The Last Exile

Now that the Lu Guang’s award winning Pollution in China photographic essay has been reaching an expending audience I thought I would point readers to China Hush’s translated interview with the photographer.

NetEase: Where did you get the funding for your project?

Lu Guang: They were my savings. I am different from other people, I make 50,0000 and fell it’s enough, other people make 100,000, 1,000,000 still don’t feel enough, and still continue to make more money. But my thinking is different from other people, I wish my life to be simpler, for example yesterday I could have flown back, how much would it have been? 690. How much was it taking the train? 210 yuan for the whole night, for sure I chose the train. Considering my health, I should have taken the plane, but I don’t have that much money. I must save money when I can. For example, other people stayed at hotels that cost 200, 300, 500 (yuan), the hotels I stayed at were all under 100 (yuan).

NetEase: How did you find and choose the locations of your photos?

Lu Guang: The information was all provided by friends.

NetEase: There are many polluted places, how do you choose the order of your visits?

Lu Guang: Continuously travel and constantly work. Every place I went, there were always friends helping me, I gave my phone number to him, he also gave me his. Whenever something happened over there, he would call me, and I would go over there right the way. Of course there were times I couldn’t make it over there.

NetEase: You said you ate and lived with the villagers, what were most of the reactions of the villagers living in polluted villages when talking about pollution?

Lu Guang: Whenever talking about pollution, they would become very talkative.

NetEase: They want to tell you things?

Lu Guang: Yes, including “Hong River flows through here, 20 years ago the river was very nice, there were fishes, we all bathed in the river, and used water to irrigate wheat, but now we cannot do that anymore. And for so many years we have talked about it many times. We reported to the government, but nothing was ever resolved. Therefore we are now numb and don’t want to complain it anymore.” They were very miserable.

Read the rest in English at China Hush.

Rebel without wifi

Chinese government bans corporal punishment for teen internet users which I suppose can be seen as a more ‘progressive’ move by the government of China. Reuters India:

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s Ministry of Health has banned the use of physical punishment to wean teens off the net, months after a boy was beaten to death at an Internet boot camp.

Chinese parents have turned to more than 200 organisations offering treatment for Internet “disorders” as the government increasingly warns of unhealthy Internet habits among the young. Many of the camps are imbued with a military atmosphere. Patients are forced to replace hours in front of the computer with arduous physical drills or even more extreme “treatments”.

“When intervening to prevent improper use of the Internet, we should … strictly prohibit restriction of personal freedom and physical punishments,” the ministry said in a draft guideline for Internet use by minors, posted on its website (www.moh.gov.cn). It appeared to have dropped the term “Internet addiction”, widely used in earlier ministry documents, perhaps in a bid to calm worried parents who fuelled a mushrooming business of harsh camps to prevent teens from spending hours online.

The Chinese Ministry of Health was forced to take action after these kinds of public cases came to light:

The death of 15-year-old Deng Senshan, just hours after he checked into an Internet bootcamp in the southwestern Guangxi region in early August, caused a media storm in China. Days later another teenager, Pu Liang, was taken to hospital with water in the lungs and kidney failure after a similar attack in Sichuan Province. The government in July had already banned electro-shock therapy as a treatment for Internet addiction, after media reports about a controversial psychiatrist who administered electric currents to nearly 3,000 teenagers.

Electro-shock therapy for teenage internet users…words fracking fail me.

I find I am still endlessly fascinated with all things found at the China Hush blog. The Globe and Mail reports on China were never like this, and frankly, the window into life in the People’s Republic is a real eye opener. If anything, I like social side of the country more than all those endless articles on the ‘economic engine/miracle of modern’ China. The Chinese have much more in common with Westerns than any official Chinese government press releases would suggest.

Case in point; this domestic violence news report translated by China Hush.

[Video] October 26th, Chongqing Shapingba district police station received a phone call reporting a crime. Police quickly rushed to the scene and found a middle aged woman named Zhen lying in a pool of blood. She was stabled multiple times.

The police immediately started searching the area around the crime scene and quickly locked down on suspect’s tracks. The police then found the suspect kidnapped another young woman as hostage. The negotiator started to communicate with the suspect, but the suspect was emotional, not only stepping on top of the hostage, his knife was constantly threatening her life. The police decided that they could shot and kill the suspect when it’s necessary.

There is much more to this report and it can be found at China Hush as well as the video. Although I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you – the still photographs are much more graphic than anything usually seen in our newspapers.

I found a number of stunningly heart-rendering photographs featured at China Hush (via QQ). Recently, photographer Lu Guang won the W. Eugene Smith Grant won an award in Humantistic Photograpy for his series on ‘Pollution in China’
This should give all of us a serious pause to contemplate the human cost before the next time we choose to walk into Wal-mart or a Dollar Store to buy that ridiculously cheap do-hickey-toaster-kettle-coffee-mug-batteries-thingy’ which is made in China.