President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao touched on energy issues in the bilateral summit between the two countries this week.
"I believe that as the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, the United States and China have a responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future. And President Hu indicated that he agrees with me on this issue," President Obama said during a Wednesday press conference.
But can the United States step up as a leader on clean energy? The proliferation of politicians whom The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard calls "climate cranks" suggests otherwise.
The biggest consumers
In international climate negotiations, the United State and China are the two key players, and if the world as a whole is to move forward on combating climate change, agreement between Presidents Obama and Hu would be a huge breakthrough. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard notes that Hu also said the United States and China would work together on climate changes, but, she writes, "I can imagine, though, that the conversation on this subject wasn't entirely as chummy as the remarks would imply, however. The US last month lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China's subsidies for clean energy, arguing that the country is unfairly stacking the deck in favor of their products."
At AlterNet, Tina Gerhardt and Lucia Green-Weiskel explain the background to those tensions and to the U.S.'s protectionist bent on clean energy projects. They write, "Energy Secretary Chu recently framed the new relationship between the U.S. and China as a 'Sputnik Moment.' Referencing the first satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, which demonstrated its technological advantage and led to the Cold War-era space race, Chu warned that the U.S. risks falling behind China in the clean technology race."
Stumbling blocks
China's motivations for growing its clean energy sector may not be leafy green; new energy sources feed the country's rapidly growing economy. But at least the country is committed to green energy sources, unlike our climate change-denying Congress. As Mark Hertsgaard argues at The Nation, this brand of American has become so pernicious, it's time to stop adhering to the protocol that dubs them "climate deniers" and start calling them "climate cranks." He explains:
True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.
Climate cranks attack
Unfortunately, climate cranks continue to interfere with both climate scientists and forward-thinking energy policy. At Change.org, Nikki Gloudeman writes about the ongoing saga of climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the climatologists embroiled in the Climategate brouhaha, who is still being attacked by climate-denying groups for his work. Gloudeman reports that although Mann has been investigated and found innocent of any misdeeds several times over, a group with a bias against climate change, the American Tradition Institute, is trying to obtain access to his work.
And in New Mexico, the state's new conservative governor, Susana Martinez, "has attempted to subvert her own state constitution in order to stop [a] plan to begin reducing her state's carbon emissions," reports Dahr Jamail for Truthout. The plan, executed through state rules, would have reduced the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 3%, from 2010 levels, each year. The rules should have been made public, but Gov. Martinez kept them from being published, according to Truthout's report. A local group, New Energy Economy, is fighting to implement them.
Bright spots
In some states, however, the clean energy economy is moving forward. As Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Clean Edge, a clean-tech advisory group, has identified the top ten states for clean energy leadership. They include California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
"Rankings were derived from over 80 metrics including total electricity produced by clean-energy sources, hybrid vehicles on the road, and clean-energy venture and patent activity," Buczynski reports.
And, as David Roberts writes at Grist, there is important work to be done at the local and regional level to both prepare for and prevent climate change. His preferred term for this challenge is "ruggedizing"-strengthening a community's ability to respond to challenges brought on by climate change, such as flooding, droughts, or food shortages. The solutions to these problem, Roberts writes, often have the welcome side effect of decreasing carbon emissions, as well:
For instance, the residents of Brisbane are discovering that when disaster strikes, it's not very handy to have everyone spread out all over the place and utterly dependent on cars to get anywhere. It's more resilient to have people closer together, more able to walk or take shared transportation. It just so happens that also reduces vehicle emissions.
The advantage of this type of work-building the clean energy economy, ruggedizing communities-is that leaders don't necessarily have to agree on the reality of climate change to move forward. But these are only partial solutions, and to address climate change on an international scale, the cranks will need to be quieted.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
In discussing how America should respond to the North Korean artillery attack on South Korea, almost all the discussion invariably turns to what China will do. The only ally of North Korea, China is the only nation in the world which can effectively pressure North Korea.
There has been quite a bit of debate about what China is thinking right now. Many hope that China will value its commercial ties to the West above its ties to North Korea. Others point out, less optimistically, that China wishes to preserve North Korea - if North Korea fell, millions of impoverished refugees would flood into the country. Moreover, a reunified Korea would be aligned with the West, constituting a threat next to China's border.
All this is very much speculation and guesswork. What does China really think about the North Korean attack?
Actually, it is very easy to find out what China thinks. In fact, the Chinese government has an official press agency: Xinhua. Most people probably don't know this, but Xinhua can be read for free online in English.
So what does China think about the North Korean attack?
Well, what better way to find out than to go read the Chinese government's official newspaper!
A year ago, it seemed possible-likely, even-that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are less wild.
The conference will be held from Nov 29 to Dec 10 and the same issues from 2009 are up for debate. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.
A very different set of expectations are building in the climate movement this year. If last year was about moving forward as fast as possible, this year, climate activists seem resigned to the idea that politicians just aren't getting it. Change, when it comes, will have to be be built on a popular movement, not a political negotiation.
Climate change from the bottom up
Last year, climate activists put their faith in international leaders to make progress. This year, they believe that it's up to them, as outside actors, to marshal a grassroots movement and pressure their leaders towards decreased carbon emissions.
"There's a recognition that the insider strategy to push from inside the Beltway to impact what will happen in DC, or what will happen in Cancun has really not succeeded," Rose Braz, climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Making Contact's Andrew Stelzer. "What we're doing in conjunction with a number of groups across the country and across the world is really build the type of movement that will change what happens in Cancun, what changes what happens in DC from the bottom up." (This entire episode of Making Contact is dedicated to new approaches to climate change, at Cancun and beyond, and is worth a listen.)
Fighting the indolence of capitalists
Here's one example of this new strategy. As Zachary Shahan writes at Change.org, La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is coordinating a march that will begin in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, then converge on Cancun. The march will include "thousands of farmers, indigenous people, rural villagers, urbanites, and more," Shahan reports.
After they arrive in Cancun, the organizers are planning an "Alternative Global Forum for Life and Environmental and Social Justice" for the final days of the negotiations, which they say will be a mass mobilisation of peasants, indigenous and social movements. The action extends far beyond Cancun, though. Actually, they are organizing thousands of Cancuns around the world on this day to denounce what they see as false climate solutions.
These actions echo the strategy that environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and other climate leaders are promoting to push for climate change policies in the U.S. All this talk about building momentum from the bottom up, from populations, means that anyone looking for change is now looking years into the future.
The U.S. is not leading the way
Of course, ultimately, politicians will need to agree on a couple of standards. In particular, how much carbon each country should be emitting and how fast each country should power down its current emission levels. The U.S. is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to agreement on these questions, especially due to the recent mid-term elections. As Claudia Salerno, Venezuela's lead climate change negotiator wrote at AlterNet:
Unlike what many suggest, China is not the problem. China, along with India and others, have made considerable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are already working to realize them. Other developing countries have done the same, although we only generate a virtual drop in the bucket of global carbon emissions. The key player missing here is the U.S.
China, the U.S. and Clean Coal
The most interesting collaborations on clean energy, however, aren't happening around the negotiating table. This week, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a long piece about the work that the U.S. and China are doing together on clean coal technology, the magic cure-all to the world's energy ills.
In the piece, Fallows recognizes what environmentalists have long argued: coal is bad for the environment and for coal-mining communities. But, unlike clean energy advocates who want to phase coal out of the energy equation, Fallows argues that coal must play a part in the world's energy future. Therefore, we must find a way to burn it without releasing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. That's where clean coal technology comes in. So far, however, researchers have had little luck minimizing coal's carbon output.
A few progressive writers weighed in on Fallows' piece: Grist's David Roberts thought Fallows was too hard on the anti-coal camp, while Campus Progress' Sara Rubin argued that the piece did a good job of grappling with the reality of clean energy economics. And Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had one very clear criticism-that the piece skated over the question of progress on carbon capture, the one real way to dramatically reduce carbon pollution from coal. He wrote:
All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us.
On every front, then, the view on climate change is now a long one.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Two years ago, a post-Bush Republican Party that couldn't find itself on Google Maps was thoroughly thrashed for the second time in as many elections. The GOP had lost over 50 House seats over two election cycles, scores of state legislative chambers, governorships, US Senate seats, and the presidency to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
The latter, something most observers thought wouldn't happen in the United States until some time between the next arrival of Haley's Comet and when Kevin Costner evolves into a fish-humanoid hybrid to live on an Earth covered by H20.
It's amazing what can happen, however, when you have a Democratic president who doesn't live up to many of his core progressive promises, who blames his base for asking him to, and whose communications people, to quote Democratic National Committeeman and CNN Contributor Robert Zimmerman, "... couldn't sell cocaine to Charlie Sheen."
The results were on display this past Tuesday, when an American public tired of being unemployed, scared about their future, and looking for some kind of leadership, handed over the US House - in stunning fashion - to a coterie of cranks who have to put corks on the end of their forks not to jab their own eyes while eating. Think Steve Martin's Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and you get the basic picture of some of the Tea Party proxies we elected to Congress last week.
Weekly Audit: Banks Get Big Bucks, Consumers Get Bupkis
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Last week, the Federal Reserve announced a plan to buy an additional $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds in an attempt to stimulate the economy. On Democracy Now!, economist Michael Hudson argues that the $600 billion T-bill buy will help Wall Street at the expense of ordinary Americans.
The guest piece below from my friend Leo Hindery shows why he would be a great chair for the National Economic Council. He has been a consistently strong advocate for a trade and manufacturing policy that puts the interests of American workers ahead of those companies getting rich by outsourcing their factories to China. -Mike
After three decades of double-digit growth, China has just passed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy behind only the United States - and it should surpass us as early as 2030. And when China wins in trade, as it now does every day, it's really only the U.S. which loses. In fact, for the last several years the correlation has been almost dollar for dollar, with America's trade deficit with China in goods and services virtually mirroring China's overall trade surplus.
This should be enough of a clarion call to the administration to demand the integrated all-of-government approach to our trade relations with China that is the only one which is going to address the economic nightmare we find ourselves in with that country. Yet the realities around our trade with China trade continue to worsen - and become a whole lot more foreboding.
Back in May 2009, in a speech I gave in Qatar, I predicted that as an extension of its ever-growing trading and geopolitical status, China would soon accelerate (and relatively soon complete) its deployment of a full-scale "blue water navy." I felt that once China has this force in place and is able to readily project power throughout the Pacific and as far as the Indian Ocean, there will be, into the long term, regional and global tensions of a magnitude not seen since the Cold War. I also felt there would soon be great pressure on Japan to re-militarize, given that a massive 86% of its oil & gas needs are met by Middle East suppliers by way of the Indian Ocean.
This past April 2010, the New York Times also began to write about China's military's initiative that is now called "far sea defense", which China has publicly confirmed is fully intended to project naval power well beyond the Chinese coast. China has been testing long-range ballistic missiles that could be used against our aircraft carriers, it intends to deploy their own aircraft carrier group 'within a few years', and its naval forces already stand at 275 "principal combatants" - i.e., major warships - and more than 60 submarines, including at least two Jin-class submarines with ballistic missile capabilities, with two more under construction, and two Shang-class nuclear-powered attack submarines.
So, what do you do if you suddenly have a 'blue water navy'? Well, you use the bloody thing, which is exactly what China is already doing in the South China Sea, where it's just said it will tolerate no interference in what it now believes to be a "core interest" of its sovereignty, on par with Taiwan and Tibet. And by making the South China Sea sovereignty issue 'non-negotiable', imminent problems now exist between China and each of Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei.
So bipartisanship isn't dead. By a vote of 348-79, Democrats and Republicans alike put aside their acrimonious differences and agreed, at least for a moment, to stop blaming each other for the sad state of American economic life. Instead, they agreed to blame China.
The bill authorizes the president of the United States to impose tariffs on Chinese goods in response to what it considers an illegal subsidy of Chinese exports in the form of an undervalued currency. It helps that the supporters in the House know that this bill has precious little chance of becoming law; it will not pass the Senate and it is unlikely that it would be signed into law by Obama if it ever came to that. As a result, the bill is the perfect campaign gesture, bombastic, angry, self-righteous, and without much real-world consequence.
The office AFL-CIO union leader Richard Trumka issued a statement that encapsulated the thinking behind the bill: "the House of Representatives voted to put an end to the Chinese government's currency manipulation, which has destroyed millions of good American manufacturing jobs. For more than a decade, the Chinese government has deliberately manipulated the value of its currency, ballooning our trade deficit with China and costing American communities good jobs....Working people continue to mobilize to elect candidates who will put America's workers first and are committed to rebuilding an economy that values working people. This November we will send a powerful message that we will support those who vote for an economy that works for everyone."
Much has been made of the recent Russian spy swap, in which ten Russian infiltrators were exchanged for four American infiltrators. The overall reaction has been one of amusement. Russian spies combined with Desperate Housewives? Straight out of a Cold War movie thriller!
In fact, the reaction to the spy scandal reveals far more about American attitudes towards Russia than most classified information would. Simply put, the United States no longer regards Russia as its number-one nemesis and rival. In the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had ten thousand nuclear missiles pointed at America, the reaction would have been far different - far more hostile, and far less amused.
Can Twitter save China? China's environment--and thus public health--has been severely undermined for 30 years, and environmental protests have been a major feature of Chinese political life for at least 20. But what's changed recently is the role of social media to help organize those protests on a massive scale. With that force growing ever more powerful, and an overall cost of pollution greater than the cost of cleanup, a major shift is in the offing, Bloomberg News reports:
China Is Set to Lose 2% of GDP Cleaning Up Decades of Pollution
Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong's Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can't stand the canal's smell.
"We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health," said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. "If we can't breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless."
China, the world's worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year -- 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures -- to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China's Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.
Failure to spend that much -- equivalent to the annual GDP of Vietnam -- may cost the Chinese economy half as much again in blighted crops, health costs and pollution-related expenses, He said: "The cleanup can't catch up with the speed of pollution" if spending is less....
Lost Productivity
The costs arising from pollution in China -- including lost productivity due to health issues, crop degradation and losses from pollution-related accidents -- totaled 511.8 billion yuan, or 3.1 percent of GDP, in 2004, the latest figures available, according to the Beijing-based Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
China doubled total environmental spending in the 2006-2010 period to 1.4 trillion yuan from the previous five-year plan, and may more than double it again to 3.1 trillion yuan in the five years through 2015, said Wang Jinnan, vice-president of the academy.
That's less than the amount He predicts will be needed on the cleanup and includes other costs: developing alternative energy and new sewage works, and protecting ecological habitats. It's also less than the 4 trillion yuan China spent on stimulus in one year to boost the economy.
And as for the social forces pushing for change:
Twitter Protests
"Environmental protests have been one of the leading sources of social unrest for more than two decades," Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia Studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The River Runs Black," a book on China's environment, said in an e-mail. What has changed is "the ability of people to communicate through texting, e- mail, and Twitter to organize a protest."
Campaigns of up to 10,000 people in major cities such as Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Chengdu were fighting the planned siting of large-scale chemical plants, and in some cases have forced the government to reverse a decision, Economy told the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China in October 2009. She said about 700 million people in China drink water contaminated with human or animal waste.
And China doesn't even pretend to be a democracy!
Clearly things are much, much worse in China, but they seem to be on the cusp of starting to get dramatically better.
Episode 2, that's right, the big wigs decided not to cancel us after the Pilot!
H.R. 2378 is being discussed in the Ways & Means Committee today and tomorrow. Our Executive Director, Jeremy Koulish has been livetweeting the hearing.
As expected the Republicans in the Senate said no to those whose livelihoods they gutted when they controlled Washington. Forget the fact that men like Mitch McConnell and yes, Ben Nelson who is a Republican and should get out of our party soaked up huge salaries while soaking the middle-class with policies that decimated them while enriching Corporate fatcats and the Chinese Communists. Of course the whole Republican Party, Mitch McConnell and Ben Nelson want you to forget. What they do not want is to bear any of the responsibility of their actions both in the past and now as working Americans who paid the price from Republicans and Corporate Democrats and the robber-barons in Corporate America getting fat, crashing the economy, and getting bailed out.
America needs an economic/industrial policy like other countries have. THAT is how we will pay off our debt -- by earning money.
You may have read about the back-and-forth on Chinese currency this weekend. China said they would let their exchange rate adjust, and then pulled the football away. The deal is that China manipulates its currency to keep undervalued, which makes Chinese good cost less than they otherwise would on the world market. So they end getting the manufacturing business (and jobs and supply chain and R&D and ...) In fact it looks like next year China will replace the US as the #1 manufacturer.
But it is not just cheating on currency that is the problem. Today's news brings a reminder of another reason it costs less to make things in China: 47 killed when explosion rips through China mine,
The blast hit a mine in Pingdingshan city in the province of Henan, the State Administration of Work Safety said. Seventy-five miners were trapped initially but 28 escaped, the central government said on its website.
This is not an uncommon headline. We see headlines like this from China all the time. More than 2,600 miners were killed just last year.
When life is that cheap you can charge less for things.
We all know about the environmental problems in China, another reason things made there cost less. It is so bad that there are "cancer villages" near polluting factories.
Here is a list of the main unfair advantages China uses to its advantage:
1) Currency manipulation. China "pegs" its currency at a very low, or "weak" rate, so goods from China cost up to 40% less than they otherwise should.
2) Labor-rights suppression has lowered manufacturing wages of Chinese workers by 47% to 86%.
3) There is massive direct government subsidization of export production in many key industries.
4) China allows environmental degradation that ends up affecting all of us.
5) Intellectual property theft and piracy mean that American products that could be sold are stolen instead.
6) China has a number of policies that block U.S. firms from market access.
All of these things that China is doing are collectively called a national industrial policy. China has one. We don't. China's share of the world's business has grown exponentially because they have and follow a national industrial policy. Ours has declined dramatically because we don't. I'm trying to drop a hint here, but for those in Washington who aren't following let me spell it out more clearly: America needs to develop and follow a national industrial policy.
Last Thursday was the one-month anniversary of the Gulf oil disaster and every day, we see more and more evidence that collectively we have failed to not only act, but also we have failed to organize and express our anger about the disaster, and its truly shocking long-term consequences.
This isn't Katrina II, it's worse. As the oil keeps gushing and the damage keeps growing, we are squandering a rare chance to turn the tide against those whose laziness and greed and ignorance is imperiling every living thing on our wonderful and beautiful -- and wounded --- planet.
Words are a necessary precursor to deeds, anger is an essential ingredient for social change. Speaking up and speaking out is the difference between apathy and action.
We all do need to speak up, we all do need to speak out and we all need to make our voices heard. Every single day, the catastrophe is getting worse.
The United States imports 11.7 million barrels of oil. According to the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. imported an average of 11.7 million barrels per day of crude and other oil products in 2009.
Iran earns $173 million in oil revenues. The Economist Intelligence Unit forecasts that Iran will generate oil export revenue at $63.4 billion this year from output of 3.82 million barrels per day (bpd). $63.4 billion divided by 365 days is $173.7 million. Up to 4 million gallons of oil surges into the Gulf. The official estimate is that about 5,000 barrels of oil are spilling per day, but independent experts contend that the actual amount is far higher -- as much as 95,000 barrels per day. A barrel holds 42 gallons.
China invests $95 million in clean energy -- nearly double the United States investment ($51 million.) In 2009, China invested $34.6 billion in clean energy compared to $18.6 billion in the U.S. ($34.6 billion/365 = $95 million a day, $18.6 billion/365 = $51 million a day.)
100,000 solar panels roll off Chinese production lines. Solar module production in China and Taiwan will increase 48 percent to 5,515 megawatts in 2010, according to a February, 2010 report by Yuanta. One megawatt requires about 5,000 panels. Assuming 250 production days per year, this translates to 110,300 panels per day.
The United States generates 19 million tons (metric) of greenhouse gas emissions per year. EPA's most recent greenhouse gas inventory reports that the U.S. produced 6,956.8 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 equivalent basis) in 2008. That's 19,059,726 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each day.
Clearly we need to move from apathy to action. Because as every day passes, as the evidence of our collective failure washes up on the beaches of the Gulf and deeper and deeper into the marshes of Louisiana, what's Washington's reaction?
"Pathetic" would be kind.
There will evidently be a commission to study this disaster, but as we saw with the 9/11 commission, even solid recommendations are usually ignored by one or both parties with little hope of action.
China says 83,196 people lost their lives in work-related incidents last year.
China's State Administration of Work Safety reported 380,000 incidents in the workplace that caused death or injury.
How does that stack up compared to the U.S.? To put the situation into perspective, the U.S. has a workforce of 155 million, while China has over five times that amount, at about 801 million.
The U.S. reported 5,071 worker deaths in 2008.
So the number of workplace fatalities in China is 16 times that of those in the U.S.
Approximately 14 workers die per day in the U.S. compared to 228 in China.
Coal mining accounted for 2,631 deaths last year in China - 7 deaths per day.
For additional context, on the 5,071 worker deaths in 2008, 5,424 Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan total.
There are human costs to our worker safety, energy and trade policies. Ongoing stories about trapped coal miners in China and West Virginia bring them into the public light, but they happen every day.
A student at an American university Googles "Tiananmen Square" from her dorm room. Among the hundreds of hits that will surface are photographs and reports stemming from the 1989 protest that followed the death of Chinese pro-democracy official Hu Yaobang. Scrolling down, she will learn that Chinese troops killed hundreds of protesters who were gathered in Tiananmen Square to voice their support for democracy and call for an end to government corruption.
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