Tag: China

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Opinion The Last Word

National Insecurity

Photo: Franck | Unsplash

High-tech spying is in the news because of the one-sided, hypocritical debate in Congress on whether the popular app TikTok is actually a tool for Chinese government data collection on American users. The sensitivity of the issue has to do not only with rivalry with China but also the fact that the U.S. government has recently been the target of hackers. In November 2021 President Biden banned use of Pegasus, a powerful Israeli-made surveillance tool, by all U.S. government agencies. His order came in the wake of two developments: hackers who used Pegasus to break into the phones of some State Department employees, and investigative journalism that revealed use of Pegasus by many governments, democratic as well as autocratic, to break into the cell phones of political opponents and human rights activists.

As the New York Times recently found, not all U.S. agencies have apparently gotten the message; an unnamed government agency is said to be using the nearly undetectable surveillance device in Mexico. Meantime, the phones of 50 more government employees have been hacked. The U.S. case against TikTok, however, sidesteps two matters: the government’s own spying on citizens under cover of law, and the questionable political motives that seem to dictate the specific effort to kill TikTok. Congress members are far more concerned about the U.S. government as victim of spying than as perpetrator. We’ve been reminded of that with the top-secret documents hacked by an Air Force reservist that revealed U.S. spying on various allies as well as on Russia. That spying is widely considered legitimate, but Congress members prefer to forget the long history of government spying on unsuspecting citizens, a history that goes well beyond the Cold War. Various agencies — Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the State Department — have monitored social media to report on “national security” dangers. Leaders of Black Lives Matter, left and right political parties and resistance groups, immigrants from Muslim and socialist countries, environmental activists — the list of targeted groups is long. To that list should be added the mainstream social media — Facebook, Twitter, Google — that have given government agencies access to users’ personal information and communications. Their data collection probably exceeds TikTok’s, but somehow they are not considered national security threats.

Legislation passed with strong bipartisan support in Congress has cemented the government’s right to invade privacy, most recently to combat terrorism. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 permits electronic and other means of surveillance of U.S. citizens suspected of being “agents of foreign powers.” A FISA court, consisting of 11 federal district judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, considers applications to carry out surveillance and may issue warrants based on probable cause. FISA has been amended several times — the USA Freedom Act (2015) is the latest version — but has been challenged as an unconstitutional violation of personal liberty. That’s because catching terrorists was used to justify creation of a huge database that went well beyond counterterrorism.

The Freedom Act puts some limits on metadata collection but still has provisions for warrantless surveillance, for instance against whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. Courts have rarely ruled against U.S. government intrusion, usually when national security is the justification. But then there’s the 2013 case in which the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided that Amnesty International lacked standing to challenge FISA. The case was brought against James Clapper, then director of national intelligence.

To judge from the virulence of the rhetoric, TikTok is one of China’s biggest threats to U.S. national security. Congress members actually seem to believe that killing off TikTok would be a major victory over a malevolent foreign power — a way to “protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put it. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese technology company, but its CEO claims the company does not share data with the Chinese government, has independent management, and is willing to store its U.S. data in the U.S.

Now I have to say that I have never used TikTok, nor do I even know anyone who does. But the roughly 150 million Americans who use it swear by it; TikTok has become an icon of U.S. culture. A number of countries, including the European Union, Denmark, New Zealand, and India, have restricted government use of TikTok or banned it altogether. But I have yet to see evidence that TikTok is channeling Chinese propaganda or amassing anyone’s personal data to be off-loaded to Beijing. Yet Congress members, and the Biden administration, are determined either to ban TikTok or force its sale, which the Chinese government opposes on the grounds that would harm investments in the U.S. The political lineup against TikTok mirrors the bipartisan consensus in Congress that is hostile to most anything Chinese made or owned.

Allowing TikTok to continue operating but ensuring that its database resides in a U.S. server such as Oracle would seem to be a reasonable answer for those who insist TikTok is a security threat. At one time the administration supported that idea.

But now we learn that Biden has “endorsed a bipartisan Senate bill that would give the Commerce Department the clear power to ban any app that endangered Americans’ security.”

That’s the authoritarian solution, but it would probably satisfy the China hawks, who love the prospect of turning public attention away from America’s real security issues. Their posturing on TikTok may fool some people, but far from strengthening national security, it reveals how insecure government leaders are when dealing with China.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Threat Business: Russia or China?

The Ukraine war has been a boon to the war economy. (Photo: Pexels | алесь-усцінаў)

For those in charge of U.S. national security, the central challenge is identifying threats and determining how to counter them. The Biden administration has cast China and Russia, in that order, as the major threats to U.S. security.

China is a “pacing challenger”; whereas, Russia is an “acute” challenger. Those rather odd designations mean, in plain English, that the administration considers China, once called a “peer competitor,” an all-encompassing threat, not just military but also political, economic, and technological. Russia has been downgraded from the Trump years. It is a military threat, but not on par with China.

Here’s how the Biden-Harris “National Security Strategy” paper (October 2022) puts it:

“The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly. Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war on its neighbor Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe and impacted stability everywhere, and its reckless nuclear threats endanger the global non-proliferation regime.”

At first glance, the Biden-Harris paper seems to say that the Russian threat is actually far more serious than the threat from China. Russia, not China, is carrying out a war of aggression, condemned as such by the United Nations. China requires managed competition; whereas, Russia is a belligerent that has “impacted stability everywhere” and poses a global nuclear threat. China, the paper says, seeks to “become the world’s leading power” and has both the intent and the capability to “reshape the international order.” Russia is said to be pursuing “an imperialist foreign policy with the goal of overturning key elements of the international order.” Is that a distinction without a difference?

Despite all the contentious issues between the U.S. and China, they are not at war; whereas, to all intents and purposes the U.S. is at war with Russia, which not only “has shattered peace in Europe” but has shown that destroying Ukraine is just part of its mission to undermine the Western alliance. Those are the reasons the U.S. is heavily invested in defending Ukraine: tens of billions of dollars in military aid, military training of Ukrainians, supply of advanced weapons capable of hitting targets in Russia, and sanctions on Russian officials and trade. In the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. strategy does not rest on war-fighting scenarios but on deterrence of China, marked by strengthening security partnerships, particularly with Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. Engaging either adversary, whether through negotiations or transactions, is not a priority. We worry that Russia will use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. We don’t worry, according to the president, that China will invade Taiwan, much less deploy a nuclear weapon. The U.S. has brought NATO into the Ukraine war, with allies supplying arms, advisers, intelligence sharing, and financial and political support. But Russia’s supposed strategic partner, China, has not provided Russia with military assistance for the war.

As the war moves closer to its first anniversary, U.S. and NATO involvement gets deeper — more military assistance of all kinds, such as a reported doubling of Ukraine soldiers trained, Patriot missiles, and HIMARS rocket launchers — and prospects for a negotiated settlement with Putin become more remote. In fact, the more successful the Ukrainians are in prosecuting the war, the greater the outside aid to Ukraine — but also, the greater the risk of expansion of the war. If Ukraine’s forces succeed at ousting Russia from more of its territory, Putin might react by escalating the use of force, such as use of a nuclear weapon. An unidentified Biden administration official recently made just such a suggestion. That prospect would present the U.S. and NATO with an entirely new challenge, one that might make them full-fledged combatants.

In the U.S. Congress, one finds declining enthusiasm for supporting Ukraine, but plenty of enthusiasm for confronting China. With Republicans about to control the House of Representatives, its far-right members are anxious to reduce aid to Ukraine. Their line of argument closely follows Moscow’s narrative on the war.

But when it comes to dealing with China, a Cold War-style consensus has formed among House members across the political spectrum. Republicans are forming a Select Committee on China that will assuredly take a very hard line, going beyond what the Biden administration has already decided — such as banning TikTok.

Republicans want Democrats’ support, the committee’s chair (Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin) saying: “We want the Democrats to nominate serious, sober people to participate, because defending America from Chinese Communist Party aggression should not be a partisan thing.” You can bet plenty of Democrats will apply. After all, isn’t TikTok a greater threat to national security than Russian aggression and election interference?

And let’s not forget the bread and butter of the threat business: the weapons and money for the Pentagon and military contractors. The New York Times reports: “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011.”

In a spirit of bipartisanship that national security always prompts, Congress has voted for a record $858 billion in military spending. That’s $45 billion more than the president requested.

The war in Ukraine has been a boon to the permanent war economy. One specialist finds that U.S. military contractors will receive about 40 percent of the latest round of military aid to Ukraine (about $47 billion). Please note: All these spending decisions have been made with virtually no debate.

Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is professor emeritus of political science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.

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From My Seat Sports

My Beijing

Frank Murtaugh in China in October 1994

A point of emphasis: I share these sentiments with the same aversion to China’s human-rights atrocities that has the United States boycotting the Beijing Olympics on a government level. A place and its people can be appreciated without endorsing a nation’s restrictive, to say nothing of racist, policies. 

I feel a kinship to the Winter Olympics in Beijing. I feel this connection despite being unable to perform virtually every athletic feat we’ll witness over the next two weeks. The Summer Olympics are easy for imagining a personal place in competition: we can all run, most of us can swim, and lots of us can dribble a basketball (if not guarded by a defender). But luge? Biathlon? Aerial skiing, for crying out loud? Yet I feel closer than usual with these winter Games.

I visited China, you see, in October 1994. Part of a press junket organized by the Wonders Series, I immersed myself in a land, quite literally, “on the other side of the globe,” and it was one of my life’s grand adventures. Sharing stories of the 1995 Wonders exhibition — “Imperial Tombs of China” — was my glorious obligation, but the return on my journalistic investment has been a monumental profit of spirit.

Our group spent some time in Hong Kong (then still a British colony), and Xi’an (site of the famed Terracotta Army, buried more than 2,000 years ago to protect the afterlife of emperor Qin Shi Huang). But Beijing and its surroundings are as colorful in my mind’s eye today as they were 28 years ago. Tiananmen Square, where pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred merely five years before my trip. The Forbidden City, home to Chinese royalty in the way Disney likes to dream of palaces and such. Then there was the Great Wall, a short bus ride northwest of Beijing. You spend your youth nodding your head when told how big — how long! — the Great Wall of China is, then one day you find yourself climbing stairs. Lots of stairs. And feeling like this structure just might be visible from the moon.

These memories danced in my head when Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 (the Michael Phelps Games). But another decade and my life’s first pandemic have a way of refocusing the moments that have truly mattered on my journey. And being part of Beijing — part of China — for two weeks is among those moments for me.

A college friend (who lived in Tokyo at the time) joined me for part of our time in Beijing. A singular experience: dining like princes (if not kings) in a small Beijing restaurant for a total cost of ten American dollars. If you want to measure the difference between “east and west,” start with economics. My buddy told me something wise near the end of his visit: “You’ll never read or hear about China again without feeling like it’s part of you.”

So here we are in 2022. Chloe Kim is primed to dominate her snowboard competition while Mikaela Shiffrin makes the alpine slopes her own. I’ve never been on a snowboard, and the one day I spent on a mountain with skis strapped to my feet can hardly be described as “skiing.” (I scored points with my future wife. Another investment in spirit.) But yes, I feel like Beijing is a part of me. Still. And maybe forever. I’ll enjoy cheering the world’s finest winter athletes, but it will have less to do with gold medals than the gleam — across decades now — of a gorgeous, history-rich place I wish we all could call our own.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Red August

I spent 10 days in China in October 1994 as a member of a press junket previewing the Wonders exhibition “Imperial Tombs of China.” It was the closest thing to a “red October” I’ll likely see. That journey is as distant from Western perceptions of communism as my memory can recall. Needless to say, the government officials who hosted our wide-eyed party of journalists were on their A game, just as all of China should be when the Olympic Games open in Beijing Friday. But whatever lengths may have been pursued 14 years ago to close the gap between East and West — between perception and reality, one might argue — are among the components of the continued efforts to bridge opposite sides of the world and balance the relationship between the last two “super powers” our planet is likely to host.

Whether in Hong Kong (then still a British territory), Xi’an (where jaw met floor as my party walked among the long-buried terra-cotta army of Emperor Qin Shi-huang-di), or Beijing (we took a short bus ride to the Great Wall), my memories of China start with the crowds. Walking around the Forbidden City one afternoon, it always seemed like a ball game had just finished, with the departing fans filling sidewalks and streets, cars and cabs bumper-to-bumper, pedestrians young and old eager to get to their next destination.

But the crowds were invariably friendly. My group stood out in China, even with a contingent of guides and translators. Adding a significant language barrier, those of us from the Mid-South were curiosities but only until the first smile was exchanged.

I call on these happy reflections, because I’d like to believe that the controversy that follows any Western discussion of China — be it over Tibet, Darfur, or human rights in general — can become part of the international hug that every Olympic gathering aims to be and not the central distraction (violent or otherwise) we remember from Beijing ’08. China has room for improvement as it gains ground on the developed world — and it’s gaining fast — but so does every nation with interests that stretch global harmony. An open mind on the part of Olympic athletes should be enough to inspire open minds on the part of traveling sports fans, journalists, dare I say even diplomats and heads of state. Yes, China must improve its treatment of all its people. That improvement will come quicker through dialogue — which starts with a visit to Beijing — than it will through finger-pointing or threats of international action.

A significant bonus during my visit to Beijing was a college friend joining me from his home in Tokyo. A Japanese native, Tamio moved to America in elementary school, graduated with a degree in economics from Tufts, and returned to Japan not long before my press junket. He emphasized during our travels that wherever I go, wherever I live, when I read about China now, it will feel closer to home. And he was absolutely right.

There was a free night we had in Beijing, in which Tamio and I bravely took to the streets without our formal supervisors or translators. We happened upon a small restaurant (maybe five tables) not too far from the Forbidden City. If there were other diners in that restaurant, I don’t remember them. What I do recall is the most energetic and friendly wait staff I’ve seen before or since (and, alas, a bathroom upstairs that was outdoors and alongside a fire escape). Tamio and I enjoyed a full meal — rice, dumplings, some chicken and vegetables, and a tasty bottle of red wine. All for five American dollars. I’ve tried to do the economics on this for 14 years now and still can’t grasp how fundamentally different two societies are when a meal in one would cost 10 times what it does in another.

Suffice to say, that same meal in central Beijing would cost more than $5 today, and it’ll cost much more 14 years from now. It’s but a tiny sample of a gap being closed, a bridge being slowly built between East and West. And over the next two weeks, as, couch-bound, I watch runners, swimmers, and gymnasts compete for the world’s attention, China will, indeed, feel quite close to home.

Frank Murtaugh is managing editor of Memphis magazine and writes the “From My Seat” column for memphisflyer.com.

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News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Memphis Light, Gas and Water warns customers we can expect at least a $40 hike in our upcoming utility bills to pay for the increased electricity used to run our fans and air conditioners this summer. Funny, isn’t it, how this rate hike closely matches the so-called credit we were supposed to get for an overcharge for natural-gas purchases.

Greg Cravens

A nurse at Charter Lakeside walks into a Renasant Bank in Germantown and hands the teller a note saying she has a knife and wants $20,000. She walks away with some money, but when police pull her over just a few blocks away, she allegedly admits, “I did it” and — as if they needed more proof — is still carrying the hold-up note. Clearly, this is a cry for help. Couldn’t she have gotten it where she works?

Area consumers pay special attention to toys after warnings are issued that products made in China may contain dangerously high levels of lead paint. Just a few months ago, pets across the country sickened and died when pet food manufactured in China contained deadly levels of additives. We know you’re the fastest-growing economy on the planet, but you’re not exactly setting a great example for the rest of the world, China.

The Bartlett parks department uses pictures of coyotes and plastic alligator heads to scare away the waterfowl that flock to the lakes there. Not a bad idea. Maybe Memphis should try it with fake police officers — even fake police cars — to keep all the bad guys at bay. ­­

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: KHZ | dreamstime.com

If I were an American soldier in Iraq, I’d be tempted mightily to say, “Good luck and goodbye,” and then start for home. I can’t see losing even one more soldier in a war over a country in which 99.9 percent of the American people have no interest.

Iraq had no effect on the American people before President Bush’s illegal invasion of it. It has no effect on us now, unless you have loved ones being fed into the meat grinder that is making futility sausage. What possible difference does it make to us who rules Iraq?

As a matter of fact, we should not only pull all of our troops out of Iraq but also withdraw them from Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and anywhere else they happen to be in the Middle East. If our leaders had the brains to do this, they would discover that the people in that part of the world are quite capable of running their own affairs.

Some of them might kill each other, but eventually things would settle down. It is, after all, one of the oldest civilizations in the world. In the meantime, no one in that part of the world could use us as an excuse for doing anything, and it wouldn’t be Americans who are getting killed.

I would also pull out of Afghanistan and say to the government, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, you fellows work this out among yourselves, because frankly we don’t give a damn. Your hardscrabble country isn’t worth 10 bucks, much less the billions we’ve spent on it. If you need water, dig a well; if you need food, grow it. Goodbye and good luck.

The American people have been conned into accepting the idea of an empire, when there is no need for one. Wherever there is oil, it will be available for sale because it is otherwise worthless, and why should we care from whom we buy it? Some of the worst people in the world are sitting on big oil reserves, and you know what? Their oil burns just as well as anybody else’s.

The imperialists have created the illusion that we are in control of the world and if we weren’t, everything would fall apart. That’s not true. First of all, we are not in control of the world. Secondly, we are not the world’s only remaining superpower. We could not whip China or Russia in an all-out war and probably not even Iran.

It’s true that we have a lot of fancy weapons, but we bought them all on credit, and it won’t be long before our credit will be maxed out. The Chinese have already demonstrated that they can take out satellites, and I’m sure the Russians have that capability too. The problem with relying on high-tech solutions comes when your high tech crashes. Knock out those satellites, and the U.S. will not only be blind but impotent.

Furthermore, we’re trying to be an empire on the cheap. To run an empire, you need lots and lots of cannon fodder. Since we stupidly decided to have an all-volunteer Army, we can’t afford too much cannon fodder. How many of our soldiers could we lose before everyone started screaming “stop the war”? We’ve lost a little over 3,500 troops in Iraq so far, and pressure is starting to build.

What the knuckleheads in Washington have created is an empire of delusions and illusions. It’s time for the nation to wake up and adopt a realistic foreign policy, which is trade and friendly relations with anybody who wants it. As for those who don’t, we simply ignore them. We don’t need to be anybody’s enemy.

As for defense, defending our space is easy and cheap. As another mark of imperial stupidity, the rulers of the empire can’t even do that while they fail overseas.

Charley Reese writes for the Lew Rockwell syndicate. He has been a journalist for 50 years.

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News News Feature

Invasion of the Asian Catfish

CREDIT: Ghubonamin | dreamstime.com

Paul Dees’ grandfather got into catfish farming in the 1960s during the industry’s infancy, realizing that his land’s heavy clay soil wouldn’t grow a stitch of cotton.

Dees took over the family business near Leland, Mississippi — about 200 miles south of Memphis — in 2000. His grandfather had grown the farm into one of the largest catfish producers in the state, which produces the most catfish in the country.

Today Dees’ livelihood hangs in the balance, as Mississippi aquaculture faces a foe mightier than drought or the boll weevil. “As an individual producer, there’s nothing more I can do,” he explains. “We can’t compete against the People’s Republic of China.”

But on May 3rd, state commissioner of agriculture and commerce Lester Spell ordered catfish imported from China off of the shelves of several grocery stores statewide after samples of the fish tested positive for ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin, broad-spectrum antibiotics that are banned by the FDA for use in human food.

Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana have since banned the sale of Chinese catfish statewide. Wal-Mart stores have pulled the Chinese fish nationwide. Tennessee has planned no such action, nor have any shipments of Chinese catfish to the state been inspected. Though the removal actions have been criticized as political, and the specific health risks these contaminated fish pose dismissed by some as inconsequential, the incident provokes questions about how globalization impacts everything in our lives, from regional industries to the food we put on our tables.

Catfish Fever

While catfish farming hasn’t taken in Tennessee, Memphis is a big consumer of the crop. Witness the packed parking lot during the lunch rush at the Cooper-Young restaurant Soul Fish.

The eatery opened last year, and its owner — Raymond Williams, who’s committed to Mississippi farm-raised catfish — sees plenty of his peers hooked by the lure of cheap Chinese product. As Chinese catfish take a larger share of the American market, prices of domestic filets increase to offset the losses. Domestic catfish jumped nearly 20 percent in price shortly after Soul Fish opened its doors.

Not all catfish restaurants in the city are as committed to buying local, however. That crispy-fried filet you enjoy at your favorite joint may not be catfish at all but Vietnamese tra or basa. “You’d be surprised at the number of places that claim to be a catfish restaurant that don’t even sell true catfish,” says Kenneth Mitchell of Sysco, a wholesale food distributor.

Farmers in the region are battling to force restaurants to include “country of origin” labeling on their menus. They won a modest victory when the FDA barred Vietnamese fish distributors from calling tra catfish in 2001. Vietnam accounted for 84 percent of “catfish” imports prior to that ruling, but now the amount of Vietnamese imported fish has fallen off considerably. The hope is that “country of origin” labeling will have the same effect on Chinese imports.

Mitchell says that he sells 900 cases of Chinese catfish to restaurants in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi every week.

Domestic fish costs about $55 per case, while Chinese fish runs $45 per case; cases average 45 pieces of fish. It’s the marginal buyers who keep the imports coming. “There’ll always be those people who try to find the cheapest price on anything they can call a catfish,” Mitchell notes.

“We’ve been trying to get a labeling law passed, ” Dees says. “As far as the catfish industry being able to go down to Jackson and shove that through, we can’t. In the scheme of things, we’re small potatoes.”

Farmers are urging the USDA to inspect and grade catfish as it does beef to establish industry-wide quality control. “We think it may help put the difference between us and the Chinese fish,” Dees says.

Big business

Aquaculture is a booming business in China. The government took an active role in rebuilding the industry after inland development, dam construction, and industrial pollution stunted China’s inland fisheries in the 1970s. It stocked rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. The annual output of China’s inland fisheries jumped from 300,000 tons in 1978 to 1.76 billion tons in 1996.

Chinese catfish exports scarcely existed 10 years ago, but their prominence in the American market is expanding rapidly. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. has imported 10 million pounds of Chinese catfish so far this year, against four million for this time last year. The situation does not bode well for producers in the region. Arkansas catfish farmer Carl Jeffers explains: “That volume translates into a reduced processing volume for the U.S. industry. It’s only a matter of time before the price declines because of the amount of imports.”

War Eagle

Though American farmers find themselves fighting Asian imports today, the U.S. has helped enable the growth of the Chinese catfish industry. Alabama is both the second leading producer of farm-raised catfish and also home to one of the world’s preeminent fishery-science departments at Auburn University.

The Auburn fishery department transfers scientific data and know-how to developing countries. It assists in installing fishery infrastructure and works on sustainability of aquaculture crops in a variety of settings. It also brings foreign agriculture officials to the South to show them how it’s done.

“Auburn hosted a Chinese delegation in 1996 that visited my farm,” Jeffers recalls. “They took notes and were very interested in what it took to raise catfish. You might say, in a roundabout way, I facilitated the Chinese invasion.”

Neither Auburn nor Jeffers is likely to have touted the use of antibiotics in fish. The Chinese have developed their own aquaculture methods. While American-farmed catfish swim in ponds, Chinese fish are grown in pens. Water quality may be an issue. “They’re growing their fish in polluted waters,” Dees says. “That’s part of why they have to give them antibiotics, to keep them alive.”

David Rouse, chair of the Auburn fishery department notes, “We have hosted some Chinese groups, but we’ve been very careful on that, particularly in the past 10 years.”

Rouse adds that anyone who wants to start a catfish farm in China can find the needed information from a variety of sources. There are no trade secrets, he says. “All of that information is on the Internet. Anybody who wants to farm or set up a processing plant, it’s out there.”

Banned by the FDA

The substances found in Chinese catfish samples in Mississippi and Alabama, ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin, are used to treat potentially life-threatening infections in humans. The problem is that by ingesting them in food we may promote the evolution of pathogens resistant to these medicines, rendering them useless as treatment — though one would have to eat an awful lot of catfish for a long time to develop antibiotic resistance.

According to FDA records, ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin have been found in shipments of catfish and basa bound for the U.S. from China and Vietnam. Shrimp from Vietnam, Venezuela, Thailand, and Malaysia have tested positive for the antibiotic chloramphenicol. Gentian violet and malachite green, anti-fungal or anti-bacterial agents applied to fish grown in tight quarters, have been found in shrimp from Mexico, eel from Taiwan, Vietnamese basa, and Chinese eel, tilapia, and catfish.

These substances pose a variety of health risks to humans. Chloramphenicol holds a slight risk for aplastic anemia, and gentian violet has been linked to mouth cancer. A Canadian study in 1992 determined that people who eat fish contaminated with malachite green are at risk for liver tumors.

“They aren’t approved for use in human food,” an FDA spokesperson told the Flyer. “They should not be present in food in any amount.”

Outlook: Murky

Scientists and farmers see the future of the Southern catfish industry differently. “I think China’s water quality is such that they won’t be able to produce catfish very long,” Rouse says. “They have to use antibiotics just to keep the fish healthy. It’s a fish that has expensive feed, so they’re going to tend to grow cheaper, easier fish. The [Chinese] catfish are probably going to go away in a year.”

Jeffers has seen the experts proven incorrect before. “We always felt that shipping expenses would be prohibitive for going outside the U.S. and assumed that other countries were the same,” Jeffers says. “Obviously we were wrong.”

“The catfish industry has already atrophied in the last five years — there’s not much fat left to trim,” Dees adds.