A Chinese Junk is a maritime vessel of great beauty. I looked at a photo from 1880 depicting a fleet at rest in Hong Kong Harbor[i]. Each individual boat is sharply outlined and the ripples in the battened sails seem to shimmer with absent breeze. Even in monochrome to sepia tone, the image proclaims the beauty of the setting. I found another picture, this time a painting of indeterminate origin but presumably painted in the late twentieth century[ii]. The modern skyline of Hong Kong provides the backdrop for another fleet of ships, this time splashed with the artist’s palette. A certain silhouette of a coastal mountain suggests a similar aspect to both pictures, separated only by a century and the media of different artists.
Is it possible that a huge fleet of such ships circumnavigated the globe, exploring the Indian Ocean and the Americas a century before the feats of Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan? Some cartographic historians certainly believe so.[i] Whether or not an expedition of that magnitude took place can remain a matter for conjecture. What is undeniable is that the sight of such a fleet in full sail in the mouth of the Yangtse or crossing the South China Sea, would have been magnificent to behold.
A Chinese Junk is a vessel of great beauty; unfortunately, today, Chinese junk is just that – junk!
Several years ago, I was waiting for my wife in a Walmart. It must have been close to Halloween because I noticed I was standing beside a tub full of long plastic swords, pikestaffs, and tridents, each one brightly colored, priced at $2.99 and bearing a label that stated: Made in China. Looking at them I sadly realized that within a month many would be consigned to the landfill, and only a few would make it into uncertain recycling.
On another occasion I decided to edge the perimeter of my lawn to remove the growth of crab grass hanging over the curbstones. I went to the store and purchased an edging tool, one of those half-moon shaped blades attached to a long handle which you step down upon and rock from side to side to cut the turf. It looked sturdy enough. On my first endeavor I held the handle, stepped on the blade, and promptly snapped steel from wood. Of course, I returned the tool for a refund, noting that it had been made in China.
A third instance of Chinese junk comes to mind as I recall a Christmas when my boys were pre-school. Their grandmother bought them miniature rachet and socket sets and their grandfather set up blocks of lumber with embedded bolts. The boys could use their wrenches to tighten nuts onto the bolts while experimenting with different gauges.
On opening the cases we noted that one of the rachets did not work. It simply turned and turned without any torque. I suggested we should return it to the store and grandma commented that it probably was not worth it as they only cost ten bucks apiece. Once again I noticed that a piece of worthless junk was made in China.
The experiences point to several sad things about our society. Firstly, and most obviously, we have sent our manufacturing overseas. Growing up in England I noticed that my older cousin’s model cars were stamped with Made in Britain on the metal base. Mine bore the impression Made in Hong Kong. I also had the distinct impression that mine were not as finely detailed.
By the time I went to college I was hard pressed to find anything in the store that was made on home territory. Clothing came from South-East Asia, electronics from Taiwan and for some odd reason my wood-working tools were made in Germany. When I bought my first turntable and sound-system I paid over the odds just so that I could patriotically buy British. More than thirty years later the system still works.
Here in the United States, the furniture industry for which Southside Virginia and North Carolina were once famous is long gone, leaving empty, abandoned factories, desolate supply chains and disillusioned communities. All of this happened simply because it was cheaper to abuse labor outside of modern employment law, in places where raw materials were cheap because of similar human exploitation, and then ship the output halfway around the world employing third parties who also were not protected by domestic standards.
That thought brings a second point. We have sacrificed quality for quantity. The less we pay for the same item, manufactured where cheaper labor prevails, the more we have to spend on other “stuff”! Our material consumerism tells us that if an appliance breaks down after a couple of years we can easily replace it – and after all, we didn’t pay so much for it in the first place! I honestly have no idea why my kids needed to have new school lunchboxes every year, other than that those they had used were of such poor quality the zippers broke or the fabric wore through by the time summer break came around.
A third impact of these economic decisions has been the global increase in municipal solid waste, otherwise known as MSW. United States solid waste disposal increased four-fold in the years between 1960 and 2020, a season in which the population barely doubled. Every one of us throws away twice as much as our parents and grandparents did sixty years ago.
I was recently at a birthday party. Increasingly on such occasions I notice the amount of single-use plastic, paper and Styrofoam that ends up in the trash can. It is the same whether it is a picnic, a church or work event, or a visit to a fast-food establishment. Bags and bags of disposables get cleared away, eventually to make their way to the landfill.
Of course, not all of our trash is wasted. Close to thirty per cent gets recycled or reused if it has been sorted properly. Some gets composted while some is cleaned and upcycled. Some gets incinerated for energy production, and the majority is returned to raw material for new production. Of the remainder not all ends up in the ground. Some of it is exported. Yes, we send it to Canada and Mexico. And until 2017 we sent some of it all the way back to China. In that year the People’s Republic banned the importation of overseas waste. Fortunately, we can no longer send our Chinese junk back to China. But until we change our habits it will continue to pile up increasingly closer to our doorsteps.
[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/world/a-new-theory-puts-chinese-fleet-ahead-of-columbus.html#:~:text=Theories%20about%20pre%2DColumbian%20contacts,a%20century%20before%20the%20Magellan (accessed 4/27/2023)
[i] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_(ship)#/media/File:Guangzhou,_Chinese_Boats_by_Lai_Afong,_cа_1880.jpg (accessed 4/27/2023)
[ii] http://www.1stdibs.com/art/paintings/figurative-paintings/unknown-contemporary-oil-chinese-junk-boats/id-a_10182522/ (accessed 4/27/2023)
THE FULLER REPORT 