No, you may no longer spout the overused PRC apologist methods that defy logic and are brought up whenever something bad in China can be attributed to 'uncontrollable' foreign influences.

Hattie Carroll was a party in her senseless murder but her ethics are not in dispute. She simply needed a job so she supplied her labor. Similarly so are the desperately unemployed Chinese masses being exploited as economic development cannonfodder in the battle to make China a 'glorious nation' on 'the pathway to socialism with Chinese characteristics' and a ruling elite wealthier than Qin Shi Huangdi. The mercury poisoning must be a theme in creating and squandering wealth in the middle kingdom.

Neither are the final European consumers to be blamed for not 'knowing' that they were paying too little for their imported products. If Chinese manufacturers started charging more, would that by necessity assure anybody that the manufacturing processes were somehow environmentally more responsible?

Yes, the market determines prices and only does it reflect costs fully when coordinated governmental efforts deny externalities from becoming part of 'the doing business'. The lamentable truth is not that labor costs are low in China; life is cheap here.

"Take the rag away from your face.

Now ain't the time for your tears."

Will the citizens of the PRC sit back and listen (most ignore.) to all the speechmaking at the this year's CPPCC and cross their fingers that something will come of it all? Is it more effective to weep for their steadily toxified homeland or to start acting, praying that the tipping point is not too far gone? I would rather see more Chinese insist that the new green insurance policy program be mandated immediately.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-02/18/content_7625416.htm

By 2015? How many cancers could be externalized by then as part of the cost of doing business? It's a progressive and effective means of helping to regulate the marketplace through market forces, but only if the state values the lives of all citizens and the succeeding generations. And we should all be clear, governments hardly do anything just because it will be good for the hoi polloi.

If, however, at the next conference, the deformed figures of children born with Chisso Minamata disease, the soaring cancer rates still fail to move the CPC to act, then's the time for your tears.

http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=13052&channel=0

-Lin NiQiu

"I agree that all parties involved lacked ethics. But let's not forget supply and demand. The German and Spanish consumers didn't have to buy the solar panels from the Chinese manufacturers. They did because they have a financial incentive to save money. They had the choice of demanding all their suppliers to maintain and prove their environmental standards. They didn't.

Every time I heard these kinds of stories, I weep for my homeland.

Zhu Zhu"

In a response to this news, Solar Energy Industries Association president Rhone Resch made the following statement:

"The 550 member companies of SEIA were outraged and disappointed by the reports of toxic chemical dumping by a factory in China... this practice violates both our association's professional code of conduct and the very spirit of what we're trying to do as an industry. We are out to solve environmental problems, not create them... Solar energy is the most environmentally friendly energy technology that exists today… But manufacturing solar feedstocks, like any heavy industry, requires strong environmental safeguards. Polysilicon, the primary feedstock in most solar cells, has been produced in the U.S. and Europe for fifty years using the Siemens process in a clean, safe manner, in strict compliance with environmental law."

Read Rhone’s full statement:

http://www.seia.org/solarnews.php?id=168

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/us/11biofuel.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1205262322-RZtzzu93w3fLFFn4OBbpQg

Is that timely, or what?

Remember Walt Kelly?

We have done this to ourselves, on so many levels, not just the manufacturing of solar panels. We want our people to have a living wage, to not pollute the rivers/soil/air/oceans, and so we legislate it. So all our manufacturing moves offshore, so that other people, somewhere else, work for pennies on the dollar and dump the gunk wherever they please. But then we still buy the stuff. Out of sight, out of mind.

We don't have to see it. It's not on our soil. It's not our people working for near starvation wages, for so many hours we'd think of it as slavery. It's not our kids who have to breathe the air that rivals Dickens' London.

But hey! We got some cheap stuff! Wanna come over to my house and see my new cheap stuff? Just got it this weekend at Best Buy/Costco/Circuit City/Target and isn't it neat?

There Ain't No Such Thing as A Free Lunch.

At bottom, nothing is perfect. Especially not us, the "human element" in it all.

Maybe if there were not so many of us...

Or maybe, just maybe, we are our own "Dosadi Experiment"?

@Nancy Ott

I agree that all parties involved lacked ethics. But let's not forget supply and demand. The German and Spanish consumers didn't have to buy the solar panels from the Chinese manufacturers. They did because they have a financial incentive to save money. They had the choice of demanding all their suppliers to maintain and prove their environmental standards. They didn't.

Every time I heard these kinds of stories, I weep for my homeland.

Zhu Zhu

We can expect a parallel article on pollution from manufacturing compact fluorescents.

The migration to CFLs means closing six light bulb plants in the U.S. with the manufacturing replaced by CFLs in, surprise, China. There is no reason to believe the Chinese will do a more conscientious job of manufacturing CFLs than anything else.

Since a toxic byproduct of CFLs is mercury, one can assume it is only a matter of time before we see multiple Minamata's springing up in China.

Will your headline then read, by parallel: Are Environmentalists in U.S. Responsible for Mercury Poisoning in China?

.