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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We left Xintao city in Hubei province yesterday afternoon. See www.elbertcounty.net/blog for an account. Tell the billion Chinese living in the non-modern world, i.e. no heat, no electricity, no running water, riding bicycles or pulling an ox cart by hand, that they need to conserve resources and clean up the planet. Western sensibilities delivered from the comfort of soft sheltered surroundings aren't worth the paper they're printed on. I'm not excusing pollution, I'm just saying that starving people have more important and fundamental problems facing them.
The West can look at itself shamefully in the mirror, responsibility for the world's current disastrous ecological condition rests quite squarely on our shoulders. Our corporations went to China specifically to skirt environmental and labour regulations, was it impoverished China's fault that it accepted huge influxes of cash? Now is the time for global co-operation on a massive scale, we're talking technology transfer, harmonization of environmental standards, rationalizing industry so that we don't ship raw logs in Canada to be turned into toothpicks in China and shipped back, and massive political and financial commitments. On the upside, such a massive endeavor even eclipses war in its demands for manpower, the amount of jobs created to retrofit human civilization with roof gardens and solar paneling is unparalleled. Its the next economic boom, so, who wants a job?
in the late 1800's headlines said "We are running out of oil, will be living in the dark"... these referenced whale oil used for lighting lamps. We found other sources of light.
There were scares that medical costs would destroy the economy. (In the 1930's due to the cost of polio.) it costs about 8 cents to vaccinate a child today.
There have been two scares over global cooling in popular press the last 100 years... and also two scares over global warming. Three of these eventually proved wrong. The fourth will meet the same fate when people realize that the next cooling cycle started in 1998.
In the 1970's we thought we would run out of food by the 1990's. There were to be global wars over food.
We were supposed to run out of water.
We were supposed to run out of oil.
The list goes on.
The car that i drove in the early 1970's put out 100 TIMES the polution of the car that I drive today (which is bigger, more powerful, safer, and a lot nicer).
We are making progress.
When we quit using fossil fuel in cars, no one will care. Just like a hundred years ago when we quit using whale oil to light our houses. It will be seen as progress. It will not require huge government to intervene. in fact, the sooner the gov gets out of the picture, the faster progress will be made.
As countries gain wealth, they are able to devote more resources to cleaning up the environment. The solution is not to deny other humans the right to better lives, it is to assist them in advancing their economies so that they can participate in activities providing higher levels of benefit for mankind.
This article while bringing attention to an important issue, is like most written by Westerners about China. It recklessly China bashes without genuinely trying to understand the complexity of everything that is or makes "China" now. Point in fact: Every ipod produced in China releases 17lbs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And I don't think we need a Mother Jones article to tell us who's buying ipods. Supply is a byproduct of Demand.
References, please?
Where are these statistics from?
Without references they are heresay, useless.
Good god folks forget about the the damn profit side of it, take note of what they are drinking and eating, can anyone say major, major epidemic if by some cahnce a virus should evolve from what these poor farmers are having to do just to survive.
think of the waste that is going into the oceans for crying out loud, something has got to give and sure as hell will be us.
remember were the parasites that are destroying our own nests while mother nature just lashes back for our stupidity, and ew keep on.
The much aligned bird flue is in our future, its just when does it start? and where will it start? were going to sadly find out.
Very well-written and researched. I live in Tianjin right now, just south of Beijing. I and most of the other ex-pats here have had lingering colds of varying degrees of severity, for weeks, due almost entirely to the air. Don't believe the "development" hype China prints. They're paying for it dearly.
As mentioned in the article: "Through all of our engagement with China, the U.S. government has aggressively promoted China's adoption of an American-style, high-consumption, high-waste economic model," says Jim Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and former executive director of the World Wildlife Fund in China. But if China is to reduce consumption, would the Western be willing not to listen to ipod, buy less clothes, etc? Can they sacrifice their quality of living?
Cool, not only is the blame for hyperconsumption, and pollution being shifted to China, soon we can start selling them pollution credits. It's fantastic to see so many enlightened people trashing China for doing what we do best. Don't forget there are vast untapped resources under a melting Antarctica, and with the opening of the Northwest Passage, we will soon be able to exploit more of the world's abundance then ever before. Then you closet bigots and self haters can really get it on. Go to wal mart and buy a computer and keep sniveling online because we are still being manipulated. I stumbled on this article by accident. I don't surf the web or buy all the new gadgets the majority of the readers of this article now are addicted to. Remember the forced import of opium to China? We are the Chinese now. The corporations are the British This (article) is not new nor is it news. The most appalling part of this article is not the article. It is the ascerbic and dewey eyed responses to it. You guys are lame. Buy lots of ammo because you will be fighting each other long before you get to fight the families of my Chinese friends and relatives.
Yes, it's true`, China is taking over the capitalist lifestyle! the world missed a big chance when China started up opening some 30 years ago. Let's not forget the western multi nationals,not only american, brought China to this point. The Chinese have been made car crazy by Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Citroen, Honda, Chrysler, Renault, Peugot, Volkswagen etc. etc. Every day 1000 new cars hit the roads in Beijing! The chinese car industry would'nt been able to produce even zero point 1 percent So, Think before you leap! Why didn't those carmakers helped China as the first country in the world with an altenative for oil based cars? the technology is available, there was no oil infra structure in china (now there is) so, this was a great opportunity!! But no, business is business, first sell them 600.000 gas cars! And then blame them for the pollution!
I live in Beijing, as an expat.. and wonders why I can still reach this W-Site!!!!
In the face of this, sanguinity can be achieved only through nihilism. Human life was once short, dirty and hard. So perhaps human life will again be short, dirty and hard. Then, later, an asteroid impact, magnetic pole reversal, or ice age will take away our concerns about the brevity, squalor and gruel of our existence. Much later, the Sun will envelop the Earth. Time to start sending out interstellar life boats...
I do agree that we here in the USA need to take a look at our consumption habits. If you compare the material possessions and consumption habits of an average American to that of the average Chinese, the gap is vast. It does nothing to blame the USA or China. We are in a time that our natural environment and economies are interrelated and we need to work innovatively together to counter global problems. As a consumer we can all make an impact by purchasing local products and distinguishing between wants and needs.
We cannot change direction like a flock of starlings. Civilization has already irreversibly used up most of the exhaustible natural goods and services and done irreconciable damage to its life support system, the environment. The best we can do is make wiser use of what remains to slow down the devastation. China clearly has major problems but civilization has been misdirected in many other countries as well. The real World Problematique cannot be overcome by puny human endeavors.
Thank god, a sane voice in all this tumult. What's wrong with people? Why can't they see what's right in front of their face? If human beings can get to the moon, we can also create a clean pollution free alternatives to the energy sources we are so addicted to today. And without question the technology is there already, just no political will or sufficient social impetus. People it seems are living in a dream state, waiting for overwhelming worldwide environmental disaster to wake them up to a new set of priorities. The universe will be happy to oblige on that score.
When we see China, which is inhabited by arguably
the most intelligent people on earth, succumb to the lure of industrialization and concomitant environmental suicide, then truly, there is no hope for humanity.
So the West pollutes, rampages, pillages, rapes starting in, oh let's say 1492. It 'raises' the quality of life of it's own citizens by inflicting violence (colonialism) on Asia, Africa, South America. Post-independence, the West's corporations continue to rape and pillage through the IMF and the World Bank. And now that the West has to compete for resources China is the culprit?!! Here's a good deal - how about the West give the East all it's resources and energy for the next 50 years (only!!). Will that make it fair?
Thanks for pointing this out! The West has a habit of adopting the high moral ground after centuries of commiting the crime of which it is accusing others.
While China is the source of this filth due to the evil filth of the CCP and PLA, MNCs played their part by fleeing there in the 70s-90s to escape communist, anti-competitive environmental and labor protection laws in the EU and NA.
Smash corporate boards, Wall St, and CEOs.
Bad China is the main culprit because it has access to 150 years of western experience and technology regarding environmental health, saftey and pollution control. But Bad China does not want to do anything that would cut into short term profits, as imported liquor, clothes and local KTV girls are more important than a truly harmonious society. China will kill itself and the rest of the world will have time to recover. Bad China, bad China expats.
The lesson I recall from this article is as ancient as the civilization it examines: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what goes around comes around, from boom to bust.
The earth is a living web, dependant on our ability to sustain a healthy number of threads. Hopefully the taoist sensibility of venerating nature will reassert itself, in both the east and west.
oh yes it's awesome i love the info, great work lol
i used to live there :]
Excellent. I found this article to be rather scary. How long can this "miracle" last before the degradation becomes so prevalent that everyone is in danger in China? I don't buy the notion that they only desire to emulate the US. Nonsense. A basic human desire is to enjoy more things as disposible income grows. Chinese are no exception.
Remember that in the US we have realized some years ago that environmental degradation effects us all. This led to the Clean Water Act, catalytic converters etc. Sure, the Bush administration has been an impediment to futher advances, but changes have been made here. How much of an effort is there in China to ensure clean water? Corrupt officials and incredible greed ensure that the situation will only worsen in the future.
I object to the notion that the US is responsibe for the growth policy in China which ignores the environment. Sure we have a consumer driven economy because this works. Taking into account CO2 production etc is finally taking hold here and I believe we will respond to mitigate the danger. But there does not appear to be sufficient will in China to mobilize. The yearning for wealth at any expense is worse in China than here because they have been impoverished for so long. And don't forget that China has more than 1.2 billion residents.....they have procreated themselves into a mess. Just imagine if the government had not mandated the one child policy!!! Of note, the previous and current Bush administrations were against this policy!!! Image the consequences of uncontrolled pop growth!!!
"B" is right on. All the complaining, threatening and diatribe will not accomplish what is really needed. That is to take what resources we have at each of our disposal and put them to work to better each and every situation we can. We are blessed with more information and knowledge than ever before. Making use of our knowledge and individual resources to make things better for humankind can lead to real results. Not just "hot air."
In simple terms, we need to go beyond "thinking outside the box." We need to eliminate the box! What are the barriers to applying improved methods and technologies? Usually money and the ability to change policies and procedures.
Sound reasoning, excellent research, viable demonstrations of things that really work are examples of people making real contributions.
There are more efficient ways to do things. We can grow more healthy food without destroying at the same time. We can produce power and not emit harmful emissions. We can work and find the best solutions.
The real progress will be made by those that do and move forward. We need to all spend more time finding the answers that really work, not just the ones that improve the status quo, but those that will be beneficial in the long run and can realistically replace the less efficient and destructive methods that, have been embraced by most of us for far too long.
It is time to look at the real costs and real benefits of all of our activities and compare them to our own interests and opinions and then to change ourselves first.
Is there a replacement for chemical fertilizers that sterilize our soil, pollute our water and rob us of nutrition and healthier plants and instead produce plants that are so weak we need to treat all of them with pesticides. How did the world produce any food before chemical fertilizers became the panacea? Are we sure that today's available technology doesn't provide much better solutions at far less total cost in the long run? (Social, environmental, health and other personal issues as well as production and distribution costs.)
This is not the only area we should question and improve, but it is an example that can lead to real benefits for the world, as a whole. After all, each of us has the internet to share our ideas and results. I'm working on mine. I would like to hear about your solutions, as well.
Great blog!
If the economics don't work, recycling efforts won't either.
Http://LivePaths.com blogs about innovative entrepreneurs that make money selling recycled orreused items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources. These includes some very cool Green online ventures and investments opportunities.
You didn't realize Mao was so destructive?? Good Heavens, what have you been reading in your lifetime??
I am always amazed when the true gluttons of conspicuous consumption and progenitors of global warming (i.e. the USA) chastise those who follow our example. Let's see ourselves for the pious hypocrites that we are and clean our own house before we ask others to do so.
This is a sad & dangerous reality that we are facing but I don't know any countries in the Western World which can say that China is worst than the past, present and future practices of the Western World.
Have you heard any Chinese organizations complaining about the US for its practices of the last 75 years in beeing the main source of polution? The US is still the main source of pollution. The industrialized world should show the example if we want the new empires respecting new international agreements like Kyoto which was by the way, rejected by the US. The problem is that we are establishing a system that only power is the main factor. Not logic, respect or care for a cleaner world.
Great blog!
If the economics don't work, recycling efforts won't either.
Http://LivePaths.com blogs about innovative entrepreneurs that make money selling recycled items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources. These includes some very cool Green online ventures, great new technologies, startups and investments opportunities.
China should work Towards 0-emission coal plants and work towards green energy. China is selling out its peoples health. I would think cancer will be on the rise. When a bunch of people get sick and die from the government maybe they will change their minds. Don't make the same mistakes we made in the United States. Try more hybrids and spend your money on a cleaner and wilder China. If you don't China will suffer in the end.
A chilling glimpse of China, made more so by the fact that, even so, the Chinese are holding down expansion by sequestering dollars in US Treasury securities to prevent even more explosive growth.
Another predictable flaw with this _Mother Jones_ article is the "solution" that Leslie offers to the environmental problems confronting China or the world: SUSTAINABILITY.
The idea of Sustainable Economic Development is the deluded mantra of many environmentalists and so-called progressives in the USA and the world, but ultimately, this solution is a BAND-AID at best.
In practice, Sustainability really means one thing: A Kinder, Gentler Capitalist Exploitation.
Sustainability is Capitalist Exploitation with an Environmentally Correct face to allow Middle-Class Whites and First Worlders to alleviate their guilt and sleep better at night.
However, this Sustainability Solution in the long run in UNSUSTAINIBLE, as the Capitalist system is intrinsically based upon the Holy Dictate of Growth and Profit.
No lasting solution to environmental found will be found WITHIN THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM, whether in China, the USA, or anywhere else.
This is why CHINA MUST REJECT NOT ONLY THE MORALLY BANKRUPT AMERICAN ECONOMIC MODEL BUT THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM ITSELF.
In short, China must return to the Socialist path.
It should be noted that if China were to return to the Socialist path and reject Capitalism, you can be sure as hell that the America and the rest of the (Capitalist) Free World would throw a hissy fit like no other. Liberals and Progressives (including _Mother Jones Magazine_) would no doubt also engage in the standard "Who Lost China" complaints.
For proof of this, one has only to see the attitude that the American Empire and Free World adopt against nations like Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, or Belarus that have NOT embraced the American Economic Model in particular and Capitalism in general.
While Americans attempt to delude themselves that the USA is hostile to these nations because of Freedom and Democracy, I doubt that anyone with a brain believes these lies. When the American Empire or Free World talk about Freedom, what they REALLY MEAN is CAPITALISM.
Indeed, contrary to both Liberal and Conservative propaganda, the American Empire did not fight the Cold War to make the world safe for (snicker) Freedom and Democracy but to advance 2 fundamental objectives: TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR THE AMERICAN EMPIRE IN PARTICULAR AND THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM IN GENERAL.
Given this, current American/Western "concern" for China's environmental problems are most likely INSINCERE and involved a disguised agenda....
The underlying agendas behind the Capitalist West's oh-so-benevolent concern for environmental issues especially in China are IMHO fundamentally about 2 things: 1). MAINTAINING AMERICAN/WESTERN GLOBAL DOMINANCE and 2). SCAPEGOATING CHINA FOR ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS THAT ARE ULTIMATELY A PRODUCT OF THE BROADER CAPITALIST SYSTEM (which the West just so happens to enforce and economically benefit from).
Regarding the first point, China, along with Islam, is increasingly depicted in the American and Capitalist imagination as a Threat to Our Way of Life and precious Freedoms (as evidenced no doubt by America's Gitmo Gulag, Fatherland Security, and Abu Ghraib torture).
While Conservatives usually address issues of military power in manufacturing China as the ENEMY IMAGE, Liberals favor a more subtle propaganda tack such as manipulating concerns about Human Rights and now Environmentalism.
Moreover, China (along with India) is seen as a rising economic power that threatens not only America's but the West and Japan's God-given right to economic dominate the globe.
Environmental issues provide a useful Machiavellian tactic to both ideologically ATTACK and CONSTRAIN rising economic competitors like China (and eventually India).
In fact, the entire debate about Global Warming can be seen as a cynical attempt to HIJACK a legitimate environmental problem and MANIPULATE to advance more self-serving American and Western geopolitical interests.
But of course, the American Empire in particular is the Beacon of Liberty and would never ever engage in such a perverse deception. This would be tantamount to waging wars of aggression against Middle Eastern nations to steal their oil--under the pretext of fighting terrorism or WMDS. ;)
Regarding the 2nd point in the hidden agendas of Western environmental (cough, cough) concern, China serves as a handy scapegoat for profound environmental problems that result ultimately from a bankrupt global Capitalist system--a system that the American Empire and West support, profit/benefit from, and enforce.
It is always easy for Americans whether Progressive or Conservatives (they of course are the same behind their political masks) to scapegoat the Other instead of questioning the legitimacy of their beloved Capitalism itself. This is a tried and true political gambit that certainly will increase in the future. Demagoguery Works.
In terms of C02 emissions and global warming, for instance, China is a Johnny-Come-Lately to this problem. China's industrialization has been in high gear for only a couple of generations since the restoration of Capitalism in the late 1970s. Compare this to the *centuries* long period of industrial development that the USA and West have engaged in. But listening to some people, you would think that CO2 emissions only begin with China's development--instead of dating back to the advent of the West's Industrial Age centuries ago.
Moreover, it is somewhat comical that Jacque Leslie suggests that "China Eats the World" when America has historically been the leader in carbon emissions and continues to be the leader in oil consumption--despite having a population that is 1/5 of China! It should be remembered that America is still the only Developed Nation in the world that has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol--even as it demands that China sign this document.
Perhaps, it is America and the Western nations that have truly already EATEN THE WORLD, and China is merely a latecomer to the dinner table.
Another thing that is curiously downplayed in much American media like this _Mother Jones_ piece is the fact that many of the corporations that manufacture products in China are NOT even Chinese-owned but rather WESTERN/AMERICAN-owned subsidiaries that have set up production there to exploit low-wage labor. It's funny how the operation of America's corporations in China is rarely subject to critical challenge regarding their contribution to environmental problems or C02 emissions.
And though he would deny it, Mr. Leslie implicitly displays a disturbing but widespread belief in the legitimacy of America's and the West's divine right to consume the resources of the planet--and the illegitimacy of any "competitor" like China to do the same. Being the self-proclaimed Leader of the Free World and Land of the Free has its perks!
Finally, even the underlying rhetoric of this article suggests Mother Jones' less than honest political intentions on China's environmental problems.
Channeling Ronnie Reagan's Cold propaganda about the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire," the title of Leslie's article insinuates that China is the "Last Empire" (i.e. a Threat).
Perhaps, _Mother Jones_ should look closer in the mirror to find the real "Last Empire." After all, it is the American Empire that has military bases in over 100 different countries around the planet!
And it is the American Empire that is waging one criminal war of aggression after another--like Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2002, Iraq in 2003--while threatening other countries like Iran and North Korea with pre-emptive assault.
These American wars are justified and hidden behind pathetic propaganda pretexts like "stopping ethnic cleansing," "fighting terrorism," or finding mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction.
But only the most brainwashed American apologist believes these lies. The American Empire's global War on Terrorism is in reality a massive pretext to ADVANCE THE GEOPOLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DESIGNS OF AMERICA AND ITS CAPITALIST ALLIES. And one key objective of American designs is the seizure, theft, and control of Middle East OIL.
Predictably, all these aforementioned issues will not be honestly addressed by the American "Free Press" whether that be Right Wing, Centrist, or even supposed Progressive media like _Mother Jones_.
Ever wonder why? One place to begin is the website: www.leftgatekeepers.com
Could anyone kindly steer me to the "2004 peer reviewed article" on mercury emissions refreed to on page 3 of this article
Are they the Locusts of this world and where are the sparrows? or are we, the western world, the sparrows?.The country that supports and consumes a large portion of the worlds consumables at such a cheap labor cost, sweat shops etc,has to have a spill off effect, this has all been good for the fat consumers of this world, who most often doesn't think of the consequences of there actions because its not effecting him (us) until now. In my observing of the world and the world leaders, the people with money and power,not only in politics but in entrepreneurial circles as well, there is a strong call to make a change to the environment and to the consciousness of the people we live amoungst. Astrologically the time is now for consciousness to shift into a place of waking up to ourselves and take action to turn around the failings of our ignorance....
America and the West are the real locust and indeed the Vampires of the world--as they live off the blood, sweat, tears of the Developing World who not only make the products that these morbidly-obese parasites consume and more importantly *work* for American/Western corporations that often manufacture these goods.
That's the nature of Capitalism and Westernism. Ain't no denying that reality, no matter how hard the United Snakes tries with its newly-discovered crocodile tears about environmentalism.
Anybody out there still greeting the opening of a new Ikea, Home Depot or Armstrong store? In my town, tons of people claim for the opening of an Ikea store 'cos it's cheap. We human beings don't give a damn 'bout the future of the planet, as far as furniture is cheap and cashmere is cheap. So China destroying attitude depends also on the responsibility of us, people from Western Countries, on our everyday behavior as customers...
So James, you wrote: "When will folks realize that China not the US is the main source of the world's pollution?"
Well, do you always act as you think? Do you always check the labels of what you buy? How many american or european brands retail products that are actually made in China? Do you always check whether a wooden-made object you'd like to buy comes from a certified wood or from illegally cut wood—still?
I still think it depends on us rather than Chinese people thmselves.
Yes, Maria, unreferenced statistics are indeed useless. As a scholarly work, this article gets an "F". The first-hand account of travels with Mr. Zhang is entertaining, but surely there is little, if anything, that qualifies as news here.
I hope those who are dismayed by China are even more dismayed by us in the US. Here on the mid-Atlantic coast we are perpetrators of disaster (e.g., destruction of the Chesapeake Bay) as well as victims of other perpetrators (e.g., acid rain and "red" air quality from Ohio Valley coal-fired generating plants).
In 1984, Los Angeles hosted the Olympics. We "Angelenos" endured a bureaucratic "odd/even" road usage rotation daily to reduce our already crowded highways. The crush never materialize. However, it did bring the world in to examine the foibles of L.A. i.e. traffic, smog etc. That was 28 years ago. The environmental issues have geometrical increased and publizing it via the NBC Beijing Olympics can only be of benefit if NBC also uses the captured audience to relay global solution that are not to late to implement. A series of :60 to :90 Eco-environment capsules hosted by someone other than Gore might be productive. There's always room for hope!
So here's the question (if you don't believe High Tech will save the day): Are you prepared to forego, not just consumer comforts, but having kids? If no, shut it. If so, try persuade your mates. I'd say the instinct's too strong - nest & breed, it's gene-deep law, species-wide. As Old Greece knew, we're about Tragedy, friends, and not Unending Advancement.
The earth is doomed. Mankind, of all types, and religions, and citizenship are a cancer on the planet and we will continue to rape it until we die off. Then the few survivors will begin the process over again. There is no way out and no turning back and if you disagree you are misinformed, or on Xanax.
SSSSSSSSSSSSCCCCCCAAAAARRRRRRRYYYYYYY!!!!!!
Helping the eviroment should be a law.
SSSSSSSSSSSSCCCCCCAAAAARRRRRRRYYYYYYY!!!!!!
Helping the environment should be a law.
By the wholesale and unaccountable ripping off of the environment on a global scale (meanwhile the ripping off of the slave-class laborers in the billion), the despotic regime of China’s is actually expropriating the rights to a sustainable future - away from every human being on earth.
This potently demonstrates why undemocratic governments need to be visualized as a real threat to the security of the world – not only because they all race to ever-enlarge their stocks of armaments.
All the irresponsible pollutants in China need to be seen as the embodiment of a new form of poaching operations, at the expense of the very sustainability of this planet. And, it is an inescapable co-product of what should be called the practice of wholesale slavery – the dirt-cheap wage paid to laborers who make strictly a subsistent wage are the same as the forced labors in Hitler’s concentration camps for the Jews.
If the estimated loss of GDP from environmental detriments as mentioned in Jacques’ article (of a scale exactly about the growth rate of China’s of GDP) is somehow correct, then it turns out that all the fuss is not for nothing – in all these, the new feudal lords of China’s get to reap from the lootings and leave the wreckage to the country’s one and something billion impoverished people, and the whole world.
The super-rich class in China has already monetized the looting, to have extracted the whole lot of the endowed resources from the land, the air, and the sea.
So these people are stealing from not only the slave-like laborer and peasants in the country, but also each day, as those carbon smokes goes to the earth’s atmosphere and lumber from illegal logging entered China’s ports, from everyone else on this planet.
The super rich, less than one percent in the population of China’s, holds more than 90% of the country’s wealth - that’s why, as is depicted in Jacques’ article, that all of the world’s most luxury cars are selling very well in Beijing and Shanghai. And in this new feudal aristocracy class, more than three quarters of the ‘constituents’ of it are relatives of the current or former higher-ranking communist bureaucrats – this country is now in many ways not much different at all from what’s in the Manchu dynasty a century ago – those who possess the absolute power possess ‘absolute’ wealth.
The Bolshevik system (which started by promising a “classless society”) was already decades ago proven a fraud of the grandest scale n human history, but not until and during the last decade the highest form of its malice and unashamed-ness was formulated by the present China system.
The inherent gross malevolence and transgression in the system, that defies every meaningful definition of legitimacy and accountability, is the root cause of China’s break-neck type environmental devastation.
There are the circa 800 million peasants, increasingly a big chunk of this migrate to cities as slave-like laborers now survive by some two US Dollars a day. The rest of the urban laborers surviving on an amount not much more than that; the members of the Communist Party of China being now simply the class of slave-owners, with a slave population of that size, they cannot but get super-super rich!
And, the country cannot but have in less than a decade accumulated the world’s largest pile of foreign reserves - $US 1.3 trillions (or something like that).
This needs to be seen as a new form of profiteering - at the expense of the very sustainability of this planet.
Since several decades ago the concept of externalities has been central to public economics – pollutants pass burdens to society, this is called the externalities in the economic activity, and taxes are to be levied on the pollutants so that the irresponsible externality effect can be internalize and the social costs recourse back to the pollutants.
Since some two decades ago China has been in each year helped by significant funding schemes from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As China’s system now has turned into a giant devilish machinery to loot on both the slave-like laborers, and the global environment (that is, you and me included), there should be a pollution tax to be enforced through the WTO instrumentalities – yet given that even the Doha run of the WTO ended up with a shamble, such proposition is hard to be made possible of implementing – but at least this should be voiced, to heighten the needed awareness of the world in this.
Social stratification to menacing proportions like what’s now in China is actually an important and direct cause of the suicidal kind of pollution in China – the super rich cannot care less about what happens in even ten year’s time in the country, as with the big money that they now have, there are countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (and many, many other lesser ones) where they will be welcomed as investor immigrants - for example, in New Zealand currently, those immigration applicants of the investor category - a sizable proportion of this are applicants from China with multi-million US Dollar assets - may be approved in a matter of weeks.
I can assure you, that a big chunk of that central government budget designated to environmental amelioration projects (going green) will end up in the pockets of the super rich (looked at what has happened in the Three-Gore Dam case) - it is, more likely than not, one other melodrama that benefits a statecraft-camouflaged blue-blood predators, a thing mutated into a system geared to extract societal resources for the privileged few.
There is not really a meaningful connotation that can be assigned to the very thin layer of “middle class” in today’s China – the evolving “middle class” as a force of stabilizing and rationalizing the society is simply too remote a scenario, the projection of an enlarging middle class is to me plainly overly naive and lacking research of the useful kind – at the current pace of environ-social deterioration scenario will mean that more likely than not the enlarging middle-class line of story is to be precluded from taking shape – before anything like that to happen, the super rich would have abandoned ship and ‘retire’ (from their historic looting career) to their luxury mansions in Australia, New Zealand, Canada (or actually, America as well), or else. When this exodus starts, even the country’s existing thin layer of middle class will begin to vanish quite quickly – just read those investigative journalism reports in Hong Kong (unfortunately, most of these are published in Chnese) that illustrates how many billions of Dollars were being transferred to overseas accounts each year by China’s super rich (and this is in the current state where no such exodus is in sight yet).
You sound like you know what you're talking about. There is sincerity in your voice, and the outrage of someone who cares about China as well as the larger Earth. This makes your piece even more unsettling than the original article. How long will it take for rapacious elites everywhere to realise that there's No More Offshore any more?
