The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
WESTBOUND ON THE EASTBOUND BEIJING EXPRESSWAY
long before Mr. Zhang's crowning highway maneuver, I'd realized that his flamboyant unpredictability was an asset. I'd hired him as driver and guide for a three-day trip from Beijing to Inner Mongolia on the recommendation of a Chinese environmentalist who'd enumerated all of Mr. Zhang's virtues except the most important—his suppleness under pressure, which would enable us to overcome the obstacles that are a constant feature of travel in China.
Of course, Mr. Zhang's chief qualification was that he was an environmentalist, or, more precisely, a fellow environmental-disaster tracker. Now, having toured choked rivers, depleted forests, and grasslands that had ceded to encroaching deserts, we were near the end of our trip, with nothing in front of us but a two-hour jaunt down the broad, brutish Beijing Badaling Expressway to the capital. Ms. Lei, my delicate translator, had announced her wish to get back to Beijing before her four-year-old boy went to bed, and we were running late. Mr. Zhang's swashbuckling solution was a "shortcut": Instead of fighting his way along the paved, but circuitous, road to the highway, he sped down a narrow dirt path that held the promise of providing a more direct route. Within minutes he was doubling back on himself, loudly grinding gears as he cut through dust-shrouded cornfields and drought-stricken cherry orchards while peasants leaped out of our way and into the foliage. By the time Mr. Zhang found the expressway, the shortcut had cost us an hour.
I already knew that China's roads are some of the world's most dangerous. A quarter of a million people die on them each year—6 times as many as in the United States, even though Americans possess 18 times as many cars—and the entire system is plagued with soul-withering traffic jams prompted by police inspectors who extract "fees" from coal-truck drivers. Lines of trucks often extend behind inspection stations for miles; truckers have waited in them for as long as two weeks.
And now we couldn't get on the expressway because traffic was at a standstill behind a toll station. An abhorrer of inertia, Mr. Zhang cut across six lanes to the only booth with a short line and cockily paid the toll. For a moment we basked in his nascarish dexterity. Then he slammed on the brakes. In front of us, the road was clogged with coal trucks lined up behind an inspection station far down the road. We'd been funneled into a classic Chinese bottleneck.
Unfazed, Mr. Zhang made a 180-degree turn and headed west on the eastbound expressway. I braced for the inevitable crash. Then, just before we regained the toll station, he swung right and headed for the center divider, past a gigantic, disabled semi stuck perpendicularly to the flow of cars. The half-dozen policemen who stood around the truck gave no sign of noticing us. Through a gap in the divider, Mr. Zhang found an eastbound lane reserved for passenger cars and turned into it; as we sped toward Beijing, we saw that the line of motionless coal trucks extended for miles. Drivers dozed or ate dinner on top of their cargo. On this tottering foundation, the world's most dynamic economy has been erected. What globalization offers, it also takes away.
THE PEOPLE'S REVOLUTION
In 2005, there were nearly 1,000 pollution-related protests a week in China, and the numbers have only increased since. The protesters run the social gamut, from impoverished villagers to the urban middle class. The government's response has been similarly varied, ranging from killing and beating protesters to launching investigations into the worst offenders.
Spring 2005: 30,000 villagers overturn buses, beat officials, and burn squad cars after police dismantle barricades set up by elderly protesters on a road to 13 polluting chemical plants.
July 2005: Protesting a pharmaceutical plant, hundreds of residents of the booming factory province Zhejiang riot for three nights. "They are making poisonous chemicals for foreigners that the foreigners don't dare produce in their own countries," a demonstrator tells reporters. "It is better to die now, forcing them out, than to die of a slow suicide."
December 2005: In the fishing village of Dongzhou, police kill up to 30 residents protesting a new coal-fired power plant.
January 2006: During weeklong riots against preferential zoning for chemical and garment factories, 60 Guangdong Province villagers are injured and one—a 13-year-old girl—is killed by police toting automatic weapons and electric batons.
Fall 2006: Villagers from seven Gansu Province towns protest for months against local zinc and iron smelters; half of the 5,000 villagers exhibit high levels of lead in their blood.
June 2007: Up to 20,000 middle-class Chinese congregate outside the city government headquarters in Xiamen to protest a proposed chemical factory. The protesters were alerted by an anonymous cell phone text message (rumored to have been sent by Xiamen University professors and students). The city cracks down on anonymous web posting.
July 2007: Farmers near Mount Emei in Sichuan Province block a highway, demanding $1.1 million in damages from an aluminum company they claim contaminated crops. Ten are injured and five detained when police clear the road.
—Jen Phillips
CHINA EATS THE WORLD
the emergence of China as a dominant economic power is an epochal event, as significant as the United States' ascendancy after World War II. It is in many ways an astonishment, starting with the ideological about-face that enabled it, the throwing over of Maoist values for plainly capitalist ones starting in the late 1970s. So thorough is the change that the 19-foot-tall portrait of a stolid, potato-faced Mao Zedong that still looms over traffic-choked, commerce-suffused Tiananmen Square looks paradoxical, even startling, in seeming need of an update in which Mao winks—or sobs—in blinking neon. Meanwhile, inside Beijing's Forbidden City, the heart of old China, buildings with such intoxicating names as Hall of Preserved Harmony and Palace of Heavenly Purity bear signs reading, "Made Possible by the American Express Company."
The grander astonishment is the most massive and rapid redistribution of the earth's resources in human history. In a mere two and a half decades, China has awakened from Maoist stagnancy to become the world's manufacturer. Among the planet's 193 nations, it is now first in production of coal, steel, cement, and 10 kinds of metal; it produces half the world's cameras and nearly a third of its TVs, and by 2015 may produce the most cars. It boasts factories that can accommodate 200,000 workers, and towns that make 60 percent of the world's buttons, half the world's silk neckties, and half the world's fireworks, respectively.
China has also become a ravenous consumer. Its appetite for raw materials drives up international commodity prices and shipping rates while its middle class, projected to jump from fewer than 100 million people now to 700 million by 2020, is learning the gratifications of consumerism. China is by a wide margin the leading importer of a cornucopia of commodities, including iron ore, steel, copper, tin, zinc, aluminum, and nickel. It is the world's biggest consumer of coal, refrigerators, grain, cell phones, fertilizer, and television sets. It not only leads the world in coal consumption, with 2.5 billion tons in 2006, but uses more than the next three highest-ranked nations—the United States, Russia, and India—combined. China uses half the world's steel and concrete and will probably construct half the world's new buildings over the next decade. So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars' performance on the city's clotted roads.
The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace" campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few months. The steel ultimately proved unusable. With another stroke, Mao perpetrated the "Kill the Four Pests" campaign, inducing the mass slaughter of millions of sparrows and a subsequent explosion in the locust population. The destruction of forests led to erosion and the spread of deserts, and the locust resurgence prompted a collapse of the nation's grain crop. The result was history's greatest famine, in which 30 to 50 million Chinese died.
Yet the Mao era's ecological devastation pales next to that of China's current industrialization. A fourth of the country is now desert. More than three-fourths of its forests have disappeared. Acid rain falls on a third of China's landmass, tainting soil, water, and food. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities, producing an estimated $12.9 billion in economic losses in Shanghai alone. Each year, uncontrollable underground fires, sometimes triggered by lightning and mining accidents, consume 200 million tons of coal, contributing massively to global warming. A miasma of lead, mercury, sulfur dioxide, and other elements of coal-burning and car exhaust hovers over most Chinese cities; of the world's 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese.
The government estimates that 400,000 people die prematurely from respiratory illnesses each year, and health care costs for premature death and disability related to air pollution is estimated at up to 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Four-fifths of the length of China's rivers are too polluted for fish. Half the population—600 or 700 million people—drinks water contaminated with animal and human waste. Into Asia's longest river, the Yangtze, the nation annually dumps a billion tons of untreated sewage; some scientists fear the river will die within a few years. Drained by cities and factories all over northern China, the Yellow River, whose cataclysmic floods earned it a reputation as the world's most dangerous natural feature, now flows to its mouth feebly, if at all. China generates a third of the world's garbage, most of which goes untreated. Meanwhile, roughly 70 percent of the world's discarded computers and electronic equipment ends up in China, where it is scavenged for usable parts and then abandoned, polluting soil and groundwater with toxic metals.
Though government-run and heavily censored, the English-language China Daily has reported that pollution problems caused 50,000 disputes and protests throughout China in 2005. (See "The People's Revolution".) If unchecked, the devastation will not just put an abrupt end to China's economic growth, but, in concert with other environmentally heedless nations (in particular, the United States, India, and Brazil), will cause mortal havoc in societies and ecosystems throughout the world.
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Great, though thoroughly depressing story. If one even cautiously extrapolates on this, the horror will stop the thought.
If we could only change direction like a flock of starlings.
China will eat the planet. They're like,
the Terminator of industrial production. I think China will assimilate Korea. Also, I think if
these people had a good reason to
build a freeway to Japan, they'd do it.
War over resources is inevitable. The thought of millions and millions of hard-pressed Chinese soldiers literally fighting for their own survival should be disturbing to nations as far away as the Middle East, Alaska, and Hawaii...
To get philosophical for a moment; perhaps no intelligent race of beings in the universe ever makes it more than 2 centuries beyond industrialization. That is why we have never been contacted by a space traveller - not because of the distance between solar systems, but because there are no survivors to rebuild and evolve. Hmmmmm
Incredible article, but MoJo really needs to get with the times. None of this is news to anyone, this is hardly a breaking piece of journalism. I suggest MoJo needs to get with the program as environmentalism is WAY ahead of them!
Great article. Let's see you do a similarly toned article on the world's #1 polluter, the United States.
Get your figures right James.Per capita the US is the biggest pollutor,China will catch up in the future.Go to the US and see the amount of cars, motor bikes, ride on lawn movers in the garage of the ordinary man.Change direction like a flock of starlings, not a hope as long as greed dominates,and its not hard to figure which nation is the greediest, the good old US of A.
as a china fan, and of mao too, i can only wish you had written this article about amerika and named names. certainly there were plenty of american political idiots. the ideal wouldn't rankle anyone now when the concept is aq prerequisite to office. unfortuantely mao was a reactionary same as most amerikan politicos and often with the same or sorse results
Now that society is becoming more aware and acknowledge all this; the good news would be, you can fight the "brain washing" from the media,society,peers. Refuse to be a consumer of "things/stuff" we don't need. Each generation shows the next generation how to live, our wants, what we waste or abuse the environment. I no longer want to be a trained laboratory animal to purchase so I fit in. What's wrong with recycled items, shared equipment, purchasing what isn't shipped from another country?
Are all the commenters missing the point that it is the capitalists push towards greater and greater consumerism that also drives poor and desperate peoples like Chinese to produce products that we Americans cannot live without? I mean, do we really need all new Christmas decorations each year? Not to mention the other holiday crap that each season seems to bring. Americans are so obsessed with acquiring products that we don't need that we are contributing to the globalization of a worldwide pollution problem. Capitalism must stay in constant growth. It cannot stay stagnant and right now it is in serious decay. We are destroying the world that supports us by the way our economy is run. The drive for cheaper and cheaper products seeks out underdeveloped countries to exploit. Do we really need to replace our decor every season or our clothes every year? Let's step back and adopt a little perspective. And let's demand that the people around us do too, for the sake of our planet.
Water, and the lack thereof. That's why so much money is being invested in, and by, private water companies. A terrible future is ahead at the hands of the greedy
Yes, sopporo is correct in that this is not breaking news, but it is important and bears further discussion and coverage. The New York Times is doing a wonderful series on China's industrial boom and the accompanying environmental crisis. This piece dovetails nicely with that and helps to reach yet another sector of those who still read.
I can only conclude that Malthus was right. The core of the problem is people. There are too many of us for our poor planet to support. I assume Earth is not concerned when species come and go.
Great thought but will never happen. At least not until global warming causes mass starvation & no one cares any longer about Christmas ornaments.
Informative but horrifying and a seemingly hopeless future for not just China but the rest of the world. Ironically, we are irrevocably tied to the disaster that China has become: financially (our "bank") economically (manufacturing, consumerism), ecologically (through ordinary air currents). And, sadly, the Bush administration continues to push for the same destruction of the US at home with its support of mountain-topping for coal, drilling for oil on public and/or preserved lands and denial of global warming. Water resources are dwindling and we have our own "deserts" and dust storms. Not a pretty future for the world's children.
Great job Jacques in capturing many of the issues. I am typing these words from a panel discussion on climate and transport in Bali as the climate negotiations come to a close.
Will there be a change in China? In the US? We don't know yet, but it is clear that until the US breaks with its own past the Chinese, Indians, and so many others will share our car-based mobility dreams, even if they are really nightmares.
Great article. Millions will suffer and die.
bUBBA you are so right. I'm leaving for the southern hemisphere soon and permanently. No one around here can see overpopulation as THE big problem anyway so at least I'll gain a few more years of clean air while the northern atmosphere swirls with industrial "excrescence".
Oy. This article brings to light what many already know. China emulated the US!! We (the United States) need to show how committed we are to halting global climate change by adopting mandatory emissions caps like the ones proposed in Bali and more investment, private and public, in sustainable power generation. The downside is, as has been suggested, this probably ain't gonna happen with the current administration in power. Let's all get out and vote in a candidate who cares about the planet in '08!
I would love to see a study of the pollution caused from the consumption of products exported from china... As I sit typing on a computer made in china, it's hard to blame them for our problems... if it wasn't made there it would be made here...
Honestly, the only answer to this is strong leadership at a national level. Pollution cap's, energy saving quota's, rebates for conservation, funding for meaningful alternative energy. Of course, this is "socialism" and the only solution to these problems is "market forces" ect. All I can say is look what they did to Jimmy Carter when he suggested Americans turn down their thermometers and wear a sweater in wintretime and drive at 55. They nailed him to the cross.My veiw is collectivism and economies of scale {small scale} and to use renewable resources to lower ones living costs to live more responsibity and sustainably. Try to get off the grid as much as possible, team up with like minded people,that"s my ticket, God Willing.
Thanks, Jacques, for this sobering look at the bleak news for all of us! I just hope the word gets out in time enough for people to get their heads out of the clouds and start taking appropriate action!
Do you guys know where can I get a good sharp old fashioned cut-throat razor? In the meantime I'll check on e-bay.
China has been putting two 1 Gigawatt coal burning electrical generating plants on live every week for the last year. These are used to create the goods that the world is greedily consuming. The idiotic greedy humans on this planet are insuring it's end at the expense of others who have never shared their insatiable thirst for material possessions. Read what a Caltech chemist says about global energy use.
http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/lewis/
The polar ice cap will be gone in 5 years. It is too late. People and business are simply too greedy and stupid to change their behavior. Thanks a lot you disgusting greedy self centered creeps. I look forward to watching you suffer with the rest of us. You make me sick!
Is anyone capable of thinking for themselves surprised at any of this? First of all, China is not nor has it ever been a communist country. It is a country run by greedy thugs masquerading as communists just like our country is run by a bunch of greedy capitalist thugs posing as believers in democracy. Our so called leaders would give anything to be able to jail or kill all those that speak out against them (remember Kent State and Chicago). We are just fortunate that so far they haven't been able to gain the totalitarian control the leaders in China have!
My daughter is going to China in February with a group of 30 from her high school. we are so excited about it or were, now I'm really depressed. What the hell can we do about this. I didn't realize Mao was so distructive either. Its very upsetting!
Well written, intriguing and shocking but in an almost expected way...implications that can make even the optimist devoid of hope, except for knowing people that there are people that really care. China and India can no longer look west for guidance and if we wish to survive, one would hope that their inhabitants find it within themselves to hinder our path toward annihilation.
Paulson, in an interview
Paulson, in an interview with a small group of reporters, said Chinese officials' willingness to speak out reflects the growing trust between the two parties. "To the extent they are disagreeing, it's really good to make sure they are not disagreements about nothing.... [It's] so easy for there to be a misunderstanding or misinterpretation," he said.
Since the Communist Party took power in 1949, China's leaders have avoided engaging critics in public at all costs. When they appear at briefings held by the State Council or Foreign Ministry, testking ccie they typically repeat verbatim what they have said in writing.
For example, in the previous two rounds of the talks, Chinese delegates kept a low profile and made their points through the state-run media, which are mouthpieces for the government. That has changed as China continues to face criticism about the safety of its food and other products in media reports published and broadcast around the world.
"There's a frustration that the Chinese feel that they are not understood.... They feel as though they are working very hard," said Mike Leavitt, the U.S. secretary of health and human services. Leavitt said he has heard many times from Chinese officials that the media reports are unfair and exaggerated but that doesn't mean the officials do not recognize there is a problem. testking vmware "Complaining about the media and making a rigorous response are not mutually exclusive," he said.
Earlier, mcse testking Wu talked about a growing protectionism in the United States and included the media in her patriotic call for parties involved to do their part to keep the relationship on good terms for the benefit of their own country.
Fantastic piece. Well done - dedicated reporter. It's what we've feared all along. I hope we have a chance.
I lived and taught in China for five years (2000-2005)--three years in Shenyang, a northeastern industrial city, and Beijing. I noted that the Chinese are very frugal, and aim to not use/buy more than is necessary. However, they more and more want to emulate Americans (I taught a university course, American Culture.) No one can drink tap water. The heat is turned on everywhere on November l5 and turned off about March l5. Trains are so crowded during Spring Festival time, students stand up on trains for many hours, sometimes becoming ill. It's hard for them to imagine how much Americans consume.
Very well written. So detailed and embarrassing for China and all of humankind.
Like it or lump it, no one likes to sit in the dark. Luckily, there's this stuff called 'automotive technology'.
That's right, the science that's evolved this last century around the task of propelling overly ambitious carbon-based waterbags around in their noisy little black death-emitting conveyances has given rise to some interesting developments over time,
to include, in recent years, fuel cell
technology, and of course hats off to
Brazil for realizing you can grow fuel stocks basically in your front yard.
It's not the fact that we are an industrialized world, it's what type of technology we choose to try and keep on keepin' on. El gasolino works, but there's other ways to do that job, and
if you can come up with a clean fuel for your car, there's no reason you can't use that same clean fuel to heat your home, or even cook with. An ethanol heater. An ethanol cook stove.
An ethanol car. And, before you start
patting me down for corn kernels, let
me add that ethanol is only ONE way.
Also, there's choices to be made, tradeoffs. Sure, you can sit in the dark which is fine, some parts of the world still haven't seen electric light here in this most technologically advanced 21st century, and throw extra blankets on the bed like you knew what you were doing, but what about that 15MW home entertainment center? And,
what's parked in YOUR driveway?
At the end of the day, those that can
afford to do things, will do them.
That's how it works. If we could afford
to do renewables, though, that's more
jobs, more applied science, instead of
just a tune-up on your car you could
have a 'green-up', it's easy to point
fingers and identify seeming problems,
it's another thing to stand up and do
something concrete about em.
There's lots of ways to generate power,
including getting off your butt and just
walking, humans emit CO2 also, and give
off those ozone-killing BTU's, so take it easy....
It was developed nations in the West shifting the old polluting manufacturing systems to China, rather than develop ecologically sustainable technologies at home. Seeking greater profit margins not through "upgrading" their factories, but by employing "cheap, non-unionised" labour with old machinery, in countries with impoverished populations. The never-ending greed for greater profit, blinds all the shareholders of these companies, to the ecologically sustainable necessity of managing the world's resources for all time. So long as we continue to believe that the world is only to be consumed/bought and sold for the empowerment of a few, rather than to be nurtured and allowed to flourish for all of its inhabitants animal/plant/human there will be an ever-increasing series of tragedies unfolding. We definitely need a set of international politicians who will speak and act for the environment, who will not be the sycophants of big business, and we need to be more conscious individually about our own consumer decisions and get the message out about those decisions.
if the subject isnt about overpopulation not worth discussing.we are in population overshoot. the end of living the beginning of survival. what the hell dont you all get? humans =comsumptition=overshoot. what of the young that are here? breeding the most selfish act!bad parenting. situation hopeless!!
the only way out appears to be shrinkage - of population, consumption etc. etc. etc. etc. sooner the better.
china or anyone else has a right to destroy the earth as the usa has done since 1776. its wrong but they have a right . we destroyed most already and-- as china and india grow they will comsume like us. continue to contaminate our earth and some night we will die in our own waste. we did it. situation hopeless. population overshoot.
unless we stop buying products made in china the problems will only get worse
Amazing, the sheer volume that the country consumes and pollutes, it is amazing that the land can sustain any life
danny
www.giftofireland.com
America is still the largest polluter overall, and is the only country that can help china change from its American style use and dump society.
This is clearly Terrorism at it's worst. We all (globaly) should be pointing our high powered tools of justice at these few who RAPE our planet to the point of submission. Screw fighting for Oil, screw fighting for politics and start fighting for our lives. Only when we have a future are we free to plan it. Life is the mose important thing to fight for. Without Life No Thing matters. Start prioritizing.
Why all the talk aboutt overpopulation? Seems to me like the problem is the rate of consumption of ressources per capita, not the number of people itself. The Earth is vast and we have the capacity to support billions of people, however not billions of people with Western standards of living.
Yes you make a best of the best point's and now all we need is for people in control and power to read it and start a change to clean the earth.Please think and post any idea's to help.sam out.
I think that Chinese are cute.
all the talk about population "d" sez? well your all wrong but--- while its true its the amount of consumptition per ah which ---can only get worse but its also true with each new ah on earth its another 2 turds a day . each new child born net! every ten seconds cretes 2 tons of all waste by age two. poluation creates problems and more waste -- human footprint, no matter first or third world. in fact, we feed the starving ones so they can make more. mother earth is finite period. too many humans period. overshoot. the dreamers dont get it. there is no do over! situation hopeless. sorry d your wrong for a fact.
In contemplating the future, there are three absolute basics going forward -
1. Population/Growth/Aging.
2. Population/Climate
3. Population/Peak Oil.
In respect of China, an observation, where do they get the vast bulk of their orders from and why?
Unfortunately, when the herd turns, Scary will not be the right word.
Good luck and watch the debt!
There seems to be so many people that recognize the problems we face but how we can act collectively to solve these problems and change our country or should I say change who and how our country is run and make sustainable living goals for our own survival as a species a reality. How do we get the message across? how do we wrest control from the capitalist thugs? How? when? where?
The time is now here for all who really care to put their personal wishes aside and protest this global atrocity.
When ,Where,? I say Washington D.C.
when Now!
Who? Everybody!
we all need to go to D.C. and camp out like the poor peoples march envisioned by MLK before he was assassinated.
we need millions of caring americans to go and suffer if need be. We all must be fed and sheltered and the police state will bash our heads in with billy clubs.
But if we all head to D.C. by the millions then it will bea turning point in U.S. History. The people who really want to do something must show solidarity and conduct a war of non-violent protest. We need to go NOW.
Time is running out. We must Act NOW!!!!!
sopporo u idiot! this person posted an interesting article for everyone else to read - doesn't matter if it's not ground breaking news it is still relevant!
Absolutely one of the most important articles I have read in any publication in a long time. While the mainstream media fritters away its time, resources, airtime and copy space on a bunch of blowhards in Iowa, Mother Jones is carrying the real news.
