The hoarding was rather ambitious given the simplicity of the circumstances. The hole in the wall below the sign did not match its extravagant claim. In fact the frontage of the restaurant was the back wall of an older, now demolished, building. Mr. Li has simply broken a door through to a covered yard, set up tables and continued his dumpling business. Ingenious perhaps but hardly suggesting blue blood. I did not see a health and safety certification but I am confident that if one had been refused, a small gift would have smoothed the path to certification. Judging from appearances I very much doubt that Mr. Li is really the dumpling King.

Mr. Li’s rather artless claim could not be considered as false advertising even in the most rigorous of regulatory environments. Unfortunately in China, the kind of confidence one has in advertising claims even by established brands is often misplaced and the supervision lax in the extreme. Until recently, I had taken a rather indulgent view of fake brands, since in the markets famous for such items, one gets no less than what you pay for. Government campaigns against the practice seemed more token than real, judging by the speed with which things returned to “normal” after the campaigns were over. For years people have been talking about the problem I did not appreciate the complexity of the issue.

A recent scandal has put the issue into a different perspective. A mysterious illness that has so far killed 4 babies resulted from wholesale contamination of the food chain. Reputable companies have been found to have sold milk powder which had been contaminated by fraudulent whole-milk suppliers. Local officials were prepared to bury the issue, and a New Zealand business partner had to go through convoluted diplomatic channels to inform the Chinese Central Government of the problem. Now a very thorough and transparent cleanup process is in play, but not before credibility in the milk supply has completely disappeared. The latest addition to those affected is Starbucks China who has very publicly announced a shift to new source for its milk products. It seems brand reputation and good enforcement of regulation are no laughing matter.

Government health standards are set centrally and are often in line with international best practice. They are rendered toothless however by endemic cronyism at the local level. In the case of the Milk Scandal, there are standards, but the petty criminality of two brothers in Hebei have undermined confidence in the national milk supply system and taken the edge of the feel-good factor engendered by Olympic successes. When the economy was less integrated, the impact of such fraud was minimal, but in a rapidly expanding and globalizing economy, small-scale corruption in the provinces can have national impact. The willingness to ignore the poor compliance record at a local level, is no longer sustainable when the consequences are so devastating.

I would bet that Mr. Li dumplings despite his claims, are not that good, but China is not going stay awake nights worrying about it. Nationally branded companies who proclaim their quality on hoardings across the country while delivering tainted product into the market place are a different matter. Of equal concern is the failure of government agencies to address the problem until pressure to do so came from the highest level. Pulling off a brilliant Olympics is not the only mark of a developed country. Brand confidence and a good regulatory framework are important also. I think I will be drinking my Starbuck’s Latte black until both of those are firmly in place.

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Tags: Beijing Diaries, bricks, capitalism, corruption, Hebei

Beijing Paralympics boosts China’s cause for disabled people (UN Official) Xinhua News

China winds fown Paralympics ( Wall Street Journal)

China baby milk toll may rise (BBC)

India and China way behind Millennium Development Goals (Express Health Care)

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Tags: news, olympics

Brick 4 -Yinning Home

Yinning Home has been recently hard up for funding but through your generous donations, Bricks t is supporting 9 senior residents this year.  The support that Bricks is giving covers the living expenses of the 9 senior residents.   Moreover,  the home decided to initiate income generating measures like building their own vegetable garden,  raising livestock and poultry to minimize the cost of food in the home and to also give the senior residents an important role in the upkeep of the home.  They are also trying their luck with local government agencies with the hopes of helping them improve their facilities and operations.  A coal mining company has already pledged support for the home during the harsh winter months.

Yinning Home extends is heart felt gratitude to all the people who have donated to Brick 4.

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Tags: bricks, seniors, updates

The May 12 earthquake did not only affect Sichuan but also many of its neighboring provinces like Gansu in North West China. Song Shu, a small village in Gansu was not spared of this. The earthquake damaged the water tank and is not in full use since May 12. Barely 20% of the tank is being filled for fear of collapse. The provincial inspectors filed a report that the tank is unfit for operation and is need of major repair. Should the tank be left in its current state, the parish will be forced to close the tank. The parish asked for help from the government but they were denied of funding as its currently focusing on other matters (problems) that arose as a result of the May 12 earthquake.

Gansu Province is located in the Northwestern parts of China. It has a very arid and dry topography. Water is scarce in Gansu and is often considered as a precious commodity. A lot of places and communities in Gansu are in need of water for farming, livestock and consumption. One such place is Song Shu.

Song Shu is a quaint little town just outside Wu Wei. Even though water is scarce, most families in Song Shu live through farming. Water for irrigation is rationed by the government, but drinking water in Song Shu, like in many places in rural Gansu, is a precious commodity. In most cases, water for human consumption is bought. For the past ten years, the local parish in Song Shu has addressed this problem. In 1998, the parish applied for rights to dig for water and build a tank that would supply 2000+ families free drinking water in Song Shu (only half of these families are Catholic). Before the tank, they get their drinking water by collecting rain water through makeshift wells.

Through the local parish’s initiatives with the help of the Lanzhou Archdiocese, the Song Shu community decided to take matters into their own hands and sought for ways to repair the water tank. Bricks has agreed to provide 40% of the repair costs from the funds raised (thanks to your generous donations) for the Wenchuan Earthquake Appeal. With your help, the 2000 people in Song Shu will again be assured of free and safe drinking water. Our promise is that 100% of your donations will go directly to the project.

Tags: bricks, Gansu, Wenchuan Earthquake

It was the annual diocesan pilgrimage and the crowd of more than 5,000 pilgrims were in festive mood. The Mass on the 8th of September was the high point of the three days of celebration. The setting was perfect, a tree-lined valley where, even without the addition of a well designed Lourdes Grotto, the veil between earth and heaven seems particularly thin. The bishop’s sermon was perhaps a little pious, but the delivery was firm and the tone commanding, hinting at the steel in his velvet words. The congregation were actively attentive and the ushers had almost to beat the faithful back as they tried to touch his robes at the end of the celebration. Within an hour, the crowds had thinned to a few hundred hard core devotees in front of the grotto, some praying, others singing songs and the rest eating packed lunches. In a while even they would be gone, bus bound for remote villages, shriven, nourished and ready to face the challenges of living the Christian life. It was a very successful annual pilgrimage.

The pilgrimage could have taken place almost anywhere in the Catholic world, the dynamic is instantly recognisable. I could have been in the West of Ireland not the North East of China. I find it somehow reassuring that the Catholicism of two such different places could have such similarities. Commentators, who tend to be more educated than the communities they are observing, usually highlight contrast, and take on a slightly superior view when introducing local customs of far away places. On a mild September morning, I saw only the familiar, and strangely comforting, folk Catholicism that was struggling but still vibrant in my 60’s west of Ireland childhood. I don’t think the feeling was simply nostalgia, but rather an emotional expression of an opinion I have long had about the importance of popular religion. In a glade in North East China, I might be educationally and culturally miles apart from the peasant women who predominated in the crowd, but when we knelt to recite the Hail Mary, those differences were stripped away and we were sisters and brothers praising the Mother of the Son we all worship.

The fact of this pilgrimage, a very public event, might seem surprising to a Western reader, used to a diet of negative commentary on religious freedom issues in China. In fact, within undeniable constraints, there is a surprising degree of real freedom here. The pilgrimage I participated in took place with the active support of the police. Their presence ensured some measure of coordination in a situation where the crowd was just barely held under control by the familiar rhythms of the liturgy. Also, with the constraints, the Diocese in Jilin is thriving. Through this pilgrimage and other similar events, it is actively bonding the faithful together in a new way. It has to. Religious Freedom, in my opinion, is not the most pressing issue, China is changing very rapidly and so are the needs of the Catholic faithful. The farming women and men were content to come away from a pilgrimage having prayed to Mary and touched the robes of their saintly bishop, but their urbanised sons and daughters will want more. The question remains, can the Church here move quickly enough to provide it?

I came away from this pilgrimage, like my sisters and brothers, both shriven and nourished, but also confident that Our Lady is helping the Diocese of Jilin to find its answers to its challenges. I hope she will, in equal measure, help me find the answers to my own.

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Tags: Beijing Diaries, bricks, folk religion, Jilin, pilgrimage

Water, not oil,  is China’s biggest shortage Seeking Alpha

China may raise poverty line to 80 million. Economic Times

Paralympic Games

And now for the games to change the minds and attitudes in China The Age

Paralympic Games to change China New Zealand Herald

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Tags: news, olympics, poverty news

I was beginning to enjoy this running lark. Muggins, who never voluntarily sees 6.00 am is now regularly up, togged out in (don’t laugh), running kit and training at this ungodly hour, all part of a schedule for a charity half marathon run in October. The Seminary is quiet at that time; what, were we in Oxford would be called the “quad” is empty and ideal for a practice run. My regular progress in fitness was inviting an almost Palagian confidence in the possibilities of self-improvement. The fall was inevitable but unexpected.

On Tuesday I was ready for a relaxed 20 laps. All warmed up I begin. As usual I began the Rosary crossing the starting line. To those inclined to be impressed I must add a caveat. I count my laps in decades of the Rosary; one lap is enough to get through the prayers and give time for a short reflection at the end. Lap training is very boring and this keeps my mind in gear. At first I was mildly embarrassed to use the Rosary in this way. I say it fitfully at best, despite a theoretical appreciation of the prayer itself and no wish to exclude it from what might be called my prayer life. Over the months of training, I have begun to realize that it wasn’t just a lap counter but was prompting prayerful reflections different from those which I normally associate with my less active recitations of the familiar decades. My most, dare I say profound reflections, given their theme, are perhaps triggered by the aches and pains my poor out-of-shape body is experiencing from all this unfamiliar stressing. The decades which catch me most are the Birth and the Resurrection, with a respectful nod at the Assumption as well.

These days, pushing myself past unfamiliar milestones of endurance, I am all too aware of the limitations of the body, and marvel that God might voluntarily have assumed this condition. I am used to thinking of the Birth of Jesus as God present in the human simplicity of a baby and the pious stories of Mary’s painless delivery all suggest an almost heavenly carnality. Puffing my way round the “quad” I feel my own carnality in an all too earthbound way and when the third Joyful Mystery comes round I marvel, with new intensity, that Jesus could choose to take on such a limiting form.

The first Glorious Mystery provides a far more immediate hope than I normally associate with the theme. Instead of the rather theoretical sense of “life beyond the grave” that I usually link to this core doctrine, these mornings I feel a real delight in the certainty that there is a future for this frail body I am pushing round the track. I am comforted to know that it will find completeness in Paradise that it does not now have. I am not planning charity Marathon’s in the afterlife, but rather derive from these lap-counting reflections on the Resurrection a confidence that all this carnality has an ultimate purpose and will be transcended, not abandoned, come the day.

Coming out the 8th Hail Mary of the Presentation, I pulled a muscle and must rest for a week. This does not put paid to my (half) Marathon hopes, but it is a reminder, if ever I needed one that one cannot move effortlessly from a breathless reflection of the Joyful Mysteries to the sweaty meditation on the Glorious ones, without first going through a painful encounter Sorrow decades. Such are the thoughts of this long distance runner who had expected that Salvation was possible without the Cross; No longer!

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Tags: Beijing Diaries, bricks

The bus pulls up to the terminus and the smattering of potential passengers crowd around the door, anxious to get one of the few seats in a vehicle designed for standing. I have a long journey ahead so I join the mad scramble, certain of only one thing; that the lady beside me trying to jump, what might be loosely called the queue, was not going to get on before me. A newly acquired skill in the careful positioning of elbows and briefcase ensure that I win my point without the loss of face that actually admitting we were competing would have involved. I settle into my hard blue plastic seat, hoping that no elderly late arrival will shame me into giving it up.

Since we are outside the city limits, my fellow passengers are a varied bunch. Behind me a farmer shouts into his mobile phone that he has set out on his journey and will be at the station in half an hour. Rather optimistic I surmise, but somehow resist the urge to correct him. In front is a middle aged gentleman whose demeanor suggests that he is a man of position wearing casual wear because of the heat. He is probably an academic returning home after the first classes of the year. A young woman with a mobile phone that thinly tinkles the soft centered pop music that is so popular here spends her time giggling girlishly into the aforementioned phone, oblivious to the rest of us. Some likely lads get on at the next stop, gangling all over the place in basketball outfits that are more Harlem that Handan, but the way they gape at me suggests that, for all their swagger, they are not long left the farms that raised them.

Approaching the city the remnants of country side give way to the rather grubby suburbs of Shijiazhuang. For those used to the images of Beijing sophistication, the reality of this second tier city might disappoint. The developments which have transformed the capital are only fleeting felt here, and new constructions glitter in the evening sun, towering over their more humble and more numerous neighbours. The “neighbours” are mom and pop affairs, endless series of haberdashers selling cheap version of Japanese pop fashions, followed by rows of hardware shops offering useful but hardly hardwearing plastic basins and finally the ubiquitous restaurants, dispensing noodles and lamb kebabs to the evening strollers. All the storefronts are attempting to seem new and modern, but one carries the slogan “Our whole heart and profit is at the service of the people”. It is probably considered too expensive to replace the glass onto which this improving communist motto is etched, but it has long since been drained of any meaning in Modern China.

Our bus is filling up now, with prim office girls trying, not quite successfully, to suggest that the normally travel by a car and they are actually returning to their own home and not their parents tired old two (barely) roomed apartment. Many are wearing the cheap clothing mentioned above which makes them, to writer’s eye at least, ,all look alike rather as Mao suits robbed their grandmothers of their individual allure. Commerce has been more successful than communism in this regard. A mother with babe in arms struggles on board, forcing the able-bodied among us to feign willingness to give up our seat. I loose and she graciously allows me to play peek-a-boo with her pudding-faced son in recompense. Her obvious delight in her son is touching and opens, briefly, in me that Pandora’s Box where thoughts of what-might-have-been are kept. Passing a building site, we pick up some construction workers. Grizzled young men with safety helmets still on, giving the (false) impression, that despite the statistics, their work is safe. The friends who board with them fill the last spaces on the bus with enormous piles of belongings carried in old fertilizer sacks, the newly arrived migrant’s trademark. There are so many of these now and they all have hopes of making it good in the “big smoke”. I think of the Irish arriving in America in the 1850’s looking for gold in the streets and I wish them better luck.

As we trundle through the gather dusk the movement of the bus creates a flow of slightly cooler air past the window. In it refreshing sensation, I feel the hand of God, moving from one passenger to another, gently blessing each one individually at the end of the day. I become almost tearful that they know nothing of the benediction that is bestowed upon them. In the murmur of bus-bound conversations I hear Our Lady whisper endearments in unhearing ears; reassuring mothers anxious for their children, men missing their homes… I, following her lead, glance at each companion in turn, whisper unspoken encouragements and add, as if to gild the lily, my blessing to His.

We pull up at the Railway Station, (it was more than half an hour). The bus empties quickly and our solidarity is lost. I ask God that he may allow His hand to stay with each one as they disperse and that Mary’s words will get past unhearing ears to lodge deep in comprehending hearts. I turn and head for the mad scramble of the ticket office, all recollection lost. But for a moment, a brief moment, this is how I prayed on the No 31 bus.

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