I’m shocked, Shocked, to find the Chinese using lead paints on toys for toddlers.

They put Etheylene Glyclol as a substitute for Glycerin in toothpaste and a few years ago in medications. Ethylene glycol works great as antifreeze, but it’s poisonous in small doses.

In The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, available from Amazon, Elizabeth C. Economy describes “In late July 2001, the fertile Huai River Valley – China’s breadbasket – was the site of an environmental disaster. Heavy rains flooded the river’s tributaries, flushing more than 38 billion gallons of highly polluted water into the Huai. Downstream, in Anhui province, the river water was thick with garbage, yellow foam, and dead fish. … Only seven months earlier, the government had proclaimed its success in cleaning up the Huai. A six-year campaign to rid the region of polluting factories that dumped their wastewater into the river had ostensibly raised the quality of the water in the river and its more than one hundred tributaries to the point that people could once again fish, irrigate their crops, and even drink from the river.”

They lied and their people die.

In Deep Economy, also available on Amazon

, Bill McKibben describes “a trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province – that is she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out.”

What’s one or two girls in a population of one billion three hundred million?

Unofficially HIV Aids follows trade and prostitution. January, 2006, the Chinese government, (www.avert.org/aidschina.htm) reported 650,000 people living with AIDS, down from the 2003 estimate of 840,000, and up from 1989, when AIDS was known as “aizibing,” the “Loving Capitalism Disease” and it was reported at 153 Chinese and 41 foreigners.

If they are correct in their characterization of HIV Aids as the disease of loving capitalism, boy are they in trouble.