Vanguard Blog

The Chinese press is having a field day with the juicy details in a case involving massive government corruption, mob-style beatings and a 46-year-old female crime-boss, reputed to have a stable of 16 lovers at her beck and call.

Ongoing trials are taking place in Chongqing, a megacity located in Sichuan, a province in western China. Xie Caiping, aka ”The Godmother”, was the ringleader in an extensive organized crime network that ran 20 illegal gambling halls, all protected by the police. (Chongqing’ deputy police chief, who happened to be Xie’s brother-in-law, reportedly bought a $4.4 million villa from bribes.) The investigation has been going on since last year and over 1,500 suspects—from gangsters to high-ranking officers—have been rounded up. This AP article notes: “Intended to display the Chinese leadership’s renewed resolve to stamp out corruption, the Chongqing campaign has instead highlighted how entrenched criminal gangs have become through China.”

Back in 2007, Adam Yamaguchi and I travelled to Chongqing and profiled people from different walks of life in this megacity on the rise. We visited a city in transition between the old and the new. The old could be very picturesque—smoky, crumbling old teahouses where old men played checkers and card games, freelance porters known as “bang bang” men stooped under the heavy load they toted on their backs, peasants eking out a meager existence on the few remaining plots of land within city limits that hadn’t yet been seized by greedy developers.

We also couldn’t help but be confronted by the new look of Chongqing—as revealed to us by young Chinese yuppies who had filled their new apartment with IKEA-esque knock offs, the real estate developer super-confident he’d be able to sell thousands of apartment units before they were even built and the homegrown auto company that aspired to be China’s answer to BMW. Even the “bang bang” man who we profiled was no longer carrying loads across his back using a traditional, old-fashioned bamboo stick. Instead he was valiantly carrying gigantic sacks, filled with Western-style garments, for a department story catering to China’s rising middle class. It was clear that the new Chongqing was quickly replacing the old Chongqing and most residents seemed, on the surface, happy about it, as long as everyone’s lives were getting better (read: richer) by the day. So what if all the construction dust and power plant pollution made the air seem as thick as pea soup?

About a week after we aired “City on Steroids”, a massive earthquake struck Sichuan province. More than 87,000 people were killed including over 5,000 children when some 7,000 shoddily constructed schools collapsed. Allegations of government corruption as the cause behind the substandard buildings are still being investigated by grieving parents and media. But, over a year later, the Chinese central government in Beijing is still trying to silence all critics on this matter.

Instead, the central government periodically goes after provincial and city officials in cases like this one. It’s happened time and again in many of the megacities on China’s East Coast. Now it’s Chongqing’s turn. The scandals are covered breathlessly by the state-run media. Scapegoats are found. Colorful characters like “The Godmother” and their extravagant lifestyles are trotted out for show trials that rivet the population at large. All this, of course, deflects from examination of the deeper underlying problems in China’s hybrid, Communist-yet-Capitalist system.

In the past three decades as China’s economy has undergone its stratospheric rise, organized crime has re-emerged, like any other well-run business enterprises. And with the reform of China’s tax code in which local governments had to send their revenue to Beijing, local government officials like the ones in Sichuan, became all too susceptible to shady dealing making with organized crime groups .

“The Godmother” has been sentenced to 18 years and some of her cohorts have even gotten death sentences. But in a country as vastly populated as China, this measure is kind of like cutting one head off a hydra-headed monster. You can bet this web of businessmen, mobsters and officials isn’t unique to Chongqing. And until the central government is willing to undergo the difficult, systemic reform to get at the root causes of corruption, organized crime will keep on gathering economic and political strength.

City on Steroids (Video)

Vanguard airs a new episode tomorrow night at 10pm ET/10pm PT: “Sri Lanka: Notes from a War on Terror”

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Happy? Or scared?

Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross Domestic Product grew 3.5 percent from July through September, the first GDP growth in over a year. Wall Street was happy.  Stocks on the Dow Jones average rose nearly 200 points. The Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, combining tax cuts and government spending got some of the credit.  At the same time, another report this week showed that American consumer confidence is down, partly due to unemployment continuing to climb. It’s almost at 10 percent now, while wages are mostly flat and home prices remain low, 401Ks are not recovered, blah, blah, blah…

If you’ve looked at a newspaper, or TV screen, or the Internet in the past 18 months, you’ve seen all the dismal stats.

So now that the GDP is growing again, which way are things going for you?  Not in the next six months, but in the next six years. What kind of economy is going to emerge from the greatest economic decline since the 1930s?  That’s the big question, and it points out one of the big dilemmas of journalism.   You would think that the really important stuff would be stuff that you would want to pay closest attention to but the important stuff — the average American’s position in the economy — often builds over a lot of time, sometimes over many years, in the way that you’re supposed to boil a lobster, starting with the water at room temperature, so that by the time he or she is cooked, he or she doesn’t notice (so they say).  So although this present recession seemed to start abruptly, the factors behind it kind of crept up on us.  And that’s what’s tough to cover, and tough to follow.

As I’ve said before, at Vanguard we try to look forward. In May, we did a documentary mini-series in which we tried to look at the economy that we’ve had in the US since the 1980s, against the backdrop of its collapse.  Laura Ling went to Las Vegas, formerly the fastest growing place in the US, for “Lost Vegas.”

Adam Yamaguchi went to China’s manufacturing center for “Outsourcing Unemployment.”

And Lauren Cerre and Tracey Chang went to Argentina for “Thank You, Recession.”

Basically, we were looking at what kind of economy will emerge from this present downturn.  Will we manage to go back to the system we’ve had since the 1980s?  There we had tremendously high levels of consumer spending on cheap stuff — cheap because we’ve outsourced many of our manufacturing jobs to places where wages are lower.  And our wealth creation came from real estate, stock, and equity inflation — essentially a series of bubbles.  Or we could go back to the system we had in the ‘50s through the ‘70s, where there wasn’t so much economic separation in the US — we were essentially middle class — and wage growth was the key to economic improvement.

As we travel around the world, there is also another model that we see in globalized economies: Those economic engines of the developing world, like China and India, where the “developed” portion of the economy, the economy that we see and which looks like ours, doesn’t include all the population, or even most of it.   Many, or most citizens, in these countries are invisible in economic terms.  In fact, when Tracey Chang interviewed the COO of Infosys, the poster child of India’s high-tech development, in Bangalore India, he pointed out to her that India’s growth was not including most people.

So where are you going to emerge?  Right now there seem to be three directions.

Over the years, I’ve worked on a number of environmental stories that have taken me from one part of the globe to another — from Madagascar to China and all the way to Greenland.

For me, this entire journey has been a bit accidental. I’d never really considered myself to be truly “green” in any one way, but when I came to Current, I committed myself to doing stories of large global import. As I began mapping out the big stories that I felt needed to be told, many of them have happened to point back to the health of our planet.

This led me to the realization that everything is somehow tied to the environment. By simply paying attention, we can see and understand how most every action we take, nearly every product we consume, has an effect somewhere else in the world. That reaction may not be within sight – conveniently, it often isn’t – but somewhere, you can bet there’s a cost.

I began tossing around ideas about how best to illustrate that idea. Examples abound – like plastics accumulating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, electronic trash burning in an e-waste wasteland in China, or sushi’s acceptance as a global cuisine leading to an emptying of our oceans. My colleague found an unexpected, nearly grotesque example.

Ecstasy.

A few months ago,  Joanne Shen and I traveled to Cambodia to see how the global demand for ecstasy was helping drive the destruction of what was amongst the most pristine, intact rainforests in Southeast Asia. It’s a great example of how the demand for various goods can, and often has, massive, reverberating effects halfway around the world. These ‘ecstasy hunters’ are burrowing deep into the forest to obtain safrole oil, the precursor to MDMA, or ecstasy. This is the crucial ingredient for the drug.

In “The Forest of Ecstasy” you’ll see me trudge through the rainforest in search of a rare tree that’s being cut down for its high quantities of the essential oil. And we came across safrole oil ‘factories’ in the middle of the forest, extracting and refining the oil before it’s sent out to become the ecstasy pill. The damage doesn’t end there. As the guys create roads into the forest, they’re paving the roads open for poachers looking for the wildlife bounty inside. It’s a chain reaction caused by club kids looking for a good time.

I’m not suggesting we stop doing all the things we do in any given day, or stop consuming the things that have become ‘necessities’ in our lives. But a greater level of awareness just might make you think a bit more about the choices you have to make.

The world is far more connected than you might imagine.

The “Forest of Ecstasy” airs tonight Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 10/9c on Current TV. For more information, visit Vanguard on Current.com.

In the Vanguard documentary “Chinatown, Africa”, we looked at China’s growing presence in Africa through Angola, China’s largest trading partner on the continent. We highlighted some of the controversies surrounding China’s influence including the lack of transparency in some of it’s loan deals, corruption and China’s willingness to look the other way on the question of human rights.  Today’s New York Times has a fascinating story that really gets into the nitty-gritty of one deal between China and Namibia. For anyone interested in China’s rise as a global player — particularly, how it wields “soft power” –  it’s a great read.

I want to highlight one quote from the piece:

“We know more about China’s military expenditures than we do about its foreign aid,” said David Shambaugh, an author and China scholar at George Washington University. “Foreign aid really is a glaring contradiction to the broader trend of China’s adherence to international norms. It is so strikingly opaque it really makes one wonder what they are trying to hide.”

President Obama made his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa this week. In his speech in Ghana, he called for a renewed relationship between the US and the continent. But he also sprinkled in a little tough love (fast becoming a trademark of the new president’s overseas appearances). While accepting some blame on behalf of the West for some of Africa’s problems, Obama also held up the mirror, calling on Africans to rid themselves of the corruption, conflict, dependence on oil and other commodities, etc that have stood in the way of meaningful growth. Here’s a few Vanguard pieces that cover some of the issues that Obama addressed in his speech:

Oil and Corruption

HIV

Conflict

And for good measure, we’ll throw in a little China…

Hello! And welcome to our shiny new blog.

We decided to kick this thing off while we’re in the thick of it, which is a good thing because there’s nothing worse than having nothing to blog about. From now on, this is where you’ll be able to keep track of all things Vanguard, like what we have hitting the airwaves and internets, what we have in production, where we are in the world, what the hell we’re doing there, etc. We really don’t have to tell you what a blog is for, so let’s get straight to it.

Last Wednesday, we launched “Vanguard’s Economic Stimulus Package”. It’s our take on the sad (and no so sad) state of our economy. We started it off with “Lost Vegas”, Laura Ling’s tour of the wreckage of Sin City, which did really well when times were good, but is getting clobbered now that the economy has hit the skids. Tonight we’re premiering Adam Yamaguchi’s “Outsourcing Unemployment”, a look at what happens when instead of jobs the US starts outsourcing unemployment to China. And because good things come in threes, the last of our economy trilogy will premiere next week with “Thank You Recession”, where Vanguard travels 5,000 miles from Wall Street to Argentina looking for inspiration in these troubled times.

Adam Yamaguchi’s “Outsourcing Unemployment” on Current.com

While our awesome editors have been chugging red bulls and coffee (yes, sometimes mixed together) to meet deadlines, our producers and correspondents are deep into production for our next run. (Like all good blockbusters, we’re scheduled for Summer ‘09).

Here’s a quick look at what we got cooking up:

Mariana van Zeller and Darren Foster just returned from Sri Lanka, where they were reporting on what may be the most brutal chapter in the island nation’s 25-year conflict.

Adam Yamaguchi and Joanne Shen are off to the rainforests of Cambodia this week and will hopefully be checking in here from time to time.

Christof Putzel will be heading to Europe, where btw Vanguard is HUGE. (We’re like the Baywatch of documentary programs). Christof will be on the European Coke Trail.

Kaj Larsen and Lauren Cerre are looking into next generation warfare, which is as fascinating as it is scary.

There’s much, much more and to keep track of it all, you can check in here. Or become a fan of us on facebook. Or both.
Thanks! The Vanguard Team, over and out…