Wisconsin, a ginseng growing state, is looking to China to bolster its economy.
WAUSAU — In a cavernous warehouse amid rolling hills and dairy farms, a group of farmers recently gathered around a buyer in a conversation heralding a sea change in the United States.
“I don’t think you Americans get it,” said the buyer, dressed casually in designer brands and sporting a watch worth as much as the mud-splattered GM trucks in the parking lot outside. “We need quality. We demand quality. Top quality. If you work with me, we can win together. But if you don’t, there’s nothing I can do.”
Being harangued by a pharmaceutical company executive from China was new for these burly farmers, but no one complained. These tough men from the American Midwest treated their Chinese guest as a savior of sorts, in an important economic and cultural reality that has confronted President Obama on his first visit to China.
In China, Obama has encountered not simply a rising global power but a nation that is transforming and challenging the way Americans live overseas and at home, from college classrooms to real estate offices to the ginseng farms of central Wisconsin.
Americans have been selling “Panax quinquefolius” to China since 1784 when the first China-bound trading ship sailed from New York to Canton, today’s Guangzhou, weighed down with 30 tons of the root, prized in Asia for medicinal properties. But today the U.S. ginseng industry, centered here in Wisconsin, is on its back, kicked down by bogus imitations from Chinese competitors and state-subsidized crops from Canada.
Related posts:
