What a public toilet in China taught me about Trump

I keep this book on my coffee table in fond remembrance of the Republican Party

I went to law school at night because I had a day job working for, believe it or not, a republican governor. Governor Orr walked the talk, and I respected him.

Orr was such a big believer in spreading democracy through global commerce, he forged an early, formal trade relationship with China. Indiana’s partnership with Zhejiang Province promoted economic growth between the two regions, and the trade relationships it nurtured continue to this day.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Governor Orr was also a dinosaur. He was one of the last principled republicans to walk the halls of government.

I have missed real republicans since their tragic mass extinction, and mourn their disappearance. I sometimes leaf through “All my friends are dead,” a book about the last dinosaur, in their memory.

What I learned in China

I left Indiana to finish law school at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai. Studying the Chinese Commercial Code paid off, in that I could fake it enough to get a job later, but the most valuable lessons I learned in China came from outside the classroom.

First, I learned that communists in China placed more value on public surveillance than on public health. This was the nineties, when Chinese people were overly plentiful, so it’s possible Deng Xiaoping didn’t much care if his people died young, fewer mouths to feed and all.

The government’s dismissive attitude toward—and its failure to fund—public health manifested most clearly in China’s lack of plumbing. Their public toilets were nasty affairs, consisting of holes carved in wooden planks that hovered over a long, shared, communal trough that smelled like the color of necrosis.

Money for plumbing was spent on spies instead

The telling contrast with these non-funded public toilets was this: Xiaoping didn’t care enough about public health to modernize China’s plumbing, but he cared mightily- some might say obsessively- about what Chinese citizens read in the privacy of their homes.

As a group of foreign students, we’d been told to bring inexpensive gifts for the new friends we’d meet. Chinese youth loved Americans back then, so they wanted gifts reflecting Americana: Levis 501s, packs of Marlboros, CDs they couldn’t yet play in their cassette players.

More than any of these things, however, the young Chinese we met wanted western magazines. Sports, fashion, or cars, the subject didn’t matter, Chinese students wanted to study them to improve their English, and to glance at life in the west.

But a few days after these exchanges started, we found out that every magazine and newspaper we gave them was confiscated by the government. As soon as we dispersed at night, authorities crawled out of the woodwork to take each and every magazine, every brochure, every piece of paper we shared. Not one Chinese student was allowed to read them because their Communist government did not want them to know what the world looked like outside China.

Messed-up priorities

Cocky law students that we were, we asked our new friends how many government spies were watching us at any given moment, and how many descended on them every night to confiscate the Rolling Stoneswe gave them. We calculated the costs nationwide, assuming starvation wages, and deduced that Xiaoping’s government was spending three times what it would have cost to modernize China’s plumbing, just to pay spies whose only job, whose only purpose, was to keep Chinese citizens uninformed.

It was a lesson in autocracy I will never forget.

Today we see similar upside down priorities parading in the Trump administration. In executive orders that would make Xi Jinping proud, Trump hints at siccing the military on US citizens, and announces that federal agents will now scour the social media pages of every student coming into the country. We don’t have spies snatching magazines, but Fox News keeps 45% of the country uninformed while Trump tries to put other networks out of business.

In his Big, Beautiful Bill, Trump wants to spend a trillion dollars on the military while gutting medical research, education, and healthcare. Trump wants to let an alcoholic who can’t shut up about “lethality” manage a trillion dollar defense budget. Hegseth and Trump keep flexing empty-brain machismo, dreaming of nineteenth century conquests despite Trump stressing isolationism. What’s the purpose of a trillion dollar military when we’re shirking our national security alliances, including in Ukraine? Gold trinkets in the sky and ego-stroke parades are expensive, but they’re not that expensive.

Venom of the red scorpion

The second lesson I learned in China wasn’t about plumbing or spying. It was about science.

The university had these wide, white marble stairs that curved around to the first floor, where the base opened to the front desk. I was walking down the stairs when I almost stepped on a blood red scorpion. I don’t mean russet or sepia toned, I mean that scorpion was blood red, like a crayon in a primary color box. I was spooked by its aggressively curled tail, so I motioned the guy at the front desk, and within nano-seconds, a least twenty scientists were positioned in a circle around the creature, two and three lab coats deep.

I later learned that scorpion venom is one of the most rare and precious materials in the world. As a medical compound, Stanford University’s Richard Zare said it would “cost $39 million to produce a gallon of it.” Biotech scientists have only recently developed applications using the venom for pain management and pain blocking, immunosuppressive therapies, and drugs to treat glioma, leukemia, human neuroblastoma, brain tumor, melanoma, prostate cancer, and breast cancer.

Will the US survive its know-nothing leader?

My take away was that scientists in China are serious people. They immediately recognized the medicinal value of the scorpion, as well as the research gift that had landed in their laps. Again, the contrasts with Trump’s America sting:

University scientists in China are making people healthier; research scientists in the US are looking for a job. In China, science is revered; in Trump’s America, science is silenced.

Just this week, Chinese scientists enabled paralyzed patients to walk again using a world-first brain-spinal implant. Just this week in the US, advanced clinical trials on everything from cancer to dementia were defunded.

While Trump is trying to ruin universities and end scientific research, letting China pull ahead, he’s expanding the use of the military to “enforce the law,” and quadrupling federal resources for prisons and detention-related facilities. Just like authoritarians in China in the nineties, instead of taking care of the nation’s health, Trump is expending vast resources to surveil and control us.

But if a red scorpion appeared on the steps of the Capitol, Trump would stomp on it, brag about how brave he was, and blame Biden if he gets stung.

I never saw a scorpion as metaphor until now.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.