May already be too late to rein in Chinese juggernaut

I COULDN’T agree more with Keith Woods’ column in last Wednesday’s Bulletin (‘Council loses the plot by censoring children’s art’, GCB, 16/5/18) about the official Chinese response to the Taiwan flag incident in Rockhampton.

Time is fast running out for Australia and really most of the Western world to rein in China. It was pure folly (and greed ) for the Western world to allow China to join the free markets of the world and relocate their manufacturing in China to take advantage of their low labour costs, whether it be clothes, white goods, and electronics right through to heavy equipment, before China moved to being a democratic nation.

To allow China to boom economically in our free markets while they manipulate their currency to stay low and don’t play by the market rules like every other country, has only created a communist monster heavily armed and cashed up.

I had the misfortune several years ago to work for eight months at a shipyard in China preparing a new oil rig for delivery, in a city called Nantong (one of their smaller cities, only eight million).

I found that the Chinese are not as smart as they present. Basically they have plundered the technology of the greedy foreign manufacturers who have set up in China, and this needs to stop.

One on one, most of the people I worked with and met were just average, nice people, not at all procommunist. It’s a shame the West didn’t push for democracy 30 or 40 years ago when China’s choice would have been embrace democracy or stay in the rice paddies.

At a local restaurant/bar we used to frequent, one of the waitresses was telling us how happy she was her daughter had done extremely well in her final high school exams and couldn’t wait to start university. I said what does she want to do at uni, she said she hadn’t made a final decision but she had told her that the first thing that she had to do as soon as she set foot in the uni was to go and join the young communist party or league (I can’t remember the proper name).

I was surprised, I said I didn’t realise that you were communist, she said she wasn’t but the only way to get ahead was join the party. She went on to explain how many jobs/careers in China are only accessible to party members or their children.

I found my whole China experience to be quite depressing.

The pollution problem has to be seen to be believed. Clean cars would drive into the shipyard and park in the morning, at knock-off time they would look like they had been snowed on with about half an inch to an inch of fly ash, which had come from poorly designed coal fired powerstations.

The city had a lot of natural waterways which had been fluffed up by the city council with a lot of riverbank trees, shrubs and huge lily pads in the water, everything had the same amount of fly ash covering. I only saw one clear, sunny day in eight months.

At night time the city really presented itself well, as all the buildings were lit up. The funny thing was that I never saw the moon or stars in eight months.

China has destroyed its rivers and ground water but I think the air pollution will be a health catastrophe in the near future, you can’t breathe in incredibly high levels of pollution all of your working life without severe consequences (plus they all smoke excessively).

In a few years China could end up with 25-30 per cent of its population requiring hospitalisation. This will put a huge hole in their future economy.

China thinks it’s now at the stage where it can do what it likes. They ignored the court ruling from the Hague over the Spratlys and right or wrong, they want to get their hooks into Taiwan. They throw huge unaffordable loans at island nations and third world countries knowing the debt can’t be serviced in a bid to take control.

For Australia to get on its high horse over these loans and show concern and worry over them must have had the leaders of these nations rolling around on the ground laughing. How can Australia have any credibility in this matter after doing a 99-year lease on the port of Darwin with the Chinese; the lease should be torn up.

The silent Chinese aggression must be bought to the public’s attention regularly in the media.