While eating my usual before work pop tart and watching Sportscenter on ESPN I was treated to a bit of unexpected news: that a DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) operation nicknamed ‘Raw Deal’ busted a number of Steroids labs across the United States, many of which were supplied by China. There are a couple of pretty damning statistics that are provided in the article about this on ESPN’s website.

“We came to find that 99.9 percent of the steroids in the U.S. were coming from China,”

And…

The World Anti-Doping Administration estimates that Chinese factories are responsible for as much as 70-80 percent, or up to $480 million worldwide, of an annual $600 million black market in human growth hormone.

What effect this will have on the upcoming Beijing Olympics or worldwide opinion on Chinese goods is hard to say. It will be interesting to see how the Chinese government reacts to this, and how they intend to deal with the HGH factories in China. The DEA will be a holding press conference later in the day to further explain the outcome of this sting.

Popularity: 22% [?]

After almost doubling in price in the past 12 months, an 85.8% increase, the price of pork in China has fallen slightly in the past 4 weeks. This seems to be caused by a number of reasons, included an increase in demand and a highly infectious pig virus. But will this highly priced pork cause civil unrest? I think the only thing that could do that would be an increase in baijiu prices.

Popularity: 13% [?]

After living in China and then returning to the United States, people ask you a very wide variety of questions about China. One of the more common questions is about religion. My usual answer is that Chinese people as a whole are not very religious, and making up a statistic, say that only about 1% of the population is religious. Thanks to Shanghaiist I know that 31.4% of the Chinese population 16 or older are religious, meaning I was way off. And according to one researcher from a article in the Washington Post from February, Poll Finds Surge of Religion Among Chinese, many people feel purposeless in a cut-throat market economy. Perceiving this this lack of moral guidance, and trying to construct his “Harmonious Society” Hu Jintao proposed a moral law on the land, the 8 Virtues and 8 Vices.

1. The honor of loving the motherland ; the disgrace of endangering the motherland
2. The honor of serving the people; the disgrace of turning away from the people
3. The honor of upholding science; the disgrace of ignorance and illiteracy
4. The honor of industrious labor; the disgrace of indolence
5. The honor of togetherness and cooperation; the disgrace of profiting at the expense of others
6. The honor of honesty and keeping one’s word; the disgrace of abandoning morality for profit
7. The honor of discipline and obedience; the disgrace of lawlessness and disorder
8. The honor of striving arduously; the disgrace of wallowing in luxury

A numbered list of moral codes. That seems to remind me of something else. Perhaps the seven deadly sins of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride. These go along with the 7 holy virtues of chastity, abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. By my estimate the list share sins of sloth, envy, greed and pride. Obviously, any sort of morality code is going to have some overlap, but instituting a numbered lists begs comparison to the famous Christian list (it doesn’t stack up as well against the ten commandments). And judging from my experiences, maybe they should add gluttony and anger to the 8 Virtues/Vices.

Popularity: 43% [?]