written several award winning books on china and she's a border which many of you are going to portugal the hood yes among her many skills and and virtues  charlotte speaks mandarin and cantonese and did much of her early work in hong kong and can talk so i'm delighted that she'll be speaking with you about critical issues in china today i know many of you are there and interested in and sound about major this major country in the all right thank you i hope i've chosen topics that will be of interest there are so many topics one could discuss on china that it's sort of endless so you'll have to forgive me if i have chosen topics that i hope are of interest to you but are especially of interest to me since i'm more prepared to talk on top topics that i've actually done some work on now the first topic that i'd like to talk about is the situation in the environment in china i know a lot of you are concerned about u s chinese relations and i will get to that at the end but what i want to do is kind of correct what i see as a serious imbalance in presentations about china in the u s and that is that we're very much aware of a rising china and an aggressive china and this kind of thing and we kind of ignore the fact that while much of this is true china has certainly grown enormously particularly in the last twenty years it has serious domestic problems that at any time could cause financial economic and to some extent even political problems and with these kinds of issues in china's background of you know they can't devote all of their energy to international affairs or expanding their sphere of influence they have to think very much about how do we keep our own situation you know stable how do we keep the population happy might be too strong a word but prosperous of certainly so i thought i would start with something that does actually get coverage in the u s and that is china's environmental degradation you also tend to hear i'm going to go into a little bit more detail of course on what the nature of this degradation is but many people associate it almost exclusively with the past thirty five years of development thirty to thirty five years of development in fact much of china's environmental difficulties go way way back these are related to climate issues population pressure and so forth and i'll talk a little bit about that so one of the first things we need to know is the layout of china everybody's got a map i hope china broadly you know north china south china enormous differences in water  building as population pressure builds china particularly in the north west began to move into areas that really was not sustainable you could not really have sustainable agriculture solely with counting on rainfall and you needed to do irrigation and china very early on developed tremendous irrigation networks along the yellow river which basically runs through this area the yellow river south of beijing pretty far north of shanghai so through this area so the yellow river for a long time has been a source of irrigation for much of china but so it's an ongoing problem with population pressure move forcing agriculture to move into less sustainable areas more recently during the maoist arrow roughly one hundred forty nine to nine hundred seventy six i'm out took a very strong stance on developments he was very big on the idea that human labor power is very important and can achieve almost unbelievable and when properly motivated  he had demonstrated this in a number of projects that were carried out on a small scale but in one hundred fifty eight he began this project known as the great leap forward the idea of the great leap was that economic development would develop very rapidly and even overtake england eventually england being the target country at that time unfortunately this was an ideologically driven and not a scientifically  driven kind of policy decision it led to crazy things like the deeper you dig the better it is will the seeds and they dug right down into sterile levels of the soil guess what if it's a sterile level it's not going to your seeds are not going to  grow he also had everybody melt down any piece of metal they didn't new use your walk because for a while they had communal cooking so you did not need private household utensils your walk anything else that was metal was force to be thrown into a backyard furnace that would generate steel so this is an air of backyard steel furnace is well could you get the temperature high enough did everybody know how to do this no it was a real disaster from the point of view of wasted metals it was a real disaster in terms of crop failure estimates vary but very rapidly it became clear that ba agricultural decisions had been made partly based on the fact that local officials felt that it would be a mess take to say they weren't doing well so you said sure mao is right we doubled tripled or quadrupled quintupled yields and they would when the inspection team came by they would have these huge piles of grain that were probably from fifty fields and say we got this from five fields and you know they would get a little medal for that but that was very misleading for thought wow we're successful we're getting all of this growing so they upped the quota that they could take for tax purposes and for paying back loans to the soviet union and so forth and guess what there was no grain left in the figure is a very bought a middling figure for the number of people who died as a result of this famine that occurred from sixty to sixty two is on the order of thirty million people that's a big mistake for a great leap forward so things were already obviously also this was destructive of the soil many dams were built at the same time and these dam were again collapsing right and left so it wasn't simply since the economic reform period of the early one nine hundred eighty s to the present that got china into its fix this been a long history of we wan conquer nature i mean you you read dollars poetry and so forth and you think they love nature they would never do anything you know that's a piece but that's very different from looking at what's actually happening on the ground oh ok so let's look specifically at some of the issues soiler land tremendous deforestation china currently is i think the largest importer of lumber from out you know from outside of china because they have frankly very little wood very little woods that means a very few trees that means there's not much to hold the soil back this means two things depending on the larger climate in the immediate area one is it leads to swept soil going all over the place and some of you may have read about these dust storms that come swirling in  beijing these are from the desert which is now i don't know what like seventy miles west of bay jane the desert is just and croaking and encroaching and encroaching so a very difficult situation there the second great problem is where there's a lot of rainfall and you're not holding the soil the rain is going to wash the soil away this is going to promote flooding silting and so forth so deforestation has been a major problem there have been i mean the government has responded to this it's not like they don't know what's going on and they have periodically at the provincial level instituted replanting campaigns but again it's the sort of thing actually i see this in cambridge and extortion they plant a tree and who is going to water it some good natured soul well not in cambridge those trees all by the next year i belong to green cambridge so we're trying to get the trees to grow but china has got the same problem they will put up you'll go buy some place and you'll see you know middle school students out there planting these cute little trees about yay big about this far apart well what's the future for two little trees growing this far apart not good plus they don't water them so it's again it's a lot of wasted effort that it shows intention but the follow through at the local level is frequently not what you would want so we have deforestation leading to flooding leading to satan storms certification that's turning the landed to desert some sort of already covered that and there's also salinisation to be sure that's a real word but this is causing the soil to become more salty from a variety of different reasons but when the soil becomes salty it will basically only grow salt loving plants which are not the normal agricultural plants that people would want to be planting so you're taking a lot of land out of agriculture at the very same time that your population is growing in the desert is taking land away so they're in a bit of a mess when you come to looking at the agricultural situation and there's more mist which i'll come to shortly all right so land is a problem and land utilization and preservation are both problems water rainfall varies enormously across china i mean if you have a desert that suggests there must be regions of china with very little rainfall and that is true this whole area is practically practically there are and sorry this whole area is practically desert this area has always so it can produce agriculture you know palms and whatnot  dates in certain areas but other than that it's largely desert the south on the other hand gets lots and lots of rain so problems vary depending on what part of china you're from wet area and i was flying from joe to beijing in the course of flying from joe to beijing i flew over the two biggest rivers in china the young  which comes along here to and the yellow which i mentioned earlier and that's the way so youngsters running through heavy duty rainfall country the yellow river is running through a flooding of me on the river that year and it was covered very yes we do but i'm using the chinese young the it's the same place yeah but it's the same place it was covered very much on national t v in china but the coverage was how few people were killed only three thousand three hundred people were killed which gives you some idea of the magnitude of flood damage that china has undergone before there have been very very serious  floods i kept on going with my little airplane ride and i was excited i thought to see the yellow river but i missed it i mean it was clear how can you miss it you know you think i'm picturing this yellow ribbon you know going through  the landscape and it wasn't there and i thought you know i must've blinked or something i'll catch it on the way back ok so now i'm flying back from beijing and i looked down at what must have been a river valley it was draw i draw it as a bone and i thought how can that be how can the yellow river be gone this doesn't make sense the next year i was attending the association for  and somebody was giving a paper on the yellow river and i thought oh you got to go so we went and it turns out the yellow river for several years in the one nine hundred ninety s didn't make it to the  so it was correct there was no yellow river there it ran short seventeen miles upstream so how could it run short while people upstream were using it for irrigation for power generation for consumption domestic consumer consumption domestically and in cities and you know i want min and then you get yours and then you don't get anything so they really needed to get some coordination going so that this problem did not continue also of course people upstream are taking water and then dumping the bad stuff in the water for the next group down so the yellow river was a real mess so both the yellow river the young a number of major southeast asian rivers like the kong draw there some water their primary water from the mountains in tibet from melting glaciers from annual snow falls and so forth well folks whether you believe it or not it's warming up out there glaciers are melting the snow has gone down and these rivers are under threat not of drying up to the extent of the yellow river in the one nine hundred ninety s but eventually this is going to be a very serious problem at the same time both south east asian countries and china in that region are very interested in generating more hydroelectric power i mean they don't have to irrigate so much in that area because that's a rank high rainfall area but they're interested in power and building dams so that's a lot of money that's a lot of political hassle both domestically one province arguing with another and certainly internationally with vietnam cambodia burma and so forth so all kinds of problems because of the water shortage in the rivers china has particular north china has relied increasingly on water from the ground groundwater well the groundwater level is going down down down you try to sink a well you've got to really really go down and as you suck that water out from these millions of wells the ground falls too so there are these problems of subsidence buildings being unstable and so forth so a lot to worry about if you're the chinese government and then last but certainly not least is incredible pollution of the water i have a book which i didn't bring here called the river runs black this is not the young and it's not the yellow it's the why rivet a q a i which is a  agriculture make it richer fertilizer excess fertilizer excess pesticide they've gone overboard we've got all these great chemical things let's use them and very little sense of balance so it's been a very difficult situation the rivers are to polluted everybody using bottled water the question to for me is where is the water in the bottled water coming from i mean i don't know but that's that's everybody's drinking no no tap water please you can shower but not everywhere so quite difficult our air pollution terrible i was in beijing in two thousand and fifteen for six weeks  tobar november and everybody the side of the pacific was saying oh my gosh aren't you scared i'm going to choke to death and so on and so forth actually no it wasn't until our very last week in there that would began to the air pollution is really really very bad and the reason for this is that it's cold up there but most places are not allowed to use coal for heat until a forgotten like november fifteenth i did not the right date but it's somewhere around there and then suddenly the heat turned on i mean we were freezing people finally got a little space heater so we wouldn't freeze to death because i mean this is beijing in november and no heat so when the cold comes when it's time to turn the heat on and the cold goes the city where is it starts to disappear and there were some really frightening statistics which i can scare you with here ok certain small tiny breathable particles are what's really bad for you because they stick in your lungs and so forth some of these bigger things like dust from construction it's unpleasant it causes pollution it dirty as your t v screen your camera you can't see but that's not the dust that's going to get into your lungs and cause you serious problems all right official maximum is thirty five micrograms per cubic meter this is what's considered it's still healthy up meter that's a lot warmer than the maximum considered helpful and there was a lot of concern on the part of the olympic committee that the atmosphere would be too terrible i mean that this would be unhealthy for the athletes so could beijing do anything about this well first of all they didn't hold the games in the winter so that's a big step you're you're away from a lot of the coal but they developed all kinds of things they ha for several weeks so look great you can get a blue sky picture but you can't do that forever and they don't and they haven't but they are aware of the problem they there is an environmental protection agency and if you look on the books there is some pretty nice legislation the problem is that what is said or made policy at the national level has to be implemented at the local level and you might say well certainly it's people at the local level who would say we're the ones who are experiencing the pollution we can't drink the water we can't fish  you'd think they'd be all for this well it's just like louisiana some of the most polluted parts of louisiana have people who will look the other way and the reason is because it's polluted because it's industrial development and these are areas that can make much more money with industries than they can with agriculture so you're caught you know we'll take a short term loss and pollution in the hope that this big financial gain will get us up to a certain level and then maybe one where better off we can think about cleaning up the rivers and so forth so there is this this problem if you're poor maybe you'll take a short term los because it's also a short term gain and then you hope you will be able to resolve the problem later however there's also a problem in that the local government usually gets a large part of its revenue from its industrial part so there's a big incentive to do economic development even though you've been running up with the pollution thing so the government has finally decided ok we are going to take this very seriously and they have actually made pollution reduction a goal for officials to you know that's put on you know so many points for this so many points for that and now you get points for reversing pollution and these points are relevant because that's how you get promoted up the ladder to more access to better paid to maybe a nicer location that's not even polluted so they are trying to do these things but there's this real problem these are generally poor areas they need economic development and paying a high price so how do you deal with it ok nongovernmental organizations are n g o s have also emerged it's not just an official environmental protection agency but there are many private nonprofit organizations both international working in china as well as domestic from the environmental point of view these organizations tend to target maybe not the most important things dare i say that i mean how can you say what's important but they tend to be more on save the panda rather than save the village or from the cancer in the water part of that is because those are the kinds of organizations that are allowed in you know who could be against a panda right even the chinese like pandas so you know we can we can do something like that protect the species you know save some exotic antelope on the tibetan plateau but if you really want to start telling people to you know close down factories that's that's harder to do and it's harder to get n g o s to do that that's seen as politically too dangerous and for the last several years under a loop xi jinping the government has cracked down even more on n g o s particularly foreign n g o s restricting what they can do or requiring them to registered so that even if they're not directly restricting you you self censor and self limit what you're going to do because you don't want to get on the wrong side so lots of problems there so i hope i've convinced you that a moment china could flood famine air water so yes there are big and powerful countries but they're not all there and then we have a population age which surely that must be a good thing right here we are population asia right here who could be against it well economists seem to be against it because older people cost money  they get medical care they get pensions they get all kinds of weird subsidies so what do you do well the chinese point of view is what you guys in the west did might be good because you if you see that little quote there the west developed first and then age two and it's also the case that in the west we age relatively slowly so that you could see what was coming i mean the government and policymakers could see what was coming and sort of gradually get some pieces in place china aged first and then developed not exactly true but age to develop simultaneously such that it really wasn't possible to have these big pension funds available and the pension system in china has gotten seriously messed up health insurance has gotten seriously messed up although it's it's there have been fixes in the last five so china has been very concerned with the cost so let's look at some of these basic statistics all right population for china just comparing china with the u s here so china the population sixty five or older ten point five percent the u s fifteen percent now if you look at the real numbers though holy cow one hundred forty two million chinese over the age of sixty five compared with a mere forty nine million americans to lot of people life expectancy at birth for males in china seventy three point five males in the u s seventy seven point five life expectancy at birth for females seventy seven point nine in china eighty two point one in the us now life expectancy at birth is one of those figures that sometimes tells you less than you think what it really means is it's matching the death rate of a particular year what's the average age which people died this year it is you know seventy seven point five for men it had to put on for women if you already get to the age of sixty five that doesn't mean you've only got eight years left you know obviously life expectancy is sixty five could be in the case of the us another twenty years again that doesn't mean everybody drops eighty five that means on average people sixty five will live to eighty five some of them will live to less than eighty five half of them back and half of them will live to more than eighty five so you need to watch out for that figure when you i mean it used to read also you might read you know a particular country has a life expectancy of fifty five that doesn't mean there's nobody over fifty five that means half the population lives past fifty five so just watch out for this this tricky number ok the total fertility rate one point six in china again noon we've talked about how footage that might be and in the u s one point eight seven total fertility rate means the total number of children born to women of childbearing age when they have completed their childbearing ok so it doesn't mean so some people have zero some people have one some people have two some four but the average would be one point six and one point eight seven so the question is why did population aging occurs so rapidly in china for two reasons changes in mortality changes in fertility the changes in mortality are pretty straightforward better transport peace food can move from one part of the country to another food can be grown nobody's burning it down and so forth so people have better nutrition more very diet better able to fend off ordinary infectious disease threats but when your weekend these diseases can take you out even though normally they would not be fatal so better nutrition whatever but a nutrition better preventive care china launched major efforts in public health during the maoist era and that really made a big difference and better medical care and access to medical care since prior to nine hundred forty nine so all of these things contributed to a reduction in mortality particularly infant mortality fertility fertility has gone way down and i'm sure you all know why anybody know why vibration one finger when one child policy or right during began to think that this could be a break the are a key a brake on economic development and he argued that maybe we should reduce population gro emphasizing the benefits to families and particularly to women of later marriage fewer births and birth spacing and actually those three policies if you the age of marriage births out of wedlock are no not acceptable so if you push back the marriage age you automatically reduce fertility because people have a shorter bl shorter period when they're in the game so to speak so in the one hundred seventy s those were the policies in that did result in substantial drop actually most people don't realize it but it did result in a substantial drop in the fertility rate but not enough from the point of view of the population experts at that time and so in one hundred seventy nine china instituted a one child policy which i think we've all heard all of all households should have one child only one child girl or boy that's it and that did not go over well in the rural areas particularly they really really really wanted to have a boy for reasons that we can get into shortly and if their first child was a girl they they would go for it you should still space but you can have a second child and i was surprised to discover that people even had three and i ran into one family rural village policy we want to make sure everybody understands we're serious on this policy i don't care if you're five months pregnant you're pregnant out of time and place they never would say forced abortion they always say persuade we persuade people to have an abortion and the persuasion would be having you sit up for twenty four hours a day being told how selfish you are and you know everybody's suffering because of you  and maybe you'll be persuaded or maybe we'll really have to cart you off and have the abortion anyway so in the first couple of years there were some really grotesque things going on which got a lot of coverage press coverage abroad certainly in this country but that's locked off after a while it slacked off and you could find people for having extra children but that's another way to make money find people for having extra children so some areas actually i mean officially you're not supposed to do this but if you do and you can pay for it bring it on so in fact there are some larger families in rural areas but not many and in the city the one child policy was really very vigorously enforced i'm trying to think if i ran into any in my own study it was unbelievable how many were one child families and i finally caught one this is the grandchildren of the people that i was interviewing and finally somebody had two grandchildren by the same daughter now this twins so the consequence of this is a rapid rise in the average age of the population and more and a higher proportion of the population is elderly than ever before in chinese history and different parts of china experience this age differently shanghai for example is the oldest city in terms of proportion of the population sixty five and older it's the talk around twenty percent of the population sixty five or over and shanghai so big differences my book a picture taken by me of a family that was not in my study but were personal friends and this is the celebration of this lady's eightieth birthday held in a gigantic fancy hotel with all of her her husband eighty six at the time now one hundred three it was a big newspaper article on him last year one hundred three and when i showed him this book with his picture you can imagine he was thrilled so but there are nine children there are nine children in law they're on countable grandchildren and then you know the ones great grandchildren this was the ideal i have another picture maybe it's in the book somewhere with my alternative cover which has the entire family like on the stage and it's this one couple and all their descendants that is it wa should say the chinese dream so for folks can't do that now and although they had nine children  none of them lived with them none lived with them now even though they have five children jo the children live elsewhere instead they have a distant relative who may or may not really be a distant relative or from or from a village who lives with them and looks after them she has since passed away the husband is still around so let me talk a little bit about what the ideal situation is the ideal situation and i could have to make this short because i can see i have planned unwisely on the time distribution here  anthropology we talk about different kinds of descent who counts as a real member of a family and who doesn't and in the us we call it bilateral descent your relatives on your father saw your relatives on your mother's side they're all the same i mean they're the same genetic component we think of them the same way what factors into whether we're close to our mothers parent mothers people or fathers people has to do with location personal relationships history whatever it's not a cultural  requirement you go one with one of the other the chinese traditional system is different it's a unit lineal system and your little systems mean that only one side of the family really counts as the relatives to whom you o certain set of obligations and have a certain set of rights in their common common good it could be following the particular turn along there are societies to follow the maternal line but china follows the paternal line your only real relatives are your relatives descended from a common male and sister your sisters are descended from the same ancestor but your sisters will marry out of the family they will join another family and become labor power family caregiver or whatever to the husband's family this is the ideal it has to do with the original fact of being an agricultural society where land was held in common by men and their male relatives and the women went elsewhere now most people in china today are probably not making their primary income from agriculture even in rural areas the country has really really gone industrial and service sector but the legacy is there for example if you have a lot of money you can invest equally in sons and daughters give them the same level of education but if you don't have adequate resources you have to decide what's in the best interest of the family as a whole and the best interest is to invest in those who are going to be permanent members of the family so in straitened circumstances it's the boys who get the education this is traditional and not the girls the girls will get less in my own study i don't want to tell you how many of the old women were completely illiterate none of the men were completely illiterate some weren't great readers but they were not completely illiterate almost every man said he could read the paper again the papers are simplified to make sure they grab a large i mean they're written in third grade that's simplified but it's not college level text it's not the new york times but it's but most excuse me it's set so that people of say middle school level of education would be able to read it so if you have less education you have less likelihood of getting a decent job so women are going to be making less money and therefore in old age they are less of a resource for you because you don't have pensions and so the preference is quite practical it's not that they don't like girls and in fact recently there has been a shift i mean partly due to one child family whenever you saw signs posters we were in china in one thousand nine hundred right after the  one child family had been implemented and every big poster that we saw going gigantic posters you know one is enough they had a girl child girl child so you'd be happy with your girl girls are good women hold up half the sky and other other such phrases so i mean in the urban areas by and large women get the same level of education as men they don't get the same jobs they're still job diversification gender based inhabitants but they get enough money and furthermore you're not really expecting money from your daughter what you want from your daughter is affection emotional support and if a daughter gives you money she is praised to the sky whereas if your son gives you money you'd better so you know when we get off easy it's sort of like if a mother you know helps it in the us you know wakes up nervously in cans to her little child and all that if that's what she's supposed to do the dad does it what a guy so it's that sort of thing you're violating you're going beyond what's the requirement so anyway cultural ideals filial piety agricultural sons should stay with the family farm the son should stay together and then when the old man dies the property is divided among the sons when you can see after a few generations what's going to happen you can have a piece of land this big so in effect you can't keep dividing the land so eventually you've got to buy more land or you've got to diversify and have some of the household members go into of the lines of work peddling masonry carpentry medical whatever in the village but the ideal would be an older person is living with their elder son his wife and their grandchildren ok and this is because there's very little to provide people w times got them in ninety eight got the person eighty seven then went back four years later in ninety one then went back to the same household in ninety eight and also added some new people in in one hundred eight because a lot of my previous people had already died all of these households had one person at least one person over the age of seventy whom i called my focal elder and i focused on that person got all kinds of information from them on their families and so forth and one of the things i was particularly interested in was what impact are all of these economic changes in urban china having on the support networks for the elderly so specifically i was looking at not financial i mean i did look at financial but i didn't analyze it for for this paper i was interested in who helps with activities of daily living if people you know can't do their own chopping can't walk so far can't dress can't this can't that and i compared these same households that had a surviving elder up until ninety eight which wasn't all of them to find out how care changed ok let me just give you a few figures and then have you speculate as to why it changed in hundred eighty seven eighty six and a half percent of my people had all of their daily needs met by a member of the household that is somebody that they were living with eighty six percent in  ninety eight that was true for only forty eight percent just what happened well paid care came in in hundred eighty seven three point eight percent of households needing assistance drew on paid care the met also had a household member helping but they had some paid care three point eight percent in one thousand nine hundred eight twenty six percent had paid care and all of that twenty nine percent of those had only paid care that is no family members were contributing sometimes there weren't any but nine percent also a big change nine hundred eighty seven there was no one in my study who had needs that were not being  in terms of daily living we're not talking financial but in terms of shopping cooking eating up in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven point four percent were not having their needs met so just in the space of eleven years there was a major change in the way care was being provided to older people ok why young people are no good you know something you would probably not think of and it's called housing reform people lived with family members prior to nine hundred eighty seven and in one nine hundred eighty seven because they had to there wasn't enough housing to go around very little housing so you stayed with your parents in the middle ninety's china embarked and joe was one of the leading cities to do this embarked on privatizing housing most people lived in housing that was provided by the work unit that they were affiliated with if they're working on it could be a school university hospital civil service battery factory the garment industry whatever those outfits were supposed to take care of your housing provide you with with some place to live if you work for a smaller unit that didn't have that kind of economic heft and they couldn't provide you with housing so municipal housing hero would assign you to something at miniscule rent miniscule rent i was shocked people elected me to give you a sense of the rationality of pricing in one thousand nine hundred seven people's electric bills were ten times their rent but yes i don't know what it is now because i haven't interviewed that but i mean it was just the pricing system for rent was it was just completely whacko square feet didn't matter whether it was when there wasn't any luxurious house and what for your on what local amenities there are none of this matter it was your status within your organization and title due to a certain number of square feet and that's what you got ok but with this housing reform there was an enormous expansion into building housing and work units went to zork erecting housing and putting their people in it as fast as they could so what happened was people who were still employed that is the children were getting new housing and then the old folks stayed in that original you know three dollar a month joint now you might settle why didn't they go with the old people people go with the kids they would've had to give up everything these were very stable neighborhoods you knew your neighbors you knew the market you were also in a more compact city at the time you were close to your doctor you were close to a park where you participated in various activities if you moved with your kids you'd be giving up everything except your kids who worked all day not and some people did move but only when they had to or i should say only but usually only when they had to most people preferred to stay this is in my study in the stable neighborhoods where they knew everybody well if the kids it's very hard for the kids to come in these great distances so what i do they hire people now there had been hired help even as early as nine hundred eighty seven but it was a particular kind of hired help it was the kind that i just described for the family where the guys now one hundred three you brought in a distant relative from the village and you housed her in your well and because she was not entitled she didn't work for work units so she wasn't trying to housing so you had to have enough space to be able to put somebody up was usually used and that is in the middle one nine hundred ninety s the state business system was completely revamped lots of people lost their jobs and women in particular retired at fifty retirement ages fifty for women and they wouldn't get rehired and so they started to be organized into hourly workers so now instead of having to have somebody in your house all day every day you could contract to have somebody come in and once a day for two hours get you out of bed or you could have somebody who would shop for you once a week twice a week three times whatever so these hourly workers became a whole new source of labor so this is been the source of major major changes in how care was being delivered in china and i'm not i was going to go into this great detail but i won't in two thousand and thirteen there was a very popular every problem that families have in looking after elders it's very sympathetic to older people and it shows you everything older people are looking after older people you know you have a sixty year old looking after an eighty five year old how does that work out you have exploitative relatives who think if i look after this old guy in the village i will inherit his property whatever it might be but they don't really want to care for you they just want the property you have people who are living with a child but the child warks all day in a very demanding job and when she in this case comes home she doesn't have the energy to look after you and so you feel abandoned even while you're living with your child and more and more terrible tales the ending of the solution right there the cover down love in the golden years and life in a warm neighborhood like retirement home where one can contribute and be appreciated by one's peers so the ideal in this cereal is not living with your family the chinese are being told right on their t v screens that it's too much for families now they should be allowed to move to low cost there's a problem their drawings with other older people where they can help each other out do exercises together and so forth and everybody will be happy so in the end these two marry love in the golden years these two marry yes  there's only one child what if it's a girl and they promise that they would be benefits but that kind of they did get little benefits at the beginning but they were benefits for the kid to get a good placement in school and then once it was in force by everybody that it was no longer a special benefit so yeah of course the one child i mean children get jobs in other parts of the country what do you do so yes that's definitely one of the consequences ok now very quickly muslims so they're ethnically and racially if you can use that term these days they don't look the same as han chinese they look war european but they are turkish population  and they've been there for ever and ever the chinese have been there to for a long time fought in very small numbers primarily in a military capacity but since the hundred fifty s more and more chinese have moved into that area initially primarily military and then people who have been released from the military would settle their own collective farms and  and those people are used to cross while they were used to crossing the border freely they were disregarded you know they were they didn't see themselves as members of a nation state they move freely back and forth and the soviet union in the  tried to help that area get free of china and in one thousand or was it nineteen forty six i think no nine hundred forty four briefly independent of china and then in one thousand nine hundred nine china demanded it back and got it back just by military force and so there's been an active separatist movement there for basically ever since i mean i've been there when there were signs saying you know support the law of the land to not yield to separatist bluff so you know it is a dangerous area prior to two thousand and one the u s was kind of sympathetic to these minorities and was they were saying china was too harsh and so on and so forth but then the chinese got lucky because with nine eleven you know we weren't so  militants and so the chinese said oh you know those leaders there are a terrorist group so now we have agreed that there is a terrorist group so we don't talk about them so much  the external powers have or activities have impinged on this but they do occasionally the weaker ears do occasionally show up and commit a terrorist act blow up a bus attack people with knives in a railway station miles and miles away in totally different provinces so there is a lot of tension a lot of tension there so you know there always worry the chinese are always worried about the border area i mean is that going to be a way for people to infiltrate into china or are bored of people's going to go over to their argument is that they would like to have their religious leader the dalai lama back and that they would like a r which is what we associate with the dalai lama but there are many tibetans in china outside of the t a r that is there are autonomous counties in provinces all around there in this is if this is tibet says she sung on your paper that's tibet these areas are also lots of t and what the chinese are afraid of the chinese government is that sure you only want to t a r but once you get the dalai lama back here you will start agitating for all those other tibetans to come and join you and you know we don't want that we don't want all these other provinces disrupted and so on and so forth so they've been very sympathetic to tibet on that score to do more on that later taiwan republic of china as you know our new president accepted a phone call a congratulatory phone call from the president of the republic of taiwan which got everybody hot and bothered  possibly unnecessarily the chinese government i mean they they will say things and bark but they will say behind the scenes that things don't really bother them as much as we might think i mean the official government will say that but other people will say it  let me just give you a small example of how the game is played you may i mean i know that massachusetts has a sister province relationship with gong don't province so every so guangdong province will send a delegation to massachusetts and my husband is on the i don't know what the system was on the sister province committee at one point so this meant that i too would you know host some of these committees and so one day we're with this group in their little charter bus and the governor we're going to we're going to go to a certain place in boston but to get from point a to point b we would have to pass the world trade cent in boston you might say so what's the big deal the big deal is the world trade center was decorated with flags of all nations that we have a trading relationship with including the republic of china that's taiwan and they shouldn't have i mean from the chinese point of view they're not supposed to have their own flag they're not independent they're part of us but they also understand that it's defact independent almost effective independent so i'm sitting on this bus and all of these long people are sitting there and one of them turns to the others and says you know we're taking a really roundabout route to get where we're growing and he knew what he said do you know why he said because that's they won't they don't want to see the taiwan flag and so everybody had a good laugh and then i realized i understood what they were saying which we all laughed but the point is they were willing to tolerate it you know they were not going to stand up and say ah we can't come to boston because you've got the taiwan flag there i mean so you  you don't ignore taiwan efforts to move to independence and for forgotten when but about ten years ago i guess there was a change in political party rulership and one country one with the new party began to agitate and talk about independence and that got to your west scared witless because we've pledged to protect them if the chinese were to if the mainland chinese were to say you can't separate like that we're going to use military force the shanghai communique which was promulgated in one thousand nine hundred two and was the result of negotiations between nixon and joe in lyon other leadership in china was that we would agree that taiwan was a part of china and leave it at that so you know just live with it don't do anything about it just let the taiwan people have their party and let the mainland have theirs and as long as nobody tries to force the other party to do something you know we can live with it just the economic integration between taiwan and the mainland is unbelievable here's taiwan here's the adjacent province of full ki tremendous ties i mean even a lot of the businessmen they have their taiwan wife and therefore gen y for one in each country over twenty one countries so there are all kinds of things going on economically  and the united states also became very upset with this independence movement and while we talked you know agreeably officially we sent a lot of people behind the scenes to say we do not want you to drag us into a war with china so to think about cooling it so the big quiet on that  front now some people can get elected claiming they're going to agitate but so far it's been pretty quiet since that initial florrie maybe ten years ago so they both agree they're one country if you look at chinese maps includes taiwan i don't know if you look at taiwan massive includes china you have to look at that ok other international concerns the south china sea self china sea is down here it's practically falling off the map of china sea and then the east china sea over here these are disputes about islands they're really not so much as fears about islands as they are disputes about the water and if you can clean you own the island then you can say it's part of your international territory and therefore it's subject to the twelve mile territorial integrity boundary and even the two hundred mile economic zone boundary and china has been aggressively moving in the south china sea to create islands that is to build on what are shoals or even reefs you know they're not above water when it's high tide but and they're not capable of sustaining human habitation but they're putting a military installation or this or that or the other thing on these and trying to assert that these are islands and they're ours and last summer the philippines who are very close to all this the philippines just picking up out of the corner here because china was claiming one of these new islands and said you can't claim that you have no right to claim that it's very close to the philippines and the court decided in favor of the philippines chinese claims to this land are invalid and this is international law and china has said oh we beg to disagree we don't believe it so they have so far rejected but they haven't acted particularly on it and the u s has reserved the right to demonstrate freedom of navigation if china claims the whole south china sea then in theory they control maritime traffic through that area because it would be part of china and a huge amount of trade goes through that area japan korea  whatnot taiwan and certainly china itself but they have we have gone in with our ships and sailed through there and the chinese have looked angry and i think didn't we lose something over the side recently and they recovered it some kind of ball like sensing instrument in the chinese gave it back graciously probably after decoding it but nevertheless they gave it back and they didn't get into a big spat but the big concern is that you'll get somebody who wants to be top gun and you know in pit independently acts and does something reckless and then where will it all go