On a separate note, yeah China is criminally capitalistic, corrupt, greedy, and immoral, but so is Wall St. and DC. Don’t knock a whole country because of a minority of people screws up royally; leave that job to the French, they do it better anyways.

well said.

get real man

I just had my first kid and my wife is breast feeding – that’s a god damned nightmare – every 1-2 hours, at the little bastards demand? C’mon, you have kids – you gotta remember what a nightmare it was (unless your wife didn’t breast feed).

Which isn’t communism. As soon as you have classes, communism is not in effect and we’re into standard-issue oligarchy. China is a totalitarian government with partial free markets. The problem is not “communism”, it’s accountability.

The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: ‘No man should have so much.’ The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: ‘All men should have so much.’”

That sounds really nice, but that’s not how it works. To reduce it to a soundbite:
* Communism: “Everyone should have the same, no matter how hard they do, or don’t work” followed by gunfire.
* Capitalism: “Mine”, followed by gunfire.

Both systems, inherently, suck. Communism, in it’s ideal form, implies accountability to the proletariat, but it’s ideal form can’t happen because people suck, too. Capitalism implies no accountability to anyone, except for the ultimate market reckoning, which means that it puts people through the meat grinder in search of profits.

Perhaps the word you’re looking for is “democracy”? You know, where government is responsible to it’s people? The other word you want is “regulation”, by which the market is forced to be accountable to it’s participants?

Poison milk! Don’t have ‘laws’ against it. The ‘market’ provides a solution.

China is not capitalism run wild… it’s communism that uses slave labor in poor conditions to produce cheap products to make a buck on so that the elite can live like kings; all while the masses are kept down. As a quote I have says, “Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: ‘No man should have so much.’ The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: ‘All men should have so much.’”

As far as the difficulty of breastfeeding, it gets substantially easier after the first 2-4 weeks. And any breast milk (even from another person) is still better for your baby than formula.

It’s an accountability problem. To have a truly free** market, you must have accountability. Sometimes regulation is the only way to achieve accountability, especially when markets tend towards concentration of power. Of course, yes, the regulators also need to be open and accessible. The USDA is effectively a cartel.

The problem with China is that no one is accountable: not the government, not the regulatory systems, not the judiciary, not the corporations. In a true communist state, this wouldn’t be the case, but China is communist like Michael Jackson is white guy.

** free as in open and accessible, not free as in unregulated.

I’m not an expert, I just live with one, so what I know is just what’s rubbed off on me.

Viruses can cross the blood/glandular barrier, so yes, it is true that you could contract HIV or similar. It’s very rare (like, lottery-winning rare), especially if the mother or nurse is on a course of antiretroviral drugs: between that and the treatment and the sheer amount of immune-system function in breastmilk. The same applies to other viral pathogens (hepatitis, herpes, influenza) but not necessarily bacteria.

The greater risk in disease contraction is via blood. Nipples chap and bleed, and blood is the primary method of transmission.

If the nurse has full-blown, symptomatic AIDS instead of just HIV, that’s different. If they’re fully symptomatic, though, they’ve got a world of other problems.

All that said, if you’re hiring a quality wet nurse, you’d be smart to insist they supply test results. Most Western health professionals do exactly this.

I’d also like to point out that, with treatment, HIV is manageable; people live decades with it without being symptomatic. Melamine, by comparison, will either kill you, or at least destroy your kidneys and put you in dialysis for the rest of your life.

Michael: Getting paid 4xs the normal wage to sit around and lactate…

Spoken like someone who has never had kids, or has had kids that weren’t, ah, high-needs as infants. I’ll just say this: my wife deserves to make double the amount of money I do, at minimum.

I take full responsiblity for both comments.

Actually, they come from my (Chinese & female) Executive VP who had a baby, and missed just two weeks fo work ….

She calls breastfeeding “no work at all.”

And she says “No thanks” equals “Bu, xie xie” – gotta believe her – got no other choice.

Poison milk! Don’t have ‘laws’ against it. The ‘market’ provides a solution.

I believe the poison milk was in the Communist Utopia of China.

PREPARE!

I’ve never done it, but for 100,000 a year and room and board I’d be willing to try.

You’re going to get slammed for calling breastfeeding “not really hard work” if anyone who has actually done it reads this post.

Right you are. With that $300 – $1600 contract comes a thorough health check, and the lady must stay at home and not stray … or get – horrors of horros – ideas such as the below, which are a new fad in Japan:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sourceid=navclient&hl=en&u=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2emilkybaby%2ejp%2fnew%2findex%2ehtml

Milk Mothers or Wet Nurses with good looks and better education make more than bland looking girl fresh from the farm. This due to the belief that the baby picks up a lot of its smarts and good health through the (surrogate) mother’s milk.

On one hand China is relatively corrupt:

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2007

On the other hand, those that do get caught in China face rather stiff penalties:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6699441.stm

The USDA is so corrupt that it fought long and hard against country of origin labeling and is now hesitantly enforcing the law that was finally passed:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26890660/

Very nicely stated. I’ve had some dealings with Chinese electronics manufacturers, and it runs the gamut of very good to downright sleazy. In general it seems that any corners will be cut if they think they can get away with it. Chinese cars or tires for my family? I won’t bet mine or my kids lives on them. No way.

When will they start using people as furniture as Melville described in Moby Dick.

Weeeee!!!! This is the fun game called rapacious capitalism.

Poison milk! Don’t have ‘laws’ against it. The ‘market’ provides a solution.

While the International Breastfeeding Committee of WHO/Unicef recommends breastfeeding for six months, Chinese hospitals recommend a year or more.

Not entirely correct: WHO recommends an absolute minimum of six months of exclusive breastfeeding, but recommends complimentary (that is, breastmilk and solid foods) at least two to four years, especially in developing countries where basic nutritional needs are not met through diet alone.

Or in countries like China, where the food system is badly compromised by corporate profiteering. Put it this way: would you trust some conglomerate whose goal it is to turn a profit to provide adequate, safe food for your child?

There’s very sound scientific reasoning behind this: breastfed kids have much stronger immune systems, better growth and development, and are less likely to develop diabetes.

affluent Chinese parents of babies more and more turn to ‘milk mothers’ or ‘Nai Ma’ who breast feed their new-borns if the real mother doesn’t want or can

The Western term is “wet nurse”. It’s been around a long time, and was the traditional occupation for women whose children died at or shortly after birth. Generally, this was in the service of nobility. It’s still done, though not at all often because a) Nestle and their ilk have done a hatchet-job on breastfeeding, which is a travesty and b) less kids die before weaning.

I want to know how you get that spread in pay. What makes some breast milk worth $1600/month while another is $300? That would be a really awkward taste testing.

The same reason it costs more to buy a house in New York versus Detroit: location.

All that aside, China’s problems with food are going to extend to their automotive industry. The country is the worst mix of market-driven profiteering and oligarchial lack of accountability. Either the free market needs to be restrained or, better yet, government needs to be held accountable to the people.

Remember the safety lawsuits Western automakers faced? What chance do you think the Chinese will have when some jackass executive decides to shave several yuan off the cost of the car and gets away with it because he’s got pull with the party?