11/07/09 -Session 1b - Dube - 19th century China

Hello- I thuroughly enjoyed today's session. It was informative on the geography of the differnt Asian countries. I have been to Japan, and I noticed that Korea has the same type of geography. 70% mountainous! And I was shocked with the population being double of California! I knew about Japan and it's massive population because I was fortunate in being able to visit there two years ago. They actually have people called "pushers" during rush hour who literally push people together on the metro....it's crazy! But true! You are packed in like sardines. Literally. The one thing I noticed was that Japan is VERY CLEAN. They have 7 different types of recycling along with 7 different types of trash cans, and if you mess up, you are in BIG trouble! China seemed to have a lot of smog, and an abundance of trash on the streets. You didn't see that in Japan. I haven't been to Korea yet so I'm not sure how their refuge system works. Maybe someone could enlighten me?
marisa :}

Marisa,
I have not been to either China or Japan, but I find their regulations on recylcing amongst a crowded population to be interesting.
I found this link that talks about recycling in Korea:
Korea- recycling programs

Thanks Morgan for that web site. That was very informative info about Korea & their recycling. Wow, it does sound like they are hard core if they don't recycle too, like Japan. We are very lucky here in the US that we do have curb side pick up & half the time people do not even have to separate things out!

Hi Morgan,
In fact, the Chinese are world class recyclers and have been for a long time. When I lived in China in the early '80s, we all took bags and bottles to the market to buy bulk items. This was decades before that became the LA norm. A colleague here at USC, Josh Goldstein, is writing a book about the history of recycling in China. We funded some of the contemporary part of his work. You can read about it here: http://china.usc.edu/ShowArticle.aspx?articleID=769

As you can see from this article and many in the popular press about how China's processing much of our e-waste, the Chinese are carrying out a lot of recycling, though often not in conditions that are best for the workers themselves or the environment.

Quite honestly, I was expecting the 5 hours to be painful, but the sheer volume of information we covered kept me pretty attentive. Over the summer I attempted to read a little book on the history of China, and I realized how difficult it is to get a cohesive picture of such a vast history. I hardly have a concrete sense of our own countries brief U.S. history. I think professor Dube did a good job of giving us a snap shot of that.
Kristian Engle
PVPHS

The information about population booms and busts were fascinating. I have always considered a certain amount of space be it at home, or work as a 'right' implied by being American, from CA, or whatever. It is daunting for me to think about mass humanity being so interwoven and connected in such close proximity. I am interested to learn more about the psychology imployed to maintain equilibrium with so many people exsisting so closely.

In the article "Don't Bring me your huddled masses" I was interested to learn that one of Japan's ideas to confront an aging population, is robots. However this article also introduced that the although '2/5ths of the worlds robots are in Japan' that the production of robots has decreased dramatically and that it will not be the save all that they had hoped. Japan is looking to immigration to help solve their aging population and smaller work force to find an equilibrium. My question for their hopes for immigration to solve this crisis is "Where are this immigrants going to come from?" "What role or roles do you want them to fill to maintain the success of Japan?"
😀

Sticking with the recycling theme.....

I was reading the "With Wounded Pride, Unemployed Koreans Quietly Turn to Manual Labor" article and was struck by a particular quote. The gist of the piece is that times are tough and white-collar workers are resorting to manual labor and many are a bit ashamed.

"Another allure is that many of these menial jobs seem to be recession-proof"

Maybe a boom in recycling programs serves as a way to help the employment crisis as well as doing good for the environment.