Mary Kay Magistad
Scientists in California and the Pacific Northwest have made a startling discovery in recent years. Pollution from China, they say, is degrading the air quality along the West Coast of the United States. Soot, mercury, and acid-rain producing compounds from Chinese power plants and factories have reached such high levels that the pollution is now spreading across the Pacific.
It's not yet a big problem for the United States, but pollution is a huge problem in China. According to the World Bank, China is now home to 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities. China's government says that most of the nation's rivers and aquifers are heavily contaminated. And China is now second only to the United States as an emitter of climate-changing greenhouse gases.
This week, we'll take a close look at the declining state of China's environment, and at China's role in the global environment. We begin our four-part series by examining how things got so bad in China – and why. The World's Mary Kay Magistad has our story.
Shanxi Province
Shanxi Province is the heart of China's coal industry. Coal provides about two-thirds of the nation's energy, and China's urgent need for more energy has led to hundreds of coal mines springing up here. These unregulated and illegal mines have ravaged the already denuded mountains and polluted what's left of the groundwater in this dry and dusty province.
In the midst of all this, within view of tar refineries that belch out black smoke, an elderly farmer tends to his climbing green grape vines. Cheng Qiran says farming is getter harder in this industrial landscape:
In Chinese, followed by translation: "When I started farming 40 years ago, we had plenty of fresh clean water, and our wells were only 30 feet deep. Now, we have to drill more than 600 feet to find water, and even that's not too clean."
Farmer Cheng Qiran
Shanxi Province is one of China's most polluted, and most parched. Water is rationed. Even the provincial capital gets water for only a couple of hours a day. It's then reasonable to ask why anyone would even try to grow grapes with water drawn from a deep, non-replenishable aquifer, or why so many illegal coal mines have been allowed to operate throughout the province.
A young taxi driver, Jin Chuanliang, pauses from his lunch in a local noodle shop to offer one answer.
(Speaks in Chinese)
He says the coalmines have huge profit margins and have made a lot of people rich, including local officials. He says the income gap between Shanxi's rich and poor is growing fast, with coalmine owners zooming around in BMWs and Mercedes while poor farmers choke on their dust.
The city of Linfen
Linfen is one of Shanxi's most polluted cities. Residents here say they literally choke on coal dust in the evenings. That's when trucks piled high with illegally mined coal roar past. In a neighborhood medical clinic, nurse Du Qiufang says the pollution is taking a serious toll on people's health, including her own:
In Chinese, followed by translation: "I feel like my throat is very dry, and the stuff coming out of my lungs is black."
And in her clinic, Du says, she's seeing ever more cases of bronchitis, pneumonia, and lung cancer. Her own father-in-law has lung cancer, she says. So does the father of another health worker here. Du says the central government has tried to improve air quality and has even closed a few of the worst-polluting factories. But the problem, as with so many environmental problems in China, is resistance from local business interests and local government officials.
In Chinese, followed by translation: "Shanxi is a province of coal, and this is the main economic income for the province. There are a lot of coal mines, iron factories and tar refineries. So it's really difficult to improve the situation in a short time."
That's especially true since China's rapidly growing economy needs these resources. And Shanxi's woes are not unique in China. Throughout the country, thousands of factories dump their waste directly into China's lakes and rivers. The Chinese government has called the mighty Yangze River "cancerous with pollution." It says one in five Chinese citizens lack safe drinking water. And the World Bank says China's air pollution causes some 300,000 premature deaths each year.
Polluted river
Jim Harkness is the former head of the World Wide Fund for Nature in China. He says an underlying cause of these problems is that China doesn't treat the environment as a community resource, but as a commodity.
"If you have a common good like clean air or water or land or a forest, and one player, like a local official or a company that's in league with the local government, starts abusing it, there is not only the damage caused by that actor, but of course, everybody else then says, 'Well, if they're going to do that, why should I play by the rules?' And pretty soon everybody is chopping down trees or dumping waste into the river or operating a backyard zinc smelter."
Harkness is quick to add that this pattern of development at the expense of the environment is not unique to China. Heavily industrialized areas in the United States suffered from extremely bad air and water pollution in their day. It's just that China is developing on a scale, and at a pace, unprecedented in the world. And Harkness says China's current political system exacerbates the problem.
"You see a lack of transparency, lack of democracy, corruption, large industrial interests being able to take over land from local people, and also a system where the center doesn't really know what's happening in the periphery. So whereas in a country like the United States, the EPA actually is able to monitor the whole country very effectively, in China, the local environmental protection agency staff, they report to the local government. They don't report to Beijing."
And since local Environmental Protection Agency staff are beholden to the local government for their jobs, they may be less willing to push when the local government decides bending environmental rules is good for growth.
The relationship between the central government and local governments causes problems in another way. For the past quarter century, Beijing has rewarded and promoted local officials based almost entirely on the economic growth in their areas. That's prompted local officials to push for ever more development, no matter the cost to the environment.
Meanwhile, China's economy is growing at almost 10 percent a year, and so far, China has been modeling its consumption patterns on the United States. If that continues for another 25 years, says environmentalist Lester Brown, it will be a disaster for the world. Brown heads the Earth Policy Institute in Washington.
"In 2031, China's paper consumption at US per capita levels will be double current world paper production. There go the earth's forests. Or consider cars. Three cars for every four people, as in the United States today, and China would have a fleet of 1.1 billion cars."
Brown says that would mean that China would be using 99 million barrels of oil a day – or almost 20 percent more than today's total world oil production.
"What China is demonstrating very clearly is that the Western economic model, the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throw-away economy is not going to work for China."
China's leaders seem to have realized this. Earlier this year, they imposed new consumption taxes on a range of items from disposable wooden chopsticks to golf clubs to the most polluting cars. More significantly, Chinese premier Wen Jiabo announced a major shift in environmental policy at this year's National People's Congress, in March.
(Speaks in Chinese.)
He said from now on, economic growth won't be allowed to come at a steep environmental cost. He said local officials will be judged not just by how fast their local economies grow, but also by how well they protect the environment.
Still, many local governments continue to push ahead with environmentally destructive projects. It's not yet clear whether China's central government will be able to rein them in before the environmental cost becomes too high for even a rising superpower to bear.
For The World, I'm Mary Kay Magistad, Shanxi Province, China.
photos: Mary Kay Magistad