Report on the workshop on the Sustainability of
China¡¦s
growth
Green/European Free Alliance in the
European Parliament delegations to
the WTO Ministerial in
Hong Kong
Dec. 2005
by Gaby Kueppers,
* The high
price of the low price*
**Over the past weekend, thousands of
representatives of governments,
official delegates, NGOs and grass roots
organisations flooded into Hong
Kong. The citizens of this city, symbol of
free trade unlimited and its
rather questionable, but mostly non confessed
effects on architecture,
people¡¦s health and the environment, expected them
rather scared. For
weeks the media had launched articles on Korean peasants
going to commit
suicide in the middle of their streets, violent
demonstrations and
possible terrorist attacks. The first, very peaceful and
creative march
of about 7000 activists ¡V most of them women, as observers
underlined -
on Sunday started to break the ice, the second march on Tuesday
helped
even more to make Hong Kong inhabitants understand that the presence
of
foreigners protesting against the WTO Ministerial in their city was not
meant to destroy their homes and rights of movement, but to voice
disagreement with the ongoing negotiations of an international treaty.
Interesting enough, while the international press seems to have focused
more on a hundred Korean NGO members jumping into the river in front of
the WTO venue on the evening of the official first WTO day, followed by
very limited clashes with the police, the local press, quite well
informed, reported more on the contents of the different activities of
the events around the opening of the 6^th WTO Ministerial.
Soon after
the registration of delegates, NGOs and press, many of them
had already an
additional white lace around their necks, with a slogan
which might sound
familiar to you: ¡§No deal is better than a bad deal¡¨.
We will see later this
week, if former European Union trade commissioner
and present WTO director
general Pascal Lamy succeeds in inversing the
generally sceptical
mood.
The Green/EFA group decided to initiate their activities in
Hong Kong
with an astonishingly unique
approach: ¡§Where are we? What are the
problems of the people where the
Ministerial takes place? What is the
next step?¡¨ In fact, the Green/EFA
seminar on Hong
Kong and
the
surrounding industrial area of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) has turned
out to be the only place where people from the West invited activists
from China and
Hong Kong to present and discuss their problems
and
alternatives of an economic model built up around trade. The underlying
question ¡§Is the model sustainable? Is ¡¥slow trade¡¦ ¡V echoing the
Italian ¡¥slow food campaign¡¦ in terms of quality, wellbeing and
sustainability - possible, here and elsewhere?¡¨ bridged the general
division between the Chinese and the people interested in WTO from
abroad and initiated a hopefully fruitful dialogue in the
future.
After a first introduction to Hong Kong and
China on Monday, organised
for us by Ms.
Lau Kinchi, an extraordinarily skilled, convincing and
sympathetic fellow of
ARENA (Asian Regional Exchange for New
Alternatives) and a briefing by the
Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, the
Green/EFA delegation participated in the
opening march on Tuesday. On
Wednesday, our seminar ¡§The Pearl River Delta:
can it still grow? World
market production against local production in the
powerhouse of China¡¨
initiated the series of events
taking place in the venue of the Heinrich
Boell Foundation, the Knutsford
Hotel in Kowloon (see
www.hongkong2005.org <http://www.hongkong2005.org/>). Frithjof Schmidt,
MEP from
Germany, said in his welcoming speech, that the
Greens/EFA
wanted to see what is behind the figures representing trade: how
is the
life of the real people and what is the real production of goods
behind
nice or naughty statistics. As people need to benefit first, what
conditions are necessary? Au Loong-Yu from the Hong Kong Globalisation
Monitor showed that while China is represented as the biggest winner of
the current economic model, the workers in
China as elsewhere are the
losers and
that action has started to create awareness in order to stop
the downward
spiral. It is not only the low wages that make investors
move to
China, but also the existing discipline and
the immense and
intense social control allowing for making
China competitive, but what
is the price
for workers? He did not believe in the usefulness of
existing codes of
conducts, as they should be legally, and not only
morally binding. The
problem is not the absence of laws, but the failure
to implement and monitor
them. The Chinese model is already
unsustainable, he said. The stakeholders
who are the victims at present
must be empowered so that things can
change.
In a second session chaired by british MEP Caroline Lucas, Han
Dongfang
from the China Labour Bulletin presented the concrete case of the
Italian company Decoro, which produces sofas in
China. After a 20 %
wages cut its
managers physically attacked three opposing workers, until
they were sent to
hospital and afterwards sacked without corresponding
compensation. Hand
Dongfang sees the WTO as a double edged sword: on the
one edge it opens
China¡¦s economy, on the other hand it
broadens the gap
between the rich and the poor in the country, not at least
profiting
from the long standing cultural tradition of discipline and
acceptance
to swallow whatever is imposed. The way out he sees is not help
from the
West, but empowerment of the Chinese workers and the development of
a
civil society.
Poon Man Hon from the HK Confederation of Trade
Union, the Hong
Kong
branch of the ICFTU, presented examples in the Pearl River Delta as the
Gold
Peak company, with its high pollution and presented the
difficulties for trade unionists to mobilise workers in a country, where
trade unions posts used to be taken over by factory directors. The
Gold
Peak company produces batteries mainly for
the European market, with
highly polluting cadmium. This will definitely be
a campaign to develop.
A third session was initiated by Christine Loh
from Civil Exchange, a HK
think tank of, as she says, ¡§intellectual
activists¡¨ with very green
ideas. Presenting the case of the highly
unsustainable economic model
pursued in the Pearl River Delta, she compared
the situation to that of
a man who grows fatter and fatter. What to do, when
he get ill, bursting
out of his vest? Make him new clothes or go back to the
origin of his
fatness?
Kevin May from Greenpeace Hong Kong showed
¡§The dark Side of Growth: the
case of electronics¡¨, which shocked the
audience, just by the evidence
of facts: the PRD¡± is one of the giant
producers and exporters of
electronics, and it is also a harbour ¡V for
re-export to other
developing countries ¡V and importer of electronic waste.
A mobile phone
is a status symbol, pretty outside, but dirty inside. Every
hour, 4000 t
of electronic waste are produced (that is to say 16 000 t
during the
time of our seminar), with inorganic polluants and heavy metals
that are
shipped ¡V often via EU harbours ¡V back to
China. Giuyu, not far from
Hong Kong, is called the city of garbage. The
people¡¦s work there
consists of separating metals from the rest, cutting,
heartening,
burning. And exposing their lives to highly polluting
substances,
without any health care, risk insurance, compensation. Another
arena to
take action!
In a final round table, the French MEP
Marie-Hélène Aubert recalled the
strange situation that demonstrators seem
to belong to the ¡§landscape¡¨
of events like the WTO ministerials, with
delegates taking souvenir
pictures of them instead of taking their concerns
seriously and asked
for a better integration of both sides of the political
struggle.
Claudia Roth, co-president of the German Greens, said that this
disintegration is also true at the international political level: the
negotiators on human rights who meet in Geneva never meet those
negotiating the
follow-up of the Kyoto Protocol in Montreal who never
see the
Hong Kong negotiators for the WTO. Jill Evans
considered that
her first task on return to
Wales would be to inform and make people see
the whole picture, when companies close in Europe and reopen in
China.
This is also what Christine Loh
echoed and enlarged: ¡§You are not seeing
the story of
Hong Kong
or of China, but the story of trade. And you need
to tell the full story.¡¨
That is what we are trying to do in the
coming days.
/ Gaby Küppers, 14.12.2005, from Hong Kong/