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China’s ecological suicide
a global nightmare
China is committing ecological suicide, argues
LAURENCE COATES – destroying its waterways, atmosphere and natural
resources to fuel runaway industrialisation. And this process threatens
the entire planet. Just as the Chinese people are among the main victims
of global warming, mainly caused by the older industrialised ‘West’,
China’s latest export wave – acid rain, air pollution and even more
greenhouse gases – is a major threat to the global environment.
IN APRIL, THE population of Beijing awoke to find a
yellow blanket covering the city. A massive sandstorm originating from
Southern Mongolia had dumped an estimated 300,000 tons of sand dust on
the Chinese capital, with the authorities urging its 14 million people
to stay indoors. Desertification in northern China and one of the most
acute water shortages in the world, alongside the effects of global
warming, has increased the frequency and ferocity of such storms. While
Beijing was struck by five severe sandstorms in the 1950s, this rose to
20 in the 1990s, and eight so far this year!
Extreme weather conditions, environmental shocks and
pollution scandals are grabbing the headlines in China, despite the
‘communist’ regime’s continuing tight grip on the media. There is a
growing popular questioning of the regime’s pursuit of rapid but
uncontrolled industrialisation, and the antics of corrupt officials who
in cahoots with local and foreign capitalists are fast obliterating the
country’s land, forests, rivers and other natural resources.
Desert now accounts for a quarter of China’s
landmass and is advancing at the rate of over 3,000 square kilometres a
year. The destruction of China’s natural forests as a result of
ill-planned cultivation during the Mao era, industrialisation and, more
recently, widespread illegal logging, is the main cause of
desertification. A government crackdown on the loggers has driven them
into Burma, Indonesia and the Amazon, where Chinese companies are
notorious for evading local laws in order to feed China’s booming
furniture export trade.
With pollution-related mass protests rising ten-fold
over the last decade, the Chinese dictatorship is increasingly forced to
pay lip service to a ‘green agenda’. According to the World Bank, of the
20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China. More than 100
million people live in cities like Beijing where the air is considered
‘very dangerous’. The approach of the 2008 Beijing Olympics – improbably
dubbed the ‘Green Olympics’ by regime propagandists – adds to the
pressure on the ruling Communist Party (CCP). But, above all, it is the
rising economic cost of environmental destruction that alarms the CCP
leaders. The World Bank estimates this is costing China 7.7 per cent of
gross domestic product (GDP) every year. By this measure, its recent
headline GDP growth rates of 10% a year are not so impressive. Giving
vent to the pessimism in official circles, deputy environment minister
Pan Yue warned of millions of "environmental refugees" and predicted
that China’s so-called economic miracle "will end soon because the
environment can no longer keep pace". (Spiegel, 7 March 2005).
‘Life-threatening environmental crisis’
ACCORDING TO the US environmentalist Elizabeth
Economy, hundreds of millions of Chinese face "a life-threatening
environmental crisis". The poisoning of its rivers, into which largely
untreated industrial waste and sewage is routinely pumped, means that
700 million Chinese drink contaminated water. China now produces as much
organic water pollution as the US, Japan and India combined, which
explains its high rates of hepatitis A, diarrhoea, and liver and stomach
cancers. Of the 500 largest Chinese cities, 193 undertake no sewage
treatment whatsoever, according to a report from the State Environmental
Protection Agency (SEPA). Thirty thousand children die every year from
diarrhoea caused by drinking unclean water. The Ministry of Health
openly acknowledges that environmental pollution is behind a 25 per cent
increase in birth defects nationwide since 2001.
The dangers were brought home to the entire
population in November 2005, when 3.8 million people in the
north-eastern city of Harbin had their water supplies cut off for a week
following an explosion at a petrochemical plant 350 kilometres away. The
scandal at Harbin, involving a 100-ton toxic slick of the deadly
chemical benzene, and a botched cover-up by local authorities, forced
the environment minister’s resignation. Yet appalling industrial
accidents of this kind are a weekly occurrence in China. While the
central government can make an example of this or that errant official,
the incentive to cut corners in order to maximise profits means that
countless other transgressions go unpunished and often unreported at
local level.
Around 60 per cent of the water in the seven major
river systems – the Yangtze, Yellow, Huai, Songhua, Hai, Liao and Pearl
River – is ‘unfit for human contact’. Even the Yangtze, the world’s
fourth longest river and previously considered too big to poison, is a
‘dying river’ according to a recent official report. With 25 billion
tons of mostly untreated wastewater pumped into the Yangtze every year,
its water is ‘cancerous’ and a threat to drinking supplies in the 186
cities along its banks. The official Xinhua news agency reported a
pollution belt stretching hundreds of kilometres from the inland
metropolis of Chongqing all the way to Shanghai. Cities along the
Yangtze must tap far away reservoirs for drinking water or drill deeper
into the underground aquifer, a process that causes land subsidence.
Shanghai’s city centre has sunk 1.7 metres over the past 40 years.
This explains the increasingly heated debate
surrounding the mastodon $50 billion project to divert 45 billion cubic
metres of water from the Yangtze to China’s arid north via a network of
canals, dams and tunnels to be completed over the next four decades. The
south-to-north water diversion scheme is the regime’s answer to the
acute water shortage in Beijing and other northern cities. As pollution
exacerbates China’s water crisis, however, even water rich southern
regions like the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta are now
experiencing water shortages.
River runs dry
WATER, EVEN MORE than oil, is a vital commodity in
any industrialised society and therefore the object of potentially
serious conflicts. Inter-provincial conflicts over natural resources are
nothing new in China and are set to intensify. This is due to the
increasing sway of private – including foreign – capital, deregulation,
and the anarchic jostling for economic advantage between the provinces.
There has been fierce competition for control of water resources between
mainly agricultural upstream provinces and the industrialised coastal
ones.
"There’s growing tension among rural interests,
urban interests and factories over who gets water. Water will become a
major problem in China in the next decade", warned Yukon Huang of the
World Bank.
On a per capita basis, water consumption is 2.5
times higher in the cities than in the countryside. The rapid growth of
China’s cities means urban demand for water is set to rise by 60 per
cent over the next five years.
The CCP regime’s love affair with large dam projects
has further aggravated the situation. It is "a dictatorship run by
engineers, in particular hydropower engineers", argues Jesper Becker in
Asia Times. President Hu Jintao is by profession a hydropower engineer,
as is former prime minister Li Peng, whose son heads the China Huaneng
Group, involved in several major dam projects including the world’s
biggest, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Nearly half the
world’s 45,000 large dams are in China (22,104). Many more are underway
as the regime aims to double China’s hydropower output by the year 2010.
CCP spokesmen insist the dams help prevent
devastating floods and generate clean electric power, helping to reduce
dependence on coal, which currently produces 70 per cent of China’s
electricity. Hydropower is undoubtedly cleaner than coal, but not
without serious adverse effects on the environment. The problem of
severe flooding has become worse despite the proliferation of dams, due
to global factors such as climate change but also local factors,
particularly silting of the riverbed. This was illustrated when the
Yangtze burst its banks in 1998, killing 4,000 people and causing $30
billion-worth of damage. The dangers that flow from excessive dam
building are illustrated by the fate of the Yellow River – known as the
‘cradle of Chinese civilisation’ – which has been dammed virtually out
of existence. In 1972, the river failed to reach the sea for the first
time. Nowadays, with the exception of the rainy season the Yellow River
is prone to run dry about 1,000 kilometres from the coast.
Opposition to new dam projects has been the main
issue for the emerging environmental movement in China. As Chinese
author Dale Wen points out, "At the root of the rush to build more dams
is deregulation and privatisation of the utility industry. The
phenomenon is generally known as ‘enclosure of the waters’ in Chinese".
(China Copes with Globalization, December 2005).
By restricting water flow, the dams limit a river’s
natural ability to dilute and break down industrial pollution. They also
aggravate the problem of sedimentary build-up or silting. This has led
to the absurd situation in which the construction of large dams creates
the need for more dams to ‘correct’ problems caused by the existing
ones. Large dam projects have been catastrophic for China’s
bio-diversity: The Three Gorges Dam threatens the world’s only fresh
water dolphin and several other unique species with extinction. The
human cost too has been monumental. So far 16 million Chinese have been
displaced by dam projects, the majority condemned to unemployment and
destitution. Local officials often cheat ‘dam refugees’ out of the
meagre compensation due to them under Chinese law. Mass protests,
marches and battles with the police have become a common feature of dam
clearance schemes.
Fossil fuel addiction
CHINA’S CONSUMPTION OF fossil fuels has exploded as
its economy has surged, but in a hugely wasteful and uncontrolled
fashion, with "vast overcapacity" in industry according to Chinese
premier Wen Jiabao. So, while it accounts for five per cent of global
GDP, China consumes 12 per cent of the world’s primary energy resources
and is now the number two producer of greenhouse gases after the United
States. Between 1996 and 2003, China’s oil imports increased from 20
million tons to 90 million tons annually. More than a third of this
increase is due to the expansion of the motor vehicle fleet, already the
world’s third largest and growing rapidly under the impact of World
Trade Organisation (WTO) market-opening rules.
"China has begun to enter the age of mass car
consumption. This is a great and historic advance", proclaimed Xinhua
proudly in 2004. The environmental impact of this is, of course,
devastating. Based on research by the State Environmental Protection
Agency, vehicle exhaust emissions already account for 79 per cent of
total air pollution in China. If this is so today, with 33 million motor
vehicles on Chinese roads, consider what will happen when that figure
rises to 130 million by 2020, as most industry analysts predict. China
will in that case have amassed, in a relatively short span of time,
around half as many vehicles as in the United States today. As is widely
known, motor vehicles are the single biggest source of atmospheric
pollution, causing around 14 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide
emissions – the most common ‘greenhouse gas’.
Not surprisingly, with nearly 1,000 new cars hitting
the streets of Beijing every single day, it recently became the ‘air
pollution capital of the world’, based on satellite data from the
European Space Agency. Not only are the people the capital being
poisoned; motor traffic in Beijing now moves at less than half the speed
(eleven kilometres an hour during peak periods) than when it was still
known as the world’s ‘bicycle kingdom’ in the 1980s!
While other famously polluted metropolises like
Mexico City and Los Angeles have an air pollution index of 66 and 44
respectively, Beijing has recorded figures above 300, at which point the
air becomes ‘hazardous’. For a child exposed to this level of airborne
toxins, this is equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day!
Despite the huge rise in oil consumption, coal is
still the main driver of the Chinese economy. Given the three-fold rise
in world oil prices since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, this
dependence on coal has grown. China is the world’s biggest producer,
with total estimated coal reserves of 5.5 trillion tons. Domestic
production has rocketed from less than one billion tons of coal in 2000
to two billion last year. The coal boom has spawned countless small
‘wildcat’ coalmines across China, and directly contributed to the
carnage in that industry. Almost 6,000 Chinese coal miners were killed
last year, 80 per cent of the global total. In India, where miners are
organised in trade unions, mining deaths are one-tenth the level in
China. As one Indian commentator pointed out, if the Indian coal
industry suffered a similar horrific body count, the government would
fall.
Every seven to ten days a new coal-fired power
station opens somewhere in China. Given that only one-fifth of China’s
coal is washed, coal-power produces massive quantities of sulphur
dioxide causing around 400,000 premature deaths a year through heart and
lung disease. It also creates acid rain, which falls on nearly 40 per
cent of China’s territory – poisoning rivers, forests and crops.
According to the World Bank, crop loss from acid rain alone costs China
$5 billion annually. In Chongqing, which burns 15 million tons of coal
every year, acid rain has stripped the paint off traffic signs.
‘Green GDP’?
CONSIDERING THAT CHINA just two decades ago was a
Stalinist ‘command’ economy, today’s anarchic state of affairs – the
almost complete lack of even minimal environmental controls – can seem
incongruous. In fact, the Stalinist regimes of Mao Zedong and Deng
Xiaoping wrought colossal environmental damage, due to arbitrary and
adventuristic policies that, in the absence of democratic controls by
the working class, could not be reversed or modified. The wholesale
destruction of forests carried out under Mao, designed to expand the
area under cultivation and achieve complete food self-sufficiency, has
led to widespread soil erosion, flooding and landslides.
But the growth of capitalist relations and even more
pervasive official corruption since that time has powerfully undermined
the central government’s grip on the provinces and, therefore, over the
economy. Today, barely ten per cent of China’s environmental laws and
regulations are actually enforced. SEPA, the government’s environmental
protection arm, is, according to the Financial Times, "a weak and
understaffed actor in the Beijing bureaucracy", with a staff of just 250
compared to 18,000 at its US equivalent. China’s ‘strong’ central
government, in other words, is a myth!
While the government still produces a ‘five-year
plan’, this is no longer in any sense a directive to the state-owned
sector that still accounts for half of industrial production, but rather
a set of guidelines. A 2004 government study found that half the sewage
treatment facilities built under the last plan (2001-05) were not being
used because local officials considered operating them too expensive.
Similarly, although two-thirds of factories have water purification
equipment, most choose not to use it. Not only are the fines for
non-compliance usually cheaper than the cost of running the equipment,
but local governments also derive a significant part of their budget
income from collecting the fines. The new five-year plan approved in
March, promises greater use of ‘Green GDP’ (economic production less
environmental costs) as an official measure. But the National Bureau of
Statistics has yet to agree what criteria to apply when compiling this
information. Not surprisingly, local governments are not keen on ‘Green
GDP’ measurements – their income and influence within the government
machinery are based on the past year’s economic performance. A pilot
scheme introduced in Shanxi province in 2004 concluded that, based on
‘Green GDP’, its economy had hardly grown at all for the past 20 years.
This province, which produces one-third of China’s coal, suffers from
massive subsidence caused by its network of underground tunnels.
One-seventh of the land in Shanxi – twice as big as Austria – has caved
in, leaving 400,000 people homeless. The picture is similar in other
resource rich regions. Of 118 cities whose economies depend mainly on
natural resources, supplies are running out in thirty. The Economist
reported that, "protesters blocking bridges and roads, and staging
sit-ins and other kinds of demonstrations had become common sights in
these cities", some of which have unemployment rates in excess of 20 per
cent.
Clearly, the Chinese dictatorship is incapable of
arresting the headlong rush of the country – and with it the whole
planet – towards ecological suicide. Only by completely reconstructing
the Chinese state along democratic socialist lines, ending the rule of
the so-called ‘communist’ party (in reality a pro-capitalist
bureaucratic dictatorship) and taking the economy into democratic public
ownership and control, can the present disastrous course be changed. To
bring about such a fundamental shift, China’s fast-growing environmental
movement must link up with working class resistance to privatisation,
deregulation and sweatshop labour, a movement that has experienced an
even more dramatic upswing in recent years. |