The Last Empire: China's Pollution Problem Goes Global
Can the world survive China's headlong rush to emulate the American way of life?
The process is already under way. During the Mao era, the People's Liberation Army ritualistically fired shells at the Taiwan-controlled island of Quemoy; now, the mainland spews garbage that floats across the mile-and-a-quarter-wide channel and washes up on Quemoy's beaches at the rate of 800 metric tons a year. Acid rain caused by China's sulfur-dioxide emissions severely damages forests and watersheds in Korea and Japan and impairs air quality in the United States. Every major river system flowing out of China is threatened with one sort of cataclysm or another, including pollution (Amur), damming (Mekong, Salween), diverting (Brahmaputra), and melting of the glacial source (Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra). The surge in untreated waste and agricultural runoff pouring into the Yellow and China Seas has caused frequent fish die-offs and red-tide outbreaks, and overfishing is endangering many ocean species. The growing Chinese taste for furs and exotic foods and pets is devastating neighboring countries' populations of gazelles, marmots, foxes, wolves, snow leopards, ibexes, turtles, snakes, egrets, and parrots, while its appetite for shark fin soup is causing drastic declines in shark populations throughout the oceans; according to a study published in Science in March 2007, the absence of the oceans' top predators is causing a resurgence of skates and rays, which are in turn destroying scallop fisheries along America's Eastern Seaboard. China's new predilection for sushi is even pricing Japan out of the market for bluefin tuna. Enthusiasm for traditional Chinese medicine, including its alleged aphrodisiacs, is causing huge declines in populations of hundreds of animals hunted for their organs—including tigers, pangolins, musk deer, sea horses, and sea dragons. Seeking oil, timber, gold, copper, cobalt, uranium, and other natural resources, China is building massive roads, bridges, and dams throughout Africa, often disregarding international environmental and social standards. Finally, China overtook the United States as the world's leading emitter of CO2 in 2006, according to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
All this is common knowledge among the scholars and activists who follow Chinese environmental trends. The news, however, has not yet shaken China out of its money-induced euphoria. One indication is that China's 10 percent growth rate takes no account of the environmental devastation the boom has caused. In June 2006, an official at China's State Council said environmental damage (everything from crop loss to health care costs) was costing 10 percent of its gross domestic product—in other words, all of the economy's celebrated growth. Vaclav Smil, a highly respected China scholar at the University of Manitoba, pegs the environmental-damage rate at between 5 and 15 percent, with 7 percent a "solid, defensible figure." Smil says that shorn of hype, China's growth rate is also likely 7 percent, "so basically every year environmental damage wipes out the gdp growth."
LOOKING FOR TROUBLE
for a daredevil, Mr. Zhang looked surprisingly bland. Closely trimmed hair, receding at the temples, crowned his smoothly oval 45-year-old face, and on all four days of our acquaintance he wore the same gray, odorless T-shirt. To sustain his family, Mr. Zhang works freelance as a telecommunications engineer—his current project, he said, was designing a mobile security system for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Freelancing allows him to pursue his real passion: water. He's tracked Beijing's numerous waterways and carries in his head a map of them in all their polluted, obstructed, and diverted complexity. Together, they reveal the capital's fragility. Now he treated me to a sampling of his discoveries: It was the inverse of the typical tourist's treacly junket, a passage through the region's environmentally degraded places.
To achieve this, Mr. Zhang eschewed not just highways but, for long stretches, anything paved. He clearly had such adventures in mind when he bought his vehicle, a primordial two-wheel-drive suv made by the Great Wall Motor Company. Having reached Beijing's Tong Hui canal, Mr. Zhang gleefully bounced us down a dirt path overlooking it. On one side were the makeshift settlements of some of Beijing's legions of migrant laborers, and on the other, the cement-lined, nearly waterless channel. Mr. Zhang pointed to a slightly viscous liquid issuing from a foot-wide pipe on the opposite bank and declared that this marked the first entrance of raw sewage into the canal; from this point on, he said, all the sewage entering the channel, including the squatters' own waste, was untreated. Far downstream, the canal's water merges with the Hai River, one of China's most polluted waterways.
On the city's outskirts, we stopped at a gas station, whose attendants told Mr. Zhang that a nearby beer factory had sucked up enough groundwater to lower the local water table by 40 or 50 yards. We took a bridge across a riverbed so dry that the grass in it had turned yellow. After driving alongside the Mi Yun reservoir—Beijing's last remaining reliable source of water, which has dropped more than 50 feet since 1993—we passed a sign reading, "Looking for someone to drill a well?"
At midday we ascended the Jundu Mountains, the low, jagged range north of Beijing. The twisting road offered frequent glimpses of precarious, crest-top outcroppings of the former world wonder, the Great Wall—obscured by the haze, it looked diminished by China's new scale. At last we stopped for lunch at a rustic, thick-walled restaurant with cigarette butts on the floor. Mr. Zhang objected to the disposable chopsticks we were offered—whole forests are succumbing to China's consumption of 45 billion pairs of chopsticks per year—and demanded washable ones. The daintily manicured Ms. Lei was more worried by the restaurant's indeterminate hygiene, and stuck with the disposables. Reluctantly, so did I.
BEIJING GOES GREEN
In preparation for the Olympic Games, China has spent $3.6 billion and taken some radical, and sometimes loony, steps to clean up the capital.
TRANSIT
Four new subways are being built; fares cut 33% to 27¢. In August, 1.3 million cars were banned for four days. Subway ridership increased by 30%, and pollution was reduced by 20%. A million vehicles will be banned for the entire Olympics. 54,000 taxis and buses have been kicked off the road due to new emissions restrictions. Beijing now has a fleet of compressed-natural-gas buses, and by the Games will be using battery-powered garbage trucks.
GREENWAYS
More than 50 percent of Beijing is now "green areas," including 20 nature reserves. 33 million trees have been planted along Beijing's highways and rivers. But a mountain was destroyed to provide the soil.
WEATHER MODIFICATION
135 "rainmakers" at 22 sites around the city have been enlisted to shoot clouds approaching Beijing with silver iodide in a cloud-seeding operation. "If rain clouds are headed toward the Olympic stadium, we will intercept them," one official said.
FACTORIES
200 factories and steel mills have been relocated outside the city, already the origin of most of Beijing's particulate matter. Hebei Province is spending $2.8 billion to build six air-quality monitoring stations and install scrubbers in 34 power plants.
INSECT CONTROL
The city aims to increase bird and ladybug populations. Hoping to eliminate 80% of Beijing's insects, two farmers have volunteered to stake out parks and toilets, videotaping flies to learn their behavior and best eradication methods.
GROUP EFFORT
Bureaucrats told to wear short sleeves to reduce need for AC. Volunteers with the Green Woodpecker Project are trying to persuade Chinese to stop spitting, and videotaping those who persist in order to shame them.
—Jen Phillips
By now I'd realized that Mr. Zhang had only a vague idea of the location of the newly formed Inner Mongolian desert that I'd hired him to take me to. As backup, he stopped at a cluster of houses in Fengning County, Hebei Province, that had been engulfed in an April 2001 sandstorm. Residents told us how the sand penetrated their houses and got into their food, clothes, eyes, and mouths. Many just left: One village's population, about 200 people in 2001, is now half that.
By the end of our visit, evening had set in, and Mr. Zhang realized he'd locked his keys inside the car. An hour passed while he tried increasingly improbable but inventive stratagems for opening the doors, finally removing the car's front bumper so he could open the hood and disable the car's electronic lock system—to no avail. Ms. Lei and I were getting cold and irritable. By the time Mr. Zhang shaped a snag out of a windshield wiper and successfully hooked an inside lock, he looked thoroughly beleaguered. At last back on the road and out of options for spending the night, we came across a karaoke inn near the top of the mountain pass that would take us to Inner Mongolia. We slept in bare, cold rooms as disembodied, dissonant karaoke strains floated up from the floor below.
PULP NONFICTION
no sector better illustrates the vast reach and explosive impacts of China's manufacturing dominance than logging. At one end are the consumers in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China itself, who are mostly oblivious to the social and environmental destruction left by the Chinese-made furniture, plywood, moldings, and flooring they buy.
At the other end are the wood suppliers, almost all poor countries with weak or corrupt law enforcement and a flourishing trade in illegal lumber. Among China's leading wood importers, Thailand and the Philippines have already been stripped of their natural forests; Indonesia and Burma are projected to lose theirs within a decade. Papua New Guinea's will succumb within 16 years, and the vast forests of the Russian Far East will survive no more than two decades. Even so, Forest Trends, a Washington-based nonprofit, estimates that China's wood imports will probably double over the next decade. Chinese manufacturers are already developing replacement sources in Africa, and South America's forests are under threat for a different reason: China's growing consumption of pork and chicken is fed by soybeans grown on newly cleared Amazonian land; by one estimate, 30 percent of the jungle could eventually be transformed into soybean fields.
In the middle is China, the world's workshop, now both the planet's leading wood importer and exporter, supplying more than 30 percent of the international furniture trade. Hundreds of sawmills line China's northeastern border to process softwood logs harvested in Russia, while a port north of Shanghai called Zhangjiagang, described by the British watchdog group Environmental Investigation Agency as "a sleepy backwater" in 2000, grew to become "probably the largest trading centre for tropical logs in the world" by 2005—by then, at least half a billion dollars in wood passed through it annually, according to Chinese customs figures. From the port, many of the logs are transported two hours by road to the town of Nanxun, another former hinterland that the eia calls "the wood flooring centre of the world," with more than 500 flooring factories.
Until 1998, China fed its wood mills trees from its own forests. That year, the middle reaches of the Yangtze River swelled with the region's biggest flood in more than 50 years, killing 3,000 people, destroying 5 million homes, and engulfing 52 million acres of land. As winter approached months later, 14 million were still homeless. The land, it turned out, had no defense against erosion left. Lakes and wetlands that once would have absorbed some of the rain had been drained to create farmland, and the forests that once held topsoil in place had been harvested. Torrential rainwater carried the topsoil to the river and then down it, until its bed swelled with new sediment and the floodwater rose above its banks. As a result, China declared a logging ban on what little remained of its old-growth forests. Most environmentalists applauded the ban until they grasped its corollary: Chinese companies began harvesting other countries' trees on an even grander scale.
this is really the crux of the matter, it is up to the government to make sure that economic externalities (i.e. environmental damage)do not get out of hand, but in China's case they are more concerned with lining their pockets and keeping power.
this puts reality in the statement "Going to hell in a hand basket (Made in China)
Unfortunately the evolution of an enlightened human species will only come too late with our demise in a global cesspool
I've got a question and some suggestions on this topic.. First I noticed all these reports are referring to China as a developing nation. Why is it considered to be developing when China is one of the oldest countries in the world and has been "developing" for over 1000 years? It's far from being a third world or even a second world country trying to "develop" into a first rate nation on par with others such as Japan, U.S., or many of the European nations. China also has the highest population of any country on the planet and as a whole continues knowingly and willingly to pollutes it's own local and national resources, water and land, as well as polluting the worlds only completely shared resource, air. Now in my opinion if they want to pollute their resources, potentially killing millions of it's own populus, and stalling maybe even put their "development" into a decline, is not just their problem. Also countries such as the U.S. and others who contribute to the chinese export and GDP, want to help stem off the problem shouldn't feed the country more money by "outsourcing", consuming products, and supply them the resources they need to manufacture and produce such items, but lead by example (kyoto agreement), to bring the country into a more "green" society. If China refuses to sign, like the idiots on capital hill, they should place sanctions or even embargos to force/persuade China, as well as other countries including america, into reducing their major pollution problem. Doing so would have a huge impact on how china, and other nations, treats it's pollution production and it wouldn't take decades to get their factories and illegal energy, mining, and water shortage under control. The whole "it's america and the western societies fault" excuse is lame rhetoric, when China clearly has had time to see what effects and repricussions that being an industrialized nation comes with, and how to combat it. The U.S. is the world leader in pollution, and probably the leader in chinese imports, but we as a country are one of the leading nations in prevention, clean up, and reduction. We're not perfect nor is any other nation, but the short time this country has been founded, very short in terms of nations lifespans, we have developed the knowledge for the industrial age, learned the fall out industrialization produces, and most recently how to prevent further destruction of the enviroment plus how to help restore it. The problem doesn't lie solely on china or america but the world as a whole.
having worked the oilsands i cann say that this is not the end of the world but at syncude one can almost see it vote my US friends and remember that one of them was going to give healthcare - a birthright here - but failed to deliver tim146atshaw.ca
What can we do about it? Some ask.
I have argued earlier that the irresponsibility in all the menacing pollutions is a necessary co-product of the repressive system’s ripping off of the 800 million something slave-like laborers.
For the three decades till late 1980s (perhaps the 1988 Olympic Game in South Korea signifies a symbolic dividing point) South Korea and Taiwan were the places where most of the world’s lower-value-added consumer’s goods are being made – China had since gradually taken over that role.
For the said three decades when most of the stuff were Made in Taiwan (or Korea), there was not a single event similar in scale or nature to what were seen last year, of poisonous toys, toothpastes, etc. made in China. Why?
Perhaps this helps to illustrate the emphatic difference between more responsible and less responsible systems at work. And now, China, which took over the role of the world’s workshop, needs to be seen as quite a different species. Things like this are rather sufficient in dismissing the optimism that China is now following the development path of south Korea and Taiwan’s, which eventually bring prosperity to its ordinary citizens – and which nations acquired sophistication and became responsible world citizens.
As Steven Spielberg had recently renounced his earlier commitment with the Beijing Olympic 2008, he is making a statement by his act, against what Beijing has been doing and continues so doing in Sudan, I personally think things of this sort would be one of a few levers that ordinary people in the free world (I do mean free world, not just configurative) has got a chance to prompt the world’s last standing Bolshevik power to ever get the message that they are actually not able to remain unanswerable forever to the world for fundamental issues of the very basic human decency and responsibility to the humankind.
UK’s Minister for Africa, last night praised Steven Spielberg’s boycott of the Beijing Olympics in protest over Darfur, claiming the director had forced China’s leaders to “sit up and take notice”.(see report on the Times)
There will be plenty of ways that people in the West might take to SIDE WITH Steven Spielberg, in making such statement - before and during the 2008 Olympic.
That’ll be at least what we can do.
He United States is hardly an environmentally heedless nation, as the author states on page 1 of this article. Granted we use more and pollute more than our share of the global population. However, the United States has been mindful of and worked to improve our environmental impact since the 70's. I'm not trying to excuse our contribution to past or current environmental ills; I'm just saying, we're not environmentally heedless.
The reporter should do a follow-up story about how many of these Chinese factories produce goods for Americans.
After reading this, I am more confirmed in my decision to NEVER visit China in my lifetime! It's an unhealthy place to be. Even if I was to get a free first class all expenses paid deal, I wouldn't take it. The developed world is as responsible as China for raping and pillaging our Earth. We are and will be the ultimate losers.
This is so true. After traveling in Beijing, Luoyang and Guangzhou in 2007 I left China with a horrible respiratory infection. The sky always had a thick haze and in Guanghzhou it would be around 10am before the sunshine would begin to eek through the clouds.
We need to take responsibility as we have been industrial role models. Now we have the opportunity to be environmental role models. I saw a bumper sticker that read "Environmentalism, the idea that we should clean up our own mess." I think that should extend to help those who have simply tried to keep up by emulating us.
Jacques Leslie's The Last Empire does not live up to its billing. It certainly does not develop its thesis, which should have put a lot of focus on the US as well. In citing unsubstantiated statistics and inundating the reader with huge numbers, Mr. Leslie has created a horrific scenario, a fright worse than anything Poe could have mustered. Mr. Leslie has, too, made one small facet of China stand for the entire country; it's quite obvious, other than on this jaunt with Mr. Zhang the mad driver, that he's never been out in the country--and most definitely has not lived outside a major city. Citing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and implying they are China is akin to citing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and letting the world know that they are all there is to the US. Ad hominem writing at best.
In reality, this article is a massive China bashing--and it is quite effective. It is also mass quantities of fuel for the environmental hysterics, so it's doubly frightening. Two, two, two slams in one! I just love the bit about the dust flooding the airwaves and depositing itself over the US. True? I don't know. But such kinds of information have never been done and never been circulated about the US's dust and pollution. If they had, then this kind of reporting would have validity. As it is, it is without substance, settling into the lungs of the readers like the dust it raises up in alarm.
All of the horror may be true but the lead-in and subtitle of the article was that China's problem is following the US's lead in economic development and the consumer society. This did not materialize, except by the by. For the thesis of this article to have any applicability, that is, for it to have been followed through as the lead-in led us to believe it would be, there would have had to be comparative findings with the US. Bringing home what's happening in China is necessary but Mr. Leslie never got home, so the intended comment/blame on the US economic society never got made. Indeed, only once did Mr. Leslie come close to saying that this is what the US wanted.
I wonder how much Mother Jones paid for writing that would not have made a college senior English thesis? In my six years in China, I've seen better, more logically well-constructed writing than this. But it has admirably satisfied the hidden objective of Mother Jones' editorial staff: China bashing to scare the hell out of people. There's not much difference in this type of reporting and the type of reporting that alternative media damn in the US mainstream.
Nice photography, too. Pointed and propagandistic: notice that the only person wearing a facial covering in the picture from Ningxia is the woman on the bike right in front of the lens. There isn't even any subtlety in this!
great that young americans get to see up close and personal what the Real china is become. Make her read this article before she goes so she can look at china with an informed eye.
I feel the same way. Consumerism is destroying our Spirit and killing our Mother Earth. For all you Bible reader, what would Jesus do ( He would surely cry if he saw what has happened to our enviroment.) Peace be with you!
Ya know at some point the poor folk of China are not going to be able to reproduce due to excessive air and water pollution. Bio engineering the next generation (stronger,smarter, etc)of Chinese is already well underway.
once again that nobel peace prize winner al gore needs to go to china and campaian for a cleaner china instead of carrying on here about the enviornment which in china is really polluting the world weve done enough here its chinas turn because something tells me china dosnt give a rats butt about global warming which in turn if we keep listening to al gore well all cook in a couple of years due to global warming they keep coming up with new laws for the enviro but as long as china is polluting the world we may as well forget it i dont have a college degree but we all breath the same air as china and the rest of the world dont we ????
I certainly DO NOT think this report is any China-bashing. There is a Mr Jim something who claimed to have lived in China for 6 years. Does that prove that Mr Jim is better informed than Leslie about things outside the big cities in China? No. and I'll tell you why, for foreigners who are trying understand what's going on in China, mostly there is no way for them to get "in the know" in such a police-state system. So 6 years (teaching English, for example) in China surely does not give much of any credit to the kind of strong argument that Mr Jim (a few comments earlier) was intending to make.
As an overseas Chinese who speak and read the Chinese language - Leslie's report is actually mild as is compare with those from the free journalism in Hong Kong (I guess Mr Jim above would not have had a chance to read those many, and much more alarming ones published in Hong Kong, in Chinese, about how things are being run in China).
And, I would like to point out, that Mr Jim has meted out a much more evidently "Ad hominem" writing here, as he was talking about in one minute that Leslie was making unqualified generalizations basing only on what he saw in big cities, for conditions in China generally, the next minute he was grading Leslie's article in terms of an English-class merits. I don't see any logically productive argument there.
And also, I was surprised that Mr Jim seem to have not in his 6 years'in China seen perhaps thousands of drivers' who were no-less "mad drivers" as was Mr Zhang in the story, as he so branded - for someone like me, Mr Zhang's mentality in driving was not much different from an average driver in China.
Personally, I would prefer to have more China-bashing, or America-bashing, or else, articles to come around - than those that do not perceive much of what the real issue is underlying.
Now, excuse me for any imperfect English used here, any ENglish teacher out there, as English is not my first language.
while i agree with the points in this story and many of the responses of the readers, i'm also worried that our concerns have turned into racism (e.g., referring to all chinese people as "these people," calling them names, etc.) and also into scapegoating (turning our frustration about global issues into something exclusively chinese).
i think it's important for us to remember that we are all responsible. after all, americans are racing to invest in chinese corporations and their emerging economy, regardless of china's faulty policies toward the environment, human rights abuses, etc. what does that say about our ethics and values?
real change happens when we're willing to look at issues within contexts and work to solve problems instead of standing around pointing fingers and calling names.
The simple reason is that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) don't have the Legitimacy to rule and they already killed 80 million Chinese people (data subject to scrunity, but all Communist countries killed more than 10% of their population, 2M of 8M in Cambodia, for example).
I am not saying CCP are crazy people, but essentially they are. They will do anything, everthing to keep themselves in power, in fear of the consequency of their crime in history and still committing. Basically a position of a killer's nightmare in short.
Please look the attached photos. These are poluted river in China. They jailed all people dare to raise voice for environemtnal issues in the name of "disturbing social order and releasing state secrets":
http://epochtimes.com/gb/8/1/10/n1972460.htm
A price that the earth with us included will pay, someday.
And in my humble view, social and material issues are all related, such as the human rights and the environmental issues in China.
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-2-4/65281.html
Over 1,000 Japanese Poisoned by Dumplings Imported From China
http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-7-24/57963.html
Can Communist China Control Its Toxic Exports?
Many issues that we have not really touched, including the forced labor.
There was a hearing in US congress in early 2000 that make me really concerned: basically, China is using jailed labors to produce goods to export here. These efforts are handled by the Chinese GOVERNMENT.
How can we compete economically? A witness who is a manufacture hired a investigator who showed all the evidence that the goods from China are from prison.
Plus, the Chinese government is not afriad of jail people, especially the activists and concerned people with nerves, and they can be free labor.
If we cannot fix these problems (there are more), we lost a big time. Watching all the container cargos from China, we will be doomed with time, ship by ship.
Again, it is Communists: they treat people as MATERIAL only. This is the basics basic.
"Expanding is the foremost HARD princiapl," declared by former CCP leader Deng XiaoPin. Why? fearing of losing power is the only reason, regardless of consequences, means, or future.
The secondary reason is CCP wiped out Chinese traditional values, replaced with communism idealogy which no body believed in any more, but the CULTURE was lost. However, the fundamental communist thinking take roots in many people - that is the problem.
Aks around in China, how many people really believe in Tao or Budda? and their peaceful theory about dealing with nature?
May be one need to read the book of "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party" to understand the ruling party CCP and current social conditions of China.
agree with deborah February 23, 2008 8:43:58.
China used top monay to paint a nice picture: Bought all 59 satallites in the world largest media companies. Why so many (lot $$$$)? one-third Sat will cover the globe, not mentioning that China has their own sat.
The reason is that they want to control the world media, becoming accomplice to cheat the world. Currently, no large media group dare to say no to China! (Thanks for Mother Jones)
I bet that you cannot release Mr. Zhang's real name, otherwise he will be in trouble.
It is complicated to deal with China's issue. But for the readers hear if you agree and care, we need to act early than late.
As for solutions, it is clear. Chinese people should be included.
I would like to share with you if you are interested.
i traveled abroad to china to check this information out to myself and i interviewed many villagers. its true, china does indeed have a water crisis. too wrapped up in industry to fix this problem...
Damn right! Stop screwing. Enough kids! Does not anyone think about the world that future generations are inheriting from their parents?! This is why I chose to not have kids.
And... I am the DETONATOR! When I die, and all this is unresolved, (if I am who I think I am), I will go to the center of Earth and detonate its core. Earth will be no more, as will suffering by countless billions of birth, death, loss, pain, anguish, sadness. There is a reason why we have not found other civilizations on nearby world - because we cannot be trusted. We were separated from all other worlds so that we would not reach out and destroy them. Now, it seems very unlikely that a superior race of beings will come and replace all the current races of Earth before it becomes another Mars.
See you on the flip side.
china is screwwing us all with the pollution
China is currently undergoing an industrial revolution. Think of US. It used to have the same industrial pollution problems back in the 50's. Just give china some time to advance, and things will get better for them (environment wise). Hopefully this industrial boost will help enlarge the middle class.
You are truely an extrimist. I hope you could reduce your rejudice on China. What is your purpose behind this article. I hope you have peace in your heart!
I think that the 2nd byline is interesting!!!!!!!!!!!
Like the tower of babylon...we've risen too fast as a race and we will only realize what needs to be done when it is too late.
As seen by some of the comments here like Orwell Lee and Alex Fan, some people obviously don't understand the difference between Communism, Capitalism, or their own noses.
China's environmental problems are ultimately caused by ITS EMULATION OF the AMERICAN/WESTERN CAPITALIST MODEL called Neoliberalism.
China is now communist in name only. Capitalism is what has conquered China and indeed much of the Communist/Soviet World since the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
But apparently, these people haven't got the memo yet about the End of the Cold War and still spew their tired jingoistic propaganda about China.
If people are sincere about environmental problems, then ultimately they need to question the entire Capitalist system itself--in China, in the USA, in the West, and the world.
Indeed, what many people carefully gloss over is that America's corporations are key contributors to the environmental degradation on a global scale--including in CHINA itself.
After all, how many American/Western corporations have relocated to China to exploit the lax labor and environmental conditions there?
The label "Made in China" may be literally true, but it glosses over the reality of Whose Corporations own/control the factories there? China increasingly serves as a cheap labor "colony" for Western and American capitalism.
Behind the self-serving complaints about "foreigners stealing our jobs, this is what the Outsourcing issue is truly about: Capitalist exploitation on a global scale.
But, opposing Capitalism is precisely what the USA and others do NOT want to do. It is always easier to look for a foreign country to scapegoat and blame.
Even this MOJO series (grudgingly) admits that China's economic development is based upon imitating the American Way of Life and its consumption habits.
But one implication that many people would rather not consider is this: What does that say about the American Way and its legitimacy?
While China's environmental problems are real and serious, most of the concern--and proposed (cough) solutions--that you see from America, the West, and their corporate free press are cynical to the core.
Their agenda is to SHED CROCODILE TEARS ABOUT THESE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES IN ORDER TO ADVANCE AMERICAN/WESTERN GEOPOLITICAL AGENDAS THAT AIN'T ABOUT ENVIRONMENTALISM.
China (along with India) is seen as a rising economic challenger of the USA and West. This challenge threatens the American Empire's God Given right to dominate and rule the world.
Environmentalism is increasingly being manipulated by America both as a propaganda and economic weapon to vilify China and to curtail its economic growth--all justified behind a Green pretext.
I suspect this Mother Jones article is implicitly driven by this less-than-sincere motivation.
The idea that the USA--home of the Exxon Valdez accident, Three Mile Island, Drilling in the Anwer Arctic refuge--has suddenly "gone Green" is humorous and should be treated with skepticism.
In fact, as one can see from *some* of the comments here, a thinly disguised anti-Chinese chauvinism motivates certain people's supposed "environmental" concern.
A critical question that one needs to ask is: Why are the Corporate Media and many corporations all of a sudden hopping on the Environmental Bandwagon?
It is because these (Western) corporations have suddenly "gotten the message" about the importance of environmental issues--after decades, if not centuries of despoiling and raping it?
It is because of the supposed apocalyptic threat of Global Warming?
Or is there something else involved that has nothing to do with Environmentalism but rather the MANIPULATION of this issue as a mask for other agendas--such as, say, imposing global economic Austerity measures in the West and a "green" economic Malthusianism on Developing/Emerging nations like China and India?
On the current "Hot Button Issue" of Global Warming, William Engdahl suggests:
"The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to 'prevent the harmful effects of climate change.' The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy….
Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.
The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its 'possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.' Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity. "
Neoliberals and "Progressives" (like MoJo magazine perhaps) represent the Soft Power faction of the US/Western ruling class.
While they differ in tactics and "political marketing" from the Neoconservatives, Neoliberals share the same underlying agenda: Global Economic Austerity, if not Malthusianism.
No doubt, many Mainstream people will dismiss Engdahl's analysis as "conspiracy theory."
It's always safer and more comfortable to believe what the Capitalist free press tells you--the same media that pushed the West's outright lies about Iraqi WMDs for over a decade and its deceptions about the USA's War on Terrorism since 9/11.
good info but you should add more details
i think our next president should really put some time into helping china
WE BELIEVE OUR GOVERMENT COULD SOLVE IT
If China is messing up our seafood, where are we suppose to get our seafood from now? And why couldn't we have got the food from our own coast?
China maker of lead tainted plastic CRAP!
i didn't know alaska, hawaii and the middle east were nations!
I really wisht that China would stop doing all those things. They're like the majore murderer of the Earth.
China ships 20% of their production to the US. So, possibly, up to 20% of their GHG and pollution is caused by producing goods for the US. Also, we know that ocean freighters cause a great deal of pollution as well as trains and trucks carrying Chinese goods across the US.
When we see Olympic athletes hacking and coughing, we should know perhaps 20% of there misery is caused by American consumers. So, if we want to reduce CO2, global warming and pollution (and the decline of the US economy), buy local. Also, we need to require US importers of Chinese goods to insist that they be manufactures in an environmentally responsible way.
Take care, frank
Horrific article! Just horrific. What do we do when faced with destruction on such a mind-numbing scale. Just one point: Indonesian Papua is the western half of the island. The eastern half is being pillages mainly by Malaysian timber companies.
Before judging to harshly, consider that China and India might have unwittingly provided some breathing room against global warming. Checkout "global dimming" and China's contribution to particulate matter. What a mess.
Gee, and to thinl I started reading this article because I thought I might learn something helfpful from the Chinese about how to get rid of air pollution here in Texas!
