Society

I have resisted making a big deal about this month’s escalating dispute between China and Japan over the East China Sea, because it is hard to envision a scenario where it spirals out of control beyond nationalist chest-thumping and diplomatic brinkmanship. At this point, this row is still, for me at least, safely at a stage where we can laugh at it, and you should too, by watching this brilliant animated confection from Taiwan’s Next Media Animation (hat tip to Danwei, which beat me to the title “Ninja vs. Panda”).

I think you’ll enjoy the David Caruso CSI spoof, complete with removed sunglasses and bad pun. You can say you’re keeping up with the news because this actually sums up the story to date pretty well, including the absurd coincidence of a panda death in Japanese custody at a Japanese zoo:

In a fit of serendipitous geopolitical comic timing, Boing Boing may have unwittingly hit upon the best metaphor for how the world views China at times like this. Beijing is flexing its rhetorical muscles with Japan and, on a possibly unrelated front, putting fear in the balance sheets of high-tech and clean tech companies by limiting its exports of rare earth metals, a resource that China virtually monopolizes, at least until other countries start producing more some years from now.

It remains unclear at this writing whether China has linked the issue of Japan’s detained Chinese fishing captain and rare earth metal exports, as The New York Times suggests in a report that has been disputed by several other outlets, including Reuters and the Associated Press. More thoughts on this below, but in the continuing spirit of not taking ourselves too seriously until the world actually does end, I present to you the panda that no one should mess with:

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.