Society

One of my biggest nightmares is that I wake up in a Chinese hospital. I'm scared not because the doctors lack knowledge or their equipment is old--the opposite is often true--but because of the endemic corruption there. In China stories abound of patients' families slipping packets of money into doctors' hands before surgery to ensure good care. Sometimes they feel compelled to give money because they worry that otherwise the doctor will retaliate by giving them too little anesthesia or stitching them up sloppily.

A Chinese hospital can be a scary place if you don't have money or connections. It seems that every week the Chinese media tell of a hospital denying treatment that costs only $50, leading to the death of a poor person who had no cash on him. That is why the billionaire Mr. Chen, who I wrote about in "What I Learned from A Chinese Billionaire," walks the halls of hospitals giving out money to poor people as they wait in line for hours to see doctors. Mr. Chen feels he is literally saving lives when he does that.

The remote alpine lake and glacier grasslands of the 11,000-foot-high Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas may seem to be one of the unlikeliest hot spots of 2020. But this vast land of Buddhist monks and nomadic herders stores abundant wealth of an indispensable resource that is in increasingly contested supply across the region--fresh water.

If China is trying to give its manufacturers a leg up by restricting exports of rare earth metals, it may find the advantage temporary.

With prices spiking following the latest in a series of annual export quota reductions by Beijing earlier this summer, miners have been scrambling to develop deposits of the essential industrial minerals worldwide. Now Japan’s Nikkei business daily reports that Japanese manufacturers have developed technologies to make automotive and home appliance motors without rare earth metals. Hitachi has come up with a motor that uses a ferrite magnet made of the cheaper and more common ferric oxide. Meanwhile the chemicals conglomerate Teijin and Tohoku University have co-developed technology to make a powerful magnet using a new composite made of iron and nitrogen. (To read the story, you’ll need a subscription to the Nikkei, which can be obtained here.)

Here's some reassuring news to send us into the September-October holiday season. In the wake of the Henan Airlines crash in Yichun a fortnight ago that killed 42 people, an investigation by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has revealed that more than 200 commercial pilots in China faked their resumes in 2008-2009. Even more disturbingly, more than half of the pilots with fake qualifications worked for Shenzhen Airlines, which holds a 51 percent share in Henan Airlines.