Yea, I don’t get it either.
But the Spiegel is reporting that several German companies with factories outside of Beijing are considering legal action so they do not have to close their operations during the Olympics. The Chinese government has ordered nearly 1,000 factories to halt production during the games in a last ditch attempt to provide clean air over the city, but the Germans are having none of that.
The five companies are among some 1,100 businesses, many of them located up to an hour away from the city center, which will have to put production on hold for the duration of the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games immediately following. In addition to Beijing closures, some 267 companies in the industrial city of Tangshan north of the city will have to cease operations and 40 factories in the nearby port city of Tianjin are closing, according to Reuters. Factories in three other provinces will also have to shut down.
Of course, only Americans and Chinese are polluters in the world. The Germans probably have some excuse why they should be allowed to operate whereas the rest need to shut down. I wait for yet another example of European “Do as I say not as I do.”
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