the water-abundant southern China to the draught-ridden northern plain.

China also has the might to pull the plug to stop power and water supply to Hong Kong. That’s unlikely to happen if Beijing wants to prove that Hong Kong still has a strong back from its master of “One Country.” In stressing the source of their drinking water, Beijing is making this point to Hong Kong people—do not forget your roots and be thankful for the one who feeds you.

Unless Hong Kong finds its way to diversify the city’s freshwater supplies, reducing reliance on Dongjiang water, Hong Kong protesters can’t boycott Chinese products entirely yet. As a matter of fact, after the 2019 havoc in Hong Kong, Beijing is speeding up the economic development of the Greater Bay Area. What used to be called the Pearl River Delta that created tens of millions of manufacturing jobs now has been expanded to the Greater Bay Area which includes Hong Kong and Macau. Urbanization and cooperation between mainland cities and Hong Kong and Macau will deepen water reliance on major rivers and hydropower energy in Guangdong. I’m talking about seventy million people and rising are competing for the same water resources in this region.     

Pro-democracy Hong Kongers call for a more distinct “Two Systems” model in the city while Beijing interprets the call as too much emphasis on Western values but too little emphasis on patriotism by Hong Kong youths. Before “One Country, Two Systems” sets to expire in 2047, Hong Kong has lost at least two generations who are in despair and lost faith in government.

There is no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. I think this well-known principle in international relations also applies to China’s so-called domestic issue about Hong Kong democracy. Hong Kong may not appear to be as important to China as it was two decades ago. But there have been plenty of elites and princelings who successfully have obtained permanent resident status in Hong Kong or via Hong Kong to handle their assets in between two different financial systems—the government-controlled one and the free market.

When it comes to political differences, few Beijing-backed, new Hong Kongers would defend “Two Systems.” They know—without saying it out loud as a wise guy might do—that the “Two Systems” is conditional and one way—just like the flow of Dongjiang water from Jiangxi province to Guangdong to Hong Kong.

There are mega bridges, highways, high speed trains connecting major cities in the Greater Bay Area. There are relaxed rules of housing, education and retirement for residents of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in mainland China, especially in the economic zones like the Greater Bay Area. Economic mobility is ensured in the decades to come. More economic successes only enlarge Beijing’s shadow in democratic cities like Hong Kong and Macau. Will Dongjiang water unite or divide Hong Kong? Only time can tell.

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2020 finally comes to us. Unlike the futuristic movies I watched in childhood that forecast in the imaginative year of 2020, cars would be flying in the skies and that humans would be living with aliens from outer space. Nothing has come true in reality although humans are advancing technology to develop self-driving cars and preparing expeditions to explore Mars.

In reality, there’re plenty of challenges for us in 2020. We start the new year with bush fires in Australia; the escalating tension between the US and China on trade and technology; and deepening clashes in ideology and the military between the US and Iran. While these events become the headlines in mass media, do you know our languages are dying off rapidly?

Linguists estimate of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, nearly half of them are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks, according to an old article in The New York Times thirteen years ago.

2020 does not begin a new decade but ends one. Looking back, if linguists made such an estimate about dying languages more than a decade ago, a decade later there must be spoken languages already dead.

When an endangered species is pronounced dead, biologists and the world will mourn it and resent the fact that humans have not done enough to preserve them. Some will even blame human activities for the cause of the extinction of the species. Skeptics will argue that it’s the cause of nature just like the extinction of the dinosaurs before the advent of humans.

As much as we praise the Internet for bringing us convenience and the closeness of the world, I wonder how many websites we’re browsing are in the dominant languages and how many of them are in the endangered languages? You’re reading this article in English, so the answer speaks for itself.

Does that mean websites in an endangered language are unpopular? Yes but no. Endangered languages are spoken by different ethnic groups at different sea levels on the planet. On the Tibetan plateau at least four Tibetan dialect groups are spoken. An isolated language that has never been studied by linguists is found on remote South Pacific islands of Vanuatu. American Indians can speak English as well as their tribal languages; so can American Amish.

From an economic viewpoint, if money doesn’t circulate, it loses its value. It’s more profitable to create a website in a dominant language than a website in an endangered language. The flow of the viewers is like money, isn’t it?

Older speakers of an endangered language may still cling to their mother tongue, but driven by economic needs and other reasons, younger speakers would rather use the dominant language in the society to communicate with outsiders. It’s tragic that native speakers can’t use their mother tongue in more domains in their life. Use it or lose it. Fewer users of the native languages will lead to the fate of the language becoming obsolete.

Urbanization and political decision can bring hope as well as a death sentence. With the support of local government and artists, the once declining Low German, widely known as Platt, is now one of the popular dialects in Northern Germany. It is taught in school curriculum and used in staging theater performances. Let’s flip the other side of the coin. Chinese Mandarin is thriving because, domestically, there is suppression of local dialects and, globally, there is China’s economic influence attracting more non-native speakers to learn Mandarin. This is sad news for speakers of other Chinese dialect groups. Learn more in my previous piece “Portuguese Renaissance.”

According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left.

Don’t forget. Many dying languages have no written forms. Investigating an extinct species, archaeologists may someday find its fossil or food chain from other living creatures. But for an extinct language, without written form, when the last speaker passes on, the language dies with the speaker. I hope there will be some folk songs, nursery rhymes of sorts left behind for future linguists to mourn and then, perhaps, revive the fossil languages.

If my writing in Golden Orchid makes a dedication to my mother tongue Cantonese, I’m happy to do it once again in my debut novel. My new year resolution in 2020 is:

Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.

Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.

Saving the Endangered Species and Languages.

Yes, how important is it? It’s worthy of repeating three times and take action!

China’s notorious hukou system, the household registration system, is seeing some changes in the new year 2020. The system will be eliminated in cities with less than three million residents; and in cities with population of three million to five million, rules of the hukou system will be relaxed.

The media compares the decision to a Christmas gift for China’s 290 million migrant workers. Simply put, the hukou system in communist China has divided Chinese people based on their birthplace into agricultural hukou and urban hukou. Despite that tens of millions of migrant workers—the rural population—move to big cities to work, marry and even die, they and their children are not entitled to the medical, education and retirement benefits of the adopted cities.

In recent years, local governments of Chinese big cities are adopting a point-based system to vet applicants for urban hukou. This is similar to the immigration policies in some Western countries, such as Australia and Canada. Applicants are evaluated based on their education, work experience and talents.

The immigration issue is a hot stick in the US, so is the domestic migration in China. Because of the abolished One-Child Policy, four hundred million unborn babies have disappeared during the thirty years of the draconian family planning law. Chinese aging population outnumbers the working labor force. That’s why China is spending a lot of money on AI technology—high productivity with small labor. Productivity boosts economy; economy stimulates consumption; consumption triggers demands.   

I don’t see China will open its door for foreign-born citizens to become Chinese nationals in the near future. Looking around the neighboring East Asian countries: Japan has the same issue of aging population and low fertility rate, as is South Korea. But the difference is South Korea welcomes foreign workers; and Japan is slowly relaxing its immigration law but its legislation is not as fast as its robotics development. The gray-haired Japanese seniors are more likely to depend on robots than working-age humans for long-term care.

To relax the hukou system and even abolish it like the One-Child Policy is inevitable for Chinese leadership. The US-China trade war wakes up China to boost domestic consumption in order to maintain the 6.0 and above percent of annual GDP growth. Urbanization gives the perfect environment to stimulate domestic consumption. Therefore, the Christmas gift for migrant workers to settle in medium to small cities is also a long-term strategy for China to find an alternative alongside the sole dependence on manufacturing for foreign exports.

In my memoir Golden Orchid, I’ve made my point that China’s fast-changing policies affect several generations, in particular under communist rule. Tens of millions of Chinese workers were laid off due to the state-owned enterprise reform in the 1990s. Their children—most of them with urban hukou—had some tough years when their jobless parents could not meet both ends. The One-Child Policy has caused the-one-and-only only-child generation to take on a heavier social obligation than any predecessors to support the citywide welfare system.

As for the hukou system, it is not invented by the communists. The system has been in used since ancient China to keep track of who was in what family. However, under communist rule, the hukou system has become a tool for the top leaders to restrict movement and economic benefits of rural people and to create hereditary privileges of the urbanites. The relaxation of the system only means migrant workers and their children will contribute to the economic sustainability of the party’s coffers in exchange for a candy of social security. After all, to become new residents with urban hukou in mega cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing, is off limits.

Happy New Year to all my readers!

It’s a linguist’s nightmare that an endangered language is dead after the last native speaker of the language passes on. Political and economic marginalization accounts for most of the world’s language endangerment, in particular, in Macau, the former Portuguese colony.

After the Macau handover in 1999 to China, Mandarin Chinese speakers in Macau outnumbered  Portuguese native speakers, although Cantonese is still the predominant language in the enclave. According to The Guardian, in 2000, the number of people who speak Patuá—a blend of Portuguese and Cantonese—was down to just 50 speakers worldwide. A year prior, UNESCO classified Patuá as a “critically endangered” language.

Despite the fact that Macau set Chinese and Portuguese as official languages after 1999 handover, the Portuguese-speaking residents of Macau are declining—older speakers pass away and young people are not interested in learning the out-of-fashion Macanese Portuguese. It was estimated in 2017 that only 0.6 percent of households in Macau speak Portuguese as their first language.

Growing up in Cantonese-speaking Guangzhou, I’ve witnessed how Cantonese is marginalized as new Mandarin-speaking domestic immigrants flooded in the city. As I described in my book Golden Orchid, the immigrants contributed their labor to the modernized urban development; and yet, instead of learning Cantonese, they speak their own dialects; instead of learning about the history of Cantonese culture, they bring their own to the metropolis. For instance, retired Mandarin speakers gather in the open air to dance with the company of loud music.

If the new Cantonese residents pay little attention to the Cantonese history, the new immigrants in Macau cannot be oblivious of the European architecture in the city. The road names and the local cuisine are all associated with Portuguese. I’m a strong believer that knowing a language is the first step in embracing its culture.  

But now, Beijing sees Macau as a door to the lusophone world, such as Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and East Timor. The establishment of the BRIC economies speaks for itself. As the “Big Four” member states, Brazil and China have built a stronger-than-ever economic tie. As a result, students in the casino-dominated “Las Vegas of the East” see studying Portuguese as a shrewd career move. The territory’s government also pledged to make the city a hub for Portuguese learning. There is an increasing number of Chinese people in Macau—residents and mainland students—studying Portuguese as a second or third language. The number of native Portuguese speakers is also growing in the enclave to set up businesses or pursue careers.

As a polyglot, I cherish every language that survives regardless of the influence or intervention from a government or a ruling party. If only Beijing could see the importance of dialects in the mainland. If only the Communist leaders could embrace language diversity instead of implementing nationwide Standard Mandarin through coercive measures. If only today’s Portuguese renaissance in Macau could last for generations.

This week Chinese president Xi Jinping will visit Macau to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the handover. His uplifting speech in Mandarin Chinese will no doubt increase the confidence of the Portuguese speakers in the casino hub. Will his speech also strengthen investors’ faith in China’s goal of turning the enclave a financial hub as a backstop to the neighboring untamed Hong Kong? Let’s wait and see.

Anti-pollution makeup has become the latest trend in China. In fact, sales see an uptick in India, South Korea and even in Britain. As city air becomes more toxic, the demand for anti-pollution skincare products is soaring. Many cosmetics companies are capitalizing on the environmental problem by launching products from sunscreens to sheet masks that are aimed at preventing and offsetting skin damage.

However, at the other end of the spectrum, certain cosmetics themselves cause pollution on a much larger scale than previous thought. According to a study published in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, the divide between fuel emissions and chemical emissions is closer to 50-50. In other words, humans who use personal care products are also sources of harmful emissions.

I rarely wear makeup. Not only because I don’t like to embellish my look with cosmetics, but also because applying makeup is simply a time-consuming routine. No offense to the cosmetics users. The optimum effort I commit to my skincare is to wash my face with facial cleanser every day. During my travels with my girlfriend, I had an opportunity to be a fly on the wall to watch her morning routine on her face.

From washing her face to dry it up, from applying facial sunscreen and lotion to putting on foundation, concealer, and cheek powder in a rigid sequential order, not to mention lip gloss and eye shadows are equally important for the face as a whole, my friend stood in front of the mirror for a good thirty minutes plus. The dust from the brushes of all sizes in her hand rise in the sunlit room as if countless sparkling particles were dancing in the ray of light. A haze of sweet scents permeated the air.   

I am amazed at how many lotions and potions we lather, douse, spritz, and spray ourselves with each morning. If Americans live longer because of the magic of chemistry in medicines, do they look younger and more beautiful because of the magic of chemistry on skincare products?

The air pollution problem is complicated. And yet, if as the study discovers, cosmetics cause pollution; the more severe pollution is, the greater opportunity it seems for the anti-pollution cosmetics companies. The more we emphasize on protecting our skins with the application of skincare products, the more these chemical products will pollute the environment. Isn’t the skin precaution counter-productive? Isn’t the pollution self-inflicted?

Manufacturers and consumers need clean water to produce skincare products as well as to cleanse both skin and the makeup tools. Water is primarily used as a solvent in cosmetics and skincare products. When drinking water is a big problem in some part of the planet, tons of water is consumed by the cosmetic industry in the well-developed part of the planet. It is high time we conserve water.

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As part of China’s socialist economy with Chinese characteristics, the reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), has never stopped for forty years. However, instead of shrinking SOEs and expanding private companies like what the reform initiator Deng Xiaoping advocated in the 1978 Open Door Policy, there are signs in recent years indicating China’s SOEs are decreasing by number but their GDP contribution is increasing remarkably.

My understanding of China’s SOEs deepens as I grow older. Partly because of my age, partly because of censorship in China, the latter was more to blame for my ignorance. I only witnessed the phenomenon as I described in my memoir Golden Orchid, my parents were victims of the SOE reforms in the 1990s, losing their jobs as their state-owned companies were closed. But I didn’t think deeper then why the SOE reforms were so crucial to China’s socialistic economy with Chinese characteristics.

The term “China’s socialist economy with Chinese characteristics” appears often in the Chinese political rhetoric. The phrase is no stranger to Chinese citizens. But smart people are not fools. The phrase means China has an authoritarian capitalism. Unlike the free market in the West, the Chinese authorities want to be the biggest winner from a capitalistic market. Not to mention that the Communist Party in China is no different from any other political party in the world. All political parties need money to survive. (All political parties say they are for the people. Don’t buy it.) The SOEs help realize this goal. As a result, much of the SOE profits go into the coffers of the party. And party members running these companies pocket high salaries. The SOE reforms become an immediate and necessary solution in the past forty years.

In China, SOEs are controlled not only by the Chinese central government, but also by local governments. The simple way to understand it as if the American federal government and the state governments owned business enterprises. (Unfortunately, there’s no perfect system. The US political system leads to a faulty corporate capitalism.) There are almost 100 thousand local SOEs in China, and many of them are highly indebted.

Therefore, in my opinion, the provincial and municipal-level SOE reforms are more active and “necessary” as the central government says. My parents’ former employers were local SOEs. There aren’t many central government SOEs, but they have made huge profits.

When Jack Ma, who had been a low-profile Communist Party member until the party mouthpiece People’s Daily exposed his party identity, holds the largest individual shares of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, how can I not laugh at the sugarcoated “socialist economy with Chinese characteristics”? When some beleaguered Chinese companies are found that they are fake SOEs to mislead creditors about their state connections, how can I not see it another phenomenon “with Chinese characteristics”?      

According to multiple sources, China’s central government SOEs deliver strong performance. By the end of 2016, the revenues of more than 100 central SOEs reached 27 trillion yuan (approx. US$3.9 trillion at the time), making up 59 percent of the total revenues contributed by all SOEs in the country. (NOTE: the exchange rate between USD and CNY has been volatile since the US-China trade war began in 2018.) In the same year, 80 Chinese SOEs were listed in the world’s 500 largest companies.          

Chinese authorities are proud of the invention of an economic system with Chinese characteristics. A reform doesn’t mean to dismantle SOEs but to take the most advantage of SOEs to serve the ruling party. They see the rapid economic growth as the result of the introduction of private companies in China in the early days of SOE reforms. Private companies and joint-ventures with foreign investors have been the miracle drivers for jobs, productivity and even innovation.

Look at the economic boom of e-commerce and 5G network in China. Almost every foreign IT brand and service in the West can find its Chinese equivalent, from WeChat to Douyin, from Didi Chuxing to Meituan-Dianping. These Chinese firms all have central government’s support. Their success drives Silicon Valley to envy and to simulate. If Donald Trump bans Chinese telecom giant Huawei from entering the US market on the ground of national security, he is copying China’s long-standing protectionist approach from foreign competition in the domestic market. Sad to say, today’s US-China trade war is part of the global technology race.

As much as Chinese leaders emphasizes deepening SOE reforms, they do not tell the public in plain language that the role of the SOEs not only cannot be diminished, but must be strengthened to protect Chinese economy from foreign pressure and risks.

A long time ago, Chinese leaders called on the people to “look ahead” —in Mandarin Chinese, xiàng qián kàn—for a bright future. I was amused that the locals made fun of the call with the pun for “look for money.” “Money” sounds the same as “ahead” in Mandarin Chinese. China today is money-oriented and so is its authoritarian leader. As the influence of China’s SOEs grows bigger, the SOE mindset is a must-have for the centralized government. The rivalry between the US and China under the hawkish American administration only strengthens it.