Transpacific Maladies

Social Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Corey Byrnes

This article centers on cultures of anxiety and threat across the Pacific. Threat is an especially useful category for writing about a “rising” China, which is often imagined both as a site of localized environmental ruination that prefigures imminent global collapse and as a source of contamination that easily crosses national borders. Particularly in the global North, China has become a focal point for ecoanxieties that are shadowed by longer histories of perceived racial and cultural threat. This article confronts the idea of China as threat by investigating representational cultures across the Pacific. It focuses on a series of recent events mediated through textual and visual forms that unfold as a contemporary ethical drama between species—the human and the pig: the 2009 swine flu pandemic, a 2013 episode in which thousands of pig carcasses were found floating in Shanghai’s Huangpu River, and the 2013 purchase of Smithfield Foods, one of America’s biggest pork producers, by the Chinese conglomerate Shuanghui. To understand the movement between the representation of threat and the violent responses that flare up in its wake, one must pay attention not only to quantifiable risks but also to the cultural forms that characterize anxiety in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, what is at stake is not just geopolitical relations or public health but also the lives and deaths of the animals that are so often slaughtered to protect humans.

Author(s):  
Floor Haalboom

This article argues for more extensive attention by environmental historians to the role of agriculture and animals in twentieth-century industrialisation and globalisation. To contribute to this aim, this article focuses on the animal feed that enabled the rise of ‘factory farming’ and its ‘shadow places’, by analysing the history of fishmeal. The article links the story of feeding fish to pigs and chickens in one country in the global north (the Netherlands), to that of fishmeal producing countries in the global south (Peru, Chile and Angola in particular) from 1954 to 1975. Analysis of new source material about fishmeal consumption from this period shows that it saw a shift to fishmeal production in the global south rather than the global north, and a boom and bust in the global supply of fishmeal in general and its use in Dutch pigs and poultry farms in particular. Moreover, in different ways, the ocean, and production and consumption places of fishmeal functioned as shadow places of this commodity. The public health, ecological and social impacts of fishmeal – which were a consequence of its cheapness as a feed ingredient – were largely invisible on the other side of the world, until changes in the marine ecosystem of the Pacific Humboldt Current and the large fishmeal crisis of 1972–1973 suddenly changed this.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1000
Author(s):  
Jin Wang ◽  
Gang Chen ◽  
Tao Yu ◽  
Zhongxin Deng ◽  
Xiangxiang Yan ◽  
...  

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the following enormous tsunami caused great disturbances in the ionosphere that were observed in various regions along the Pacific Ocean. In this study, the oblique-incidence ionosonde detection network located in North China was applied to investigate the inland ionospheric disturbances related to the 2011 tsunamigenic earthquake. The ionosonde network consists of five transmitters and 20 receivers and can monitor regional ionosphere disturbances continuously and effectively. Based on the recorded electron density variations along the horizontal plane, the planar middle-scale ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) associated with the 2011 Tohoku tsunamigenic earthquake were detected more than 2000 km west of the epicenter about six hours later. The MSTIDs captured by the Digisonde, high-frequency (HF) Doppler measurement, and Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) satellite provided more information about the far-field inland propagation characteristics of the westward propagating gravity waves. The results imply that the ionosonde network has the potential for remote sensing of ionospheric disturbances induced by tsunamigenic earthquakes and provide a perspective for investigating the propagation process of associated gravity waves.


Author(s):  
Fatema Rouson Jahan

The chapter critically analyses the discourses on global factory workers that rest on three assumptions. First, the discussions of production are centred on stories of victimhood and produce a homogeneous image of third world workers as cheap and docile, who are affected by global labour market dynamics similarly and equally. Second, the third world is always theorised as a site of production and women factory workers are always positioned as sweatshop workers and never as consumers. Third, women's role as consumers appears only in relation to white women from the global north, who are assumed to have more purchasing power. Third world workers' consumption practices have been largely overlooked. The chapter problematises some of these assumptions. It proposes to look at the gender dynamics in the lives of women workers in global garment factories with a focus on their clothing consumption in order to further an approach that acknowledges the heterogeneity and agency of garment workers.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yijia Zhang ◽  
Zhicong Yin ◽  
Huijun Wang

Abstract. North China experiences severe haze pollution in early winter, resulting in many premature deaths and considerable economic losses. The number of haze days in early winter in North China (HDNC) increased rapidly after 2010 but declined slowly before 2010, reflecting a trend reversal. Global warming and emissions were two fundamental drivers of the long-term increasing trend of haze, but no studies have focused on this trend reversal. The autumn SST in the Pacific and Atlantic, Eurasian snow cover and central Siberian soil moisture, which exhibited completely opposite trends before and after 2010, were proven to stimulate identical trends of meteorological conditions related to haze pollution in North China. Numerical experiments with a fixed emission level confirmed the physical relationships between the climate drivers and HDNC during both decreasing and increasing periods. These external drivers induced a larger decreasing trend of HDNC than the observations, and combined with the persistently increasing trend of anthropogenic emissions, resulted in a realistic slowly decreasing trend. However, after 2010, the increasing trends driven by these climate divers and human emissions jointly led to a rapid increase in HDNC.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (10) ◽  
pp. 192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Slocum

The collective politics of climate justice makes the important claim that lowering emissions is not enough; society must also undertake radical transformation to address both the climate and inequality crises. Owing to its roots in the environmental justice movement, addressing systemic racism is central to climate justice praxis in the United States, which is a necessary intervention in typically technocratic climate politics. What emerges from US climate justice is a moral appeal to ‘relationship’ as politics, the procedural demand that communities of color (the ‘frontline’) lead the movement, and a distributive claim on carbon pricing revenue. However, this praxis precludes a critique of racial capitalism, the process that relies on structural racism to enhance accumulation, alienating, exploiting, and immiserating black, brown, and white, while carrying out ecocide. The lack of an analysis of how class and race produce the crises climate justice confronts prevents the movement from demanding that global north fossil fuel abolition occur in tandem with the reassertion of the public over the private and de-growth. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Oregon and Washington, I argue that race works to both create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate politics.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diva Amon ◽  
Amanda Ziegler ◽  
Jeffrey Drazen ◽  
Andrei Grischenko ◽  
Astrid Leitner ◽  
...  

There is growing interest in mining polymetallic nodules from the abyssal Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Despite having been the focus of environmental studies for decades, the benthic megafauna of the CCZ remain poorly known. To predict and manage the environmental impacts of mining in the CCZ, baseline knowledge of the megafauna is essential. The ABYSSLINE Project has conducted benthic biological baseline surveys in the UK Seabed Resources Ltd polymetallic-nodule exploration contract area (UK-1). Prior to ABYSSLINE research cruises in 2013 and 2015, no biological studies had been done in this area of the eastern CCZ. Using a Remotely Operated Vehicle and Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (as well as several other pieces of equipment), the megafauna within the UK Seabed Resources Ltd exploration contract area (UK-1) and at a site ~250 km east of the UK-1 area were surveyed, allowing us to make the first estimates of megafaunal morphospecies richness from the imagery collected. Here, we present an atlas of the abyssal annelid, arthropod, bryozoan, chordate, ctenophore and molluscan megafauna observed and collected during the ABYSSLINE cruises to the UK-1 polymetallic-nodule exploration contract area in the CCZ. There appear to be at least 55 distinct morphospecies (8 Annelida, 12 Arthropoda, 4 Bryozoa, 22 Chordata, 5 Ctenophora, and 4 Mollusca) identified mostly by morphology but also using molecular barcoding for a limited number of animals that were collected. This atlas will aid the synthesis of megafaunal presence/absence data collected by contractors, scientists and other stakeholders undertaking work in the CCZ, ultimately helping to decipher the biogeography of the megafauna in this threatened habitat.


Author(s):  
Doug Ashwell ◽  
Stephen M. Croucher

The Global South–North divide has been conceptualized in political, cultural, economic, and developmental terms. When conceptualizing this divide, issues of economic growth/progress, technology, political and press freedom, and industrialization have all been used as indicators to delineate between the “North” and the “South.” The North has traditionally been seen as more economically, technologically, politically, and socially developed, as well as more industrialized and having more press freedom, for example; the South has been linked with poverty, disease, political tyranny, and overall lack of development. This conceptualization privileges development efforts in the Global South based on democratic government, capitalist economic structures with their attendant neoliberal agenda and processes of globalization. This negative view of the South is a site of contest with people of the South offering alternative and more positive views of the situation in the South and alternatives to globalization strategies. While there may be some identifiable difference between some of the countries in the identified Global South and Global North, globalization (economic, political, technological, etc.) is changing how the very Global South–North divide is understood. To best understand the implications of this divide, and the inequalities that it perpetuates, we scrutinize the Global South, detailing the background of the term “Global South,” and examine the effect of globalization upon subaltern groups in the Global South. We also discuss how academic research using frameworks of the Global North can exacerbate the problems faced by subaltern groups rather than offer them alternative development trajectories by empowering such groups to represent themselves and their own development needs. The culture-centred approach to such research is offered as alternative to overcome such problems. The terms usage in the communication discipline is also explained and the complexity of the term and its future is explored.


1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-143
Author(s):  
Kyozo Sato

In the years leading up to the outbreak of war in Europe in early September 1939 Japan had been busy tackling the commitments she had made in North China at first and then in the whole of China. Although war was not declared, Japan had been at war with China since July 1937. It was a war of attrition; both Japan and China claimed to be winning, yet neither could, on any occasion, see any prospect of a final and definite victory. So long as Japan's military operations were confined to the area of North China, the war was named the ‘North China Incident.’ It was called the ‘China Incident’ after her successive and more or less successful operations had spread to Central and South China. And when a war broke out in the Pacific in December 1941 the Sino-Japanese war became an inseparable part of the ‘Greater East Asia War’ (Dai-tōa sensō), a name rarely heard by now, since it soon gave way to the ‘Pacific War’ (Taiheiyō sensō) in the sense of Japan waging the war of the Ocean, or to the ‘Second World War’ in the global sense.


2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-244
Author(s):  
XIXIAO GUO

Late 1946 was a time of anticlimax in the history of Sino-American relations. For four years since the outbreak of the Pacific War, thousands of American servicemen had been in China rubbing shoulders with the Chinese. When victory finally came, more United States troops (mainly the marines of the Third Amphibious Corps) poured in, and the Chinese hailed them as heroes. In less than a year, however, as hostilities between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closed in, the Americans were caught in the crossfire. Along the communication lines in North China, armed clashes between US and CCP forces escalated; in the cities, anti-American rallies became daily occurrences. The Chinese now became hostile to its erstwhile allies; wherever US servicemen went, they received boos from the locals. The rupture seemed to be irreversible: US forces started to evacuated, George Marshall, the presidential envoy to China, also ended his yearlong mediation, thus bringing the extraordinary intercourse between the two nations to an anticlimactic conclusion.


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