Chinese Volunteer to Solve America's Carp Problem

Chinese volunteer to eat the fish we won't.

Sometimes, Chinese netizens pay more attention to a U.S. news story than Americans do. President Barack Obama’s Feb. 23 decision to allocate $51.5 million to eradicate an invasive species known as the Asian carp is a prime example.

Outside of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, news of this carp-control strategy barely registered with the U.S. public. But on March 6, it hit China and, like a jazz trio riffing for an hour on just a few notes, microbloggers took to the minor news topic with gusto, using it to explore issues ranging from corrupt civil servants to U.S. sovereign debt. Soon it even had its own hash tag, roughly translated as #Asian Carp on an American Rampage#.

Some comments from Chinese bloggers:

We can eat your carp if you have too much: braised carp in brown sauce, roast carp with scallions … Sweet and sour carp is great and it’s a famous dish in Shandong cuisine, though I haven’t eaten sweet and sour carp in a long time.

“Save that $50 million and toss one million civil servants over to America and let them eat fish for two years. Nothing will be left.”

"If the United States does not eat the carp they can export it to China to pay for their national debt. This kills two birds with one stone: They no longer suffer from fish, and they pay their debts."

 Some Chinese speculated on how it was their carp thrived in America:

How could I use the word “lake” when I saw Ontario? As splendid as the sea! You could hold the water in your hands; drink it directly -- how sweet! I told my colleagues that I want to take Lake Ontario to China! But then my colleagues and I felt really bad: Are there any clean lakes or rivers in our country? It’s no surprise why Asian carp reproduce so mightily over there.

I never thought that carp would have an easy time surviving over there. So can this prove that the quality of water in America is great? If Americans transport and pour our water into the Great Lakes, I suspect that all of their fish would then be barren. Rest assured, American people and people of the world, this measure will work.

Seriously, we should explore how to fish for and export the Asian carp, but that might violate our new national obsession with not producing anything of any use to anybody.