Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Running out of water
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Water is essential to life on earth yet only 71% of people have access to safely managed drinking water. In China, only 14% of water usage goes to the basic needs of hydration, sanitation, hygene, and cooking. 62% of China's water is used in argiculture and 22% in industry and power generation. China's population has more than doubled since 1962. That growth, combined with the country's industrial rise, as well as heavier use of fertilizer and pesticides, has led to widespread water pollution. In 2014, China had just a quarter of the renewable freshwater resources per person than Americans did and one third of the global average. The U.S. takes advantage of its higher-than-average freshwater resources by using the most water per capita of any country—three times more than China uses. Of course, water in neither country is evenly distributed. California has the world's fifth largest economy and the value of its agriculture output is tenth, just behind Japan and Russia. But, to the irritation of some and at great cost, California needs to draw on distant water supplies to irrigate crops and provide for the daily needs of its 40 million people. China's South to North Water Diversion Project is far from complete, but is already bringing water 1,400 kilometers (almost 900 miles) to the relatively dry north. It required moving hundreds of thousands of people out of the way and a lot of problems for local economies.
Critics of the massive Chinese project argued that the country would have been wiser to reduce waste and pollution. Water quality has improved in recent years, but still leaves much to be desired. Government data is used in the charts below. Only 60% of China's surface water can be made safe for drinking.
The pollution problem, of course, is not China's alone. In 2016, the World Health Organization reported that unsafe water killed 842,000 people a year. 40% of those people were children under 5 years old. Managing our scarce supply of fresh water should be a global priority. More needs to be done to improve water conservation and to stem water pollution.
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Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
RSVP link: https://forms.gle/1zer188RE9dCS6Ho6
Events
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author Mike Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.