Environmental destruction in a booming China

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION IN A BOOMING CHINA The huge territory and population of China reveals the importance of it fighting against global environmental destruction. China is now the greatest coal burning country in the world, and as a result accounts for 15.1 per cent of the world's total sulphur dioxide and 9.6 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions. Here Liu Yufan discusses the way rapid modernisation has created impressive the dikes are of bad quality and often countries. The more China produces, along the Changjiang. Due to corruption, to ten times more energy than developed material wealth, but at the expense of the environment. environmental nina's awareness protection is growing, and it has endorsed many international conventions. The ban on logging and the summer ban on fishing in the South China Sea are recent efforts by the government in promoting sustainable development. On the other hand, modernisation through the implementation self-regulating market poses new challenges to the environment. The elite have uncritically accepted the consumerism of the West as a model for development. The promotion of private cars is one of the manifestations of such a mentality. It is impossible for China to copy the Western model for if China's auto industry delivered one car to every household, a level of ownership still lower than the US, it would lead to an environmental disaster. This prospect may seem remote, but we should not lose sight of the fact that China's to widespread development has led massive consumerism over a relatively short period, and the damage to the environment is reaching the point of no repair. Flooding and logging etween the 1920s and the 19/0s tne 3 changjiang (Yangtze River) fooded every six years. From the 1980s onward it flooded every two or three years and on a much larger scale. The 1998 flood led to 3,656 deaths and Rmb300 billion in damage. Premier Zhu admitted the main reason for flooding was over-logging along the big river. Between 1949-1979, forest coverage was already decreasing. Since the reforms, however, the situation has worsened. Experts report that China requires at least 35 to 40 percent forest coverage to retain water in the soil. China's current forest coverage has declined to a mere 14 percent. In forty years, the upper reaches of the Changjiang have witnessed an increase of soil erosion from 1.3 billion tons of soil annually to 1.57 billion. The Changjiang is rapidly becoming the second Huanghe (Yellow River). In many parts of the river, dikes are now as high as 13 metres so as to accommodate the ever rising riverbed. In the past, the scene of the so called 'hanging river' only appeared along the Huanghe, but now it is spreading collapse, thus compounding the seriousness of any flooding. A logging ban was implemented in 1999, and a major proportion of the one million were reassigned to tree planting. In theory this was a good idea, but in reality local governments had little incentive to implement the ban. A rise in wood prices resulted in even less incentive, and in fact encouraged local authorities to unite with private business to engage in illegal but profitable logging in order to export more wooden goods to the whole world, China is beginning to import raw woods from other countries, compounding the impact of global de-forestation. Lacking an independent media and systems accountability rooted in principles, the central government simply does not know if and how its policies are implemented at the grass roots level. simply banning the context of an essentially normative model of modernisation does not address fundamental issues relating to sustainable development. For example, demand for wood is still growing, partly because China now consumes at levels approaching developed countries. The use of disposable chopsticks, for instance, is a clear example. As for the Huanghe, soil erosion now leads to the interruption of water flow for longer and longer distances. The phenomenon began in the 1970s, and by the 1990s the stretch of the river through which water does not flow extended from 100-200 km to 300-600 km. In the 1970s it occurred in April or May, but now it happens as early as Rapid modernisation has created impressive material wealth, but at the expense of the environment. In 1995, Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases came second only to the US, and in 1999 topped the list. In 2000 the government decided to ban the production of leaded petrol. This is a step forward but still too small compared to the needs of protecting the environment. For the same unit of output, China expends three the more critical its impact on global warming. In China, as elsewhere, cost cutting firms in a competitive market have few incentives to install environmentally protective devices. Instead they attempt to shift the costs of such technology to society and the biosphere. It is at this point that public authorities often intervene by monitoring and with new laws and hefty fines for despoliation and its after effects. However, this is an up-hill struggle even for the most committed governments. In China, because of widespread corruption and the semi-paralysis of many local authorities which has resulted, many environmental laws are simply ignored and all kinds of industrial pollution continue to wreak havoc on the environment. Water 4 ccording to a 2000 United Nation report, today one third of humanity does not have enough fresh water. China has almost one-quarter of the world's population but only 6 percent of its fresh water. The big leap forward to capitalism in China resulted in serious pollution of rivers and fresh water resources as a whole all over China. Booming manufacturing also consumes large amounts of fresh water. In the next two decades, annual industrial water use could grow from 52 billion tons to 269 billion tons. ' As a result now two third of the nation's six hundred cities are facing inadequate supplies of fresh water, simply because many rivers are drying up or are heavily polluted by factories and sewage. Beijing's continuing shortage even sparked of fresh water supply has debate about moving the capital. But one man's meat is another man's poison. Fresh water shortage has become the best excuse for commercializing and privatizing water supply for the authority. The water authority has been raising water prices since the early 1990s, arguing that only market prices could internalize people's incentive to save water, forgetting that wastage of water resulting from the leakage from water-pipes has been much more serious than household wastage of water, and serious leakage is a result of long years of underinvestment in the infrastructure of water supply. Once again the government blames the victims and let go the sinners. 1. Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold, Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd, 2002, P. 23