The first I heard that New York City’s manhole covers were made in India was in this offhanded TPM post by Josh Marshall last November. Now it turns out that Indian-made manhole covers are being stolen (from America, but also from Europe and Mumbai) because of the Peking Olympics. 2point6billion.com’s got the details, including what to do about the safety risk of open sewer manholes.
According to RIA Novosti, Russia-China trade rose 44 percent year on year, to $48 billion last year. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of Russian exports to China consisted of energy products and raw materials, while 40 percent of Chinese exports to Russia were engineering or electronic products. Again, in some ways this kind of reinforcement of bilateral ties among strategic rivals represents a threat to America’s interests. But in other, broader ways, it lessens the potential for a conflict between them that could threaten the stability of the global order. With regard to the more specific question of how China’s growing [...]
The alarmist scenarios about China’s rise would worry me a lot more if the Chinese were hellbent on using globalization to slowly insinuate traditional Chinese culture on an unsuspecting world. Outside of tofu and soy sauce, though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the Chinese elites seem much more interested in drinking French wine and buying contemporary art (albeit primarily Chinese contemporary art for the time being). To me, the tensions that continued globalization will inevitably raise between China (the government) and China (the people) seem by far more potentially alarming than those it will raise between China [...]
