Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • This easy migration of people from city to city is still hard for me to get used to. Seventeen years ago when I was traveling between Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, they all had a ring of policemen around them checking identity papers. I was in China trying to get through those rings of security during the Tiananmen Square uprising. I remember traveling with wire service photographers and driving through those checkpoints at 90 mph and seeing the policeman jump up and down on the dais—literally hopping mad—but there was nothing they could do because they did not have guns or radios. After being absent 17 years, I made (technically) five trips to China in about a one-year period. The growth is so fast paced I could feel the energy and the stress on the street. It makes you realize that our empire is over, but you can’t really understand that without being there. Even though the NYT has multiple stories, every day, on the growth and complexity of the Chinese economy, the average American has little idea what this means other than a fear that increased Chinese fuel consumption will somehow affect what they put in the tank of their SUV. Robert Frank photographed twentieth-century America, recording our coming of age—the baby boom, the start of television, car culture, modular housing, and relative wealth distributed throughout the middle class. His photographs are of progress, technology, plenty, but also the weary faces of waitresses and elevator operators who were desperately trying to join the economic party. Those 1950s faces remind me of a line in Leslie Chang’s story about modern China: “What looks like freedom just feels like pressure.”
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  • People enjoying drinks and conversation at a bar.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176546.JPG
  • People shopping at a mall with cheap goods.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176448.JPG
  • People on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176348.JPG
  • People on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176346.JPG
  • People on the 236 bus in Guangzhou.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176324.JPG
  • Kids posing with people in Cultural Revolution costumes at a car show.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176269.JPG
  • People watching a video of their dog on a computer.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176476.JPG
  • People near the statue of Deng Xiao Ping in Shenzhen park.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176288.JPG
  • A crowd of people in a walkway.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176282.JPG
  • Restored Colonial colonnades edge Lima's Plaza de Armas, bringing many people into the streets of Peru's capital city. The era when the City of Kings was founded by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1535, established it as the showplace of Spanish South America.
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  • Pilgrims and local people bathe in the sacred Ganges River.
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  • People bathing in the sacred Ganges River in Varanasi.
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  • A truck stuck in a muddy road with people standing about watching.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7112_763243.JPG
  • A group of Umbero people look with wonder at a polaroid photograph seeing their image for the first time.
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  • People at an upscale shopping mall.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176516.JPG
  • People at an upscale shopping mall.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176515.JPG
  • People walking in Shenzhen on a rainy night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176293.JPG
  • Resettled people in a community neighboring a gold mine.
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people is reflected in a window.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People wait in line for food in Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327766.JPG
  • Brimmed hats mark traditional costume of people of the Ecuadorian Sierra.
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  • Young people dance to music at a bar in a district full of clubs that attract night life in Quito.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512708.jpg
  • El Molo people in the village of Komote in Kenya's Lake Turkana region.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327865.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327791.JPG
  • People wait in line for food in Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327765.JPG
  • People scavenging Guayaquil's trash dump to find food, clothing and treasures to take home.
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  • People walk along streets and pedestrian bridges in the historic center of Quito.
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  • Resettled people in a community neighboring a gold mine.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7339_1222974.JPG
  • People ignore the monsoon rain while strolling the streets on Christmas eve.
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  • Local people try to extract their truck stuck in the monsoon mud.
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  • A street scene of Pontic Greek people is reflected in a window.
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  • A male figure entices people into a Beijing chain restaurant.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People ice-fishing on the Ural River in front of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant.
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  • A water taxi ferries people to and from the airport on an island.
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  • People enjoying a riverboat cruise on the Ohio River.
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  • People sitting outside a bar in the Over the Rhine district of Cincinnati, Ohio.
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  • People run on the Great Lawn under the canopy framework of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
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  • People play in the surf along the beach during soft summer light in La Serena, Chile's premier beach resort. La Serena enjoys a transitional climate between the arid northern desert of the Atacama and the pleasant Mediterranean climate of the central coast.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187584.jpg
  • People play in the surf in La Serena, Chile's premier beach resort north of Santiago. The white sand beach is rain free nine months of the year and enjoys a transitional climate between the arid northern desert of the Atacama and the pleasant Mediterranean climate of the central coast.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187581.jpg
  • People walk through Kenya's Lake Turkana region.
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  • People living in the Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
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  • Local people cut firewood and make charcoal for the refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
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  • El Molo people at the water's edge in Komote in Kenya's Lake Turkana region.
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  • People butcher a camel in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327792.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327779.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327777.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327770.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327764.JPG
  • People living in Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lake Turkana.
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  • Young people salute the flag during a ceremony honoring veterans.
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  • Tourists photograph a Rapa Nui native dancer in body paint. Approximately 6,000 Rapa Nui live on Easter Island, which belongs to Chile. They numbered only 111 in 1877 after slave traders and disease decimated the population. <br />
Most people associate Easter Island with the famous, ancient statues known as moai and are unaware that descendants of the Polynesian culture inhabit the island today.
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  • An ancient Moai statue stands silently under the stars and night sky on Easter Island, the most remote inhabited island in the world. <br />
Monolithic figures were carved by the Rapa Nui people between approximately 1250 and 1700 A.D.. Many of the more than 900 statues are still at a quarry and some are lie along the roads. But hundreds of the 33 foot high moai weighing more than 80 tons  of volcanic tuff were transported and set on stone platforms around the island's perimeter. <br />
<br />
It is believed that the statues may have "walked" to their destinations by workers using ropes to rock them side to side although some archaeologists disagree thinking they may have been rolled on logs although the island is now treeless.<br />
<br />
The nearest population center is Chile (2300 miles) and the nearest Polynesian center in the opposite direction is Tahiti (2600 miles). Easter Island, (Rapa Nui, Isla de Pascua) is famous for Moai, tall statues carved out of rock that stand guard
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  • Women from the rural countryside learn to be maids for the newly wealthy class. They learn to cook and iron at the Fuping Vocational Skills Training School. Li responds to flying grease in one of the cooking classes.<br />
<br />
Since opening up its economy in 1978 and moving toward a market economy, China has lifted about 400 million people out of poverty, according to the World Bank. But this has led to wide income inequalities that the Communist Party is trying to address through its notion of a “harmonious society” that has a more even distribution of the benefits of recent decades of speedy economic growth. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who go to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. Men often get construction jobs while women work in cheap-labor factories. So many migrants leave their homes looking for work they overburden the rail system. In the Hunan province, 52 people were trampled to death in the late 1990s when 10,000 migrants were herded onto a freight train. To stem the flow of migrants, officials in Hunan and Sichuan have placed restrictions on the use of trains and buses by rural people. In some cities, the migrants almost outnumber the residents. One young girl told National Geographic, “All the young people leave our village. I’m not going back. Many can’t even afford a bus ticket and hitchhike to Beijing.” Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one.
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  • Residents of a remote village  in Kamchatka rush to meet the supply helicopter. Original inhabitants Khailino are indigenous. Dogs run wild in the street and locals on board a motorcycle race to try to get a woman on board to be taken where she can get medical attention. <br />
<br />
In Northern Kamchatka, indigenous Koryak people and Russians came for “Northern money” when the Soviet Union wanted to tame the area. Income paid was eight times more than a similar job in Moscow, so some people figured out how to get all the necessary permits to work. When default happened, no one in the remote outposts received salaries.  People made a living from salmon caviar and created fishing brigades with distribution systems. Living in a very small community of 700 residents, and the temperatures drop to –40° in the winter, everyone works hard to merely survive and are kind to each other.
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  • China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition that began in 2003 is one of the largest international auto shows in China. This event has an exhibition ground measuring 85,000 square meters and it filled eight exhibition halls. Over 370 exhibitors from 20 other countries and regions, took part in this exhibition, which was covered by more than 1,600 news reporters representing upwards of 510 TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and online media at home and abroad. 120,000 people attended.
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  • Workers repair electrical power lines above pedestrians. The need for electrical power is so great in Shanghai that migrant workers are hired to hook them up by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist and pull it across an already stressed net by walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  There is a (dirty) coal power plant coming online every four to five days in China that could power a city the size of San Diego. Energy is wasted on an epic scale. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages last year. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. Thus, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions and accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. The lack of independent scrutiny and accountability lies behind the massive waste in the Chinese government and destruction of the environment. Air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
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  • Wearing a black hat, a sister waits while her brother unhooks a horse from a sled. Some Ladinos choose a simple life in LaVal the Dolomites, a village so isolated that the people there have their own language. In small villages, population continues to drop and older people go unmarried.
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  • Men sitting outside a shop on a street known for wedding attire. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176322.TIF
  • The need for electrical power is so great in Shanghai that migrant workers are hired to hook them up by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist and pulling it across an already stressed grid by walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  There is a (dirty) coal power plant coming online every four to five days in China that could power a city the size of San Diego. Energy is wasted on an epic scale. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages last year. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. Thus, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions and accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. The lack of independent scrutiny and accountability lies behind the massive waste in the Chinese government and destruction of the environment. Air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176327.TIF
  • Aerial photo shows rows of identical houses in Huaxi Village (Farmer’s Village). It is emblematic of the beginning of the massive urbanization of China and of the largest human migration in history from the rural areas of China into the cities. In 2008, these  workers villas in wealthy Huaxi village included some of the industries in the background. Villagers didn't migrate because they changed their model rural farm into a modern industrial city. <br />
<br />
This co-op has been a model farm for 45 years. They were capitalists before it was legal in China. They started factories, but worked in them with no windows in secret. When government officials came to inspect, they sent all the workers out to the fields and disguised the factories. Huaxi became the first and most successful capitalist exploitation of the collective. This model farm became so successful they started selling shares in the 60's. They sold the shares "underground" The residents now buy shares or work for shares to purchase these homes.  When shares were first offered, they went for 2000RMB, now they go for 30,000 RMB. In 2008, 30,000 officials visited this place to see how it runs effectively. There are not many model farms left in China, and none with this wealth. The model farm runs about 80 factories and In 2008, Huaxi was held up by the government as the most successful transition from farmer to the socialist/capitalist world. But more recently, in the face of economic pressures, Huaxi Village has gone bankrupt.
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  • Guangzhou has huge live reef fish restaurants that have 3 or 400 chinese chefs and live crocodiles on the floor of the mall-like area outside the restaurant. The crocs mouths were taped shut, and they would be meals soon, but people would be walking along, talking on their cell phones, not paying attention and trip over live, hissing, charging crocodiles.
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  • Women from the rural countryside learn skills at the Fuping Vocational Skills Training School to be maids for the newly wealthy comfort class. Since opening up its economy in 1978 and moving toward a market economy, China has lifted about 400 million people out of poverty, but this has led to wide income inequalities. The Communist Party is trying to address this through its notion of a “harmonious society” that has a more even distribution of the benefits of recent decades of speedy economic growth. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who go to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7890_1386317.TIF
  • This is the Armani Club in the Liu lin Road area. This scene is a mix of young folks, mistresses, and male and female prostitutes. Bars are a little crazier in the south of China where there is new wealth.  Young people demand nice places to eat and drink. By 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 is expected to swell 61%, to 500 million, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union.
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  • Deng Xiaoping’s strategy after Tiananmen was to buy off the people by means of economic growth. Part of that growth is to bulldoze the old buildings and make gleaming new high-rise condos for the newly affluent to live in. Chinese prefer to buy into a brand new condo. Newspapers advertise homes for sale by owners as “used.” Buildings look good when they go up, but they will only look good for 20 years or so.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176342.TIF
  • The Yumin Restaurant in Guangzhou is a huge, live reef fish restaurant employing 400 Chinese chefs that has live crocodiles on the floor of the mall-like area. The crocs’ mouths are taped shut, and they will be meals soon, but people just walk by, talking on their cell phones, not paying attention and tripping over live, hissing, charging crocodiles. The pricey, exotic meat—steamed, braised, or stewed—is believed to cure cough and prevent cancer. “People don’t care about the cost,” says manager Wang Jianfei, “they just care about health.”
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  • In villages between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti Ecosystem, truckloads of rotting fish carcasses are driven to the local markets and sold. <br />
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The filets were cut off in the processing plants in Musoma and shipped to Europe overnight, and Africans get only the bones. <br />
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This is a cotton production region and these people have just sold their crops.  They have money to buy good food, but don’t have the option to buy their own fish from their own lakes.
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  • Dressed up in a suit and bow tie, a young boy patiently waits for cake to be offered while attending a wedding reception in the restored Colonial colonnades edge of Lima's Plaza de Armas.  Well dressed guests mingle at the party towering over the youth.
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  • Models walk down a runway and across stage lights for a high fashion bridal show featuring designer gowns. The cosmopolitan city of Monterrey is modern and industrial attracting young people with money to spend.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187042.jpg
  • Dried shark fins sold at the Guangzhou Fish Market.<br />
Shark fins are used to make shark fin soup, a delicacy once prepared exclusively for the Chinese emperors and nobility. The cartilage from the fin is carefully dried and prepared, and used as an ingredient in a soup flavored with seafood or chicken broth and herbs.<br />
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The demand for shark-fin soup has rocketed. It is still associated with privilege and social rank - a bowl of soup can cost up to US$100 - but the explosive growth in the Chinese economy means that hundreds of millions of people can now afford this luxury. Many consider it de rigueur at important events such as weddings, birthdays, business banquets and during Chinese New Year celebrations.
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  • The joke is the "crane" is the official bird of China. They are everywhere. This is the China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition, and one of the biggest auto shows on the planet. When people have MORE STUFF it also creates more demand for resources. China already consumes more of seven of the eight most basic resources on the planet (the eighth being oil). They need THEIR plastic objects, their cars, their air conditioning. There is a (dirty) coal power plant coming online every four to five days in China that could power a city the size of San Diego.
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  • Southern Metropolitan News surveys since 1989 cite Guangzhou residents as saying that “love” comes after “money” on the value ladder. In 2008 “love” slipped even lower for most people, according to a survey by the Guangzhou Social Trend and Public Opinion Study Center. The center has conducted a survey each year since 1990. Another finding of the survey is that money has universally meant more than love in the eyes of women in Guangzhou for all years the survey has been given.
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  • Guang Hui Plaza | Shanghai, China  in the west part of Shanghai–Xugiahui area. Public displays of affection are rare, but these two young people are comfortable sitting close to each other and watching the world go by.
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  • Maternity Ward at Mulago Hospital in Kampala.  Head of OB/GYN was taught by Jotham Musinguzi who became head of Population and Development Dept. for the government.  Jotham recently retired because he did not agree with the current president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Museveni has a military background and just wants to get BOOTS ON THE GROUND. Jotham said he wants to bump Uganda's population up to 60M before he even starts to worry about infrastructure for all these people. Uganda is about 30M now.  About half of Uganda's population is under 15 and life expectancy is about 50.  Population has doubled from 1990 to now.
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  • A farm family heads home after working in the fields in LaVal under the vista of the Dolomites.  The mountain cliffs are so steep that no glaciers formed on them. The Alps thrust up when tectonic plates collided between Africa and Eurasia.  The Ladin people living in the mountain region have a close bond with nature and the outdoors.
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  • A Ladin funeral procession seen trough a lace curtained window in a small village of LaVal in the Alps where the people are isolated and speak German and Italian but also Ladin, their own ethnic language.
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  • Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions of the country moving to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. An estimated 230 million Chinese in 2010, roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. Men often get construction jobs while women work in cheap-labor factories. So many migrants leave their homes looking for work they overburden the rail system. In the Hunan province, 52 people were trampled to death in the late 1990s when 10,000 migrants were herded onto a freight train. To stem the flow of migrants, officials in Hunan and Sichuan have placed restrictions on the use of trains and buses by rural people. In some cities, the migrants almost outnumber the residents. One young girl told National Geographic, “All the young people leave our village. I’m not going back. Many can’t even afford a bus ticket and hitchhike to Beijing.” Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one. From the New York Times: “As a result, China’s rulers face a dilemma: the very policies that cater to the urban middle class come at the expense of the rural poor. The revised law on property ownership pushed through despite objections from old-line conservatives, the law for the first time gave equal weight to both state- and private- ownership rights. But a look at the fine print shows that the law only protects things dear to the rising middle class: real estate, cars, stock-market assets. Farmers, on the other hand, will still be unable to purchase their land and instead will be forced to lease plots from the government.
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  • The grooms antics amuse the bride during a wedding reception in Khailino in Kamchatka, Russia. It is important to note that some of the theater of this wedding happened because it is Russian tradition. The community has endured great hardship and a people who have adjusted to being really kind to each other to all survive together.
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  • A bride's father supplies caviar from his fishing camp. He got enough caviar to feed 200 people at his daughter’s wedding. <br />
<br />
The bride is one quarter indigenous—there is, however, an easy mix between indigenous and white Russians. This family decided to have a wedding although the bride is seven months pregnant. Common-law marriages are the norm among the indigenous people, so the entire town prepared for almost a year for this event.  Most of the decorations were brought in by MI-8 helicopter.  <br />
<br />
Russia wanted to “tame” the salmon zones in Kamchatka, so some moved to the northern communities that were technically war zones with the United States.  To do so, they had to have connections and get permits, then move to where they make eight times what they can in Moscow in government wages. When default happened and their state-subsidized salaries disappeared, all they were left with was the resource—salmon.
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  • A family meal in Gandiol. Senegal’s national dish is thieboudienne.  Eaten from the salty coast to the arid heartland, thieboudienne literally means rice & fish and is a staple.  For a country known to produce some of the tallest and strongest people on earth, fish is an essential source of protein.
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  • Beloved icons, St. Bernard dogs were once indispensable for their abilities to save people buried by avalanches. Although replaced by modern equipment, traditions die hard and the dogs are maintained as a tourist attraction.  200 years ago St Bernard dogs saved 45 of Napoleon’s soldiers buried in an avalanche—the dog was bayoneted to death when one soldier thought he was being attacked by a bear.  St. Bernards are cared for by a foundation in Martigny, France.
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  • A diner watches people cross El Zócalo, Mexico City's grandiose main square, from the elegant Gran Hotel's rooftop restaurant. Built atop ruins of the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, the zócalo is now surrounded by sprawling Spanish colonial architecture, the most prominent being the Metropolitan Cathedral.
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  • A Koryak man dries fish in his summer camp that will feed his family through the winter. Koryaks are an indigenous people of Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East, who inhabit the coastlands of the Bering Sea to the south of the Anadyr basin and the country to the immediate north of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The koryak are typically split into two groups. The coastal people Nemelan (or Nymylan) meaning ‘village dwellers’ due to their sedentary fishing habits and the inland Koryaks, reindeer herders called Chauchen (or Chauchven) meaning ‘rich in reindeer’ who are more nomadic.
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  • The Armani Club is in the Liu lin Road area attract a scene of young people.
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  • The dancers, wait staff, and performers are all migrant workers from Xinjiang Province in Northwest China. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who go to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China has been experiencing the largest mass migration in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • These buildings will disappear because the property is just too valuable to leave them. For the moment, however, the government has cooled the housing market by imposing a 20 percent resale tax. If you want to see what this block will look like in the future you can just go to the City Planning Museum off People’s Square in the Puxi side of Shanghai. A 3D model shows not only the buildings that are already done, but also those planned for the future. These buildings will all be torn down.
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  • The dancers, wait staff, and performers are all migrant workers from Xinjiang Province in Northwest China. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who go to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China has been experiencing the largest mass migration in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—and 500 to perhaps 800 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • This scene is a mix of young folks, mistresses, and male and female prostitutes. Bars are a little crazier in the south of China where there is new wealth.  Young people demand nice places to eat and drink. By 2015, the number of Chinese adults under 30 is expected to swell 61%, to 500 million, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union.
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  • A  flamboyant bar in south China attracts new wealth. In the Baby Face Club in Guangzhou, the bartender sets up a stack of glasses, then pours a flaming liquid over the top to make one of the most popular drinks, a Flaming Lamborghini. Young people demand nice places to eat and drink. The news bombards us every day about how China’s economic engine will change our world. At the center of this engine is the “Little Capitalist” class or ”Comfort Class.” This group embraces Deng Xiaoping’s revolutionary proclamation, “To get rich is glorious.” After 50 years of pent up frustration and stoically weathering the worst social experiment in history—Mao’s Cultural Revolution—this class is ready to lead the charge for the most voracious consumption on the planet. Of the five major commodities (grain, meat, oil, coal and steel), only oil consumption is less than the United States. This consumption is estimated to increase by 18 percent each year for the next decade, compared with 2 percent for the U.S.<br />
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The number of Chinese adults under 30 was expected to swell 61%, to 500 million by 2015, equivalent to the entire population of the European Union. Ironically populated by children whose parent’s lives were ruined by Mao precisely because they were capitalists, this “Comfort Class” came of age after Tiananmen Square in 1989. They are politically apathetic. To them, Tiananmen Square was a failure and they just want a nice life. Estimates vary, but the higher claims are that there are 150 million in the comfort class, which would equal the size of the U.S. middle class. As their culture turbo-evolves and our culture devolves it is hard not to compare both in terms of political apathy, cushy lifestyle, and preoccupation with the pursuit of consumer goods.
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