Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

I received an email from a reader recently, pointing me in the direction of a website that concerns itself with statistics of various sorts. Now, I don’t know if this is your sort of thing, but I simply love statistics, so MLHQ has been knee deep in numbers for the last few days.

Did you know, for instance, that the value of the prostitution industry in Australia is twenty seven million U.S. dollars? I’m frankly staggered, and have to assume they aren’t including all the keen amateurs who marry for money or expect blokes to buy them drinks and steak dinners. The figure for the U.K. is more realistic, around a billion dollars, which is just a little over half of what gets done in much smaller Taiwan ($1.84B). I was not surprised to see that Thailand, long regarded as the sex capital of the world, has a annual turnover of 4.3 billion dollars, but I was a bit surprised to see the Philippines at six billion green-backs. American men are obviously not getting any from their wives, because they are spending 14.6 billion dollars annually on prostitutes, but in Germany, where the industry is legal and regulated, the figure is eighteen billion!

In China, it’s seventy three billion dollars a year! That’s USD$73,000,000,000 per year!

So, you might be thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of poon getting tanged, but after all there must be a reason Shanghai is called ‘the Whore of the Orient’, right?” And you would be correct, because most economists I’ve talked to, quietly reckon that prostitution is not only the only State-owned business that turns a profit, it also accounts for between ten and twenty percent of true GDP. Add in the fact that Chinese women really are the most unfaithful in the world, and you can understand why China has the worlds highest rate of syphilis – and it’s growing by 30% every year (that’s a faster rate than any other country).

But it isn’t the only big number you see when you start getting into the statistics. Take illegal logging, for instance. That’s 3.8 billion dollars right there, and that’s only what the Party admits to. Music, film, DVD and software piracy add up to more than 20 billion, while the counterfeit goods market is worth 60 billion. China’s contribution to the global drug trade is 17 billion dollars annually, and human trafficking brings in another 2 billion every year, almost as much as the cigarette smuggling industry. To get an idea of volume, a Burmese girl between the age of 16 and 18 who has been snatched from her home and sent to China (and several thousand are every year), is worth approximately $700 when sold as a bride in the countryside. A Chinese girl would be worth far less. The black market is worth nearly a hundred and sixty billion dollars a year!

The reports say that one third of homosexual men in China are married, but I might have read it wrong – it could have been one third of married men are raving queers, which seems rather more likely. Thirty-five percent of organ transplants take place via the application of forged documents, with almost all the rest being harvested from prisoners killed to order. Ninety percent of female North Korean refugees in China end up sold either as wives or prostitutes and sixty thousand Chinese children are abducted and sold annually. Non-performing loans are estimated to be worth nine hundred billion dollars! Seventy three million sharks are killed every year for their fins, 100,000 pangolin’s find their way to the dinner table, and 3,000 tons of protected and endangered animals are annually smuggled in from Vietnam alone for the restaurant trade (that’s why I only eat Panda).

These are big numbers, almost too big to comprehend. Let’s look at numbers you can get your head around, shall we? Like the price to be smuggled out of China and into another country – average price to go to Italy is $15,000 but that probably includes buying off every Italian official in the whole country. But if you’re Chinese and don’t have that kind of money, then why not just stay home and dull the pain of your worthless life with drugs? Pure heroine is cheap at $36.20 a gram, Meth is $6 a gram, Ecstasy is $4.50 per tablet, and Marijuana is a great deal at eighty cents a gram. And if it’s really bad and you decide to end your life, you always have the option of breathing the worlds most polluted air or eating the local food, though I wouldn’t recommend it due to the intense suffering you’re likely to experience (world’s highest rate of food poisoning). Hell, buy yourself a bear paw before you check out; a snap at $50.

Well over half of all the world’s seized counterfeit goods come from China, as do 90% of the counterfeit goods in the whole of the United States (64% in Europe). Chinese organised crime (which in China means ‘working with the blessings of the Party’) earned 3.3 billion dollars for the nation in Italy alone last year. Industrial espionage against the United States is worth in excess of fifty billion dollars a year!

Not one single Chinese policeman has ever arrested the top leaders for crimes against humanity, however.

Folks, I’m not making this stuff up – these numbers are based on official sources.

I love statistics, so if there’s any readers here who consider themselves a ‘numbers’ kind of person, and would like to discuss these shameful and disgusting statistics, feel free to be ignored in the comments section below.

I’m off to see if it still costs $10 to get my knob polished outside the nearby school.