Eva Cheng
Is China losing the battle to save its horrifically degraded environment?
China's heavy reliance on coal has been a decisive factor in polluting the country's air and land, earning it the notoriety in 1998 of being home to seven of the world's 10 most polluted cities. After slashing its coal consumption for four consecutive years until 2000, coal demand rose again to 64% of China's primary energy consumption in 2002 and 67% in 2004. This was on the back of rising oil prices — which have doubled since 2001.
China's coal dependence was slashed from 94% in 1953 to 71.8% in 1975. It crept back to around 75% in 1990-94. China depends significantly on coal for power generation and steel production, as well as for other industrial and domestic uses.
Coal combustion has contributed significantly to corrosive acid rain, which has plagued China for years and affected more than one-third of its land. Dust storms, often linked to China's deteriorating land condition, especially in its north-west, are another nagging issue. In August 2002, when a shocking "brown cloud" engulfed east Asia, reducing sunlight by 10-15%, few observers were confident that China's appalling environment had nothing to do with it.
China's failure to reverse its coal dependence is not unique. The November 16, 2004, Wall Street Journal cited British Petroleum figures that indicated world coal consumption rose by 6.9% in 2003, compared to 2.1% for oil. Coal is a much cheaper source of energy: based on last year's prices, if it takes $3 to produce a certain amount of energy with coal, it costs $7 with natural gas and $8 with oil.
Being a Third World country with a large population, China faces more difficulties than richer nations in shifting to clean energy. But that only explains part of China's environmental crisis. Policy mistakes and ignorance after the 1949 revolution, for example in the massive conversion of marginal land into crop land in defiance of ecology, led to widespread land degradation.
Lethal blow
However, the most lethal blow has come since the 1980s, when China switched to "free market" (profit-oriented) rural and industrial production across its vast territory. The problem has escalated since the 1990s, as Beijing increasingly positions China to be the "factory of the world", blindly pursuing economic growth at all costs.
While not all state firms were faultless before the 1980s in relation to polluting the environment, violations were less rampant because social responsibility was still a consideration.
Fiscal decentralisation from the mid-1980s meant that sub-national authorities tended to focus on their own narrow interests. The mushrooming of township and village enterprises, which are generally key contributors to the income of local areas, resulted in local authorities turning a blind eye to their environmental vandalism. Rampant wastewater discharge by such enterprises is a huge problem.
The proliferation of small coalmines is one example. The essential procedure of coal washing is increasingly ignored. Employing technology to make coal mining cleaner involves investment that is out of the reach of most small operators.
Most collectively owned enterprises are only nominally "collective". Driven by profit, they tend to be blind to the environmental costs of their production activities, so long as their bottom line isn't hurt. Outright private firms, which are fast rising in number, care even less about the public good.
De-collectivisation in rural production, among other problems, has meant that ecologically sensible measures such as crop rotation and a sustainable balance between cultivation and other forms of food production are much less likely to be maintained. The sharp increase in intensive livestock rearing has hugely increased organic pollutants, which often aren't managed responsibly.
Red tides, black rivers, brown cloud
Rampant misuse of pesticides and fertilisers is common. The latter is a major cause of eutrophication, nutrient over-enrichment of water bodies through organic pollutants, which promotes algal blooms. It causes "red tides" (marine algal blooms), which have plagued Chinese coasts. These devastate the ecology as well as economically valuable marine life. According to China's State Environmental Protection Administration, red tides hit China's coasts 96 times in 2004 and 119 the year before.
According to a 2001 World Bank report, China: Air, Land and Water, China's pesticide production skyrocketed from 1000 tonnes in the early 1950s to 625,000 tonnes in 1999, making the country the world's second largest producer and consumer of pesticides.
The heavy export orientation of a significant section of both domestic and foreign-invested firms has resulted in serious depletion of China's raw minerals, energy and other natural resources. More production inputs need to be imported, attracting the unfair accusation that China has drained "world resources".
Writing for the Summer 2004 edition of National Interest, David Hale said China accounted in late 2003 for 20.6% of global copper demand and expected it to account for 21% of global aluminium demand in 2005. Hale added that China already accounted for 20% of world zinc output, 20% of magnesium, 16% of phosphate and 35% of coal.
This has left China to shoulder the rising devastation of its air, land and water by such a high concentration of cowboy-style industrial production that is way beyond the needs of its own population. This is a shift, or "export", of the undesirable consequences of industrial (especially polluting) production to China.
Growth at all costs
China's economic growth for the last 20 years has averaged 8-9%, far exceeding the world average. But industrial production has grown even faster — 18% in late 2003, while exports grew 40%.
The irrationality of the pro-capitalist path is the critical cause of China's worsening environmental crisis. Beijing's blind efforts to outbid rival producers in the long-saturated automobile market is a clear expression of that dynamic. From negligible private car ownership two decades ago, China's production of non-agricultural vehicles reached 22 million in 2004, with a total of 106.4 million non-agricultural vehicles now running in China.
Turning a blind eye to its further contribution to capitalism's problem of overcapacity/overproduction, Beijing proudly declared that in 2004 China became the world's fourth-biggest auto producer and third-largest auto consumer.
The 2001 World Bank report reveals a sober fact: "Motor vehicle emissions have become a major source of ambient air pollution in a few super large cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou." In an interview with the March 7, 2005 edition of Spiegel magazine, China's deputy minister for the environment Pan Yue disclosed that "in Beijing alone, 70-80% of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment", with lung cancer being the number one cause of death.
From Green Left Weekly, August 17, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.