ABSTRACT

The original Bhopal incident in December 1984 was, by any standards, an awful disaster for the community within which the Union Carbide factory was located. The tragedy of Bhopal is that of a society without the control mechanisms, without the social, political, legal, economic and cultural mechanisms to control the excesses of capitalist minimalism. In this way Bhopal has become emblematic; it encapsulates and magnifies so many issues that were not only relevant then, but sadly are equally or more relevant today. Bhopal is symbolic of a sort of cultural collision that provides the raw ingredients for similar human and ecosystem disasters around the world. China has sought to manage this collision with a one country, two systems' approach that allows the parallel coexistence of the state controlled industries and the inward investments of Western capitalist enterprises: it remains to be seen whether such institutional schizophrenia is viable.