MON AUG 31, 2015 AT 08:57 AM PDT
Much of China Is Now An Unrepairable Ecological Disaster
This article from truth-out.org may be a couple of months old, but it describes in excuciating detail why China's ongoing ecological disaster is unprecedented, unending, and unrepairable. It is also a definitive answer to conservatives in this country who say they want a "smaller government", that is, a government with much-reduced (if not eliminated) power to regulate industry.
[Update: It's been brought to my attention that diarist Arendt penned a diary on essentially the same article in May of this year; you can see it here. Apologies for missing your diary, Arendt.]
The article starts with a vignette:
The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he could not believe his eyes. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their factory compound without a word. . . . When the dumping began, crops wilted from the white dust, which sometimes rose in clouds several feet off the ground and spread over the fields as the liquid dried. Village farmers began to faint and became ill. . . .
Reckless dumping of industrial waste is everywhere in China. But what caught the attention of The Washington Post was that the Luoyang Zhonggui High-Technology Company was a "green energy" company producing polysilicon destined for solar energy panels sold around the world.
But China's rise has come at a horrific social and environmental cost. It's difficult to grasp the demonic violence and wanton recklessness of China's profit-driven assault on nature and on the Chinese themselves. Ten years ago, in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in March 2005, Pan Yue, China's eloquent, young vice-minister of China's State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) told the magazine, "the Chinese miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace." Pan Yue added:It's a long article, so I'm quoting a bit more than I would from a more usual-sized article, to get you to go read the whole thing.We are using too many raw materials to sustain [our] growth ... Our raw materials are scarce, we don't have enough land, and our population is constantly growing. Currently there [are] 1.3 billion people living in China, that's twice as many as 50 years ago. In 2020 there will be 1.5 billion ... but desert areas are expanding at the same time; habitable and usable land has been halved over the past 50 years ... Acid rain is falling on one third of Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one fourth of our citizens do not have access to clean drinking water. One third of the urban population is breathing polluted air, and less than 20 percent of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner ... Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 percent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs for health ... In Beijing alone, 70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment.
Other vignettes:
China's rivers suffer huge spills of all kinds of toxic chemicals - benzene, xanthogenate, analine - every year. In north China, the Yellow River "is a catastrophe" and the 300-odd rivers that drain the North China Plain "are open sewers if they are not completely dry" in the words of Ma Jun, China's leading authority on the country's water crisis. According to a government report, the Yangtze River, the world's third longest, is seriously and irreversibly polluted. Long stretches are said to be in "critical condition," in places, too dangerous even to touch. Aquatic life has all but collapsed. Pollution and shipping wiped out China's legendary Yangtze Baiji dolphin while even common carp "are gasping for survival." The 500-mile-long reservoir filling up behind the huge Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze qualifies as the world's biggest cesspool. In some areas groundwater is being irreversibly polluted as textile dyeing mills and other factories, looking to avoid fines for dumping their effluents into rivers, instead drill and pump them into the earth.Read that last part again. Not only are some of China's largest rivers irreparably damaged, but Chinese industry is doing the same to the groundwater, as well. If this continues (and it almost assuredly will), large portions of China will become either uninhabitable, or too toxic for families to bear healthy children.
China has an ostensibly strong central government. China also has an environmental regulatory agency, the State Environmental Protection Agency, or SEPA. Why, then, is China's environmental problem so intractable? In four words: the Chinese Communist Party. An organization of ~86 million members run, according to the article, like a criminal organization:
Life in the Communist Party is not so different from life in the mafia: It's a constant, treacherous and highly dangerous nonstop factional struggle between crime family-based groupings in struggle with one another over top offices and treasure. The key to safety is building unshakable vertical and horizontal networks of support and protection - of guanxi. And the key to solidifying those networks is sharing the loot from corruption.Members get rich by corruption-generated loot provided by underlings, and security is generated by passing a portion of the loot to patrons. And that loot is generated by exploiting the country - its natural resources and its people - through industry as thoroughly and harshly as possible. There are no incentives for reining industry's polluting ways in, or for environmental protection generally, amongst those in control in China, only incentives to loot.
These incentives have also led to the numerous bizarre construction projects in China - the building of ghost cities, modern airports for flights that don't exist, intercity freeways for vehicular traffic that doesn't exist, and so on - all designed to generate income and support existing networks of guanxi, and all of which encourage more environmental destruction.
Also as a result, with respect at least to the environment, China has no functioning regulatory state, legislature, or judiciary. The ruling class essentially is a mass of completely unregulated capitalist enterprises, a legion of polluters with absolutely no brakes. And yet, the ruling class, the Communist Party members, live very well compared to the people they exploit.
And China's people, the day-to-day workers, farmers and villagers? They have no voice. They live in the world created by the CCP members, and suffer.
When conservatives in this country say they want "smaller government", this is what they are aiming for. they are aiming for an ineffective regulatory state, an ineffective Congress, and an ineffective judiciary. All for the sake of increased profit. This, as much as anything else, is why we must fight conservatives, and conservatism, in this country.
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