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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: China Today
- Sprache: Englisch
China’s huge environmental challenges are significant for us all. They affect not only the health and well-being of China but the very future of the planet.
In this trailblazing book, noted China specialist and environmentalist Judith Shapiro investigates China’s struggle to achieve sustainable development against a backdrop of acute rural poverty and soaring middle class consumption. Using five core analytical concepts to explore the complexities of this struggle - the implications of globalization, the challenges of governance; contested national identity, the evolution of civil society and problems of environmental justice and equity - Shapiro poses a number of pressing questions: Do the Chinese people have the right to the higher living standards enjoyed in the developed world? Are China's environmental problems so severe that they may shake the government's stability, legitimacy and control? To what extent are China’s environmental problems due to patterns of Western consumption? And in a world of increasing limits on resources and pollution "sinks," is it even possible to build an equitable system in which people enjoy equal access to resources without taking them from successive generations, from the poor, or from other species?
China and the planet are at a pivotal moment; the path towards a more sustainable development model is still open. But - as Shapiro persuasively argues - making this choice will require humility, creativity, and a rejection of business as usual. The window of opportunity will not be open much longer.
Chapter 1 - 'The Big Picture' - is available online.
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Seitenzahl: 327
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Map
Chronology
Preface
Acknowledgments
1: Introduction: The Big Picture
GLOBALIZATION
GOVERNANCE
NATIONAL IDENTITY
CIVIL SOCIETY
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL HARM
ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES AND THE STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES
OVERVIEW
2: Environmental Challenges: Drivers and Trends
POPULATION INCREASE
RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS
GLOBALIZATION OF MANUFACTURING
LAND USE CHANGES: URBANIZATION, INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND LOSS OF FARMLAND
CLIMATE CHANGE
RECENT EVENTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS
3: State-led Environmentalism: The View from Above
GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE
4: Sustainable Development and National Identity
CHINESE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS
THE MAO YEARS AND THEIR LEGACY
DEBATE ABOUT CHINESE CULTURE
5: Public Participation and Civil Society: The View from Below
MODES OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
FRIENDS OF NATURE
GOVERNMENT-ORGANIZED NGOS (GONGOS)
ROLE OF INTERNATIONAL ENGOS
ENGO STRATEGIES
USE OF THE COURTS
CITIZEN ACTIVISTS
6: Environmental Justice and the Displacement of Environmental Harm
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE IN THE URBAN SETTING
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AT THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE: CANCER VILLAGES AND OTHER DISEASE CLUSTERS
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE BETWEEN CHINA’S EAST AND WEST
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: INTERNATIONAL DIMENSIONS
DEBATE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL IMPACTS
CONCLUSIONS
7: Prospects for the Future
FINAL THOUGHTS
References
Index
Copyright © Judith Shapiro 2012
The right of Judith Shapiro to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2012 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6090-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6091-2 (pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6309-8 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6310-4 (mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
Chronology
Preface
I first visited the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 1977. United States–China relations had not yet been normalized, Mao Zedong had been dead less than a year, and political posters plastered everywhere showed the Chairman lying on his sickbed with his chosen successor Hua Guofeng at his side, saying “With You in Charge, I am at Ease.” Hua would only hold power until December 1978. A reformist government followed under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, who returned from political exile and persecution to revolutionize China as profoundly as Mao did in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party’s army defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and drove it and its followers to Taiwan. Little did I know then, at the age of 24, that the parades and celebrations I witnessed in Shanghai marked the beginning of Deng’s political rehabilitation. Nor did I understand that this political “opening” was about to transform China, the world, and also my own life, providing me with the opportunity to be among the first 40 Americans to teach English there, along with a few resident foreign Maoists who had managed to survive the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
China had been profoundly shut away from most of the outside world since the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. What the West knew about the Mao years was limited largely to interviews with refugees conducted by scholars and government officials in Hong Kong, and glowing reports from leftwing “friends of China.” When I was at university and graduate school in the 1970s, the United States was reeling from the unpopular Vietnam War. Many American young people were highly critical of the U.S. government and skeptical of its claims that our traditional enemies, China among them, could possibly be as bad as claimed. We knew vaguely about “people’s communes,” which sounded fascinating at a time when our domestic counter-culture movement was also experimenting with collective living. We also knew that in China it was said that “Women Hold up Half the Sky,” a compelling slogan for Western feminists who were expanding their intellectual, political, and personal influence and becoming a truly popular women’s movement. Through “ping-pong diplomacy,” or friendly sports matches intended to break down political barriers, and the limited cultural exchanges that followed the famous 1972 Nixon and Kissinger visit, we caught televised performances by the fantastic Shanghai acrobats, whose back-bending female contortionists could stack bowls on their heads with their feet while standing on their forearms, and whose male gymnasts could create tableaux of 20 figures balanced on a single circling bicycle. We admired naïve and charming peasant paintings that showed nets full of golden carp and fields of abundant harvests, with red-cheeked girls portrayed as members of the “Worker, Peasant, Soldier” proletariat. In retrospect, our romanticism was at best untutored and at worst dangerous. Nonetheless, it was the reason for my determination to learn Chinese, which I began studying in my sophomore year at Princeton, and to go to China to live.
I might have been more sensitive to signs that not everything was as rosy as I hoped, during my first visit in the summer of 1977. My organized group tour consisted of members of the U.S.–China People’s Friendship Association, a populist organization intended to build people-to-people ties at a time our governments were at loggerheads. At one point, we were traveling by overnight train from Beijing to Xi’an when the guide assigned to spend two weeks with us, a kindly middle-aged lady, returned from the train platform after a ten minute stop, weeping profoundly. She was sharing a sleeping compartment with me and I asked what was wrong. She told the story of her beloved son who had been “sent down” from his home to the rural countryside to “learn from” the peasants. She had just seen him for the first time since he left home ten years earlier. She explained that the residence card system, which included everyone in China, kept him in exile. His residence card, or hukou, had been transferred to the countryside, keeping him trapped there; he would be unable to obtain ration coupons to buy rice, cooking oil, vegetables, clothing, and other life necessities anywhere else. She missed him terribly.
Also on that trip, an overseas Chinese woman in our group made every effort to contact her relatives and was finally allowed to glimpse them for a few moments. In the company of Party handlers, they were unable to speak freely and she was unable to discover what had happened to them during the Cultural Revolution. Their gaunt appearance and fearful demeanor made her profoundly worried.
However, instead of paying attention to these warning signals, I became more enamored than ever of a country whose people appeared strong and slim, warmly hospitable, and eager for our help. The women wore the same clothing as the men: blue or green pants and simple white shirts. They wore their hair in long braids or short bobs; they used no makeup, and indeed, there was none for sale. The men had brushy haircuts, bad teeth, and wonderfully winning smiles. The entire country seemed to rely on bicycles for transportation; automobiles were few, and reserved for “distinguished guests” like ourselves or for high-ranking Party officials. The Chinese were clearly thrilled we were visiting – everywhere we drew huge, curious, friendly crowds. Foreigners unlucky enough to be tall or to have blond or red hair were mobbed. The Chinese begged us to come back and help them to develop. Profoundly moved, I was determined to try to make a contribution.
When in early 1979 the phone call came from the Chinese Embassy telling me I had been selected to teach English in Hunan Province, I was a Masters degree student in Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. With almost six years of Chinese language training and blessed with short stature and dark hair to help me blend into local crowds, I was as well-equipped as any American might have been for the experiences that lay ahead. In retrospect, I was totally unprepared for the shocking stories I heard once I arrived and the moving events I experienced. In the course of those early two-and-a-half years of life in China, I made deep and often dangerous friendships (foreigners were still widely viewed as spies), traveled to numerous places where no foreigner had been, witnessed the struggles of a country recovering from a prolonged nightmare, and found my own writer’s voice as someone who could bear witness to the suffering of a people who had no other court of appeal.
Hunan Province was Chairman Mao’s home province. As a result, Maoism ran deep. Ultra-leftist military men were entrenched in power at my university, Hunan Teachers’ College, and they were not at all pleased to be sent a Western foreign teacher, even if (or perhaps especially since) her English was considered an essential tool of the modernization policy of the new government. The “foreign expert” was given a large apartment, by Chinese standards, and fitted with the only air conditioner on the campus. When I turned it on, the electricity in the whole college went out – I refrained from using it. I was assigned a Party handler, a charming young woman teacher whose only duty was to spend every possible moment monitoring my activities. I fought back against her smothering attention vigorously, with eventual success. After several months she was allowed to return to her teaching assignments and instead I was placed under the charge of a genial retired army officer with a second-grade education (the military was still controlling the universities), who let me do as I pleased. I fought also for the right to ride a bicycle instead of being chauffeured in one of the only three cars in the campus garage (what if the foreigner had an accident or went somewhere off limits?) and to practice my passionate hobby, ballet, with the local song and dance troupe, who spoke of their affection for the Russian teachers who had been forced home after relations collapsed with the 1960 Sino-Soviet Split. I also fought for the right to attend the required weekly political study sessions for faculty, only to feel confused by the ill-concealed hatred that the professors displayed for the leaders, who sat in front of the room reading Party directives aloud from the official newspapers. The professors whispered loudly, knitted, spat, and showed their disdain; this was hardly what I expected.
But my political education began in earnest when I was at last permitted to teach the students. In my first months, I was considered too precious a commodity to share with anyone but the professors, many of whom were elderly former Russian teachers attempting to retool for the country’s modernization drive. However, in 1977 the first examinations for university entrance had been held since before the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution began in 1966. The students were brilliant; no professor was qualified to teach them because most English instructors had built their careers on obscure points of grammar or laborious translations of the classics (one had even achieved professorship for his translations of the poems of Chairman Mao), and at last the top students were put under my tutelage. Many of them were my age, in their mid-twenties, and had studied English in secret, often while in the countryside where they had been sent, like my former tour guide’s son, to “learn from” the peasants. Such studying was highly dangerous; during the Cultural Revolution you could lose your life for listening to the Voice of America or the BBC. Yet these students, confused and embittered by the sacrifices they had made seemingly for naught, risked everything to ask questions about the outside world and about the regime under which they grew up and by which they felt misled, tricked, and exploited. They gradually started to share their stories with me, through class essays and friendships. Ironically, they often trusted me, an outsider, far more than they trusted each other, for every class had its student spies who would report what was said in order to gain their own political advancement.
From my students, I began to learn the grass roots perspective on the history of China after Mao came to power. They recalled how they were told that they were the luckiest people in the world to be born after 1949 into China’s new socialist paradise. They told of the 1956–1957 Hundred Flowers Movement, a brief few months when people were encouraged to criticize the regime so as to improve it, and of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement which followed immediately after, when many of China’s most brilliant and outspoken intellectuals, scientists, and political leaders were labeled as Rightists, silenced, imprisoned, exiled, and even executed. Although my students were children at the time, some had lost parents to politically induced divorce or persecution, and they themselves had been viewed as politically suspect as a result. They also knew about famous intellectuals, writers, and artists who were denounced as Rightists, silenced, and sent into exile in the countryside, never again to publish or resume their professional duties. They told me about the 1958–1960 Great Leap Forward, when China tried to catch up with industrialized nations through a great burst of social mobilization. Every “work unit,” whether school, factory, hospital, or government institution, was organized to smelt steel in “backyard furnaces” in an effort to move China past its domineering “elder brother,” the Soviet Union, and compete directly with developed Western countries in industrial output and modernization. Children and adults alike killed rats, lice, sparrows, and mosquitoes, the so-called Four Pests; farmers were induced to conduct agricultural experiments in deep plowing and close planting intended to yield one bumper harvest after the next. The “Three Hard Years” arrived immediately, from 1959 to 1961, after officials neglected the harvest, natural disasters arrived, and grain rotted in the fields. This was one of the most severe human-created famines in history, with somewhere around 30 million deaths that would not otherwise have occurred. My students told me about eating bark and gathering bitter weeds, about grandparents who starved while giving food to their children and grandchildren. Even those from big cities remembered terrible shortages. At the time, I was not attuned to the story of the deforestation that fueled the backyard furnaces, or to thinking of the great famine as a great ecological collapse, but, of course, that is what it was. Both were expressions of Mao’s attempt to conquer nature.
I also heard from my students about the turmoil of the 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution. Many of them had been swept into the competitive frenzy to protect Mao against his purported enemies and joined the Red Guards, only to be manipulated into violent factional struggle against each other and against rival Red Guard groups from other universities and work units. They told of verbally and physically attacking and humiliating teachers and Party leaders, of putting up Big Character Posters drawn in large brushstrokes that enumerated the counter-revolutionary, reactionary, and revisionist crimes of the accused, of riding trains for free around the country to spread the revolution, of ritually recreating the 1934–1935 Long March by hiking arduously from one Red Army historical site to another, of humiliating religious leaders, writers, and artists for their so-called reactionary attachment to the Four Olds: old customs, culture, habits, and beliefs. They told me, too, of denouncing their own parents and siblings in an effort to be more “Red” and revolutionary than anyone else. What they did not then understand was that they were pawns in a power struggle at elite levels of political life. The protagonists included Mao’s ultra-leftist radical wife Jiang Qing and her three close associates (later denounced as the Gang of Four), Mao himself, and a large cast of other central-level leaders who disagreed sharply on the political direction of the country. They also did not know that at provincial and local levels, the Cultural Revolution provided an opportunity for old rivals to settle scores. Even less were they able to reflect on their own role and responsibility for a culture of obedience, through which patronage and fealty could easily be manipulated into violent factionalism. Their impulse toward free expression, to travel throughout the country and spread revolution, and to challenge a repressive and authoritarian educational and political system, had been abused and manipulated by forces they did not understand.
Almost all of my students had been made to “volunteer” to resettle in the countryside after those few months of chaos and gratuitous violence. In early 1967, Mao sent the army into universities, middle schools, factories, and government offices in an effort to regain control, and there was nowhere to send young people when so many schools and factories were closed. Many of these “educated youth” were organized into military-style encampments and set to manual labor on China’s frontiers, filling in wetlands and cutting down forests, attacking nature as they had attacked Mao’s purported enemies in the Party.
During the early post-Mao years of university life, I also worked with professors who too had returned from the countryside, having been subjected to so many self-criticism sessions that they were terrified of speaking and often shielded their mouths with their hands. I met students whose only exposure to literature was from the Marxist left, whose only intellectual life had been political study in which they were made to memorize Party texts and repeat slogans. Their wicked sense of humor included using such slogans ironically in daily speech. I felt a great responsibility to provide a bridge to the world of ideas and culture. My students had never heard of Freud or the notion of the unconscious; the Beatles and Rolling Stones were unknown; the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown was not mentioned in their newspapers when it occurred soon after my arrival in March 1979. Romantic love was still considered dangerous, if not counterrevolutionary – if a boy wrote a letter to a girl and they went for a walk together, it was tantamount to engagement and marriage. My library of foreign books, some sent ahead, some provided by the U.S. Embassy, and many cadged from generous foreign tourists, was treated as a treasure trove.
In this atmosphere, I met and eventually married a young Chinese literature student, Liang Heng. To get permission for the marriage we had to appeal to “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping himself. As we were courting, Liang Heng narrated his life story to me systematically in Chinese and I wrote it down in English before translating it back to him orally in Chinese; this process helped him come to terms with the political upheaval that had ripped his family apart even as it helped me to understand, on a visceral level, just how traumatic the Cultural Revolution had been for the Chinese people. We later published this memoir as Son of the Revolution. We emigrated to the U.S. after Liang Heng received his university degree and I had been in China for three years, but we continued to return frequently to China, writing additional books about China’s reforms and the changes in intellectual life. Traveling widely, we chronicled China’s growing freedoms and ongoing restraints, political repression, and limits on access to information. Our adventures in remote areas closed to foreigners often involved late-night knocks on the doors of fleabag hotels where we were staying; uniformed local Public Security Bureau officials demanded to see our passports and reprimanded us for being in “closed” areas. But we evaded the serious repression experienced by democracy activists, who were sometimes sent to prison or labor camps merely for their ideas or publications, because Liang Heng was by then a U.S. citizen. China was opening up and it was often enough to apologize for being in the wrong place and continue on our way the next day. Despite such constraints, the changes under Deng Xiaoping were astounding, and by comparison to life under Mao, Chinese society under the reforms was markedly better as people’s standard of living began to improve and their intense fear to abate.
Economic freedoms far outpaced political ones. In the countryside, the people’s communes were disbanded and de facto private plots created. Systems of leasing land allowed specialized production and unleashed enterprise and innovation. In the cities, the “iron rice bowl,” which guaranteed basic food and shelter for everyone in Chinese society no matter what the contribution of their labor, was “smashed.” Efficiency became the order of the day as enterprises had to show they could be profitable or they were closed down. Large state-owned enterprises such as the big iron and steel mills were often exceptions, but even they were expected to create sideline businesses to stay afloat. Individual entrepreneurs began to flourish, especially among the children of high-ranking officials who often had access to commodities that were supposed to be under state control. A gray area, neither socialist nor capitalist, became a significant part of the economy, and success in life depended on connections and access to people who could help you “go through the back door” to obtain regulated or scarce goods and special permissions.
Even during the “golden decade” of increased personal freedoms from 1979 to 1989, educated Chinese spoke of a “crisis of confidence” in the Party and socialism, and some members of the central government tried to reform the political system to keep up with economic reforms. Impatient with the slow pace of change, students and intellectuals in Beijing and other cities famously demonstrated beginning in April 1989, taking over Tiananmen Square for days. It was too much, too fast. Reformist leader and Party Secretary-General Zhao Ziyang begged the students to go home, foreseeing the massacre which arrived on June 4, killing hundreds if not thousands and setting back the reform effort. Zhao ended his days under house arrest for his role in promoting political liberalization and democracy.
In the aftermath, disillusioned with the state, many bright young people turned away from politics and focused on getting ahead economically. Business and computer schools flourished, and China came into its own as the world’s manufacturing hub. Getting richer, in any way possible, became a shared national passion. Apparently, the Party would be allowed to stay in power as long as the people’s living standards continued to rise. The dark side of this economic activity was, of course, resource depletion and industrial pollution, the subject of this book.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S., my own career turned to the study of global environmental politics. The marriage to Liang Heng had ended and I was looking for a new direction that would bring my China experiences together with my love of nature. Fascinated by the relationship between the intellectual and personal repressions I had witnessed and the way people were despoiling the planet, I returned to China in 1999 to teach at an agricultural university in Sichuan Province and collect material and interviews for a new book, Mao’s War against Nature, which told personal stories about how the political repression of ordinary people was mirrored in an attack against nature. State-ordered transformation of human souls was often carried out through political campaigns marshalling collective labor to “Make mountains bow their heads, make rivers flow uphill,” as a Mao-era poem expressed it. Mao’s uneasiness with intellectuals allowed him to dismiss the most elementary of scientific principles and celebrate his notion, as a military general, that mobilizing the country into a vast army would allow him to defeat all enemies, both human and non-human.
As this book will show, the environmental problems of the post-Mao years have only become worse, with globalized free-market capitalism an equal if not greater driver of environmental degradation than the Stalinist-style state. Perhaps the root problem is not the economic system at all: both during and after Mao, limits on public participation and freedom of information have been great obstacles to the possibility that society collectively can make wise choices. Political repression, rapid change, and the state’s willingness to reorder society for its own purposes have remained constant themes which put nature under assault. But as we will discover in our exploration of China’s emerging civil society, which provides more “democratic space” for individuals to voice their concerns about the condition of the environment, there are signs that an environmental movement is now emerging to help protect endangered species and clean up the pollution created by socialist and capitalist cultures alike.
I eventually became a professor of global environmental politics at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, where I teach the subject, using an interdisciplinary approach, to passionate graduate and undergraduate students who wish to find solutions to our environmental crisis. This book draws upon my efforts to clarify the many scholarly and political approaches to global environmental study; it pulls them together to shine a focused light on my primary passion, China. I hope that you, the readers, will enjoy the book and that you will find it helpful, inspiring, and not overly discouraging. We need you.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the patient persuasion of my editor at Polity Press, Louise Knight, who convinced me to write it, and David Winters, who shepherded it expertly and responsively through the publication process. Ian Tuttle copy-edited the manuscript with skill, sensitivity, and a keen eye. Many able readers were involved and I am in their debt, including Anna Brettell, Ken Conca, Mike Gelner, Gary Marcuse, and Paul Wapner, each of whom spent many hours providing detailed suggestions. Tough and helpful anonymous readers shaped the initial proposal and critiqued and improved the draft. Sikina Jinnah, Garrett Graddy, Tim Kovach, and Rong Zhu were also very helpful at critical stages. American University’s School of International Service has been a wonderful base for scholarship and teaching, and I am most grateful to be here. I have learned much from my colleagues and students. I also feel extremely fortunate to have had the research assistance and editorial participation of Adam Jadhav, whose intelligent comments and questions, eye for detail, and willingness to delve deeply into the problems of a country that is not his beloved India have turned out to be one of this project’s most important assets. I must also thank my ever-supportive husband Rick Shapiro, and my two cats, Binky and Scrushy, who responded to me much as they usually do, which was perhaps the greatest help of all.
1
Introduction: The Big Picture
“Climate Change Threatens China’s Crops, Warns Expert.”
“Amid Severe Drought, Chinese Government Admits Mistakes with Three Gorges Dam.”
“China’s Environment: An Economic Death Sentence.”
“World’s Longest Natural Gas Pipeline Goes into Operation in China.”
“China’s Air Pollution Again at Danger Levels.”
“One in Three Buyers of Newly Built London Homes Are Chinese.”
“China Expands Economic Influence around the World.”
“China Suspends New High-speed Rail Projects Following Crash.”
“China Closes ‘Toxic’ Chemical Plant after Thousands Protest.”
“Company Ordered to Halt Production after Dumping Toxic Waste.”
“Thousands Riot in South China over Land Grab.”
This sampling of headlines, compiled from Chinese and international news feeds in 2011–2013, reflect the breakneck changes in China’s development, its global influence, and the enormity of the environmental problems that the country faces. How are we to make sense of the huge shift in China’s position in the world? What does it mean for China’s prospects for sustainable development? How does it affect the global environment? This book explores these questions.
China’s huge environmental challenges are significant for us all. The choices the Chinese Communist Party, national government, and Chinese people are making influence not only the health and well-being of China but the very future of the planet. Environmental issues do not stop at state borders. China’s air and water pollution, dam construction, and resource consumption have a profound impact around the world. What China does affects global climate change, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, desertification, acid rain, commodity prices, fisheries, wildlife migrations, and a host of other environmental challenges. China’s expanding economy, consumption of energy, and scarcity of arable land generate environmental problems in other countries such as Canada, where the environmentally devastating Alberta tar sands are being developed with the Chinese market in mind, and Kenya, where vast areas of farmland are now owned by Chinese interests, and Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, and Thailand, where local economies will be affected by China’s construction of dams on the Salween and Mekong rivers. China’s problems are interconnected with those of the rest of the planet.
China has become a major player in the international competition for resources, speeding up deforestation and land degradation around the globe. However, the huge size of China’s environmental footprint is created, in part, by the export of the developed world’s consumption costs: The raw materials that China extracts, not only at home but also overseas, often end up as products in stores in the developed world. The environmental degradation caused by China’s resource extraction often takes place in distant countries, many in the developing world; the pollution generated during the manufacturing stage affects the Chinese people; and the finished goods are often consumed in developed countries. When consumers are finished with the products, the trash is often re-exported to the developing world as part of the illegal trade in toxic waste. The Chinese state has positioned the country for explosive economic growth, and many Chinese are growing wealthy and reaping the benefits of China becoming a global manufacturing hub; yet ordinary Chinese are bearing the brunt of global pollution, as they suffer the negative impacts of production in terms of reduced quality of life, prevalence of disease, and shortened life spans.
Here are a few striking examples of the transboundary implications of China’s environmental challenges:
Particulate air pollution from China is regularly measured in California, Oregon, Washington State and Western Canada, and China is a major source of mercury deposition in the Western U.S., providing a striking reminder that a nation’s environmental problems do not respect political boundaries. We know China is the source because Chinese air pollution has a high percentage of lead, and those measurements spike in Western North America in the spring when China’s dust storms are most intense. The great size and intensity of these storms are caused in part by environmental mistakes made decades ago, during Mao’s time, when northern grasslands were destroyed in an attempt to grow more wheat. But the sparse rainfall did not support grain production, crops died, and vast areas were reduced to desert. Now, when typhoons whip up massive dust storms over Inner Mongolia and Western China, debris can occasionally even be deposited as far away as Eastern Canada and Florida.
The dams China is building on the upper reaches of the Mekong River – in China, called the Lancang – and on the Salween River – in China, called the Nu – affect the water supply of the downriver states of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Cambodians worry about the drying of lakes and the impact on fish, their primary protein source, while Vietnamese residents of the Delta are concerned about having enough water to support farming and other basic livelihoods. This dam-building activity is complicated by the fact that China (like Myanmar) is not a full member or treaty signatory but only a dialogue partner in the well-established Mekong River Commission; it is thus less likely to be bound by collective decisions. Upstream dam-building plans and activities in China on the rivers originating in the Tibetan Plateau and elsewhere in Western China could also threaten the water supplies of people in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kazakstan; indeed, as we see from this list, there are tensions over transboundary watercourses between China and almost all of its territorial neighbors.
The Chinese people’s growing appetite for exotic meats, animal parts, and plants threatens rare and endangered species; Chinese gastronomic and medical traditions see consuming a species as a way of acquiring desirable characteristics like strength, prowess, and longevity. The Chinese demand for body parts of rhinoceroses, tigers, bears, pangolins, and turtles, to name just a few creatures under siege, is felt in many other Asian countries and indeed throughout the world. Even in North America, American black bears are poached for their gall bladders, and wild plants like American ginseng root are poached from parks and protected areas and smuggled to the Chinese medicinal market. Sharks, whose fins are sliced off to make soup, are in decline throughout the world and captured from as far away as the Galapagos.
Since the 1998 Yangzi River floods, when China banned logging in the headwaters of its major rivers, China’s import of exotic hardwoods from Indonesia, Myanmar, Cambodia, and other remaining tropical forests has increased dramatically. The ban increased pressure on some of the world’s last remaining old growth forests, in part to feed a market in furniture exported to the U.S. and other developed countries. China is in a dominant position in the middle of the commodity chain between loggers and consumers. Without more active participation from China, efforts to create “sustainable” forest product certifications are doomed to fail. The logging ban in China has also had an enormous effect on the forests of the Russian Far East, the last redoubt of the Siberian Tiger, and as far away as Canada, where the logging industry is enjoying a recovery thanks to its major new customer.
China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gasses. Together with other developing countries, China argues that its “survival emissions” should not be compared to the “luxury emissions” of developed countries, which have enjoyed the benefits of burning fossil fuels that put most of the carbon into the atmosphere and should rightfully bear the primary costs of saving the global atmospheric infrastructure which sustains life. This position affects the outcome of the ongoing global climate change negotiations to extend or replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which have so far met with failure. However, even in per capita terms China’s emissions are rising dramatically, and pressure is mounting on China to modify its position that it should be treated as a developing country. Encouragingly, China is taking unilateral steps to reduce emissions intensity and increase the percentage of renewable resources in its energy mix.
The rising middle class in China, as in India and other rapidly developing countries, is using more refrigerants and air conditioners, reversing some of the favorable movement toward repairing the thinning stratospheric ozone layer which protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. China, like other less-developed countries which signed the 1987 Montreal Protocol, had more time than developed ones to phase out ozone-depleting substances like CFCs (technically named chlorofluorocarbons and marketed as Freon), halons, and the agricultural fumigant methyl bromide, which is still used on strawberries and other crops. Although the phase-out period is over, CFC substitutes such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) are also ozone-depleting, if less so. Even in the best case scenario, increased demand for such products in the developing world may undermine the world’s most successful example of international cooperation on environmental issues.
Acid rain deposition from sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions, to which China is a major contributor, has destroyed forests in Japan and Korea. This remains a sore point in diplomatic relations in Northeast Asia, with as much as half of the acid rain in the region coming from China’s coal-fired power plants and automobile exhaust.
