Chapters 3&4

In your own words, what is going on with property transfer in China today, according to Bill Dodson in Chapter 3?  How do you respond to his description of this? 200 words


Property transfers in China are just that. There is no real payment, no real resolution for the people, they just get their property pulled out from under them. Something I found very troubling was the live sentence in China. This means no moving and no chance to advance in society at all. This goes back to the other economic hamstrings place on the Chinese people, but this also effects them socially. It rips parents away from children and vice versa – leaving the whole family unit in taters. This creates a weaker populous that is always depressed on a very basic emotional level. Furthermore, the Chinese government or building officials will then sell what is not even theirs to sell right out from under a Chinese family. When Dodson discusses his dealings with Chinese officials about where to build new buildings, the Chinese official gestured to a row of occupied houses and told Dodson he could have it all. If Dodson had decided to take the space, the entire row of Chinese families would have been displaced without question, hesitation, or pay. Plus, these families do not even own the land they live on – it is only leased to them for a number of years. That raises another question; exactly what do the Chinese people HAVE. This sounds like a ‘Capitalist Pig’ kind of question, but really, what do the Chinese people own? They do not own their own home. Most probably do not own cars – this means that unless they have a mattress full of money they have almost no assets to speak of. Assets would, in the United States, allow them to do things like borrow money against their already purchased things – since those things would be worth money. As it sits now, the Chinese people do not own anything, making what could be their greatest bargaining chip literally worthless.


What is the most compelling piece of information related to pollution in Chapter 4?  Why do you single out this information as most compelling? 200 words I think the most ridiculous thing I read about was the health issues related to the pollution and how the situations were handled. I simply cannot fathom how these people were literally being poisoned – some of them by their own companies – and then hung out to dry. There was a case discussed about one lady who was hospitalized along with one thousand others, and then told that their illness was not real. They imagined it. All one thousand sick and hurt workers imagined their illness. The company told them that if they denied that they had imagined it then the company would cease all medical treatment (let me reiterate how no one who was hospitalized could have ever paid for treatment on their own) and the employee would be let go. The absurdity of this situation is unfathomable. The people in China have completely no rights over their employers – much less the ability to protest what is being done to their environment -which, I’m sure, makes their living spaces much less enjoyable, if not totally unlivable. As if hurting the environment was not enough, the factories are dumping waste directly into rivers which leaves many families without water for days on end. This will only make people sicker, as they are not even able to drink fresh water with any certainty on a daily basis.