One would think that with the government buying a million pigs at a time at market prices, people would give up all sorts of other occupations to grow pigs: <Pork prices are unusually volatile because some farmers stopped raising pigs after a 2007 outbreak of blue ear disease killed hundreds of thousands of animals and prompted Beijing to destroy millions more >
TJ, you make the usual mistake of thinking there is 600 years of pent up demand. That's like people saying decades ago that China was 100 years behind the rest, meaning it would take 100 years to catch up. I used to explain that no country is more than 20 years behind anywhere because that's how long it takes for the next generation to become adults imbued with the latest and greatest, and without being burdened by legacy this and obsolete the other, with vested interests in the preservation of the blocking technology, be it a road, telephone pole, factory or government building.
So China went in a decade from hutongs with open sewers and no phone lines, let alone faxes, ISDN, and huge cellphone towers, to a mobile Cyberspace realm seething with hundreds of millions of CDMA and soon to be OFDM DeVices, linked to cute little towers and smaller cells, zinging petatrillions of phragmented photons through the aether into Cyberspace.
There isn't 600 years of demand. There is just a swarm of young people wanting to be up with the play and maybe even in front of the play.
Perhaps Premier Wen was really leaning on the local bosses to cut the pork in their spending and imposts on the pig farmers and get out of the way of the crop growers and producers of the goods which people want to eat with their profits from their good works. I took the translation as it appeared - "You naughty pig farmers need to charge less money and be poorer. We will confiscate and kill any pigs you do grow if we decide they might be sick. No, we won't compensate you at market rates."
If Wen was telling the people blocking the pig farmers to get out of the way and stop robbing them, then that is indeed a good thing. One can't trust news media. Why do you think the media got the message so wrong? Did you actually read or listen to what Wen said, or just make up what you think he should have said? It's not really beauty to tell officious local kleptocratic suffocatocracy to get out of the way of people doing good things. Beauty is when something is achieved. Stopping doing something hopeless is not beauty.
A good idea would be to stop turning American corn into ethanol to feed to SUVs which don't really like it and to instead feed the American corn to Chinese pigs for a win[USA taxpayer] win [SUV driver] win[USA corn farmer] win[China pig farmer] win[pork eater in China] Wen [Beijing bosses] Winn [I'd win when they all buy CDMA/OFDM upgrades with the savings and profits].
Mqurice |
