tim's experiment

Another of those little mysteries on Page 2 of the Post today. At the top: the G20 confronts the global economic crisis. On the right, the CE election. At the bottom, Hong Kongers queue for Lady Gaga tickets. In the middle, two academics comment on safety conditions in the Zambian copper mining industry. Eh? I realize that readers of our Leading English-language Newspaper are citizens of the world, cosmopolitan investors with a wide range of outside interests, but even if Zambian copper mining is the thing which floats your boat, why would you be interested in what a couple of local Powerpoint pushers had to say about the subject?
Well the Post team did their best. It seems that safety standards in mines owned by Chinese firms in Zambia had been criticised in a Human Rights Watch report for having unusually low safety standards. I presume this means unusually low by Zambian standards, not by Chinese ones. This is a them versus us story, OK? Chinese firms are being slagged off by Western imperialist running-dogs.
Two local academics will present a paper on their disagreeement with the report next month, the story went on. Actually if you want to read their comments they are already on the internet, followed by a reply from Human Rights Watch, and further comments from them. Agreement remains elusive. The seminar, if you are a glutton for the finer points of human rights in Zambian copper mines, is at the HKUST on March 9. You will not meet me there.
Actually there is more going on here than meets the eye. The two academics, Barry Sautman of the UST and Yan Hairong of the PolyU, have a nice little joint thing going on the Chinese presence in Africa. Many “research outputs” have already hit the presses. Basically they see China as a Good Thing. This will not surprise connoisseurs of Dr Sautman’s output because as well as a “political scientist and lawyer” he is an enthusiastic exponent of the idea that the Chinese government is a benevolent and law-abiding institution shamelessly slandered by Western academics and journalists. He is the sort of foreigner the China Daily cherishes, willing at appropriate moments to be rude about the Dalai Lama, Liu Xiaobo, or anyone who supposes that at some point in its long history Tibet may once have been an independant country.
Diligent searchers of the internet will find the Zambian copper mine controversy already covered in a variety of strange places, including one website whose correspondent in Syria started his latest bulletin with the immortal phrase “The Syrian military yesterday continued their operation to defend the Syrian population from insurgents, which are most heavily concentrated in the city of Homs.”
Readers will I hope by now be nurturing some suspicions that the mine safety aspects of this matter are being somewhat polluted by the political ones. The two complainers have it in their report that the total number of deaths in China-owned mines is lower than in the others, which by itself is meaningless. They go on to the figure proportionate to the number of miners, which is a bit high but not much, then rather muddy the waters by suggesting that low wages at the Chinese mines are because both of them were closed for long periods during the time the casualty figures were being collected. Clearly it is not beyond the wit of man to settle this by examining detailed figures, but this is not what social scientists and anthropologists do. So readers who are really interested in mine safety should probably look elsewhere.
Meanwhile we are left to wonder what the Hell is going on at the South China Morning Post. Upcoming academic seminars on business practices in Africa are not usually regarded as material for the news pages. Drs Sautman and Yan clearly belong on the Op Ed page, if we must have them. Is the new regime trying harder … to compete with the China Daily English language edition?