>Every jackass with a business plan could no longer get funding,
Thanks. That's the kind of thing I was looking for.
>and they stopped laying fiber optic cable like crazy.
I recently saw a documentary called Manufactured Landscapes about a photographer who has been making huge photos of industrial scenes all over the world for over 30 years. He's Canadian and started there, taking pictures of abandoned mining sites. In the documentary you see the process of him getting photos at Chinese factories and at the Three Gorges Dam Project there, and at shipbreaking operations in Bangladesh. There is also a part about towns in China where the primary work is recycling "e-waste." If I'm remembering right they said 50% of junked electronics goes to China where it's stripped down.
It came out in 2006. I got it from Netflix.
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=manufacturedlandscapes