China's Environmental Challenges

Judith Shapiro

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745663098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

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.

In a competition over the power to exploit natural resources, the Chinese are asserting territorial maritime claims over the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. There, multiple actors including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also assert rights to oil and natural gas sea-beds, fisheries, and shipping lanes. Fragile relationships in that region are unstable, and the United States’ support for its traditional allies has created friction in the relationship between the U.S. and China.

Chinese international investment in oil, gas, and minerals, welcome as it may be to political elites overseas, fuels environmentally destructive extractive activities in places as far flung as Central Asia, Ecuador, Sudan, and Iran. Chinese foreign aid programs often facilitate such extraction by carving roads into wilderness and across deserts, bringing development into fragile ecosystems and contributing to the current great wave of global species extinctions.

As fascinating and sobering as these examples may be, they cannot be understood fully without appreciating China’s domestic political pressures, struggles, history, and culture. Thus, the primary focus of this book is on the domestic roots of some of these transnational challenges, for it is within China that much of the future of the planet will be decided. Conventional “realist” political analysis tends to see nation-states as unitary, power-seeking actors in an anarchic world and do not uncover the complexity of China’s political and social landscape. We need to recognize the multiplicity of actors who play a role in China’s future and appreciate the country’s geographic variety, regional disparities, and ethnic and cultural complexity, as well as the unique character of China’s authoritarian political system, with its economic and social freedoms and contradictions. All of these factors will play a role in determining China’s future environmental “footprint” and transnational impacts. What are the implications of the fact that, as Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley expressed it in an extensive 2007 New York Times series on China’s environment, China is “Choking on Growth”? How will the Chinese navigate the challenges they are facing, and what dynamics affect their choices?

Before we begin to approach these enormous questions, here are just a few facts to illustrate the severity of China’s environmental crisis. The World Bank has found that 20 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities are in China, primarily because of heavy coal use, with Shanxi Province’s coal mining city Linfen the dirtiest. China’s high economic growth rate – close to 10 percent per year between 2000 and 2012 – must be greatly discounted with the inclusion of environmental costs in lost work days, premature deaths, and pollution clean-up. In 2004, for example, economic losses caused by environmental pollution accounted for as much as 3 percent of GDP. Additional costs resulting from resources depletion and ecological damage could not be calculated due to lack of data (State Environmental Protection Administration 2006). Efforts by some government officials and think tank scholars to create a reliable “Green Gross Domestic Product” calculation for China stalled from 2004 onwards, in part because of the political sensitivity of the effort and the difficulty of obtaining reliable statistics.

Air pollution is a huge challenge. The problem was made famous by the attention to poor air quality in the capital during the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but it is even more serious in other parts of the country. The World Resources Institute (1999) found that total suspended particulates (TSP) and SO₂, both produced by burning coal, far exceed World Health Organization guidelines in the majority of Chinese cities. Lung diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer are so prevalent that Chinese “cancer villages,” in which cancer death rates due to air and water pollution are far above the national average, are well documented. By 2010, the media and Internet had drawn attention to 459 cancer villages distributed across 29 of China’s 31 provinces (Liu 2010).

Meanwhile, severe water pollution affects 75 percent of China’s rivers and lakes and 90 percent of urban groundwater, with 28 percent of China’s rivers ranked category five (the worst) on a Chinese scale of one to five, so toxic that they are unsuitable even for agricultural use. China’s major lakes such as Lake Tai in Eastern China and Dianchi in Yunnan are ranked at category five (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2008). A 2007 OECD study found that hundreds of millions of Chinese people drink water contaminated by arsenic, fluoride, untreated wastewater, fertilizers and pesticides.

In addition to pollution problems, groundwater aquifers are rapidly being depleted as users dig deeper wells each year. Falling water tables in North China threaten the water supply of Beijing. The great Yellow River does not reliably flow all the way to the sea; in 1997, the worst year so far, it failed to reach the eastern delta for 226 days, essentially drying out. In a book originally published in Chinese in 1999, water pollution activist Ma Jun states that 400 out of 600 cities are facing water shortages, including 30 out of the 32 largest cities (2004). Attempting to deal with this threat, the Chinese government is building a three-channel “South–North Water Transfer Project” [nanshui beidiao 南水北调] to move water from the Yangzi to the Yellow River, a multi-billion dollar megaproject with enormous environmental and social implications, including effects on irrigation in the South where farmers accustomed to access will be deprived, human rights implications for the forcibly relocated, and devastating ecological impacts on the Tibetan Plateau should the Westernmost channel be built (International Rivers Network n.d., a).

Research studies have suggested that water stress could create massive numbers of dislocated “environmental refugees” in coming decades as large parts of China face water shortages (Shalizi 2006). The World Bank has estimated that more than 300 million people in rural China lack access to safe drinking water (Xie 2009). Water shortages, sea-level rise, increased droughts, and disruptions of rainfall patterns from climate change could cause the displacement of millions of Chinese by 2050 (Myers 1997). China’s rainfall is already highly seasonal – with 70 percent falling during the rainy months and 30 percent during the dry – and geographically uneven. The North, with 60 percent of China’s cropland, has only 16 percent of its water, while the South, with 40 percent of the cropland, has 84 percent (Loh 2011). When climate change, pollution, and overuse for irrigation and industry are added to this fundamentally insecure situation, the Chinese people’s access to water becomes highly unpredictable.

Given the severity of these and other entrenched problems such as deforestation, erosion, desertification, heavy metal pollution, salinization, loss of arable land, acid rain, and biodiversity loss, China’s handling of its environmental crisis has become of critical importance to the country’s stability and the legitimacy of the government. Indeed, the nation’s environmental challenges are so severe and so central to the manner in which China will “rise” that it is no exaggeration to say that they cannot be separated from its national identity and the government’s ability to provide for the Chinese people. Acute environmental degradation threatens social stability; increasingly, environmental protests trigger state concerns about broader unrest. “Environmental mass incidents” [huanjing quntixing shijian 环境群体性事件] sparked by local pollution are estimated to number 5,000 per year (Ma, Tianjie 2008/2009), with some reports putting the figure much higher. Many of these involve only a small crowd or short protest and are resolved in a matter of hours, while others involve thousands of people and shut down major cities.

The Chinese Communist Party and the state government’s controls of power are at stake as they try to achieve contradictory aims. They must provide an improvement in material living standards in a country whose hinterlands are still desperately poor and whose middle class is just beginning to discover the joys of consumption after decades of privation. At the same time, they must deal with industrial accidents, the environmental costs of the country’s manufacturing so many of the world’s consumer products, and growing resistance to toxic pollution. Despite being armed with some of the world’s best environmental laws and regulations, China’s bureaucracy faces huge challenges in implementation. Local incentives to cut corners on regulatory implementation and enforcement and pursue polluting practices prevail. While some government officials and agencies are making serious attempts to shift the country to an alternative development model, these efforts often seem puny when pitted against powerful forces of corruption, decentralized authority structures beyond the reach of the law, and incentives to focus on economic growth to the exclu...