12 November 2015
Free But Not Easy
By Neil Tidmarsh
The best things in life are free and natural – a mother’s milk, the air that we breathe, the freedom to think and speak the truth – but we shouldn’t take them for granted.
Consider three stories from China in the news this week.
Australia is suffering from what was a mysterious shortage of infant formula; shops and supermarkets in Sydney and Melbourne and Perth seemed to sell out of baby milk powder almost as soon as it went on the shelves, and yet it didn’t appear to be finding its way into Australian babies. ‘The Times’ reported that a mother in Sydney contacted every supermarket within a 20 mile radius of her home, but all were out of stock; another in Melbourne drew a blank in 15 different shops; another in Perth came home empty-handed after a three hour shopping trip.
The mystery was solved when a well-organised and clearly experienced team of shoppers was spotted emptying the shelves in one supermarket after another. More or less professional gangs of profiteers are buying infant formula in Australia and selling it in China. Chinese parents are worried that infant formula produced in and for their domestic market is not safe. In 2008 China was rocked by a poisoning scandal; a dairy adulterated its infant formula product with the chemical melamine to artificially boost the protein content. About 300,000 children were affected by the contamination; 54,000 babies were hospitalised and six died from kidney damage. To this day, many parents in China don’t trust the domestic product and will pay up to five times the original price for milk powder from Australia or New Zealand.
In Shenyang city, northeast China, air-pollution levels were the highest ever recorded in China. The World Health Organisation says that the maximum level of pollution by PM2.5 (airborne particles which are a cancer and heart disease risk) is 25 micrograms per cubic metre of air: in Shenyang on Sunday it was more than 1,400. Government warnings recommended staying indoors, patients with breathing difficulties flocked to hospitals and air-purifying systems worked overtime in those institutions lucky enough to have them. The air quality in many Chinese cities has been improved recently, according to Greenpeace China in ‘The Times’, but it is still too high in most of them. Coal-burning heating systems are largely to blame, and the problem is at its worst at this time of year as the cold weather begins. A recent study by an American university claims that air pollution causes the deaths of about 4000 Chinese people per day.
The China Alliance of Radio, Film and Television announced this week that it was setting up a committee to put in place a ‘self-discipline pact’ which 50 media groups have already signed up to. The committee will be a powerful media watchdog and organ of state control, to make sure journalists and editors remain loyal to the Communist party line. They will have to agree to ‘protect the leadership of the Communist party of China and the interests of the state, and not to publish or spread any information that would undermine the image of either.’ The committee will have the power to punish anyone who breaks the pact. Punishment could involve demotion, sacking, blacklisting, public apologies and public shamings. The state authorities also announced this week that they were going to monitor online news bodies even more closely. The state administrations of cyberspace and of the media used the issuing of new credentials to 594 online news reporters as an opportunity to remind them that they had to obey the same rules as reporters in traditional media.
The best things in life are free, but that doesn’t mean they’re always in stock.
